A vision should give you answers, shouldn't it? But all I see are more questions. It's not right, I tell you, it's crook and it's wrong. But i am not surprised by that either. Life has only ever been a constant puzzlement to me, so why should I expect death to suddenly make a whole lot of sense?This last quote, the story of Slattery, is Flanagan at his most storytelling best. Marching in step, following the rules, waiting in line, paying taxes--all of these which are participation in the plan, in the dream--are no guarantee of fairness. Though we pay for them with the bits and sometimes better portion of our freedom under the contract that fairness, equality will be attained, we find ourselves with no better commerce than a very expansive set of regulations to help us fill our time until we die. The system established under the recognition of equality and endured under the promise of perpetuation of that ideal, does not fulfill it's purpose. In fact, one begins to wonder if it does not work to attain its opposite.
Nothing ever really seemed that important to me, not since Jemma's death. People worry about how their hair looks, or what other people think of the colour they've painted their house, or, as I was once asked by a woman, what size doily to put on her washing machine. But you will understand me when I say that if you are drowning none of these things seems overly important. And I am drowning. I don't care whether your hair is done or not done, whether your house is painted or not, or whether you even have a house or a washing machine to place a doily upon. Granted I ought to. I'll give you that, but then I've always been easygoing. Lazy, some might say, but I wouldn't agree. Or maybe I would. All that they say about me being lazy, about being a drifter, about having no future, about not knowing what I want out of life, maybe it is all true.
People must believe, even, if it must be so, in a lie. Without belief all is lost. And yet, like all blind faiths that seem to go so much against the evidence of reality, they in turn foster their own truths. As long as no fear is acknowledged, great things are possible and the punters are capable of feats of endurance and courage of which they never believed themselves capable.
A man who could evade death chooses against good advice to meet with it on his own terms. Is this an act of cowardice or courage? Of stupidity or wisdom? Of ignorance or enlightenment? I don't know the answer.
I could, of course, be mad. That is a possibility. That is also a form of hope. If insane, this entire horror is nothing more than a delusion, a malfunction of nerve endings and electrochemical impulses. If sane, I am in true agony. In hell. If sane, I am dying. And being humiliated by memory at the same time.
They felt consumed by the river, felt that they had allowed it to chew them up in its early gorges and were now being digested in its endlessly winding entrails that cut back and forth in crazed meanderings through vast unpeopled mountain ranges. And it frightened them, these people from far away cities whose only measure was man; it terrified them, this world in which the only measure was things that man had not made, the rocks and the mountains and the rain and the sun and the trees, and the earth.
The Cockraoch tells the stories for effect, not because he believes them but because he knows they are what the punters want, and his job is to satisfy their needs. Aljaz says nothing. Other nights on other trips he has told the same stories. They ought be honoured by their repetition and by their currency. But they are not and Aljaz dislikes them, dislikes telling them. What is there to say? It is too hard to say something different, to tell a new story that no one has told and to which he doesn't know the response of either the punters or himself. Those stories are too hard. They come from something too close.
What is evident from what I see is that while Harry knew he loved her, even if he would never understand her, Sonja knew she understood Harry and wondered therefore if he was worth loving.
Poor people are good customers, mate, that's what I say. People say, get the rich ones. I say, fuck 'em. The rich ones never give you cash, always run dodgy credit cards and always want a receipt. And if I want a smoke--no way. Bugger 'em, that's what I say. Why you reckon the rich are rich?
Maybe thought Aljaz, just maybe everybody else was also on the road--from the beats through to the hippies to the yuppies to all the arsehole careerists of today, from me to the taxi driver, all of them and all of us seeking constant flight from our pasts, our families, and our places of birth. Even if we travelled in different standards of fashion and comfort. And maybe all the rest of them were as wrong as I was, thought Aljaz, and maybe it was time to walk off the road and head back into the bush whence we came.
There are the heroic failures such as Slattery, who wins his place in the school running team with ease, and is a favorite to win the 400 metres at the Tasmanian high school championships. At the championships Slattery wins his heat in the fastest qualifying time. In the final at the 300-metre mark he is ten metres clear of his nearest rival. He suddenly halts and starts running backwards through the pack of runners behind him, emerging triumphant at the wrong end of the race waving his long arms in triumph to the crowd of the school's supporters. The teachers are outraged and perplexed as to why the children cheer and laugh until the tears run down their cheeks. But only the children understand that to win is for Slattery to participate in a lie that everyone in life has a chance of winning if they try hard enough. By losing so spectacularly, by turning his loss into a triumph, he has turned their collective fate into a celebration and a challenge to the teachers, who could not begin to comprehend what it all meant. They ask Slattery why, but Slattery can not put words to his actions, any more than the children can explain why, at that moment when his long legs began to move backwards into the melee behind him, they felt such a sense of euphoria. They only know that for one moment in their entire school lives they had posed a question about the injustice of their destiny, and the adults had not only not known the answer, they had been too ignorant to understand the question. But none of it can be put into words. And nobody tries.
Enter Slattery. Heroic failure of Slattery's kind, though seemingly dismal, depressed, and pessimistic, does make the eye skip back and those who are not too busy putting coins in parking meters and filling out forms stop to think for a second. Unfortunately, stopping to think disturbs the mind to such an extent, people will gladly fill out forms and pay the meters just to avoid thinking about it. But even these actions by which we hide from ourselves our living madness are a form of hope. And hope does not disappoint.
Hope is a dangerous attitude. A child can hope for things that are far out of his reach, and that hope can be so strong a force that the child's arms will grow and his reach stretch, and eventually he'll grasp all that he hopes for, even unto the moon. But a child can hope for things that are far out of his reach, and that hope can be so strong a force that the child's arms will grow and his reach stretch until he misses everything good around him for the grasping. It's the same hope in both cases. Hope that drives a lover to feats of fidelity is hope that shackles a lover to a sinking ship. Hope that fires the furnaces of an artist for a lifetime is hope that burns down his house and family and life around him. Unlike trust, which misplaced is the failing of another, misplaced hope is only the sign of your own foolishness. And yet hope is glorious. Hope is the quiet, hope is the loudest song, hope is the incredible power of tree roots, hope is the growing of all living things, hope is the water, hope is the feeling in your stomach, hope is the blindness, hope is the salt tears, hope is the mounting stack of books, hope is the warmth of accomplishment, hope is the longing and the patience, hope is the thought behind heartbeats, hope is the reflex of breathing, hope is the only power stronger than fate, hope is me, hope is the death of a river guide.
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