The Somerton Man

I'm breaking the mold (my mold, which admittedly was already fractured and worn) here by blogging about something that is not literary or related to publishing or my frustrations with publishing or about the discord between the world of my imagination and reality or - you get the point. For those of you already familiar with the Somerton Man, you can probably jump ahead or just skip this post entirely. I have nothing new to add. All this information has ben analysed and debated over and over and over. But if you're still reading, let's go.

First: I love mysteries. You may have realised this when I blogged about Marquez' Chronicle of a Death Foretold. But it has to be the right mystery. My criteria are vague. I'm not much for supernatural theories - magic is just science we haven't figured out yet, so nothing 'mystic'. I enjoy true crime, but not all true crime. I'm interested in crimes affecting women (I can make a sarcastic comment here but I won't), and not interested in crimes involving children. I'm interested in why people break the social contract, but I don't believe in making excuses for deviant behaviour either. (Life's hard, but it's not a character in your story and so it also doesn't owe you anything.) I particularly like frustrating mysteries, where there is a set of clues and the "truth", but the only way to link one to the other is to have been there and witnessed it.

Cue: the mystery of the Somerton Man. I referred to this offhand in a recent (time is relative) post, but let me explain why I'm writing about it now: the mystery was recently solved, except that it wasn't. We now know who he is, but not why he died or - well, you'll see.

On 1 December 1948, on a beach in Somerton Park, Adelaide, Australia, two horse-riders stumbled across a man in a suit. At first, they thought he was doing what people do at a beach (particularly, I would imagine, in a post-world war society): sitting on the sand, watching the waves and contemplating the choices he had made, but as they rode back home, they realised something was wrong. There was no obvious cause of death, and witnesses reported they had seen the man in the same position the previous evening from about 7 p.m.

He was dressed formally: in a shirt and tie, brown trousers and shoes, and a tailored double-breasted jacket, but he was not wearing a hat (remember: it's 1948). He did not have a wallet and there was no other form of identification in any of his pockets. In fact, the labels had all been carefully cut from his clothes. Police immediately suspected suicide, or perhaps a stroke (but that was not quite as racy).

But then the autopsy found his stomach, intestines, kidneys, liver and spleen all to be "deeply congested" while his heart was perfectly normal. The Somerton Man had been poisoned, but there was no trace of any poison in his blood or in any of the affected organs. The only conclusion the coroner could make was that his death was "not natural" and probably "not accidental".

(I'm going to condense time and mix details like this with the findings of the police's investigation because, well, I can. Also, I am going to leave out dead ends, like people incorrectly identifying the body to police, because you can read all that online but not here. The Wikipedia entry is a very detailed account.)

The coroner noted that the man's shoes were clean and had been recently polished, suggesting he had not been wandering the shore and considering the many ironies of existence. The sand around the body was not disturbed and there was no evidence of spit or vomit, which one would expect from a man dying of poison. Later, a witness would claim that he had seen one man carrying another in the vicinity on the night the Somerton Man died.

Found in various places on the man's person were: an unlit cigarette, a box of cigarettes (which contained several cigarettes of a different brand), an unused rail ticket to Henley Beach, a possibly used bus ticket, a comb, chewing gum and a half-empty box of matches.

The police were unable to identify the man using his dental records. Two newspapers ran the story, but all the tips flooded in in response to the publicity led to dead ends. So, the police made a plaster cast of the man's head and shoulders, the coroner embalmed the body and it was buried.

I know what you're thinking. It was my first thought, too. It's 1948 and the man has no identification, not even the labels on his clothes. Obviously, he was a spy, because the movies have taught me that every vaguely suspicious person in the 1940s was a spy. Apparently Adelaide was Spy City because there was a military research facility nearby and Australia's espionage (I mean, intelligence) organisations were going through some "changes", so they had a surplus. We'll make this The Theory to Beat.

The next "break" in the case (check out the lingo) was a piece of paper that was sewn into one of the man's trouser pockets, which was discovered several months after the body came to be just a body. (Note also that there was evidence he had tailored other spots on his own suit, which will be relevant shortly.) It was rolled up and on it was the phrase "Tamám shud", in a "foreign" script. The phrase comes from the final page of a book of poetry titled Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyam, translated from Persian to English in 1849, and it means "it is ended". The poems are all about living life with no regrets and, so, dying without any baggage (excuse the pun). It looked like the paper had literally torn from a copy of the book, rather than copied by hand.

Actual photo of the script, via Wikimedia Commons

That book turned up in the backseat of someone's car, which was parked near the beach and had its windows open because it was a different time. The final phrase had been torn out from the back of the book, so it cannot be coincidence. The car owner gave the book to police once he realised it was relevant to the case, but he said he did not know the dead man. Some reports say that the book appeared in the man's car a full week or two before the Somerton Man died, suggesting he was staying in the area and that he visited the beach at least once before his death.

The book contained two pieces of information. The first was a series of capital letters, written by hand at the back of the book, that were assumed to be a code:

Police scan of the handwritten code, via Wikimedia Commons

However, cryptologists have never been able to break the code and at least one professional organisation asserts that it cannot be a code. So far, this is very spy-like behaviour - except for the fact that this book landed in the police's hands at all - supporting The Theory to Beat. 

The second piece of information was a telephone number, also written at the back of the book. This phone number belonged to Jessica Ellen "Jo" Thompson, who claimed she did not know the dead man. However, police noted that she was being "evasive" (I am curious what exactly this entailed) and that when she was shown the plaster case, she looked like she was "about to faint" (you know, as women do). She then asked that her name and other details be removed from the case files (and the police complied). 

Jo died in 2007 and in 2014, her daughter Kate said she believed her mother did know the man but for some reason refused to acknowledge him. There were also details about her mother that Kate couldn't reconcile, like the fact that Jo spoke Russian but refused to say where or when she had learnt the language and she was interested in communism (which of course means she must have been depraved). The only clue her mother left her daughter with was the offhand comment that the Somerton Man was known "at a higher level than the police force". What are the chances that they were both spies? I've already covered the "surplus" of "agents" both in the area and after the war, so I'd say pretty decent.

The only information Jo would give the police is that she had owned a copy of the Rubaiyat during the war but she had given it to a soldier named Alf Boxall, and so for a while, police believed that Boxall was the Somerton Man. But in 1949, Boxall was found to be alive and in Sydney (with the wonders of social media, I imagine they would have found him sooner). He still had the book and the final page was intact (although technically, that doesn't prove that this book was the same one Jo had given him - apparently, it was not that rare a book).

In January 1949 (roughly two months after the Somerton Man's death), staff at the Adelaide railway station (remember the train ticket) reported that a suitcase had been checked in on the day of his death (30 November) and had not been claimed. The outer label had been removed. Inside were some of the normal things you'd expect to find: pyjamas, slippers, a dressing gown, a pair of trousers (although, interestingly, the cuffs of the trousers contained sand), underwear and shaving items (but no socks). But then there were some unusual things: a screwdriver, a well-worn table knife, a pair of scissors, a square of zinc and a stencilling brush (used on merchant ships).

Also in the suitcase was a spool of orange thread, which matched the thread that had been used to sew the scrap of paper into the Somerton Man's pocket.

A police photo of the discovery of the suitcase, via Wikimedia Commons

The labels on these clothes had been removed too, but the Somerton Man had not been as careful here: some of the clothes had different spellings of the name "Keane" stamped on them and there was a laundry bag with the same name. The clothes could have been second-hand (today we'd say "vintage"), but what are the chances that all of his clothes came from the same source? This was another dead end as the police could not find a missing person with the surname "Keane" or "Kean", not only in Australia, but in other countries too.

As I mentioned, leads continued to trickle in but none of them stuck.

Let's take a massive leap forward now, not only in terms of time but technology. Jo had also had a son, named Robin. In 2013, Robin's widow and his son gave an interview claiming that the Somerton Man was Jo's lover and Robin's father. The proof: the shape of their ears was the same (I kid you not). The police decided to re-open the case and exhume the body to try to extract some DNA evidence. That proved futile, as the body had decomposed too badly, but several strands of hair were found embedded in the plaster cast, which turned out to be viable.

There were a lot of "cooks" in the kitchen by now (most as unqualified as me), but a physicist and electronic engineer named David Abbott and a forensic genealogist named Colleen Fitzpatrick were on the trail with the hairs from the cast. They used the DNA they were able to extract and ran it through a "genealogy research database" (the home page of which claims that "Anyone can upload their DNA profile, analyze the results, and compare DNA shared with others"). They found a distant cousin of the Somerton Man and used that information to construct a family tree of a couple of thousand people (which, still, was the best lead anyone had had in 60-odd years). 

With a bit of sleuthing, Abbott and Fitzpatrick found their man: Carl Webb, an electrical engineer from Victoria, Australia, who had disappeared in 1947. (I do have to point out that this investigation was private and did not take place with police assistance, and that it still needs to be verified by sources other than the media, but I'm going to go with the DNA evidence and the woman whose entire career is dedicated to this kind of thing (i.e. Fitzpatrick) over the organisation that did not find the identity of the Somerton Man in - let me calculate this again - 74 years.)

The information on Webb is pretty scant. He was apparently born in Melbourne in 1905 and then married in 1941. He was "an instrument-maker" and his wife was a "21-year-old foot specialist", according to an interesting article in Smithsonian Magazine. Webb left his wife in 1947 and she started divorce proceedings (in  his absence) in late 1951, being apparently one of the only people who was not aware of the tantalising mystery brewing across the whole second half-century of the 1900s. He liked to read and write poetry, as well as bet on the ponies (those in the know now speculate that the "code" at the back of the book was a shorthand record of the horses he had bet on). Oh, and to nail this coffin shut, his sister was married to a man named ... Thomas Keane.

As I "hinted" at at the beginning of this post, the mystery is solved but not: we have a name and a bare timeline, but not the details of the tapestry, the meat of the pie (inside joke). Was Webb poisoned by someone else, or did he decide that life was just not worth the hassle? If the former, which I am going to tack to The Theory to Beat as the most likely, what was he poisoned with and why did it not show up in his blood or organs? Who was the man who allegedly carried him to the beach and then staged his body? Why was that scrap of paper sewn into his clothing? Why were all the labels removed from his clothes and from his suitcase? What happened in the year and eight months between when he left his wife and shuffled off this mortal coil without a soul noting his demise, at least in public? And what was his relationship with Jo Thompson?

Shakespeare had the innocent Juliet ponder, "What's in a name?" This story suggests not much, particularly if more than half a century has gone by between a man's death (which seems to be the most interesting thing about his life) and the opportunity to erect a headstone. All of which could be proof that he was a spy and doing a better job of hiding it than Jo Thompson. Alternatively, facing down the bleakness of existence in a really bleak decade, perhaps he thought he would do in death what he couldn't do in life: leave a mark, which is kind of like poetry writ large.

I still back The Theory to Beat, for the record. I'm invested in it now, which is proof of nothing. We have the evidence and there is the truth, but we have no way to link those two things together, except using a narrative (and until someone cracks the code of time travel - but then wouldn't we already see proof of someone already having returned to past and solved the mystery?). So I suppose in the end, this ended up being a literary post, in a sense.

A police photo of the Somerton Man's corpse, via Wikimedia Commons

1Q84

Two moons, the one paper-like, a cheap lantern, lit from behind and green with dust. Together the moons are a signpost of an alternate reality that the protagonist of Haruki Murakami's novel calls 1Q84. Get it? I'm not sure I do, but it is best to embrace your weaknesses when reading anything written by the master of relativity, Murakami.

I am back, dear reader, albeit not in one piece and not without a few scars. One is a pretty star shape and positioned like a gangster tat. There is only one moon here, but it is anaemic-pink with pollution and on sale.

So it is fitting that 1Q84 is my first review in a few months. It is the codex to my present. It is my white rabbit. It is a post-modern Ulysses sitting next to said tome on my bedside table. It is 1000-and-something pages light, and I read the first 100 pages three times and each time it was a different novel.

The novel is actually a trilogy, but what isn't in the aftermath of Peter Jackson's assault on Mordor? It was first published in three parts in Japanese in 2009 before being translated and published in English in 2011. Since then Murakami has written one more novel: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, which is news to me too.

My books travel with me. I never know when I may find an opportunity - and an almost physical need - to read, from doctors' waiting rooms to coffee breaks to shop queues. I have been (interrupted and) asked to describe this book many many times in many many contexts and each time I flapped my cheeks a few times before sighing, hoping this would suffice. When it didn't, I squinted at the back cover:

The year is 1Q84.

This is the real world,
there is no doubt about that.

But, in this world, there are
two moons in the sky.

In this world, the fates of two people
Tengo and Aomame, are closely intertwined.
They are each, in their own way,
doing something dangerous.
And in this world, there seems
no way to save them both.

Something extraordinary is starting.

"So," I would start. "This 1321-page book is set in an alternate universe, where everything is the same as ours except that there are two moons." I would look up from the blurb then, hoping this would have answered the question. "Um, ok. The story is told from the perspectives of two characters: an assassin-cum-gym-instructor and a writer-cum-maths-teacher. They are separately part of a conspiracy that is loosely bound to a cult that believes in faeries. The Old World kind of faerie. The nasty kind.

"I haven't finished reading it, yet," I would apologise. Still, my audience would stare.

Stop staring.

This standoff reminds me of a mistake I made once of asking an elderly sculptor what one of his pieces 'meant' - I was chewed out in Italian before being given the cold shoulder for the afternoon. Yes, meaning is relative - but meaning is also democratic, sir, and you are responsible for mowing the grass along your stretch of road whether you vote or not. Or something.

I imagine Murakami chewing me out for turning to the blurb for meaning.

In a previous novel, Kafka on the Shore, loose ends flip around like live electrical wires in the street after a violent storm. (The same street whose sidewalks you mow.) In 1Q84, the street is not only triple the length, with triple the number of sparking wires, but it also inhabits all 26 possible dimensions and then some. In other words, the novel is too long to safely sustain relativity.

The problem with the author scrapping his name from the voting ballot and setting fire to all evidence that he was ever there is that, the longer the novel, the more frayed plot points spark in the street and many of these streets are cul de sacs, each with kaleidoscopes of authors hightailing it in all sorts of directions, possibly dimensions, and while I don't mind singing for my supper, I would prefer it if we could stick to one metaphor. Right?

1321 pages is too long for the author to leave me to my own devices.

As if to punctuate this, my pet bunny ate the last 6 pages of the novel before I could finish reading. So, technically, I have not finished the novel. But neither do I have the urge to acquire those 6 pages and read them (imagine me curled up behind a bookshop bookshelf, listening for the footsteps of a bookseller who will politely ask me to buy the book if I want to know how it ends - they don't believe the story about Munroe the paper-munching rabbit).

This review is like one of those puzzles where you have to count how many shapes you see and you are supposed to count shapes in the shapes and shapes made of shapes and the shapes these shapes make. There are multiple blurbs in this post and not all of them belong to the same union. I was going to count them out for you and then I thought, nah, you could do with some exercise after your six-month break from my meanderings.

A Canticle for Leibowitz: Part 2 of 2

What is the attention span of a gnat? I am figuring that we find out its life span and divide that into something objective, like the attention span of a fly, or by the amount of time they can spend on a single task. Then we could wander through a few academic halls and land up considering the consciousness of tiny flying animals or fall through the moldy hall that is when a baby becomes a person. As you may have surmised (and as intended) you may have noticed I have a short attention span, which I would compare with that of a gnat's - no, I will compare it and tell you it is two minutes and 3.2 seconds, because I can and I did.

I have also realised that I have said 'would have' a few times today. There are three 'have's in that sentence alone. What the heck is the point of that word? (And before you get snarky, you, I am well aware there is a linguistic answer, but my point still holds because this is my blog and if I say a gnat can only focus on a single task (as defined by me) for two minutes, that is valid.)

So, I finished A Canticle for Leibowitz by sheer force of will. My opinion hasn't changed. Although the structure is interesting, the symbols are heavy-handed. I could not empathise with a single character until the last 2% of the book, but by then I could also not subjugate my lack of suspension of disbelief. (I am really trying here. Whenever I want to point out how illogical something is and that it is a result of laziness not plot, I hear the 'eh' of Dwight from The Office every time he wants to point out something illogical - usually to do with bears. It builds up at the back of the throat and pops from the nasal cavity like a buzzer in a game show.)

This isn't a spoiler, unless you are inclined to belief: the book is set over centuries upon centuries, where humans build up their technology over and over to a point when they can create nuclear bombs. How? How could this happen?

Geologists tell us (although this may be a fringe group of rogue scientists who do not believe in pollution) that the poles are overdue for a shift, whereupon north becomes south, confusing swallows, polar bears and brown bears, as well as pirates and hopefully radar linked to bombs. It may or may not kill us (dust storms, rampaging polar bears and swallows, bombs). Also, (and FYI) a certain degree of climate change is normal, judging by the ice age and the fact that Europe was a desert. (Interesting point: the size of dinosaurs was only possible because the density of the air was lower than it is now.)

Given this was written in the 60s, this would take us way into the 5000s, when (hopefully for the planet) we are extinct, because, entropy. More than a few of the surviving populations would have some kind of mutation (not the X-men kind, but if I could choose, something that gives me the ability to sprint and climb like a mountain goat, because, zombies) from the recurring nuclear bombs, which they would need anyway for the fittest, which no offence, cannot be almost exclusive to monks!

Here's another meaty one for the academics: technological determinism. This book assumes a single pinnacle of human discovery and creation. Bombs, intercoms, phones, planes etc. But a) I can imagine oh so many alternatives, like, what if we discovered the more eco-friendly (and therefore smarter) solutions to electricity, fuel and, errr, general human habitation, first? And b) does this 'pinnacle' really make society 'better'?

This a controversial topic and my gnat brain has moved on. Name of the Rose depicted a monk and a monastery in Italy that captivated my imagination. In this book I met three monks I did not like or only learnt to like in the very last pages of their chapter. It is one thing to kill off characters like a gnat flaps its wings and another thing to just move me to another monastery and then tell me they died of old age while I wasn't looking. It, in fact, makes me care less about your very stupid because they are very human characters. I have compared my brain to a gnat more than once today, therefore your argument is invalid.

Initially my foray in the world of insects was intended to justify A List. First, I did not want to talk about that book of invalidities as it shall be known from now on. Second, I am already bored, so I figured that bullet points would be more my speed. Since this argument is so very compelling, I shall add A List now, in the same blogpost, because I do not feel like writing out more than one tweet.

In the spirit of the above review (don't groan, you) I am going to pick five of the least dis-believable books I have read. I will however use short phrases instead of full, therefore very boring sentences.

1. A Canticle to Liebowitz
2. A Stranger in a Strange Land: life on Mars, general 60s-like (and spirited) shenanigans, a human taking on the physical abilities of another species as if sprinting like a cheetah were a combination of will and absence of will
3. Heart of Darkness and Atomised: more a lack of liking and an abundance of hatred than of disbelief
4. Zoo City: animal familiars that appear when you commit a crime, the final scene
5. Her Fearful Symmetry: ghosts, the characters' complete absence of character, other characters, plot - all of it, narrator (and all this from the writer who made me believe in time travel!)

While we're at it, let's add Gulliver's Travels

I always feel the need to point out that magic is meant to be compatible with physical laws, like gravity and the conservation of mass. Even zombies have an (albeit loose) explanation! So if something that didn't exist before is magicked into existence and it is made of atoms, where were those atoms before? Because so many other tricks rely on the existence of atoms - and I do not mean an interpretation of quantum laws, because *insert game-show sound effect*. Oh, I'm overthinking? Well - ok, the gnat has flown off.

In other words, if an animal familiar appears, was it lurking around waiting for you to do something awful? Is it missing from a zoo somewhere? Is it a manifestation of some communal judgement? Someone, somewhere, must have a clue - must have noticed a trend of disappearing animals - even if it isn't yet verified. And what trend is there regarding the type of crime considered worthy of a (really awesome - and if you're handing them out I'll take one) animal? Legal, societal, religious? Just one real clue, please. (I also want the awesome inseparable animal. Imagine walking down the street with a tiger, a polar bear, a tortoise, a wolf - do they come in extinct too and if so, hello, black rhino.)

Impressive - my attention is holding more like a fly battering itself against a window. (As I typed that, my bunny sat on my stomach, so maybe I am sorted. Still, a polar bear? I adore polar bears.)

What a meandering post. I think the most meandering I have ever written. Perhaps this is a good thing, because it gives me more wiggle room in future. To sum up: every book mentioned in this post, except for the Umberto Eco, is ridiculous. According to the woman with her gnat in her skull. The unconscious doesn't restrict itself to dreams. Do you see it? I asked for a polar bear when I had already been given a gnat. Does the extent of the crime affect the size of the animal? Could an insect be a familiar? That seems a bit of an anticlimax. Like this conclusion. (I walked right into that one.)

'Et vu' and other translations

Sooner than expected and probably more meandering than I intend, here is my post (not the first, I see, because there is a label in my selection of labels labelled 'translations') on, yes, translations. Translations of books, to clarify, for the semantically minded. Bear in mind that I only have a first language (yes, smarty-pants, English); a smattering of a second language and a smatter of a third language, Zulu. To further convince you of my qualifications, I studied linguistics, briefly. Although I have no interest in learning languages, I am interested the idea of language, like any good graduate with a useless degree.

First, let me explore my credentials. English is my home language. My mother grew up in Durban, which was a British port - before war upon war of someone against an other, which is how rational people and not playground bullies solve their problems - and her mother was some degree of Jane-Eyre Victorian. So, like all good mothers, she insisted we say 'hair' as in 'air' with a silent 'h' and 'r', instead of 'ghe'. A 'kid' was a goat not a child, 'mom' just sounded bad and 'ja' (Afrikaans for 'yes') was not English.

I am an editor with a degree in English (and the slightly less meaningless Media Studies). I have read Chaucer and understood it, have a firm stance on Joseph Conrad and Chinua Achebe's review (Conrad is always wrong, always) and adore AS Byatt. So, instead of taking time to learn other languages, I have explored the redundantly spelled and bastard language that is English. And, to add another 'so' to this conversation, my knowledge of translations is limited to the, well, translations.

Taal Monument, which is dedicated to the 11 South African languages

My second language (and I use the term so loosely that we should insert spaces between the letters) is Afrikaans. We started studying Afrikaans in Grade 2 and followed it (albeit loosely) to Grade 12. The teachers declared there was no hope for us - one of them ran out crying, but that had more to do with a difference in political opinion (FYI, Mrs Botha, I was on your side: I would divorce myself from my parents if they were top-level management of a mining company. Any level really).

By the end of matric, I could write complex sentences (by which I mean with conjunctions) in very boring paragraphs and when I spoke no one could understand anything beneath my English accent (FYI, if you care, my sister and I bizarrely have British-sounding accents, and I am often asked where I come from). I started waitressing the day after my last exam in an Afrikaans-populated area and then moved up in the world to bookseller.

When people spoke Afrikaans to me, I shook my head but only because I needed to adjust my language setting. Occasionally, I tried to speak to them in Afrikaans, but it took me two minutes to sound out a sentence, with the customer helping. Usually I asked and then pleaded with them to speak Afrikaans because despite my muteness, I understand Afrikaans. The same has been true of friends who say they need to practise English, or some such tripe.

Let me interrupt myself to explain that my dialect of English has an even more dodgy heritage because it has pilfered words and phrases from local languages. There's 'ja' for 'yes', 'skelm' for someone between a 'petty criminal' to 'naughty person (even child)' and you can add '-tjie' to the end of pretty much any noun to create the diminutive. Personally, I pilfered 'dankie tog', which does not actually mean anything, 'jok' instead of 'grap' to mean 'joke.' This is a joke that is only funny in my head, but I think my Afrikaans friends feel sorry for me and do not correct me.

Then there's Zulu. We started studying it as a third language in Grade 8 and could choose to study it from Grade 10. Our teacher was a very enthusiastic white woman whose husband was rich which is why she could afford a BMW while teaching. There are different dialects of Zulu (and in fact it and another language are pretty much the same Nguni language, but the colonialists conquered by setting groups against each other and general bloodshed - but this could get me assassinated, so moving on) and I think we learnt the wrong one because no one understands me.

Zulu is interesting. Most of the languages I have been exposed to (I can also say 'et vu' which is French for 'and you') are European. They developed alongside, over, below and within English, so the sentence forms are similar, even when they are mixed around. English is noun and then verb, for example. The parts of speech are often distinct words with distinct functions. In Zulu, a single word can be sentence. 'Ngiyabona' means I (ngi), ya (you) and bonga (thank). 'Siyabonga' is we thank you.

But - and here is when it sets fire to the linguistic part of your brain - the tense of the sentence is continuous present: I am thanking you. This explains why Nguni-language speakers often use this tense seemingly at random. I, however, do not, because that is as far as my knowledge of the language extends. No, that's not true, I can say 'water', 'it is hot/cold', 'hello' and 'boy'. I also know that 'ama-' indicates the plural. Other than that, our Zulu dictionary was a mostly useless waste of 128 pages with a pastel green cover. I hope the publishers have addressed that, what with Zulu and Xhosa being the most widely spoken languages in South Africa.

It looks like I am running out of time, so I will introduce The Point for the next post now. You express your thoughts in language and so your language reflects some of your cognitive structures, and vice versa. I have a case study here: me. We use 'he' as a general pronoun, right? There is no more meaning than this? Even though when I say 'doctor', you assume he is a he and then are surprised he is a she but you think 'you go, girl' or something equally patronising, and applaud her for, you know, studying.

A while ago, I consciously adopted 'she' as my general pronoun. I am a woman, after all, why should my go-to word not be female? I slipped, often, at first, so my endeavour looked like just that: a liberal attempt at who-cares. After a while, though, it became natural. The other day I caught myself assuming a doctor was a woman and being surprised when he wasn't. And if you don't think that reflects the way you think: when I assume a person or animal is a 'she', people ask me how I know or why. When I explain, they widen their eyes, nod slowly and turn around as I were sprouting green air on my cheek. If they are honest they say 'Do you really believe that?' and then turn away.

Not all of this is the next Point, so you can let out the breath you are holding. I withhold my rants for when you're not expecting them, because then I can remind you that I am the sheriff here. At the least, I am holding the keys. I am not sure what relationship this mishmash of languages has with my brain, except in reflecting it is a mishmash. I suppose you also know that I am not a polyglot, because I would rather study sentence trees than learn how to say something that I can already say in English.

For those of you who enjoyed the hiking trail of my brain, perhaps you want some closure. But if you are looking for the cognitive implications of the tense in Zulu, what do you think I am, a savant?

Show pigeons are walking existential crises, if you think about it

I am suffering a dry streak, my friends. Dry as all those rivers that were dammed to make dams because some committee wanted a dam and be damned the ecosystem. Dry as the absence of vowels in the word. I can't find anything good to read. And I don't mean 'good' as is literature, but I don't mean cult classic either. I have been abandoned by books I actually want to read.

In the not-too-distant past there has been The Passage and Night Film and Mara and Dann. But search back through these archives (maybe you will find something more interesting back there) and see that they are segregated by months. Years, maybe? Possibly. Probably. Perhaps - no, definitely - I am being melodramatic, but see, this is how I count my days, months and years. This is how I catalogue my memories.

A show pigeon

I don't think: "In February last year, I sat outside on a bench and watched a show pigeon trying to be a dove while I wrote." I think "A hardcover Kurt Vonnegut was on the table and I was listening to Ben Howard. It was windy, a cold wind, but I liked being outside." Before this, I had read Fahrenheit 451, which although I don't talk about it much is one of my favourites. It is a lonely book, as any book set in a policed dystopia must be. I had read it sitting on my bed between naps.

Some of my collection of must-I-finishes? includes A Widow for a Year by John Irving, The Luminaries by Elenor Catton and 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. Even before I finish the first sentence, I am on the tracks of my own stories, the book held in front of me like a disguise - rendered useless by the fact I am alone. Since I am being picky now, the author needs to go big or go home. I want a plot that knocks on my breastbone and yells that he will huff and puff if I don't give him my heart to chow on.

Metaphorically. Of course. Definitely. I mean, who doesn't love the bolschy character who is a bit of a bully but who also has a heart that tells him when to use it?

I had to think for a moment to remember what I am technically theoretically and painfully reading now. A Canticle for Leibowitz. One of the big bloopers in The Passage was that nothing had decayed much 100 years later. The ragtag team ate dented cans of peaches. Electricity grids still ran, albeit failingly. Did you know that the acid in modern paper actually makes it less durable? Books made of paper from the last century or so will crumble sooner.

Did you also know that in 1000 years, men in habits will be finding receipts and to-do lists hoarded in a time capsule where nothing else has survived time? And - oh this is my favourite - that all of human knowledge will disappear into warring factions of Neanderthals, in which women are once again just wet nurses. And that we will be forced to walk with a silly man in a brown habit who we cannot love even as a baby brother who likes to recite poetry he doesn't understand.

It would make sense if you read it. But don't. Let me finish and tell you at length how awful it is. My version will be a better read.

But this is not a dystopian novel and so there is light. A flickering solar light, maybe, or the slow beam of a long-dead star. I borrowed and started reading The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco. Not a recommended read, unless you enjoy pirouetting on a pinhead that is an idea with far too many rust spots to be appealing.

You know (yes, you know) that in my roving mind, ideas are important. Critical in fact. Stories of what we might do when the ties of society are loosened are vital, because that is who are, isn't it? How else can we understand ourselves as moral beings? How else can I understand myself? (That is hypothetical, because I don't and I am not sure I believe people who say they do.) Right now, steam is exploding from my nose and ears like a cartoon bull, at the frustration of being and of knowing. These are the kinds of stories I tell myself when I am pretending to read.

Umberto Eco is a true polymath, like Noam Chomsky: he is an expert in so many specialised areas of study that to call him a generalist is also inaccurate. I am in awe and jealous of the man, who by my age had probably already written two books and disproved a host of flawed ideas. I am also embarrassed (as if he were standing in front of me) by how little I have achieved. 

To take another hammer to my street cred, I only read Name of the Rose after my literature degree. Just before this, I had read My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk.

Aside, because now I know I must write a post on translations: Pamuk's writing is beautiful and made more beautiful by the strangeness (in the literal sense) of the culture, history and language. In this book, the culture is the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Marat III and a murder mystery than circles the scribes in his employ.  The novel binds itself around notions of representation and art. For example, is it art if it is mimicry? It posits that a piece of work is a form of immortality - but is it? What about those sculptures sitting in museums that we can't identify? Is that a legacy?

Name of the Rose touches on so many of the same themes, extending my experience of both novels so that they seem sort of magical (and you know I am not one to use these words lightly. Except when I am making fun. Which is often, but not now). The novel is set in a monastery in Italy, about 150 years before My Name is Red, there is also a murder mystery and the monks are also scribes. While the Ottoman scribes are also working in service of their faith, they enjoy beauty and their craft for craft's sake. Both sets of works are decadent, but the Italians are more repressed and conflicted. Probably not as repressed as the British.

In Eco's world, art does not exist for art's sake. In Pamuk's world, art for art's sake is still a form of worship. When I think of the latter, I think of rich reds and blues. When I think of the former, I think of cool golds and greens.

This venture off-the-beaten-track was not meant to be The Point, but is somehow still is The Point. (Despite what people tell you, haphazard meetings are usually more useful than laid-out plans.) The Island of the Day Before reminds me why I love to read. Why I am mostly Reader, some Writer and a fraction of other stuff that I lost years ago and am still looking for. (If you find it, keep it - I clearly don't need it.)

Books are my religion. I mean that in a quasi-blasphemy way. Most people believe in the things that they can see and touch, and that they exist, which leads to a comfortable belief that the world exists as a place with meaning. I however am an extra in The Matrix but I am very conscious of all the set pieces. Metaphorically. Where the set pieces form a dangerous a chain of existential corkscrews. Which means the 'I' that is me is usually very confused and a confused animal is an edgy one.

Books are the antidote. A novel is made-up - the story finds a way to exist in a candyland of wirly-girglies without having to touchdown. (That is just how confusing life feels to me.) It is made of words that never promise they are real but can be content in being this in-between thing. Ideas, too, are multi-coloured strands that can be strung out further, tied up and then untied. They make space and time in which to be examined, and don't hassle me to make a decision every time I put a key in my front door to unlock it.

If you are the kind of person who reads the conclusion first, this post is not about a single novel at all. But intention is nine-tenths of meaning, so know that I meant to and then got carried away. By which I mean I meant to do that, but you need not read it. I don't think this post was meant to be read; I just needed to write it.

The Last Policeman

I was not drawn to the book by the title, clearly. The title puts me in mind of an I am Legend-Rick Grimes-Deadwood mash-up. The apocalyptic surviver/cowboy thing has been done - although not to death. Those who have watched the entire Space Odyssey and can still talk about it without PTS breakdowns call the detective story, cowboy epic and science-fiction culture siblings. It makes sense, really. Yes, really. Trap activated and now you shall listen to my theories even though I have only watched five minutes of Space Odyssey before genuinely wanting to inflict physical harm upon myself.

Five minutes of my life I lost: Space Odyssey

Then again, if I were an expert, I wouldn't be putting all this down on a blog for fickle readers. Yes, again. That's you.

The Last Policeman is a detective novel. The mystery is staid: a 'hanger' has been found dead in a McDonald's bathroom and our intrepid detective believes he was murdered. The evidence being a black belt. Oh you're waiting for more? There is none. Justifiably, his colleagues think he is young and overzealous and way too committed to the whole justice thing (they have a point).

Did you notice it? The tide of silver-grey herrings? A 'hanger' is a suicide by noose. Why would one have slang for types of suicide? (I have been drawing this one out.)

An asteroid is flaming through space aimed like a stone in a slingshot slung by Hercules for Earth. And everyone is offing themselves - hanging being a popular method. (Not smart, peeps. Like, at all. It is incredibly difficult to successfully hang yourself, for reasons I shall not explore.) When the novel begins, the asteroid (sentimentally named Maia) is seven months away and 103% on course to hit Earth.

Now, I am not against a natural disaster wiping out the destructive toddler that is the human race. In fact, if I were somehow given the choice, I would choose to resurrect the dinosaurs. Partly because I have always wanted to see a dinosaur, from a secure hiding place obviously. This reminds me of the meme that if human beings had to fight for survival against the dinosaurs, the egg-laying creatures would win.

I also never understand the reactions to the apocalypse. You know we aren't immortal, right? As someone once said, we are pretty much hamburger meat. We make it until we don't. And there are lots of places on Earth where the apocalypse is pretty much every day. "Kill the cockroaches", Russian gulags and Ebola being good examples.

But while we're - I'm - discussing this, our unconscious delusions of immortality counter our death drives, like the self-correcting nervous system and Gaia. Freud said that we have to believe we are immortal in order to face our mortality and lots of psychologists whose names I don't know agree that the popularity of horror movies and apocalyptic fiction is in seeing someone else die so we can feel relief at still being alive and reinforce the idea that we are immortal.

True as Bob.

Ok, so by the time Maia gets here, she won't have many people to irradiate, and if she doesn't, there won't be anyone to say 'I told you' to. But believe it or not, some really sadistic people are still doing their jobs, including this very naive detective (I actually think he has a mild form of autism or Asberger's). Well, not doing their jobs, which is why they don't believe - or care about - the murder. Perhaps this is how he deals with his imminent demise: by obsessing over someone else's death. Oh Freud, you could write a trilogy of books about this.

 As the narrator repeatedly reminds us, the fallible scientists slid down a slide of probability until they reached the mud of almost certainly (because never say never - or just anything unequivocal. Always leave room for retraction). Our socially stilted detective seems stuck on this, probably because he likes a long shot. Which is a criterion of a good but definitely not romantic hero. These heroes are perpetually - or almost perpetually - dissatisfied.

Think of the many John Wayne or Clint Eastward characters (let's be honest, they are all just one guy with different ponchos). To be a cowboy, the hero needs to be isolated from society, even ostracised, with some trauma in his past that he assumes some guilt for. He is self-reliant in his isolation and eternally awkward in society. He is cruel, but he shows that humanity is cruel. The cowboy always faces the march of civilisation and the extinction of his little corner of desert. He is the last outpost of the old ways, in which people have one-on-one relationships with the environment. Dang society. Where is that asteroid when you need it?

Sigourney Weaver kicking some gross alien ass

Now consider Sigourney Weaver's character in Alien 2. She travelled through time when she travelled through space in the wake of blowing up a really horrid, slimy flock of flies.  Her daughter may as well be dead because she is old and crabby. No one believes her about the flies so they think she is a murderer - an insane one. She is lost in this new world and stuck in the one before having to kill things. In the end, she displays some epic gunpower (she straps two guns together - why has no one ever thought of this?!) in an epic fight wearing a robot suit. Cowboy much?

Back to the apocalypse (to my mind, facing those fracking aliens would be far worse than an instantaneous death). In I am Legend (the book), Robert Neville is all of these things, except he really is utterly alone. You could argue the zombies are a metaphor for society, being a much better catalyst than sheep, but you could also argue that without a society as backdrop, he cannot be a hero. Neville is not your Will Smith martyr; he can only be selfish to survive.

Hank Palace is definitely isolated: he uses boxes as furniture, his sister is a drug addict, and his colleagues are waiting for the day the penny drops and he realises the world is already disaster. One trait I didn't mention: honour. These men all have a code of honour (which is not justice. And I am ok with that). In Detective Palace's case, his code is logic and rules and that takes the form of justice when we meet him. He reads every amendment to the laws (now coming in and heavy), views everyone as equals (except the criminals), and writes down every clue in a blue notebook so he can put them together.

He seems to be in some denial about Maia. I will leave you to figure that one out, because you need something to do other than read blogs.

The asteroid, like bad guys, aliens and zombies is a reminder and fear of society's fallibility. The inevitability of its destruction. And perhaps the isolation that comes of knowing this. Of being unable to stop knowing this. We are attracted to these stories to roll around in their foreignness and convince ourselves they cannot happen. Except I always wonder at this fear. My degree (let's milk it for the tiny ounce of value it has) taught me that 'civilisation' is a fantasy, as is any sort of social Darwinism (I am thinking of technological Darwinism here). Change is as constant as death.

I would prefer to be murdered by an asteroid though.

There's more! I have mislead you twice about this. The detective genre. Cowboy much? One or two people deep in a conspiracy theory who pursue the 'truth' even when faced with physical harm. Look, they yell, way to loudly in a dark warehouse while they are being hunted. Society is fraught with red herrings, but we have found the truth. The world has order, friends! Phew. Joke's on you, buddy, but let's take the win. In an impressive flip, in the end they are welcomed into society, having found a friend or the love of his life or just acceptance. 'Told ya so,' he thinks and sometimes actually yells.

Society is not unequivocally screwed. Not as long as this hero(ine) brings order to the world. Like the movie named whatchamacallit, you do something good for a person, who does good, who does good. But this isn't Carthage and so our land is not about to be sown with salt and we aren't about to be taken slave. Society just is because we are and we are mortal. Good breeds good, but trauma begets trauma.

I seem to be playing both sides of the fence here. But look! There is no fence. (An asteroid took it out after a dinosaur stomped on it.) These works of the imagination conjur up our worst fears, which are part of being human and therefore inevitable, and then sings us a lullaby about our own agency. We can save ourselves, they say. Even in the face of the apocalypse, we can still make meaning of a mystery. And therefore we are immortal. Or something. Maybe just immune to death for the immediate future.

I should know better

I should know better. Haven't I been down this road? And haven't I dragged you with me, just to hear you scream? (Solidarity is what I mean. Scream in solidarity.) Suffer for your art. Lesson learnt. Do what you love. Learnt and burnt. (It rhymes. Stop thinking so much.) Language is a fickle thing, swayed by plays on words. Live what you love and vice versa. Maybe I enjoy testing platitudes, maybe I am just otherwise and maybe there is a teeny tiny origami-ed singularity of... hope... living in a swamp of nihilism. Unlikely, right? Maybe it's just a stagnant pond.

I have struck out on my own, hypothetically earning money by writing. Yes, for a living. Yes, hypothetically for a living. Yes, I know. I should know better.

For those you who are new to said screaming, a publisher in Italo Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveller explains, unasked, that a reader should never be a publisher. He leaves his claim hanging, for you to fill in the gaps. For me, it was a) realising that most of the manuscripts you thumb through are just that: a dirty thumbprint as well as an exercise in egoism - you are not discovering Yeats or Morrison; you are packaging products that are shelved and bought and shelved, and to be followed by the sequel, and b) the previous point (I got ahead of myself) about packaging.

See, words and books are the altar at which I scrutinise and decode and generally worship with the nit-pickiness of the editor I am. I am an editor and writer. In the most fundamental existential and religious sense (although I am told this is not possible, I live to be otherwise). A career is something you do to fund your existential crises - and that discord is exactly how you come to be good at your job (and, to be crass, to make piles of money you can use to line your published novels with).

Hang on. Something is out of sync in this tirade. What is it? Is it my bleeding wounds? My rampaging cynicism? My unfed facetiousness?

Bear with me, now. Perhaps this is an old song, taught to me by a long-dead bird (it may be under my bed cuddled by a self-satisfied cat named Selina the Psychopath). Perhaps I am older, bolder and uglier, better poised to defend my altar without necessarily dying in the process. This cannot be. If it is, my days and nights will run together (ok, that began yonks ago); I will hum while I do chores; I may actually finish my novel and at some point I will be... content? Sorry, I dropped my laptop as the shivers paralysed my motor skills. 

A writer is nothing without discontent. Every story has a complication or infinite; every award-worthy literary novel has complication, anti-climax and a resolution that is both unknowable and for you to find out. All writers are cynical, vaguely hostile, isolated and definitely not in any way wealthy. Or even just head-above-water not-broke. Or so volumes of novels and biographies, and degrees of terrabytes of movies tell us.

Virginia Woolf or Marianne Keyes? That is my choice? Oh deity of my absolutely fictional altar, I am just going to hide out under it for a while with you, if that's ok? I don't take up much space. Especially when I have dehydrated myself with hours of bawling.

I still protest the word plays that skip like Little Bo Peeps through this post. Partly because that is just tempting Murphy (remember last week when I left my house keys in my car, which was being serviced, or when I forgot my wallet at home and was already in a queue and had to beg the parking office to let me out, or when I left my lights on at work and had to call for a jump start at 23:00 on a Sunday evening? I have seen him in pyjamas, folks. Pyjamas) and partly because life is more complicated than seven words (which in itself nullifies that clause).

Ok, ok, since you are that insistent I will crawl out from underneath this altar and write everything and only enjoy it a medium amount of much. I will also desist from the crazy meandering of this post.  I will stop crying if you stop screaming. I will not overanalyse how much I do enjoy writing (insurance is more interesting that you think, you). I will do all of this, but I will take my imaginary deity with me. We have a novel to finish. And it needs to be complicated and unresolved.

Saying something doesn't make it true

Pinterest feeds off sentimental sayings of ten words or less set on a pretty textured backgrounds or stock photos. Saying something doesn't make it true, my friend, any less than believing the sun will rise in the south tomorrow will make it so. Nor will grouping ten words, like singles around the bar, guarantee they make sense. In fact, you could argue that there is an ideal number of words in a concise but accurate description. But ten words is not it.

Think about it: Big Bang Theory. Err firecrackers? Popping balloons (shudder)? Sheldon? Explain that in ten words or less.

In fact, most of these memes make less sense than the cliches and housewives' myths handed down through the generations (like the perfect way to make tea), which usually only inadvertently make sense (there is no perfect way to make tea, because coffee. You heard me. Coffee). "Absence makes the heart grow fonder." Aaaaaand sometimes it doesn't. "Haste makes waste." Not in the movies. You're not exactly going to sit down to think when an alarm starts running its mouth off in a nuclear reactor.

Here are some clangers.

The words are very pretty and, in these cases, make some superficial sense and give us a warm feeling that would otherwise be a symptom of internal bleeding. Although this may surprise you, I am a book person, a reader, a literate. I am also a creative who fits into the box of stereotypical characters of writers quite nicely, with some shuffling. So I can tell you that the imagination is mostly escapism and creating is more a by-product. I've lived the thousand lives The Man of One Thousand Books is alluding to. Many are independent of books and live like moss in the damper parts of my brain.

Let's take a breather here. What is The Point of this post? a) The Big Bang Theory b) Memes c) Game of Thrones d) Coffee e) None of the Above.

The Point is always coffee but you get points for trying if you went with e). Now, we're rounding a hairpin bend, so stay with me, you.

Reading turns you into a know-it-all. I am a false measure, because I was this way to start with. I once tried to convince my mother than one million was actually one thousand thousand. My clincher was "my teacher told me". This is like Maths in school - most of your marks were for working out, even if your numbers were wrong. So my logic was wandering in the right direction, but it could have hit the million between the eyes if I had listened.

A reader can, and will, tell you about Emperor butterflies (all my knowledge about these creatures comes from the books of Enid Blyton so it could, for all I know, be a strictly fictitious thing. Although, who would make up a butterfly?), the aftermath of World War I and where Anastacia's body is. Replace these facts with whatever fact the reader in your life is currently spouting.

This occurred to me because, in lieu of being able to give anything my attention for more than five minutes right now, I am devouring magazines as if they were episodes of The Office (fyi my favourite two series. Like, ever). Mostly techie or cultural things (fashion magazines, by comparison, are just recycled and often contradictory tidbits, like whether ripped denim looks trashy and whether yellow lipstick ever suits anyone. Like, ever).

Ok, I confess. I just wanted to regale you with some annoying facts about the world. Anticipating it would be annoying, I tried to ride in on the back of a Lipizzaner - donkey - mule deer - camel. Basically, I tried to hide my intention in plain sight. Since we've come all this way, I am just going to go ahead as if I had not confessed anything at all. Which, honestly, is the way most Catholics go about it.

So, did you know that nuclear reactors are being phased out, by not being upgraded, the output slowed and the plants shut, because they are not efficient sources of power? Although it is an efficient source of death and general suffering. Did you know that a team of countries hacked into the nuclear facilities of another country and shut the whole thing down? Did you know that the most complete skeleton of a T-Rex was found in 1977 and is the only one to have arms (that sounds like a meme in the making)? And that T-Rex could not live in today's world because the air isn't dense enough?

Facts are like crosswords: they are addictive. In fact, both are like reading fiction, which is addictive. Don't take my word for this though; nothing accurate can be said in ten words, other than: My favourite dinosaur is the stegosaurus. The cat crossed the road. The tree is tall. While true, they don't have quite the same ring as "A rolling stone gathers no moss" (you spotted it, right, the blatant problem here? A rolling stone probably has crevices that gather moss, because to gather does not mean to grow).

We have inadvertently (phew, this post has meaning) stumbled onto questions about language, truth and culture. None of this can be summed up in ten words, or even in this post, or probably in a lifetime. So, I will distract you with another fact: Eskom (our electricity provider) built a pumped storage site that can power up in five minutes to support the national grid. It is built underground because the site it's built in is home to a rare bird that no one has ever heard sing. Or something.

That was more than ten words, you.

Humpty Dumpty was a nihilist

Humpty Dumpty - WW Denslow

Go into your kitchen and break a glass. (You sense a moral here, but do it anyway.) Now, what do we (note: this does not imply I am in any way responsible for your decision to obey my imperative) have to hand to put Humpty Dumpty back together again? A plaster, superglue, paper mache, a welding iron? You get the point. You do, right?

What doesn't kill you does not make you stronger. Oh, it's just a saying? Well then write it on a piece of paper instead of saying it to someone in a bind. Because you may be scratching at a hairline crack or chip in the rim. I have seen people smash a glass or mug that is chipped and apparently harbouring all sorts of bacteria. This is a great metaphor, right?

People are not only flawed but damaged. Yes, even you. We're all wandering around hiding hairline cracks so that no one smashes us. To kill the bacteria or stop you from infecting everyone. Or something. This is still a good metaphor, because some people seek out other damaged people and smash them, on purpose but not consciously.

Even a saintly person, who takes in more orphans than she has resources for, may be operating from a desire to give herself up like a sacrifice, drown in other peoples' traumas or withhold luxury from herself and even the orphans. This isn't to say she's not a good person or altruistic, but she's still human.

By nature humans have to be selfish. Each one of us is glued to one spot in a fleshy box. You can't even explore the box, unless you have been breathing in fumes, but even then you just think you're exploring the box. Apart from the fact that any living creature defends its own territory, and especially when as far as we're concerned going beyond your room in the box is walking into a sci-fi movie (which rarely ends well), we may also have Stockholm Syndrome.

(That last bit may be facetious, I don't know. Part of me believes it.)

This was definitely not My Point. My Point is a) never use sayings like that in real life because you are asking for me to smash something and b) don't cast the first stone unless you are sure it doesn't have a log in it, which is unlikely because this box is made of wood. Or something.

Ever heard the claim that abused children often grow up to be abusers? Trauma begets trauma. Cracks breed more cracks, which is the real reason why people smash the glasses and mugs. This is my contribution to the Tree of the Human Condition. That people seek out other people to crack and smash, because what salves a weakness like shattering someone else's? Even the saint harbours a grudge against society or wealth or whatever.

This isn't some devilish spell; it's just unfortunate, like the flaws of our poor hero Hamlet, who is fated by the thoughts that he acts on, on purpose but unconsciously.

Ha! There is a third point! Now that I have completely depressed you (thereby perhaps fulfilling my destiny to seek out other people's chi) I am going to uplift you with the unexpected joy of the Nihilist. No, not really. That's ludicrous. But I still think I am more idealistic, even realistic, than most.

c) If most of the terrible offshoots of humanity, like poverty, McDonalds and the Vikings, are beaten into us, there is still space for us to be inherently... good is not the right word. None of us deserve haloes, my friend. Deserving of respect. Having integrity.

In my experience, treating people with respect is an investment. Even though they may be wary at first, most come around. It's a selfish ploy, really: you catch more flies with honey (disclaimer: as yet untested, because flies also like garbage) and what I want is more honey. But it's a principle I believe in (probably having wedged it into a crack), in the innate sense of belief (not the kind where you expect a deity to shower you with cash, upon which you visit said deity regularly in case they have more to spare).

The rewards have been like sunlight versus a flashlight of attempts to smash me. (Well, until now, but I also believe I will survive, even if a little less steady.)

For my belief to remain intact-ish, it's not necessary that the person reciprocate (although it is preferable because honey is expensive). Respecting other people is like respecting my image in a mirror. I am witnessing my own sense of integrity in action. If people respond they can see it too.

If that arrow didn't kill me... I'd be a warrior princess.

People usually don't call me idealistic, especially not realistic - they call me naive. How I hate that word. I see the world, and folks, it's not pretty. I cannot accept that half of the world's population is starving, and that isn't even an accurate representation because a subsistence farmer is not in my mind starving. But that a single child starves tonight disgusts me and that we (including me) don't rage in the streets to save that child disgusts me.

Is it naive to believe that child, as a human being, has a fundamental right to respect? To know that she is starving because we're all chipped and afraid of the box we are confined to? To know she is starving on purpose if not consciously? And to know there is nothing I can do to save her or her siblings?

Now you don't have to be a rocket scientist to realise this desire to be Superwoman to the world represents my own need to be cared for. Perhaps even my belief in our innate right to respect and power of integrity. But of all the kinds of chips, I'm okay with this one.

Lately I have been called naive for taking all the motivational speeches and books and blah blah at face value. People have integrity, I yelled, jumping into the fray. But apparently I overlooked the disclaimer: except within the walls of capitalism, upon which they become automatons concerned only with their own survival and that of the structure around them. Right. This is just the way it is, they tell me. Another tried and tested saying. Because life is not filled with surprises. Everything is as it appears. Right.

'The way it is' is this: a society is made up of people. Some people have more and some people have less power. But every single event that happens is related to people. Made up of persons. We have integrity, but we also have cracks that sometimes obscure our integrity. These things, together with a host of creepy crawlies hitherto unmentioned, affect how we interact with the world.

You may feel you have no power; but you have the power to assert your integrity, which (in my experience) usually reflects back from your environment.

My brand of naive nihilism says that (and this is crude and chauvinist) you need to grow some balls and man up. That you respect yourself and the people around you, and you don't let people tell you that you (and they) are worth less than that. You jump into the fray, yelling 'Integrity', but you also pack steel, because some people are looking for a crack to widen. Or something. That when you see someone on the ground you lob them over your shoulder, because when you lay him down, you'll see he has your face.

I can't promise you that you will always win. I can't promise wealth, glory or a picket fence. But I can promise you that if you call me naive or try to patronise me, I will smash your face.

The myth of the Selkie woman

Once every quarter as I was growing up, a glossy illustrated hardcover book would 'arrive'. My mother would look it over, hem and hah, show me a page or two, and then secure it at the top of the cupboard for me to read when I was older. Older being when she had decided I could decode the stories told by more realistic generations and artwork drawn by artists raised in Bluebeard's cavern. She forgot though that I could climb to the top of any tree, fence or wall with appropriate handholds and so a cupboard where my Christmas and birthday presents were also kept, meant only that I needed to get her out of the room.

The Rape of the Sabine Women

The books were a series of mailorder titles labelled 'Myths and legends'. My mother had begun ordering the series because I was fascinated by myth from around the world - and not the sanitised Disney forever-after myths. When my mother realised the titles were a bit, um, dark, she held onto them as an investment. They were hardcover with dark green and blue dust jackets with gold, embossed lettering. The pages were illustrated and full-colour with commissioned and licensed artwork: The Rape of the Sabine Women by Pietro da Cortino and Ophelia by John Millais.

Ophelia

Myths and legends are advice passed down from one generation to the next using symbolism. (Symbolism being far more effective than straight-out telling someone something. An authority figure says don't look in the cupboard? Like Bluebeard's wife I look in the cupboard. Now, if I had heard the Bluebeard tale first, I might have thought more carefully about what might be in there.) We all internalise social mores on an implicit basis, otherwise advertising that holds no relevance to a product would not work.

Illustration by Edward Dullac from an earlier version of the Little Mermaid. At the end she dissolves into foam.

I am all for scaring children a bit. I would rather my child didn't go into the forest or be nice to darkly handsome men, and deal with the emotional scars later. Generations upon generations of children listened to these stories (best told by a scraggly spinster with a talent for voices and sound effects around a crackling fire), were terrified to the point of wet pants and sheets, and lived to tell the stories in their old age.

Our real deficit I think is losing those old people to old-age homes. And our general disrespect for age and its knowledge, which we imagine is a return to juvenilism.

These stories taught that reality is brutal. Things happen for no discernable reason except that they happened, and a useful way to exorcise them is to turn them into moral tales or allegories. The stories change to adapt to changing dangers, unless they are written down and instead of adapting them we just read them verbatim. Because wolves soon cotton on that if they run across a girl in a red cape, they will wake up with a belly full of stones.

Disney spoke to a post-war and then consumerist society, where the ills were no longer hunger and shelter, but happiness, which remained elusive. Happy endings were maybe not so much a warning as a substitute, and a veil against the pyramid of class sinking into the mud. Our more post-modern Pixar nods at the brutality of life, although it ultimately convinces us of the benefits of living in society because life outside of society is wolves and most importantly loneliness. Wall-e is a beautiful movie, that like movies before it, ultimately confuses the desire for love with its necessity.

Don't get me wrong; animated films as contemporary myth are natural adaptations to the old myths (apparently there are only 10 plot lines but infinite manifestations). The adaptation is just a refusal to accept the brutality and sugarcoat it, sometimes literally, with proclamations about identity and love that, according to smart people, only sprung into being roundabout Shakespearian times. (Also the innocence of childhood, which maybe invalidates my entire argument here, but every argument is inherently flawed, else we wouldn't bother to debate.)

I think I have blogged about this before, but contemporary readers have short attention spans (you), which I am relying on.

This depressing monologue was sparked by the legend of the Selkie. Selkies were seals who concealed living breathing men and woman beneath their coats. Every so often a Selkie would 'unzip' her coat and do a few stretches, and if you caught her coat then you could keep her. So far the social more appears to be mysoginism. But this is a 'real' myth and the empathy you feel for this woman is about to be challenged and complicated.

She lives with her captor as his wife for years, because maybe he captured her from loneliness and is actually not so bad. They are kind to each other and breed some human children. One day he goes fishing and she steals back her coat. She swims out to her first, Selkie family. Husband number 2 is furious, so naturally he hunts down and kills her Selkie husband and children. In her rage, Mrs curses every man in and around the village to die in her ocean.

Yikes. Neither partner is exempt from judgement here, or from our empathy. Even society is implicated in the tragedy, by implicitly enabling this theft of a woman's rights. The consequences are vicious, but although there is a lesson, there are no dichotomies.

In another version, Mrs kills her landlubbing children and husband, and then lies weeping in a stream of his blood. This sounds like a Guy Ritchie film.

The Selkie story comes from varying cultures in northern Europe: Inuit, Celtic and Nordic, although the Celts lay claim to it. This is the type of myth depicted in those hardcover books so expertly hidden from me. Boiling, furious oceans, enraged and tragic characters, no hero or villain, or many heroes and villains, trails of blood and curses and life and death. I internalised these messages because they seemed more genuine. C'mon, even Barbie in an ivory tower must be able to see that Cinderella makes no sense, because someone's story never ends and it certainly doesn't continue for forever after.

Is a brutal mythology a sign of more brutal times? Is it an 'uneducated' peoples attempt to describe their reality? And is it paranoia to suspect that nothing has changed? That life and death are inexplicable, but that they are brutal and they do not always sit easy even when you reconcile yourself to these facts. That it is the trauma we need to be wary of: the curse of the Selkie woman. That we are both the hero and the villain, but that sometimes we are only the villain in someone else's story.That maybe children and adults could stand to be a bit more scared.