Red House

 

There is so much more in Hermann Hesse's "Wandering" - click here

 

Red House, out of your small garden and vineyard all the southern Alps breathe to me. I have walked past you several times, and even the first time my wanderlust was sharply reminded of its opposite pole; and once again I toy with the old refrain: to have a home, a little house in a green garden, stillness everywhere, a village below me. In a little room facing east my bed would stand, my own bed; in another little room facing south, my table; and there I would hang up a small, ancient Madonna which I bought on an earlier journey, in Brescia.

Like the day between morning and evening, my life falls between my urge to travel and homesickness. Maybe some day I will have come far enough for travel and distances to become part of my soul, so that I will have their images within me, without having to make them literally real any more. Maybe I will also find that secret home within me where there will be no more flirting with gardens and little red houses. To be at home with myself!

How different life would be! There would be a centre, and out of that centre all forces would reach.

But there is no centre in my life; my life hovers between many poles and counterpoles. A longing for home here, a longing for wandering there. A longing for loneliness and cloister here, and an urge for love and community there. I have collected books and paintings and given them away. I have cultivated voluptuousness and vice, and renounced them for asceticism and penance. I have faithfully revered life as substance, and then realised that I could recognise and love life only as a function.

But it is not my concern to change myself. Only a miracle could do that. And whoever seeks a miracle, whoever grasps at it, whoever tries to assist it, sees it fleeing away. My concern is to hover between many extreme opposites and to be ready when a miracle overtakes me. My concern is to be unsatisfied and to endure restlessness.

Red house in the green! I have already lived through you, I can't go on living through you. I have already had a home, I have built a house, measured walls and roof, laid out paths in the garden, and hung my own walls with my own pictures. Every person is driven to do the same - I am happy that I have once lived this way. Many of my desires in life have been fulfilled. I wanted to be a poet, and became a poet. I wanted to have a house, and built one. I wanted to have a wife and children, and had them. I wanted to speak to people and impress them, and I did so. And every fulfillment quickly became satiety. But to be satisfied was the very thing I could not bear. Poetry became suspect to me. The house became narrow to me. No goal that I reached was a goal, every path was a detour, every rest gave birth to new longing.

Many detours I will still follow, many fulfillments will still disillusion me. One day, everything will reveal its meaning."

These are Hermann Hesse's words (translated; they read even better in their original German) but they had such a personal resonance with me that I simply had to put them into this blog. Many detours I will still follow, many fulfillments will still disillusion me.

And isn't today Father's Day? I was reminded of it when I saw Father's Day cards on sale at K-Mart, six cards to a pack. A sign of our times?

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Amusing ourselves to death

 

Every catastrophe needs its Jeremiah, and for the catastrophe of the rapid decline in reading we now have Times columnist James Marriott with his book "The New Dark Ages".

There was a time when literature was our religion. We explained and interpreted our lives by it. There was a time in Sweden even when the Lutheran Church banned the illiterate from marrying! We had a quote for everything and we could cross-reference our experiences against the novels of our nation's writers. You had William Shakespeare and I had Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Now classical allusions are gone and metaphors are treated literally by the dim-witted. We have TikTok and Twitter, which is limited to 140 characters. Imagine how Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" would end: "Alright, twenty rubbles says that I can toss my bag in the air, run across the tracks, and catch it before the train arriv... [This user's account has been deactivated.]"

I have ordered but not yet received James Marriott's book, but I did read Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death", which anticipated the collapse of literacy with the coming of television. When the idiot box began to take off, life seemed to be reorganising itself around television’s centrifugal attraction. In living rooms across the world, armchairs and sofas were shifted around so that they no longer faced each other (as they had in most houses for most of history) and were directed instead towards the corner that contained the screen.

 

 

If you haven't read it yet, I recommend it to you. Unfortunately, there is no free online copy, except the German translation "Wir amüsieren uns zu Tode", which you could read if you were prepared to spend another lifetime learning German. Or you could listen to the audiobooks below:

 

Publisher's Introduction

Foreword

Chapter 1: The Medium Is the Metaphor

Argues that a culture's media (like the printing press or television) act as metaphors that implicitly dictate what kind of content and ideas can be expressed within that society.

Chapter 2: Media as Epistemology

Explores how different media define truth and knowledge (epistemology), asserting that a culture's concept of intelligence shifts depending on its dominant communication tools

Chapter 3: Typographic America

Examines early American history as a print-dominated society that prized deep literacy, complex arguments, and public intellectualism

Chapter 4: The Typographic Mind

Discusses how the printed word fostered a rational, orderly, and serious public discourse (exemplified by historical events like the Lincoln-Douglas debates)

Chapter 5: The Peek-a-Boo World

Explains how the telegraph and photography disrupted context by flooding public consciousness with fragmented, disconnected, and geographically irrelevant facts

Chapter 6: The Age of Show Business

Asserts that television has made entertainment the overarching format for all public communication, making reason and imagery incompatible.

Chapter 7: "Now . . . This"

Critiques the news and broadcast media, showing how rapid transitions and soundbites strip events of significance by teaching viewers to jump from tragedy to commercial without reflection.

Chapter 8: Shuffle Off to Bethlehem

Analyzes televised religion, arguing that when faith becomes a product designed for ratings, it is stripped of theology and transformed into hollow, comforting entertainment.

Chapter 9: Reach Out and Elect Someone

Explamines modern politics and political advertising, warning that candidates are packaged like consumer goods and political debates are reduced to superficial soundbites.

Chapter 10: Teaching as an Amusing Activity

Critiques educational television (like Sesame Street), arguing that it teaches children that learning requires no sequence, hard work, or exposition—only amusement.

Chapter 11: The Huxleyan Warning

Concludes by contrasting George Orwell's vision of a state-controlled society (Nineteen Eighty-Four) with Aldous Huxley's vision (Brave New World), warning that modern society is willingly surrendering its freedom through an addiction to amusement.

 

I hope you amuse yourself to death!

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

No need for you to get jealous

 

Unfortunately, not all imagines are from Bonegilla

 

No one ever emigrates because of the success they've enjoyed at home. No one ever says, "Well, I have a happy home life, I'm rich and I have many friends - so I'm off." The only reason anyone has for going to live in another country is because they've cocked everything up in their own.

Being just nineteen years old, my opportunities for cocking things up had been rather limited by the time I left; in fact, my only - and certainly biggest - cock-up until then had been that I allowed myself to be born to parents who were so poor that they packed me off to work as soon as I had reached the minimum school-leaving age of fourteen.

But even those tough beginnings weren't enough preparation for what awaited me at the Bonegilla Migrant Centre, which might explain why I endured it for only two nights. In on 8 August 1965; out on 10 August.

 

My Bonegilla registration card
Find your own registration card at idcards.bonegilla.org.au

 

Between 1947 and 1971, more than 300,000 migrants — Greeks, Italians, Germans, Dutch, Ukrainians, Yugoslavs — stepped off ships from a ruined Europe and into an old army camp of tin huts near Albury-Wodonga. They learned English there, ate food they didn't recognise, waited for jobs that sometimes never came — and in 1952 and 1961, when the waiting broke them, they rioted. The country that invited them barely knew what to do with them. Then Australia moved on. The camp closed in 1971, the huts were bulldozed, and the place where a multicultural nation was born became a paddock again — except one block, saved at the last minute, which has become a memorial site.

 

The Memorial Arc at the old Bonegilla Migrant Centre

 

Bonegilla has remained a powerful connection for me even though I may never see it again. Instead, several years ago I lashed out two hundred and fifteen dollars to have my name added to their Memorial Arc. A small price to pay for my own twenty square inches of immortality.

 

 

No need for you to get jealous though: you already drew the winning ticket in the lottery of life when you were born in this lucky country.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

P.S. For more, go to My once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage is still going ahead or If only those walls could talk ... or Wo ist Gerhard David?

 

Life in the subjunctive

 

 

The subjunctive is a verb mood that expresses hypothetical (but unfulfilled) conditions/situations : “If I WERE (fill in the blank), I would/could ... ”

Is it old age or boredom that makes me start many of my thoughts in the subjunctive? "If I were back in Burma, I would stick it out for at least another year instead of chucking in a job that others would have killed for" or "If I were still in Greece, I would spend more time in the Greek islands rather than giving my all, seven days a week, to a job that eventually got the better of me".

My problem has always been that I thrived on stress and stressed out without it. As long as the job was challenging and exciting, I was at it seven days a week. Once the routine set in, I would go crazy from time to time and become obsessed with something, and my obsession would sent me on a trip to a place from which the journey's origin could no longer be seen. As a result I made a lot of stupid decisions without an obvious motive.

I now wish I hadn't ...

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Das Milliardengeschäft mit den Flüchtlingen

 

 

Reich werden mit Armut. Das ist das Motto einer Branche, die sich nach außen sozial gibt und im Hintergrund oft skrupellos abkassiert. Die deutsche Flüchtlingsindustrie macht jetzt Geschäfte, von denen viele Konzerne nur träumen können.

Pro Monat kostet ein Asylbewerber den Steuerzahler etwa 3500 Euro. Bei einer Million neuer Asylbewerber allein 2015 sind das monatlich 3,5 Milliarden Euro - also pro Jahr 42 Milliarden Euro. Das ist die Summe, die in einem Jahr an alle Arbeitslosen ausgezahlt wird. Es sind nicht nur Betreuer, Dolmetscher und Sozialpädagogen oder Schlepper und Miet-Haie, die davon profitieren. Die ganz großen Geschäfte machen die Sozialverbände, Pharmakonzerne, Politiker und sogar einige Journalisten. Für sie ist die Flüchtlingsindustrie ein profitables Milliardengeschäft mit Zukunft.

Weisst Du,

• wie gewinnorientierte Aktiengesellschaften an Flüchtlingen verdienen?
• dass die Pharmaindustrie wegen der vielen Flüchtlinge mit einem Umsatz-plus in Milliardenhöhe rechnet?
• dass Polizisten und Journalisten einen Maulkorb beim Thema Kriminalität von Asylbewerbern verpasst bekommen haben?
• dass viele SPD-Politiker nebenberuflich Posten in Organisationen haben, welche Unterkünfte von Asylbewerbern betreiben?
• wie Parteien über die Betreuung von Flüchtlingen eine illegale Parteien-finanzierung betreiben?
• wie Journalisten für tränenreiche Geschichten über Asylbewerber geschmiert werden?
• wo die Bundeswehr insgeheim schon jetzt künftige Kampfeinsätze probt, um die innere Sicherheit gewährleisten zu können?
• wie stark die Immobilienpreise in der Umgebung von Asylunterkünften fallen?
• dass die Bremer Flüchtlings-Großfamilie Miri pro Jahr 5,1 Millionen Euro an Sozialhilfe erhält und zugleich noch mindestens 50 Millionen Euro im Rauschgifthandel erwirtschaftet?
• dass die 3000 Moscheen in Deutschland beim Flüchtlingsstrom aus Nahost und Nordafrika wegschauen und das Helfen lieber christlichen Organisationen überlassen?

Dieses Buch ist erhältlich hier.

 

Googlemap Riverbend