On the wharf
It’s an unintentional irony that those who talk of lifestyle are talking about something that has neither any life nor any style. Dr Zen is working at Canary Wharf, soulless breadhead’s vision of heaven. Each day I feel a thin slice of my soul shredded from me. If I had to stay there long, I would become like the many I see around me – fools who have traded life for “life”, style for “style”, anything that might be vaguely desirable as a lifestyle for “lifestyle”.
That is our life, though. It’s beginning to be all we recognise. Soon, I will be returning to Australia. Brisbane is a curious mix of the empty, vain hedonism of modern living and the outdoors. Mind you, it should be said that Australians like their outdoors to be sanitised. Most “bush walks” that I have enjoyed have been on cinder tracks, or at least paths that are inlaid with stones. It’s peculiar that in a nation that features the wild so strongly, the locals like the anodyne so much – there are a multiplicity of manicured parks, almost Zenlike garden features, order… what has always struck me about Brisbane is that so little in it is old. They constantly tear it down and build it up again. Australia is ceaselessly reinventing itself. I think that is one thing I love about it. It is a nation that embodies the truth that identity is a negotiation with the world, not a fixed thing, something I keenly feel.
Or do I feel it? I’m not sure of that. It seems to me that I am always much the same. I know intellectually that I do not have a continuing self. I know that I am constructed and reconstructed. But knowing and feeling are not always easy bedfellows.
posted by Dr Zen @ 8:25 am
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