"Going out to sea might seem simple but it is a monster you must face, If you are going to face the sea you have to be ready for all it can toss at
"Going out to sea might seem simple but it is a monster you must face, If you are going to face the sea you have to be ready for all it can toss at you, including the wind, a storm or a big animal that might eat you - all those dangers. People go out for these little seaside trips, that is not the ocean. The ocean is out there past 120 kilometres. The folks on the beach here live comfortable, they go to sleep in a bed, but out there, you feel terror. Even in your chest you feel it. Your heart beats different."
I came to this book hoping to mainline the truth of the universe as discovered by Salvador Alvarenga while adrift in the Pacific Ocean for 438 Days.
I didn't expect the truth would be so simple. Existence when it is reduced to survival is far more basic than someone ensconced on a couch reading a book could ever imagine.
The body does not have time for any thoughts outside where the next drink of water, and the calories to sustain life are coming from. Any excess mental capacity is used to kindle the flame of hope.
There's actually a really delicate balance struck by Alvarenga between the grim realities of day to day life on his little boat, and his imaginative capacity to make that reality bearable. Too far either way and he'd either give up in despair or disconnect from reality and forget to survive.
Franklin has supplemented Alvarenga's story with those of experts and other survivors to give the text a bit more intellectual substance. A necessary inclusion.
Alvarenga is a simple man and it seems that may have actually helped him survive.
There are plenty of lessons in here, many of them are common sense.
1. The person who is most easily seasick is generally the first to die in any of these aquatic survival situations
2. People of faith tend to fare better in survival situations.
3. Having an iron constitution and a stomach for anything is a great boon for someone trying to survive.
4. You need to talk your way through it. Talk to a bird, a turtle, a volleyball, whatever will help your brain coded with language continue to hold onto its sanity.
5. The ocean can be a desert so you must harvest everything you can when you get the chance and ration it with military precision.
6. You have to discover pockets of meaning to keep you going. Your imagination can turn your prison into a paradise. You'll need to do that just to get to the next day sometime.
7. All of these are nothing in the face of luck. You give yourself the best chance you can but there's still going to be an element of luck. How you deal with that concept will also dictate whether you survive or not.
Alvarenga survives through many ingenious ways, he eats, fish, sharks, turtles, barnacles on his boat, and sea birds. It's fascinating that Alvarenga calls all the different seabirds "ducks". He never learnt their names during his years of work as a fisherman but it seemed right from the author not to add them in. That was Alvarenga's world. Alvarenga would catch the seabirds and break their wings and then keep them alive, at one time he had up to 30 in his rookery.
Of all the "ducks" he catches, there's one special one. He treats him differently, gives him a name Francisco, which he later shortens to Pancho, sleeps with him, feeds him, talks to him. But then Pancho's time comes and Alvarenga has to eat his feathered friend. That was one of the grimmest days.
The toll the saga took on Alvarenga's body and mind is immense. In the single-minded determination to survive he completely disconnected from social mores and society. Everything that isn't survival drops away. Coming back to the artifice we place on ourselves and the games we play was understandably an enormous shock.
Yes the question remains, in a boat with only one survivor, the other having died long before, what really happened to other body? I choose to believe Alvarenga.
Steve Callahan who survived 78 days drifting alone in the Atlantic had this to say of survival at sea.
"People think you just sit around, and wait to wash up on something. And I have always pointed out to people that survival is not a passive activity, it's an active pursuit. If you don't work at it, you are screwed. I have a pet theory that one of the most dangerous things you can do in life is minimize all risks. You fall on your face, nothing happens, and so when something big happens, you're totally unprepared, you have no tool kit."
During the Coronavirus Pandemic, when Australians (and Brits) didn't think the news could get any worse, they were confronted with an even darker exisDuring the Coronavirus Pandemic, when Australians (and Brits) didn't think the news could get any worse, they were confronted with an even darker existential crisis, Neighbours the TV show was cancelled. Well if Reconnected is to be believed it's partly because the word neighbours doesn't mean as much to us anymore. Indeed, if Reconnected is to be believed more than half of Australians surveyed don't know their neighbour's names. I find that fact hard to believe but there it is.
In 2000, Robert Putnam wrote his seminal work Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, about the collapse of American civic life and how it can be rebuilt. Hugh Mackay has been doing similar work in Australia for the past few decades, and Reconnected continues with the same anthropological gaze but tries to focus more on the remedy than the symptoms.
As a society, we're more lonely, isolated, disillusioned, and depressed than anytime in the last 60 years but you probably didn't need me (or anyone) to tell you that. Thankfully, after diagnosing the disease Reconnected is filled with hope. I would like to say that it was also filled with remedies and cures but despite the subtitle of this book being "A community builder's handbook" this is more of an inspirational account of community building than a manual or blueprint for success. Someone trying to build a stronger community will really only find hope here (which is still an important part of any community project) rather than the ten commandments for community building. There's a few little mantras to remember, including an attempt to reclaim "double plus good" from Winston's world and make it a mantra for good community building but despite the huge reference section there's little in the way of solid framework. One other slight criticism is the authors' use of the statisticians sleight of hand, trying to overwhelm with numbers when they aren't actually that big. For example "he gave away 200 soccer balls in a year". Good, but not really that many soccer balls.
If anything, this book showed me the enormous range of charities and community organisations already active in Australia. If you can think of a charity, chances are it already exists in multiple permutations. This book actually serves mostly as a sampler of the amazing existing options out there that you could volunteer your time with. The book finishes with the authors' vision of a reconnected Australia, a paradise to be sure but also the final example of the book as inspiration rather than a handbook....more
A decade or so ago it felt like every person in the whole world was becoming a flaneur. The word must have started popping up in the New Yorker or LonA decade or so ago it felt like every person in the whole world was becoming a flaneur. The word must have started popping up in the New Yorker or London Review of Books or wherever the bourgeoise get their ideas from and then the next thing you know. BAM! Every person who was walking anywhere was a flaneur. Every walk needed to have some bullshit philosophising with it. And what's worse was that the original flaneurs didn't feel the need to share their milquetoast observations with everyone, they were content to frolic in their own little psychogeographic spaces but now people's dogs have Instagram accounts. Dog's don't have opposable thumbs so I'm pretty sure they're actually not the dog's accounts. And people's babies have Instagram accounts and while the babies do have opposable thumbs, they certainly don't have the mental capacity to put together a witty caption and they're surely yet to be filled with the drive to feed the 'gram.
I'm rambling.
Despite the above, Vanessa Berry actually suits the word flaneur. Her observations are insightful and her prose is easy to read. You can tell Berry is a bit of an odd bod, has a strong dose of alternative to her but Mirror Sydney is a neat book. Berry has preserved parts of Sydney in words for future generations to unearth.
‘What I hope for is that the places in Mirror Sydney, at the moments at which I encountered them, will remain in collective memory, as a record of late twentieth and early twenty-first-century Sydney. This version of the city, an uneven landscape of harmonious and discordant places, deserves this careful scrutiny, for it is a complex city that folds many times and memories within it.’
She rightly identifies that the built environment is relentlessly changing and that there are important features that need to be preserved in the cultural memory if nothing else.
Berry's alternative leanings guide a lot of what she finds interesting. You won't see a single sports field or stadium in here. Despite sport being embedded deep in the heart of Sydney, she only briefly mentions an abandoned velodrome, which is interesting to her as a space completely devoid of its sporting nature. There's also more of a focus on the built environment than the social fabric that fills that environment. There's definitely some interesting characters that crop up but the stars of the show are always the buildings, monuments, plants, walkways, parks, roads, creeks, and tracks. Berry imbues a lot of these inanimate objects with their own quirky characteristics, such that they often feel more real than the people who interact with them. It's understandable when so many of these objects outlast the people who first created them.
At times Mirror Sydney does feel a little bit like a collection of blogs turned into a book. That's probably because a lot of these pieces were originally blogs, and those that weren't come from a similar writing tradition. It does make the book feel a little bit piecemeal. The themes don't really create any structure. Which means that reading the book cover to cover is almost not necessary, better perhaps to dip in and out when you're looking for a little interesting piece about Sydney.
The drawings are cute but aren't really constructed in a way that actually helps you conceptualise things while reading, unless you already know what Berry is writing about. That is actually the key issue with the book. If you aren't a Sydneysider a lot of this book will feel almost nonsensical. Even for someone born and raised in Sydney there'll be moments you'll be completely incapable of imagining or picturing where she's talking about. The reading is so much richer when you recognise the spaces and Berry is pointing out the little things you may have overlooked, that transform otherwise mundane areas into little magical kingdoms.
I've been critical of the string of Sydney biographies I've been reading this year for not capturing what it's like to live in Sydney. Berry certainly has moments where she identifies exactly what life is like as a Sydneysider but these are largely restricted to places she's lived herself. But this book will be read in the future not for it's depiction of what life was like in Sydney in the early twenty-first century but what the place was like....more
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