It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

Surprised seagull. Geilston Bay Boat Ramp, Geilston Bay. June 2012.

It’s Theme Thursday time again, and these week – like the perplexed seagull above – I am left to wonder about LIFE'S UNCERTAINTIES.

Certainly, we wouldn’t like life to be too certain. I normally try to eschew the deterministic understanding of events that some espouse. Not for me is the Wu wei[無爲] of the Tao. I just can’t get behind a philosophical standpoint of “non-doing” and just drift along with events and shrugging my shoulders at all around me. If there is one thing that history has taught me, the path of least resistance often leads to a place where you don’t want to be.

Biological or genetic determinism just scares me too much, so I prefer not to think about it. Besides, you really don’t want to be on a journey with fellow travellers like Herbert Spencer, Francis Galton, Charles Davenport right through to Dr Mengele and his crowd.

I am probably more sympathetic to historical determinism than I really should be. Perhaps it is the Eduard Bernstein in me, but there is something about the economic interpretation of history that still appeals to me. There is just something inherently sexy about base and superstructure that appeals.

However, I am digressing (one might argue that my entire life has really been one long digression). We are supposed to be talking about LIFE'S UNCERTAINTIES.

Hmmm.

Life, you see, is full of uncertainties. My present philosophical condition can be summed up in one succinct sentence: anyone who isn’t confused doesn’t really understand the situation. People are unpredictable. Events are unpredictable. Sure, we can narrow the odds on choices that people make (nor not make, as the case may be); but you show me five people in the same circumstances with the same background and same set of choices and three will go one way, another the opposite and one will neglect to choose.

LIFE'S UNCERTAINTIES, you see. You can never be too sure about anything. There is no ‘dead cert’. No ‘sure thing’. The dictatorship of the proletariat didn’t lead us to a classless and stateless society, what we had as a pile of bodies and some really bad haircuts.

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...

In dreams begin responsibilities.

A life at sea, that's for me, only I just don't have the BREAD. That's right, Theme Thursday yet again and I post a photo of a yacht dicking about in Bass Strait just off Wynyard. The problem is, I am yet again stuck at work, slogging away, because I knead need the dough . My understanding is that it is the dough that makes the BREAD. And it is the BREAD that buys the yacht. On my salary though, I will be lucky to have enough dough or BREAD for a half dozen dinner rolls. Happy Theme Thursday people, sorry for the rush.

This will hurt me...

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