On the Killings at Bondi, Sydney, and in Providence, Rhode Island

We wish to send our support and care to all those who were injured or affected by the massacre at Bondi Beach and to remember those who were killed.

We also wish to send our support in the same way to those affected by the mass shooting in Providence, where we have dear friends. As I was writing to my friend Kwame Dawes, he was experiencing what was happening at his place of teaching. It was horrific.

 

It is deeply distressing to see political point-scoring taking place when people are suffering such physical pain and emotional trauma. What is obvious is that psychologies of hatred lead to death and misery, and that bigotry has many manifestations. The availability of weapons is a disgrace, and until a central part of the discussion becomes the complete disarming of the world in all capacities — private, military, individual, nation-states and so on — then hatred will find its means of inflicting the most harm it can.

 

Regarding the massacre targeting Jewish people celebrating their faith at Bondi, it is brutally insensitive and bigoted to correlate this with what has happened in the destruction of Gaza. Both are crimes. Both deserve to be understood for the indefensible crimes they are. It seems to me even inappropriate to draw them together in this lament, but others are doing so, will do so, and the situation will be manipulated to suit different agendas and beliefs. But people have died. People have had their loved ones taken from them. Community has been shattered. Our care should be for every person lost, every person affected, and for the broader community. This cannot happen. We are all culpable for failing to nuance social interactions on broader scales to help play down aggression while remaining committed to just causes. Life is the most just of causes, and life has been taken. Every person of Jewish heritage in Australia will feel threatened and vulnerable. This matters. This cannot be, any more than it can be the case for people/s of any heritage.

 

The objectionable correlation of Jewishness with the behaviour of the Israeli military state has become a mode of bigoted convenience for anti-Semites — that’s obvious to anyone who is active in pro-Palestinian causes. To support the Palestinian people does not equate to being anti-Jewish, and yet for some it is a contradictory vehicle for their own hatred. The focus on ‘race’ rather than heritage, on ideology rather than faith, has led to disturbing divisions in the common humanity we all share. We are all humans, we all wish to live decolonised lives, we all wish to survive without physical threat. To kill is the most colonial of acts. Colonialism occurs in shadow as well as overt ways. A murder is a murder.

 

So, our love and care to all those affected and damaged. Society’s purpose is to be non-violent. It’s the world’s purpose, too. Let’s start now. Totally.

 

Proliferating Elegies

 

And this morning we woke

to hear of friends at risk

in Providence, of a scene

unfolding, of a live situation

when there were already deaths.

Across the curve of the world

the news — we are safe

but it is still happening.

The heat was rising

and I went outside

to feel how heavy

the air was already.

Before the storm arrived

I saw a kookaburra

with lightning draped

from its beak. I have written

to seven people over

the last twenty years

to see if they’ve survived

mass shootings.

 

We read that it had been a beautiful day in Sydney

while it was storming here, fire in the forest.

Then people were crying and calling

across time zones, unable

to reach the end of day. We stretch

out a hand as lightning reaches

inside the house into us.

We talk in the dark, waiting

for the lights to come back on.

We learn that the killers

were father and son — that

one of them had held a gun

licence for ten years. That he

had six weapons, all legal,

all accounted for. A father

and son who went to work

killing. A spree. A targeting.

Organised, specific. A ‘mass

casualty’ event. Their family

home is being raided to find

details, to find evidence

for what remains. The hospitals

are full, transfusions

taking place. The sea tests

the beach, as always, as always.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Nightlight pleasures of the State

Been a strange day for me. Have been concerned over war-profiteering of language. Of good intent on the surface that really operates as self-confirmation or emotional profit. Have also been thinking about how I can’t write my “old life”, the decade or so I can barely remember. I don’t want to, but maybe I should. When I do recall, I seem to recall amiss, according to those who claim to have seen and known it better. Last year a friend died with whom I’d spent a lot of time during these “phases”. See, I am only left with euphemisms. I have wanted to write an elegy — a memory of her — but haven’t been able to. I think Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle takes the typically easy path when he writes: “With writing there appears a consciousness which is no longer carried and transmitted directly among the living: an impersonal memory, the memory of the administration of society” (Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Black & Red, Detroit, 1983, 131). There are not a few poets who would agree with this, but it is a typically “Western” text-entrapped conclusion come out of a struggle with State, that ultimately has given in before it has begun a resistance. The pat quoting of Novalis after this statement, “Writings are the thoughts of the State; archives are its memory”, plays the stock-epithet game. As a “saying”, it works, but as fact, it is unsupportable. The poem below — an elegy for K who died in very bizarre circumstances, made generic by the culturally-deleting “somewhere in South America” — is a processing of this. The record of K’s death is debatable in ways that aren’t mine to discuss, but nonetheless have become part of the conversation about her living life as well as her living death (many of those close to her celebrate her life rather than lament its loss). It’s also a poem about “place”. She liked to visit “the bush”, though I never saw her here. The poem is about contradictions, I guess. I once played war-games as a teenager. I also designed a war-game (or two). I then became an anarchist. Some years later (some would say many years later), a dedicated pacifist. I fought addictions and am proud to have overcome them, over a decade ago. And today I wrote this poem:


Graphology 788: Nightlight pleasures of the State

Dead-ringer, eidetic rough that sloughs
my slump, an ethics trap, sure, buster,
as K was cut up “somewhere
in South America”, culture dares

its weight, night when iron shakes,
rumples hoods to notch up fearfulness:
numb as paradox I was, and she said
hit the adrenalin, oxymoron for this

body type, beautiful in narcotics,
slam-dunked before the gates, left open,
struggling to close before sheep
stampeded, forced their way

announcing — alone — poor dittums.
I trowel those traumas, sweat that
serves my nakedness with hesitation,
embarrassment, as might have taken

root among the parrots, speaking their chat,
as I can, honestly, short-skinned,
downing long-necks in early morning,
traipsing out of sins and deals,

dead-loss conniving to empty
all accounts, cherishing sea-urge
of gulls who’d rather fossick
slightly in, in from the coast,

knowing the coast is contraire, less viable;
what if I sign up on the Sea Shepherd,
nibble before an action, come out
rough to trot, latch distant cheek by jowl,

stare long and hard, maladroit,
stretch those gibbets of gravity,
educe a tipple, violate tilt
of methylated spirits, cleaning toilets —

needle-stick around the bend?
That’s me — if known, truly known,
I’d be out on my ear, searching
for the residue of K. She

liked me and I her. I thought to be liked...
is decent. Thanks. Country night
fills country air, mercury lamps
the screen. I look out, nightlight,

barely structuring war-profiteers,
selling peace at margins, visoring lipid
sunsets in graphic programmes: she
would have temporarily

liked it out here — sequestered —
wiping aside the drool of electricity,
quaint alpacas wondering why
“sexy” is barely mountainous,

a gene-scene, remote
carpet-bagging sensibility,
the way the powders
came in from “overseas”,

cut to the chase, the drowsy
pin-cushion, vein-chase, cook-ups
when there was plenty. I barely
came out alive. Had to go, sorry.

A dog is barking. A small dog
barking high-pitched into the night.
Yapping — it is irritating,
more so because so distant.

Alone here. A country separation
like a planned pregnancy. The dog’s
pain would have irritated you
more than its barking. Music

stops and you start to worry.
Anything to keep it going. Rambunctious
crowds. Loopholes in the rapid.
Glasses that shut down 3D.

That’s eye to eye. Spectacle.
Warding off a deal with Novalis:
these archives, that memory.
I am cleaning up my act...

Half-weight annihilation.


John Kinsella