Revelation in the Market-place

The royal roads were cow paths

Seamus Heaney

It is early morning in the city. I am sitting on a park bench looking up at a walkway just outside central station. It has become almost a morning ritual. A stream of office workers, with their lunch packs and laptops, is beginning to emerge striding out with purposeful attitude ready to face, and indeed no doubt to manipulate as well, the world of commerce that forms the greater activity of our society. I want to see, enscribed on their faces, something of the purposeful society to which we all belong – at least physically. But I cannot see anything. My memory regresses back to my young days in Ireland when any time of day you could see a frowning or smiling face, or sometimes a sad face which bespoke a lifetime of drudgery or unforgiveness, faces enscribed with the reality of living. Here the faces are verging on the opaque, hidden behind an object which would set my father, now long dead, staring and wondering. Surely the world is gone mad, he would mutter, it is all the fault of these posh city people who don't know one end of a cow from the other. As for those things they stick up against their cheek and jaw ...

My father had only a primary education but he had an acute sense of hearing. He could hear the lowing of a cow in a distant field, wondering would his sleep be disturbed to-night to be present at the birth of a calf. Sometimes in the middle of spring he would come in from the fields, with excitement, to tell us he had just heard the first cuckoo or corncrake of the year. He was the monitor of the wonders of nature, knowing the annual ritual deep in the bones: the arrival of the swallows in April, the Hawthorn blossoms and fruits of May, the Blackberries we would talk about in July as being green when they were red, the first mushrooms of July, the first luscious ripened Blackberries of August or early September, waiting to be picked and staining both hands and teeth, all taking us into the great mysteries of the evolving year and our part in its sacredness.

I can remember too, the day and the hour, when it began to change. It was the first day of our new and first car, a light blue Ford Anglia. I can still remember the number: KIU 611. That morning my father and mother had tentatively set off, edging slowly out the backyard, for our local town three miles away to do some shopping. This was a journey, mostly monthly, which was often a battle, confonting the gales of the bog-road on the old bicycle. Now they arrived back, in posh comfort, parking the car under the old poplar tree, whose leaves rustled in the wind next to the water-pump. Afterwards there was a period of silence over a cup of tea. I sat waiting for the celebratory remaks of the new event, the new journey, then my father uttered, to everybody and nobody: I wonder what the Higgins will think of us now; we never stopped to say hello!

I know there are umpteen stories in the Fifth Avenues of our cities of rejoicing the day when the incumbents at last were set free from the drudgery and oppressiveness of some rural backwater. Indeed. The towering image of the Statue of Liberty on Hudson Bay being the great reminder for many – of a dizzy dream of longing within sight. But I ask myself now where is the fulfillment of the promised freedom? Did somebody or something cheat on us? Behind the neon glitter of Queen street it seems a new oppression, a new poverty, has emerged: its in the frenetic of economic determinism symbolised by the office blocks and the frenetic of mobile phones chatter and, most oppressive of all, our apparent lack of awareness of why we are as we are, unable to understand where the frenetic is coming from? We seem to have lost the nature of the belonging, the ritualism of life enhancing community and its assured permanence, without knowing anymore how to create and do it in the everyday. Is this a conditioning, a determinism, a residue of modernism greater than Freud ever imagined?

The crowds ebb a little as the morning rush-hour thins out under the rising sun. It is time to move and seek shelter from the blazing orb. Of such is Queensland where I now live. I retire to my favourite café to indulge in my 'first cup of drug' of the day. This is a ritual too, and true to form I ref lect on how strange we all are as people and a society; and wonder where we are going. We don't know, do we? Yet the whole of history should tell us: behind all the battles of body and mind, the great achievements, the heroic adventures, the mindless disasters, the criminality just around the corner, the unending searching of mobile phones, is a deep crying I want to belong.

Question: where do I belong? To whom or what do I belong?

What Kind of Belonging?

To a bog-man cities are strange places. Initially they can be escape hatches from small towns and rural backwaters offering unrestricted freedoms to be oneself. But there is an impending loneliness around the corner, I've found. Overtime the neon lights aquire a familiarity and sameness that is skin-deep. Where is mystery anymore? Even the mosaic sparkle of the night sky, a waiting wonder, is dimmed somewhat by the electric lights below with their neon-f lickers. Traisping the streets there are no gable-ends of house and home and their promise of belonging, no sheep dog at night lying in the middle of the road waiting for one's arrival home.

It is the first week of November. In the botanical gardens of Brisbane, of this land far distant from where my father was born, it is the lilac month of the Jacaranda, like myself a migrant. It is also the month of the kamakaze white butterf ly, emerging from god-knows-where, flitting everywhere but knowing nothing, it seems, about the tyranny of twenty-first century windscreen traffic. The Jacaranda f lowers the same time as the Silky Oak offering a wonderful spectacle of the intertwining of the two, the lilac of the former and the deep mandarin of the latter. In the city the grevillea, the silky oak, is conspicuous by its absence – the intertwining and intermingling only found away from the city, in some village or rural property. The air this morning is rather cool, coming up from the south-west.

I have come too early. Only later will the school-kids and Awakening teenagers come. These have become the chief focus of my interest and fascination. These are our future, I remind myself. The wind blows stronger. I shudder: is it from the extra chill or from a premonition, an inner ache about the future of our society? I need my first cup of drug.

Feeling better, after a second cup of drug, I go back out to my park seat. The enterpreneurs are gone to their offices, the college blazers and sport outfits begin to pour out. There is little noise beyond the hum of the traffic and the click of platform shoes on the pavements. Amazing how little physical encountering mistakingly happens, of people bumping into each other, because nobody is looking where they are going. Their interest, almost to a man and woman, seems focused on this precious commodity they hold in their hands. It seems like an ear-appendage protected by an enfolding palm.

Don't be judgemental, I tell myself, could this not be a sort of unification of young people as they focus on the huge problems of tomorrow because of my failure to present them with a better...