Welcome to GR Online, a series of short-form articles that take aim at the moving target of contemporary culture as it’s whisked along the guide rails of innovations in digital media, globalisation and late-stage capitalism.
Staying faithful to Earth
The history of Western astronomy is a history of the displacement of Earth as special. From Copernicus through Bruno to Galileo and beyond, each insight nudged us further away from being at the centre of the universe. No, the sun does not revolve around us – we are just one of several worlds that orbit it, and those other stars out there, those faraway ones, are actually other suns and have worlds around them, too. The perspective-altering consequences of what it means to live in a galaxy where planets are more plentiful than stars are still percolating through to us; there are so many exoplanets that a leading astrophysicist calls them ‘commonplace’, nothing but ‘specks of dirt that collect around stars, like lint in a navel’.
Of course, the burning question that follows is: are any of those planets like Earth?
You may think that ‘Earth-sized’ or ‘Earth-like’ exoplanets – as often heralded in the media – are common, and habitable by humans if we could just figure out how to travel that far. They are not.
The power of a curse
My father was mercurial, difficult to please and often critical of his children: but he would have killed anyone who laid a hand on us. And so, knowing I was upset, he showed me what to do.
‘Lick your thumb,’ he said, ‘and place it on the review…’
An effective curse, he went on to explain, should be proportionate. So, for instance, declaring to the author of that book review I hope you die would be ineffective – all it would do was prove that I did not have the power of life and death. ‘Think about it for a bit if you have to.’
I licked my thumb and placed it on the review. I closed my eyes and thought of the journalist who wrote it, and I said to myself, may you never publish a first novel as successful as Crazy Paving.
Adventures in the apocalyptic style
It's easy to laugh at preppers, dismissing their ideas in the process. It’s also easy to adopt the prepper worldview wholesale, and make fun of everyone else – all those sheeple – for not seeing what a mess we’re really in. It’s harder, but ultimately more productive, to see prepping as a complex, contradictory response to the multiple crises the world is facing. Prepping is more than just a freakshow, although it is that. And prepping is more than a useful instructional manual, although it is that, too. Neither wholly reasonable nor wholly ridiculous, prepping culture is a vivid and alarming reflection of a contemporary Anglophone culture that exists in a state of perma-crisis and can find only simple answers to wicked problems.
Religion as resistance
VERY FEW PEOPLE of colour can claim identities that colonialism has not ruptured or altered in some way. But...
Land, sea and sky
Foreigners who tried to anchor at Erub Island generally risked being beheaded. But Dabad told his warriors not to touch these men. ‘He’s telling them not to touch these people or he will have their head and no one wanted that so they just stopped there,’ says Pastor Gebadi. ‘Finally, the peace came about and they accepted the Bible and put their weapons aside.’
This was Zulai Wan, the Coming of the Light, or the coming of Christianity to the Torres Strait.
A cynic’s guide to unbelief
When I was a little girl, my parents would scold me with scripture. ‘Sita,’ my mother would say, ‘where there is love, nothing is too much trouble and there is always time,’ which was her way of telling me to stop whining. If my brother and I would fight, she would say: ‘So powerful is the light of unity, that it can illuminate the whole Earth,’ as though our altercation over the TV remote was the reason for ethnic tensions in Kosovo. My father was the same, always on about justice and mercy and truth. The Most Great Sin in our house was backbiting and gossip. ‘Thou shalt see with thine own eyes and not through the eyes of others,’ he would say, ‘and shalt know of thine own knowledge and not through the knowledge of thy neighbour.’ Needless to say, my breaking news – that Jessie Stevens told me Marjory Klimt was pregnant to Scotty Graft and her parents were making her drop out of school – was not welcome at our dinner table.
Feeling our way to utopia
Today, with the benefit of historical records and TV, film and radio, we don’t need to guess or suspect – we know there is a terrible price to be paid for emotions ungoverned by thought. And yet, in a spirit of blithe ignorance, we are awash, we are sodden, we are drenched in a tsunami of Rousseau-style sensibility. Today we are all about self-love, telling our truth, romancing our sins, elevating our uniqueness, and converting our passing complaints into unassailable evidence of victimhood. It’s self-asorption raised to the level of a social movement.
Gay saints
What is it that makes cinema, for Pasolini, sacrosanct? The answer lies in his affinity for a painter who made only one fresco. Not only was Caravaggio’s reputation restored by Pasolini’s teacher and mentor, Roberto Longhi, but Caravaggio and Pasolini have the same taste in men. Swarthy, young and savage – as likely to sit for a portrait or engage in a bit of sloppy top as to stick a knife in your ribs. You wouldn’t want to run into his John the Baptist in a dark alley (unless maybe you would). It is not just the revolutionary psychology of Caravaggio’s painting that speaks to Pasolini but his selection of subjects – his sacralisation of the scorned, the unclean, the seething subproletariat both created and rejected by an indifferent urban landscape; Caravaggio’s ‘new kinds of people’.
Girls to the front
If there are no women in leadership in a synagogue, many of us don’t bother to come. Or if we do come, we know there’s no real point joining a board or committee – our opinions count for less. And this means that Orthodox Judaism risks losing a new generation of Orthodox women – women like me, who would never accept equivalent lack of opportunity and education in our professional and personal lives.
Mustard seed
There are others like me, those who have, in faintly euphemistic terms, left the church, what we might otherwise call the spiritually unmoored, though we’ve invented specific words for them: lapsed – adjective, mildly noncommittal, perhaps only temporary; apostate – noun, sharper, less impassive. But whatever you call us, no matter the nomenclature, we’re now foreigners, I believe, in one place or another, still too much of this to be that, betrayed by something like a subtle accent, a vowel bent out of shape, if you watch or listen for it closely enough.
Dominion
GILEAD MEMES, PLUCKED from the TV series The Handmaid’s Tale, have become a reactive go-to for expressing horror and...
Under a spell
The caves delight my little boy. They smell of damp animal hide and old, old stone. He’s wearing a bright-yellow helmet. There is the dizzying possibility of bats. The cave walls are unsteady in the glow of half-a-dozen head torches as we move deeper in. We climb up steps towards the apotropaic marks. I hit my head. Even with my helmet on, my eyes water. The world shivers as though lit by firelight.