Ruminati

Watching an episode of Heroes, an opinion my mother held crossed my mind. We were talking about comic books (I was a kid). She said that Americans keep inventing superheroes because they cling to the idea that someone will save them. She didn't use these terms, because I was only ten, even if I did understand her general thesis, but she meant that they dream of salvation by external intervention. They want absolution too. They want someone else to take responsibility for their sins and their weakness. They want someone else redeem them, and to clean up the mess they've created.

This is the story of Superman. It's also the story of Batman. It is also (and here is my thesis) the story of Jesus: absolution and salvation by a third party with magical powers.

Batman considers also the issue of dealing with the monster within. It is far from the only work of literature to deal with this topic, but in the comic book medium it is the first to make it a central theme.

It is a mark of profound immaturity that an entire culture should have a manifest wish for external absolution and salvation. Absolution is an absurdity. Your acts are your own. Live with them. Even if you get away with acts you know to be bad or even evil, there's no point in punishing yourself. If you really think it was the wrong thing to do then don't do it again... and stop whining. And stop fixating. It's spilt milk. Get over it.

I really am like this. My girlfriend finds it astonishing that I really have no remorse over, well, anything. There are some things I wish I hadn't done. Possibly it might be better if I did dwell on them a little longer, if only so I remember them better for the purpose of avoiding repeating my errors. On the whole, though, I lead a life untroubled by conscience.

Every now and then I wish I'd spent more time with my loyal and loving dog, who suicided under a cattle truck after prolonged neglect when new friends and interests at university took me away from him. Dogs are different, though. They give themselves to you completely, and they depend on you utterly for everything. It's a bondage and discipline arrangement, but it isn't just some weekend fun, it's full-time and it's for real. I walked out on him and he needed me. I feel remorse over that to this day. I won't own another dog till I can meet that commitment for the term of his natural life.

I miss him. Every five years or so I dream about him. Sometimes he saves me from some dream peril. Other times he just leans against my side in the warm morning sun.

I used to feel vaguely sorry for Americans that they should feel a need for such an emotional crutch, but now that it has occurred to me that religions are manifestations of the same immaturity I have to extend this to almost the entire world. Pathetic.

At a party today someone told me about rooting powder. It's made from willow bark, or something like that. You mix it with water and apply it to... your cuttings. To encourage them to strike. Sounds good to me. I wonder whether I can get Stephen to take some cuttings from that avocado tree and strike them. I'm sure he'd like to fast-track his own orchard, and while he's at it he can organise some for me.

They don't like wet feet and they need a lot of feeding... at least that's conventional wisdom. But this specimen is bloody huge and loaded with fruit every year, and nobody feeds or takes any particular trouble to look after it. Admittedly it's planted on a hillside giving exactly the recommended drainage, so probably that's important. But it's so damn big the roots must be down at least 6m, and the hill isn't that big, so it's hard to know whether it's really a factor.

I've got a mulberry cutting from a big healthy tree. I'm going to try and strike it in some potting mix. It can't stay potted forever but I'll have a while to think about it. Possibly out at Brett's place, since he has adequate water and plenty of room on land he owns. I also have an avocado in a big pot. Curiosity overcame common sense and I excavated it to see whether it was germinating. It's cracking like a hatching egg, exactly as I've read. Roots had yet to emerge but were clearly imminent so I replaced it and watered it in.

So what's this sudden fascination with growing things? Well... the other day I stood in a supermarket in the fresh fruit section and a mother said to her child that something or other didn't grow on trees. Avocados, cherries, apples, peaches... all delicious, all nourishing, all horribly expensive... all grow on trees. How can they be so expensive when they do grow on trees?

The answer, of course, is middlemen. From my point of view, even the farmer is a middleman. When I was a kid, for six months out of the year we didn't buy butter. We used avocados, because they do grow on trees. There was an enormous tree at the bowls club where my dad worked, and I was allowed to keep anything the old men couldn't reach, which was most of the crop.

We didn't buy ice-blocks either, because it's easy to make them from mangoes. Which grow on trees, in such quantity that we had to freeze them to keep them from dropping and fermenting on the ground. Not the stringy ones, either. Bananas...well, ours weren't terribly palatable. Not compared to the avocados and mangoes. We used to trade boxes of avocados for boxes of bananas. Someone a couple of blocks down had a better strain of banana.

I also have a herb garden, which contributes daily to my diet. Parsely, sage, thyme. No rosemary (what is this, a song?) but I do have two strains of basil, not to mention loads of capsicum and a couple of chili bushes. I put in coriander but the heat sent it bolting before any crop. Not to worry, I'll collect the seed (which is a spice in its own right). I don't have any marjoram but I do have its close relative oregano, which is not so much thriving as out and out rampant.

It's too hot here for stonefruit, more's the pity, but maybe I can grow apples in the shade of a couple of avocado and mango trees.

 I''ve been thinking about building a screened shadehouse out at Brett's. It will mitigate the sun, provide a frame for a watering system and repel various creatures great and small that might otherwise munch on my herbs.

The trouble with commercial cropping is quantity. They grow massive monocultures of a single gene line, and when a disease comes along to which that bloodline is susceptible, the carnage is terrible to behold. Also, they're driven to an extent by merchandising; the fruit must look good on supermarket shelves. Hot chick syndrome applies: they're expensive, difficult to keep and disappointing when you finally take 'em back to your place.

By contrast the fruit on our trees wasn't quite as pretty but it was bigger and the flavour was just decadent. The mangoes in particular tended to be fly-specked by fruit flies. You can stop that with netting but it didn't seem to affect the flesh of the fruit, and you don't eat the skin, so nobody bothered. It's amazing how much nicer, and simpler, the world is when money isn't involved. The best part was not-paying-tax. No tax at all, since there was no transport, no warehousing, no cultivation beyond collecting the fruit and no money changing hands.

We used to make ginger beer too. That wasn't free, since we used sugar from a supermarket, but it occurs to me that we could have fermented mangoes, of which we had vast supply. Note to self: plant mangoes.

Last night I saw a TV show about climate change.

Propaganda isn't necessarily a bad thing, and these people certainly mean well, but they got most of their facts wrong and misrepresented a great many truths in order to make them support a particular conclusion.

In particular, they interviewed some woman whose primary claims to fame are (1) they interviewed her, and (2) she likes diving on the reef. This woman saw some bleached reef. Because she remembers it as once being vibrant with colour, she has concluded that the entire Barrier Reef is dying and that this is a consequence of global warming.

What a load of bollocks.

For starters, a small rise in temperature will extend the coral spawning season. Apart from that, the reef is not a single organism. When sections of reef thrive, this allows local macro and micro coral predator populations to boom. This kills the local reef, which dies and bleaches. The predators and diseases are starved out of the region, making it prime real estate for colonisation by coral spawn. The wheel of life turns, and the reef blooms again.

On a grander scale, some people also seem to think that because coral lives in a certain depth range, rising seas will kill the reef. This is also bollocks. I can explain why, but first I'll move this out of the realm of speculation and into the realm of verifiable fact:

1. The age of the reef is easily measured, based on size and known rate of growth.
2. The dates of major changes in global climate are equally easy to determine from changes in strata of known age.

From the age of the reef and the freeze/thaw dates of glacial cycles, it is trivial to show that the reef has survived at least five major global warmings and at least five ice ages. Several of those natural global warmings were quite significant, being sufficient to give Australia an inland sea. This entails a rise in sea level of more than ten metres over current levels. None of the above was considered. Presumably it was more important to keep the camera on an attractive woman rambling about her love of diving on the reef, so that women could fantasise about dolphins and men could fantasise about women in bikinis.

The dieback/recolonisation cycle is what causes the reef to grow. Growth is what allows it to rise with the rising waters. Reefs can ony grow, they can't shrink. So when the waters at last recede, the top of the reef pokes out of the water. This is called an "atoll" and there are loads of them, each documenting the height to which the sea rose (5-10m higher than the reef). Atolls are also "vital and threatened" parts of our "fragile" ecology. In order to make some new atolls we need global warming.

Quick, start your car! If we don't get some global warming the seas won't rise and the fragile ecology will be destroyed. Panic! The world is ending. Or not.