Ignorance is bliss. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Curiosity killed the cat. This mindset defined my childhood. My mother concealed family scandals and her age. My father described his capers with mates while on leave in the war, not the action they saw. Nor did teachers speak of massacres when they stamped our schoolbooks with images of boomerangs and emus. I grew up in an expurgated version of the world. Hence much of what adults avowed made fuck-all sense, and when peers piously parroted it, I felt alienated. Like I sometimes do now.

I’ve always had a habit of asking awkward questions. Others often don’t know the answers or affect to forget them. Because certain facts call for action. (Though postmodernism tells us truth is relative if we need an excuse.) No wonder mysteries are popular. Safely confined to screens or books, investigators court mortal danger to show us what inquisitiveness looks like.

Since birth, I’ve harboured boundless curiosity – touching a hot stove after mummy said not to, tearing a nostril on a nail while scaling a fence, gazing down on other backyards from the top of the tallest tree in our garden, devouring countless books on general knowledge. But school seemed designed to force compliance and stifle the spirit of enquiry, so I bailed out at 15. And art studies immersed me in nature (mediated by paints and canvas). Yet I soon realised that art, too, is escapist. Even my best efforts left many questions hanging.

These days, though I’ve taken breaks, art still offers a means of escape. What’s changed is that I know far more about the world I’m escaping. Making art used to energise visions of elsewhere; now it’s taking me deeper into myself. And I’ve never lost my curiosity; I’m just asking different kinds of questions. Like, why – after a quarter century’s investment – did I stop wanting to be a writer?

In his essay, ‘Once upon a time in America’, journalist Stan Grant says:

Grant provides no answers. He just observes and reflects. ‘The First People are still there. [When two Ute Indian men enter a Colorado bar, all the other customers except for Grant ignore them.] It’s just that no one talks about them much.’ And: ‘Still the ghost nation haunts America like my people haunt Australia.’

If we can’t face the spectre of colonisation that echoes down the centuries, how can we begin to assess the threat of Big Tech? Via corporate surveillance, as with imperialist invasion, colonisers debilitate and debase. How do we live with dignity as AI obsolesces jobs?

At school, answers served to close doors of perception that questions opened. Answers can short-circuit wisdom and, worse, transmit propaganda. Yet ignorance is abysmal. What you don’t know can give you cancer. A little knowledge might avert a blood clot. And lack of curiosity has killed a lot of sheeple. But AI Overview won’t tell you that. Nor will it touch on ‘GloboCap’, pet topic of playwright CJ Hopkins:

Without telling us how to fix this, Hopkins sets an example of dissidence. He’s like a wildly satiric, very accessible version of Wolfgang Giegerich, in whose post-Jungian view, objective soul (as distinct from yours or mine) is relocating from man to technology:

Or: ‘Nature is nothing but a kind of machine, a system of abstract, formal laws. This is the Christian soul’s truth about nature.’ A self-styled Jungian I once knew, blogging on individuation, read one essay and blew a fuse. Seems Giegerich deflated his ego: ‘The process of individuation is totally disconnected from what is really going on. Not individuation, but globalization is the soul’s magnum opus of today.’ Though, as Giegerich clarifies earlier:

Well, duh. Still, I too spent the noughties with my head stuck up my arse. Though I registered 9/11, war on Iraq and the GFC, it seemed vital to write short stories and novels and do a master’s. A course of disenchantment, at which point Giegerich offered a new slant on the dissociation I saw behind the tokenism defining the margins as much as the mainstream.

So, what’s that something Grant says is all I’ve got to tell the world, deep in my gut that I would have died for, that I’ve learnt the hard way? Something about clarity gained by losing my mind then spending years finding it without deadening meds prescribed by ‘experts’ blind to the territory. Individuation as trial by fire. Yet to think the world needs, let alone wants, what I have to offer would be naive. In the West, kundalini has no more meaning than spirit possession or soul retrieval. How can life force coiled at the base of your spine ever rise if body and mind aren’t connected? Yet exploitation of lost or dying cultures is rife. Ayahuasca tourists and the like submit to sacred rites then retrieve their smartphones afterwards.

Of course, AI Overview comes with a disclaimer at the end of its little dissertations: ‘Generative AI is experimental.’ That all Google users are lab rats can be safely and effectively taken for granted.