Imagine, if you’re open to a random thought experiment, how it would feel to experience the Earth – land and sea in every direction – as an extension of your self…
And then, what if that sense of connection reached on out – past all the drones, planes, space junk and satellites – to encompass the Moon, Sun, planets, stars and galaxies?
Instead, many humans experience the smartphone as an organ no less vital than their heart or brain, with the sea that once birthed life on Earth a sewage destination, the land that sustains us a toxic waste dump, and celestial bodies – if not potential threats to be zapped off course – ripe for mining and colonisation. How did our world get inverted? But more on that later…
The sudden whine came out of nowhere. Tinnitus? Too loud. Secret sonic weapons testing? Paranoid thinking. Psychotic flashback? Too visceral. The room had begun to spin. Meanwhile, my partner and a close friend sat waiting. As my torso leaned to the left (!), I tried to describe my state, which now included double vision, but the words slurred. Stroke, I guessed. Would my face contort? But my companions said I looked normal.
Then the retching began. And after the slur and the double vision eased, it persisted. The slightest shift of my head or even my eyes made it worse. That I could contract and release all my muscles meant nothing; I’d totally lost my balance. So when the runs kicked in, my loved ones carried me to the loo. By now they were googling while I retched into a bowl. Transient ischaemic attack? Heart attack? Allergic reaction? (I’d been taking Vitamin A for a few days on naturopathic advice.) And then my friend rang Healthdirect, an 1800 number: based on your symptoms, registered nurses tell you to see a GP or go to Emergency or call 000. This RN sounded confused (unlike me), yet favoured a hospital asap. But the prospect of a regional A&E on a weekend, even had I been able to move without violent heaving, lacked appeal. So I opted to stay put beside my friend’s wood stove and catch up on sleep. When I woke, the vertigo had gone and the gagging had slowed.
By the following night I felt shaky yet okay. But I agreed to visit Emergency the next day. Tests (ugh!) would presumably show whether I’d had a stroke. Not that I had reason to expect one. My takeaway from the episode was to ditch the Vitamin A, vow to go to bed earlier, and never to order ‘chai’ in a cafe again. But my partner, having spent several years as sole carer for elderly parents and cook for a sister confined to a wheelchair since misdiagnosis and chronic neglect in an ICU had wrecked her legs (nothing a few years of rehab can’t cure), was scared. So getting a checkup might at least distract him from Dr Google.
Yet even as a child, I felt repelled by the sterile smells and indoor decorum of medicine. I grew up on a quarter acre near a national park, and my factory-worker father raised fruit and veg in our backyard, so I spent whole days outdoors among animals, birds and insects, hiking, tree-climbing and horse-riding. Cuts, bruises, bites, sunburn, colds and more were par for the course. I weathered them and remained a bit wild. A childhood close to nature (though back then I would’ve preferred a farm or the bush to the ’burbs) is all too rare now, so I’m grateful.
My parents, unlike me, trusted doctors implicitly, even during my father’s long and torturous demise. Yet my mother evinced a healthy aversion to nursing homes, insisting she’d rather die than move out of her house – until, after one of her tumbles, a paramedic ignored my request and took her to the wrong hospital, where the social worker pressured me to find her an aged-care bed. Supposedly she’d said she wasn’t ‘ready’ to go home. More likely, she’d said ‘yes’ to hide her deafness.
Sure enough, she grew distraught when I told her the score, denying the social worker’s story. And, in the past, a panel of medicos at that facility had pushed me to put my mother in residential aged care – a euphemistic term for an underfunded ghetto sparsely staffed by overworked carers, where the infirm go to languish and die – but I’d defended her rights. She’d be so much safer, they’d warned, stressing the risk of falls.
Yet within months of the move, she fell and broke her pelvis. And without enough skilled care, she went downhill from there. A realm where all staff were gowned, gloved and masked and wore plastic face shields marked her final descent into hell. Almost deaf, she couldn’t hear a word they said behind their barriers, but they held up signs to inform her of necessities. And she could still catch bits of demented chit-chat from unmasked fellow residents. Meanwhile, via Zoom, I was expected to trust she was ‘safe’ when it looked to me like the Covid hoo-ha masked graver dangers for the aged, such as multimorbidity and polypharmacy (a euphemism for batshit overprescription), and the likelihood that the latter compounds or causes the former, and not – as doctors and carers pretend – the other way round.
So, to return to the theme of inversion, much of what we ‘know’ today isn’t learned from experience or observation, but absorbed via a network of sources subject to financial incentives, losing integrity and gaining additives on the way, until by the time it reaches us, it’s tainted. Hence the Left seems to find some comfort in the belief that driving an EV or choosing reusable plastic bags or eating grass-fed meat makes you more ethical. But for all this talk of reducing carbon emissions – a conscience-quelling abstraction – who on the Left cares to make actual sacrifices? Ditch the car, buy local or grow your own, forgo international travel, nix your addictions (instead of waiting for the nanny state to butt in). I mean, imagine if signing climate petitions could save us from perdition. It’s unscientific: magical thinking.
Inversion. Invasion. When the former disorients, the latter can displace. Take space. Stake a claim before we can acclimatise. Post-colonial this; post-colonial that… The post-colonial discourse ruled during my years at uni. Yet, though it made sense and I empathised with the dispossessed, the narrow scope of the theorising confused me. Why did no-one acknowledge that even in the mid noughties, much as Big Pharma had for decades sought to colonise our bodies, Big Tech had begun to colonise our minds? My father had recently died, after enduring drawn-out agony despite (or due to) the dozens of drugs his dodgy doc had prescribed. And in the ’90s I’d read a rad text – Toxic Psychiatry by Peter Breggin – which vindicated my choice in the ’80s to ride out a spiritual crisis sans psych meds.
Speaking of drugs, I went to Emergency last Monday – to emerge 11½ hours, a blood panel and a CT scan later with a disposable diagnosis. Ménière’s disease, cause unknown, fits some of my symptoms. But my episode doesn’t fit it. Not to worry. To prevent a recurrence of dizziness (with disabling symptoms), the nice doctor (his boss sucked) prescribed a diuretic. ‘Does it cause side effects?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said, but urged me, should my vertigo return, to come straight to Emergency. Side effects of the diuretic (see Dr Google’s list) include dizziness.
The thing is, the Earth and sea are extensions of us and vice versa; we’re all complexly connected to the heavens. But Big Tech jams the frequency with static, attacks our freedom to feel ecstatic.
observer of times 