Gino's

I often go to Gino's in the mornings to write and can’t even consider writing anything before ordering a long macchiato.

Gino emigrated to Australia from Italy and opened a tailor's shop in Fremantle and then decided to turn it into a café. He loved drinking coffee with his old Italian mates, and Gino’s became the place. The Italian in the background made it the place for me to write in the mornings.

For a long time, I sat next to the Sicilians. Dom asked me one day 'What are you writing about'? and I said ‘Criminal Underworld Activity in Australia’. I don’t know why I said that, but they became much less friendly, from then on, and would only speak in Sicilian. They became paranoid about making it into the book. Come to think of it they have just made it into the book, and I have just realized that I might have to go and live somewhere else.

Sometime before, I had mentioned how I had paid for some stonework in Bali and then it had never been sent. When Dom heard about this he said 'I have 'contacts' in Indonesia, if you need any help', which was a kind offer, but the missing $200 didn't seem enough to have the man’s legs broken or for him to go missing forever. It seemed a little extreme to me.

I love writing at Gino’s but there can be distractions like that. I was writing early one morning when a woman came up to me and asked if I had a real job to go to’? I just laughed and didn’t say anything (which is what I normally do when I don’t like what someone just said). I only knew she had once been a high-level political aide (and maybe even once a Head Prefect). It was hard to know what had triggered her. Was it the writing, the reading, the reflection? But She seemed to think I should be more focused on success.

I wouldn’t have thought writing was so controversial. I don’t know why I didn’t like what she said. It probably made me feel like the odd one out. And that is how quite a few people see writing. It is like we have become so steeped in competitive materialism that even inwardness can seem out of place. Reflection has become the new taboo. And it is hardly any wonder that we don’t see that many contemplative mystics around, anymore.

But to be fair to Barb (the Head Prefect) I have also sometimes wondered about whether I should be more focused on success. And about how I got involved in writing in the first place. And sometimes I have thought writers are just people with an overly active hidden teeming unofficial life. They are people who want reveal themselves in public when most people are quite rightly more focused on their social standing in the world.

It is like there is a creative instinct that doesn’t leave me alone, that that somehow needs to be satisfied, whether I like it or not. Sometimes it feels like my response to the world is to be creative. The crazier the world gets the more think I have to be creative. Sometimes I have also thought I write so I can say all of the things I don’t normally say out aloud in public. And I have also thought that writers might just be introverts who have finally started to speak and ever since then no-one has really been able to stop them.

Or they are just people who wandered out of the so-called ‘normal’ world and into the forest and then went feral or wild and then have never been able to integrate back into society properly. Or they are people who love the vivencia’s or the exciting and life-giving insights they sometimes get, and they have tasted some of the sweet ambrosia and some of that divine nectar which comes from the gods and now aren’t always suited to ordinary everyday life.

I don’t know, but I was going to say to Barb that I was looking for ‘the green fuse that drives the flower’, but thought it was probably better not say that, mainly because I didn’t want her to ring The Alma St Clinic just down the road. Anyway, I can only handle so much of the Trump Towers and the Kardashians and the secular materialism that is dominating everything before I get a nervous twitch and start reciting whole verses of Rumi out aloud. I start delving into the love drenched poems of Hafiz and then it makes go a little crazy and then start wanting to see if I can also write something.

Anyway, I had been reading ‘Modern Man in Search of the Soul’ by Carl Jung. And if you read Jung for long enough, you start wondering about your own soul. And he said the soul has its own peculiar concerns, demands and necessities and maybe writing is one of those peculiar necessities for me. I seem to need some kind of an inner life. James Hillman said the soul loves ‘depth’. And he quotes Heraclitus ‘No matter how far you travel you will never get to the bottom of the soul’. Writing is trying to get to the bottom of the soul.

I also have free-floating tangled ideas swirling around in my head and writing seems like the best way to disentangle them. And Rumi said ‘When you do things from your soul it is like a river moves in you’. And it is a wonderful thing when you feel the river move in you. And sometimes to me, writing is like being moved by the mysrerious force of a creative eros.

People have been writing since the beginning of recorded history. There is something more to writing than just personal expression, or saying what you really think, or revealing yourself in public. It is also like trying to find some kind of a language or expression for a tremendous mystery which is so much greater than ourselves. People have been trying to find a language for that mystery since they first started painting pictures on cave walls.