Island Two The Isle of the Bronze Age Muse

(Extract from: Muse of the Long Haul Thirty-One Isles of the Creative Imagination)
Copyright, Dr Ian Irvine, 2013 all rights reserved. All short extracts from the texts discussed used under fair usage related to review and theoretical critique under international copyright law. Image front page: Ceridwen by Christopher Williams, 1910 (note: this image is in the Public domain). Image at end of MS Islands by Caleb Irvine-King-Smith all rights reserved (using Topia world design software), 2013. All other images copyright Ian Irvine, 20072013, all rights reserved

Publisher: Mercurius Press, Australia, 2013. NB: This piece is published at Scribd as part of a series drawn from Ians soon to be print published non-fiction book on experiential poetics entitled: Muse of the Long Haul: Thirty-One Isles of the Creative Imagination.

The Goddess is a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowan-berries, startlingly blue eyes and long fair hair; she will suddenly transform herself into sow, mare, bitch, vixen, she-ass, weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid or loathsome hag. In ghost stories she often figures as the White Lady, and in ancient religions from the British Isles to the Caucasus, as The White Goddess. The test of a poets vision is the 1 accuracy of his portrayal of the White Goddess and of the island over which she rules.

Part One Three Drops from the Cauldron Robert Graves, John Matthews and others associated with 20th century Celtic revivalism have made much of the ancient Welsh tale of Cerridwen and Gwion Bach. The story has fascinated me since the early nineteen-eighties when I first came across it in Chapter Two of The White Goddess. Ive returned to it repeatedly over the years and would be the first to acknowledge that it has become deeply lodged in my personal understanding of what it means to become a writer/poet. Gwion Bach, of course, eventually becomes Taliesin, the very archetype of the Celtic poet and, like King Arthur, he apparently has both historical and legendary origins. The story is fascinating because to me it outlines the process of creative initiation in all its ecstasy and terror. We are not these days used to acknowledging the transpersonal dimension to creativity, my first encounter with this tale, however, immediately opened up that dimension to me and, as in the tale, the world rushed in and the world rushed through. At the centre of this tale of shape-shifting and potion making is a cauldron of inspiration and knowledge made for Afagddu, the Ugliest Boy in the world by his mother the shape-shifting witch-Goddess, Cerridwen. The potion would allow Afagddu to become a great poet and wizard since it apparently expanded consciousness and bestowed the gifts of intelligence and supernatural knowledge. Cerridwen, her son, her husband, Tegid Voel, and their daughter Creirwy (The Most Beautiful Girl in the world) lived on a magical island in the middle of a lake. The cauldron contained great magic and had to be carefully tended from season to season as herbs and other substances were added at appropriate times and temperatures. Little Gwion Bach was given the job of stirring the cauldron whilst Cerridwen was away collecting herbs and other substances. Lets take up the story with little Gwion struggling to carry out his appointed task:
I must have put too much kindling under the cauldron, because it began to bubble suddenly, and as I went to dampen it down several bubbles burst and, and some dropsthere may have been threesplashed onto my hand. They were scalding hot and I yelped for pain and put my hand in my mouth to suck it. Immediately the world turned around in me and I fell into a dark roaring place where sound and 2 sensation were too great to bear, and where I, Gwion, became lostnever to return.

According to Gravess retelling, once Gwion sucks at his thumb (an ancient druidic method of inspiration) he at once understood the nature and meaning of all things pa st, present and future.3 Matthewss version, however, is more inventive: I tasted and saw all the sickness and all the waste of the world, and the long slow poison of the soul of mankind. And there, too,
1 2 3

Robert Graves, The White Goddess, 1948, p.20, Faber and Faber, 1999. John Matthews, The Caldron-Born p27 of The Song of Taliesin, 1991, Aquarian Press. Robert Graves, The White Goddess, p. 24.

I saw the dawn of hope, the coming of one whose presence would change the world and so on, there is much else that resembles a psychedelic trip! I rather like the Matthews version of this section of the tale. As it turned out it more closely described certain consciousness expanding experiences I eventually underwent in my early twentiesthough I didnt actually come across his version of the myth until much later. One could legitimately point out that every man and his dog was having mind altering experiences in the 70s and 80s, due in part to the easy availability of psychedelics like LSD. In my case, however, such experiences were perhaps legitimately Cerridwenesqueif there is such a wordsince they were not precipitated by powerful hallucinogens, and were often accompanied by outbursts of genuine (if raw) creativity. Gravess book symbolised the cauldron in the tale and at the centre of my initiation was a revelation about the place of creativity in my life. Eventually it helped birth a life-long commitment to learning, literature, writing and personal psycho-spiritual growth. Thus far in the story I was in territory I could more or less comprehend. In the next section of the story, however, Cerridwen gets wind of Gwions transformed state (and the resultant failure of her vocational plans for her ugly son) forcing Gwion to flee from her in a strange and fabulous chase scene. Its exact psycho-spiritual meaning (symbolic or otherwise) is lost to history, but I fancy it outlines an ancient understanding of shape-shifting and the transmigration of souls that unfortunately my own educational experiences in twentieth century English, Australian and New Zealand schools hardly prepared me for! Gwion and Cerridwen do battle by becoming, in turn, various animals sacred, according to Graves, to the ancient Britons. Finally Cerridwen, in the form of a hen, gobbles up poor Gwion (who had mistakenly assumed the form of a grain of winnowed wheat). He ends up floating & dreaming for nine months in the watery chaos of his attackers womb before she rebirths him once again in human form. At this point she apparently loses her anger over his previous actions and restrains the urge to kill him. Instead she opts to throw him into the sea where he is found by Prince Elphin and renamed Taliesin. Soon after, his miraculous bardic skills become evident to all and sundry. Part 2 Infinitely Heavy, Sad and Lyrical It was the story up to this point that fascinated me as a young man. Until I was 18 Id never written an unforced poem or song. Admittedly Id been writing fiction in my last year of high school, so the three drops of the cauldron, when they arrived, came not entirely unannounced. However, Ill never forget the first time I wrote a song. Id fallen in love gradually, over about a year, with a friends sisterlets call her Alison. In my first year at University I finally plucked up the courage to ask her out on a date. She accepted and we went to see a film in central Auckland. Given she was still at school we behaved ourselves and though we held hands during the movie nothing else happened between us. On the way back to the bus-station after the film, however, a strange thing happened. We were standing at a pedestrian crossing when she looked up at me and promptly burst into tears. I immediately hugged her and once shed calmed down we continued walking up the street.

Later that night I decided to phone her. I was in an agitated stateour exchange of simple physical warmth had changed something in the relationship. My voice sounded strange to me on the phone and I basically mumbled a question about what she wanted from me. The world was rushing into consciousness too quickly; I wasnt prepared for the experience. To put it bluntly an awful lot of repressed experience (in the deepest most transperson al sense) was being stirred up and like Gwion Bach after being exposed to Cerridwens potion, a part of me longed simply to return to my established selfthe successful cricketer, the future economist. That weekend a strangely haunting and melancholic melody accompanied by words I didnt understand (they were highly symbolic) seemed to force its way out of me. A strange experience since up until that moment Id had absolutely no interest whatsoever in creating musicthough Id enjoyed listening to music since childhood and had even had a couple of sessions trying to sing covers of songs by Dire Straits and Deep Purple with some friends in late high school. I recorded the basic melody and lyrics to the song on the old tape recorder I owned and found myself humming the piece for weeks afterwards. The song seemed totally at odds with my macho, sports-oriented personality, it had the folk poetry mood of the early lovestruck W.B. Yeats, infinitely heavy, sad and lyricalas though I carried a great burden of unacknowledged sadness. The experience was so alien to the self Id grown accustomed to, so clearly related to the impact of falling in love that in a way it terrified me. Like Gwion, I too had no time to rest and enjoy the scenerythe dominoes of constructed identity were already fallingand like Yeats the romance itself was doomed even before it had properly begun. But this song, eerie, sweet and sad spoke to me of whole new dimensions of being. Given at the time I was full of hopethe all or nothing delirium that often accompanies new loveit was inevitable that Id follow the piper of creativity wherever he happened to lead. Part 3 The Triple Goddess of Poplar Farm Somewhere in the middle of the internal upheaval that followed, I read Robert Gravess book The White Goddess. In all likelihood there is no stranger book in all twentieth century literature. It was my introduction to English Romanticism gone archaicto a poetics of origins in fabulous, if eccentric, revolt against not only science and reason but the standard Western alternative paradigms of the spirit (at least since the Early Modern period), i.e. Christianity and post-Platonic philosophy. It is a heady book outlining a grand narrative that no eighteen year old could effectively critique. If the Isle of the Surrealists [Chapter One of this book] opened me up to the great subjective crises of the modern era, The White Goddess gave that crisis an immense historical depth. The book challenged its readers as much as it soothed them with its mytho-poetic curiosities. I was not aware of it at the time but Id contracted a virulent dose of Twentieth-century Romanticism! At one level it was certainly an escapist read for mehighly intellectual fantasy writing if you like. After borrowing the book from an Auckland library I lapped up Gravess archaeological detective work, likewise the absorbing, if hopelessly complex, catalogue of ancient European Gods and Goddesses with their accompanying cult centers and archaic rituals. I enjoyed the retellings of any number of Celtic foundation myths and legends (they hadnt taught me about Bran the Blessed, Taliesin the poet or Bridget, Goddess of poetry and healing

at Rangitoto College!). Most of all I took to heart the books all-encompassing critique of the origins of the modern worldviewa worldview I was already feeling increasingly alienated from. In truth it was an early Ethnopoetic text (which also means it was profoundly anticolonialist for its era) and a seminal Mythopoetic Feminist text. More about these important Islands of creativity later, for the present, suffice to say I was being introduced to important currents in post-Hiroshima, post-Holocaust Western culture. The power of the argument and the vastness of the erudition had me hookedbrought into question, if you like, the unconscious working class Marxism Id been raised into, as well as the antipodean mercantile secularism that perhaps best describes New Zealand under the rule of then Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon. Just as importantly the book helped me tolerate my only barely acknowledged homesickness for the UKafter all, by the time I came across it at age 18 Id been to 8 schools in three different countriesEngland, Australia and New Zealand. Since the age of three Id lived in numerous citiesManchester, Middlesborough, Sydney, Adelaide and Auckland. I still idealised the North-Yorkshire farm my grandparents had workedperhaps the true source of my youthful love of Romantic poets like Coleridge and Keats. Poplar Farm4 is close to the ancient market town of Guisborough situated between the northern industrial city of Middlesborough and the North Yorkshire coastal town of Whitby. On its 300+ acres are remnants of ancient forests, buildings hundreds of years old, as well as huge fields for crops and animals. We spent a lot of time there during the holidays and the weather was often as wild as that of Brontes moorland country not far to the south-west. Not surprisingly, my childhood experiences on Poplar Farm contrasted sharply with life in central Middlesborough (where we lived during the week)I recall large crowds of strangers, cough-provoking industrial smog and dense traffic in narrow streets (every dwelling was attached to at least two others, one on either side). Nearby Whitby, of course, is famed for its contribution to the Dracula legend and also for its marvelous gothic abbey5, a ruined structure perched windblown and magnificent near a sheer cliff face and facing out towards Europe but also overlooking the old town centre with its seaside feel, wharf and pretty fishing boats that bob about on the narrow river-come-harbour. As fate would have it (we emigrated to Australian in 1971) Whitby is also famous for its connection to Captain Cook and the First Fleet. My Aunt Josie still lives in the town as do my cousins Dave and Val and their families. Whenever I return home they take me on a guided tour of the towns many pubs and there is nothing quite like eating hot soup or eating fish and chips
4
5

Image Poplar Farm: Copyright Ian Irvine, 2010, all rights reserved Image: Whitby Abbey, copyright Irvine, 2007.

near the river as gigantic seagulls circle for scraps and the sun sets across the water.6 The White Goddess is a renegade text based on reconstructed ancient Celtic culture, and since I am half Scottish, have two Welsh brothers and lived for a time on a farm that featured many of the trees listed in Gravess tree alphabet it stood to reason that reading about the trees and plants, the birds, animals and insects, as well as the myths and legends, of Old Britain would be an intensely soothing experience to a young man unsure of where exactly he belonged in the world. Part 4 A New Destination but the Road-Map Cant be Entirely Trusted The White Goddess offered something else besides, it spoke of ambivalent truths about life, particularly relationships between men and women. In the early chapters Graves describes the White Goddess as the Muse. The idea of a woman/goddess that entered into normal relationships in order to inspire poetry was a new and fascinating concept to me at the time though in truth, the idea of the Muses is ancient indeed. At bottom for a teenage boy struggling to relate to the middle class girls of Aucklands North Shore after years of international dislocation the book was a veiled introduction to that hoary old Medieval chestnut sometimes referred to as Chivalric or Romantic (unrequited?) love. Despite all the literature it inspired the Medieval Romantic love ethos was more or less unlivable in the real world due to the idealisation by the poet (theres that word!) of his unrequited affections for the beloved. What a bind to find oneself in! The problem for me at the time was that The White Goddess partially infiltrated my expectations about what real world love might be likeimpossibly perfect! The literary construct called by Graves The White Goddess, with her supernatural beauty, easy cruelty and profound grasp of transhistoric truths etc., was, to put it bluntly, difficult for any real woman to compete with. Though it was obvious enough that Gravess version of the perfect muse-woman (as I learnt later: muse-women he had many after the departure of Laura Riding (Jackson) in the late 1930s) was, to say the least, dodgy, I did find myself writing some good poems about Alison. The book also unleashed other forces of personal change. For whatever reason, I took seriously the vocational challenge issued by Graves at the end of the Foreword. He wrote: I do not even know that you are serious in your poetic profession. Though Id been writing a novel since late high-school, this direct address to the reader went straight through me and, given the vastness of the literary road-map Graves had outlined in the work, there seemed much work to do, so much to learn and just as importantly unlearn, if I really wanted to become a poetwriter. In the months it took to really absorb the implications of that short sentence, further study toward my Bachelor of Commerce became less and less likely. After my encounter with The White Goddess I began to spend more and more time attending the literature and arts lectures at Auckland University, even though I remained enrolled in accountancy, economics and commercial law units.

I also feel profoundly connected to South Wales, where two of my brothers still live and to Scotland, where many aunts, uncles and cousins on my fathers side also live.

To summarise: if literature could free me from personal repression and alienation, also, if it could perhaps help get me a girl (even if, according to Gravess schemata she would surely reject me later!) and subconsciously reconnect me with my Celtic origins whilst giving me an expanded notion of oppressionof women, of nature, of the authentic selfthen there was nothing else to do but sign up as a devotee of the Triple Goddess of poetry. Eventually, in 1993, I wrote an Honors thesis on W.G.the work gained a high grade and helped me snare a three year PhD scholarship as well as valuable university teaching experienceso my relationship with the book turned out to be on-going. Back in 1983, however, I should perhaps have read Laura Riding (Jacksons) contribution to the contractual fine print more thoroughly before signing up Part 5 - Postscript 2013: Laura Riding (Jackson) and The White Goddess Although Laura Riding (Jackson) had been releasing high quality material since the 1960s its unavailability in New Zealand in the early 80s meant I wasnt acquainted at the time with anything but her poetry. As a consequence I was ignorant of her late-life bitterness toward Robert Graves, her former lover and collaborator. Likewise, I was not exposed to her critique of The White Goddess until I came across The Word Woman and Other Related Writings (1993), edited by Elizabeth Friedmann and Alan J. Clark. This work was released following Riding (Jacksons) deathas it turned out around the time I was handing in my Honors thesis on Gravess bookand contains two pieces that would have strengthened my overall assessmen/critique of Gravess monster of a book. As Riding (Jackson) describes it, in 1974 Beryl Graves, Roberts second wife, sent her the manuscript of The Word Woman (apparently the only manuscript by Riding (Jackson) not destroyed, at her own request, upon Gravess return to Majorca in the 1940s). The text had been forgotten by Riding (Jackson) partially because from the 1940s on, after renouncing poetry, her non-fiction research had focused on the problem of the truth-telling capacity of language (a fundamental modernist and postmodernist avant garde concern) which later birthed a full-scale critique of 20th century literary culture and society generally. It is a fascinating textcertainly an early text of Mythopoetic feminism, written almost a decade before Graves wrote The White Goddess. The editors, following Riding (Jackson), argue that Graves borrowed heavily from his former lovers ideas in writing The White Goddess. Importantly, they also suggest he distorted Ridings message. Whether the evidence backs up her elsewhere claim that she introduced him to scholarly arguments concerning the existence of matriarchal civilizations across ancient Europe and the Middle-East (and elsewhere into modern times) , arguments fundamental to W.G., is open to debate. Recent biographers assert that Graves was exposed to such ideas prior to his meeting Riding (Jackson) probably through a psychologist who had treated him for shell-shock after the First World War, perhaps also, through the circle of artists and thinkers known to his first wife, Nancy Nicholson (also a feminist). Be that as it may, it is clear that during their 13 years of collaboration both Graves and Riding (Jackson) were mulling over similar groundbreaking concepts. Graves, through W.G., merged those ideas with a fabulously complex theory concerning ancient Celtic tree alphabets and the historic suppression of matriarchal mythological motifs (incidentally helping to launch

the modern neo-pagan movement). Riding (Jackson), on the other hand, ever the avant garde modernist, went off in a different direction post 1940. In the appendix to Riding (Jacksons) 1993 collection of writings we encounter her most definitive statement on The White Goddessit includes sections disputing Gravess authorship. Her argument is couched in raw prose remarkable for its no holds barred honesty. She describes W.G. as a machine designed for the seizure of my reality (p.209) and refers to Graves as a living incarnation of the type of literary robber-baron that ensconces itself in pseudo-palatial retreats, crudely thrown up in the wilds of literary rapacity (p. 211) This might easily be dismissed as mere literary sour grapes if it were not for: a) the evidence of her fascination with Goddess themes as contained in the Word Woman manuscript (setting aside for the present the differences it exposes between her approach to women in history and myth issues and Graves) and b) the fact that her critique is no mere personal attack/reprise but is the result of a long contemplated general critique of 20th century literary culture. Riding (Jacksons) literary memoir The Person I am (in 2 Volumes), published in 2011, demonstrates the way in which she used elements of her own treatment (rather, from her perspective, maltreatment) by the literary establishment to launch a late-life full-scale critique of that establishment. Her instinctive position, for which she is unapologetic, is that of a literary outsiderone who only incidentally came to poetry and thus the sociological reality of literary culture via a belief that language could facilitate models for right living. For me, her writings about the function of language in culture and society, as well as her work on the relationship between men and women in the modern world indicate that Riding (Jackson) transcended Gravess reworked Romanticism. Her ideas also provide something his oeuvre lackeda thorough sociological and philosophical critique of the relationship between literary culture and worrying late 20th century social developments. Of the two, then, it must be said that it is Riding (Jackson) that proves most capable of biting the hand that feeds (or immortalises) via her numerous late-life critiques of: a) the impact of scientific rationalism on literary criticism/theory and creative practice; b) the essential hollowness of the rankings game so fundamental to modern literary culture (with its unacknowledged celebrity creation and maintenancerather than genuinely literary protocols); c) the sometimes stifling impact of corporate publishing cultures (indicative of NeoLiberal social and economic ideologies) obsessed with brand-name establishment and maintenance and powered by an implicit ideology of individualism worthy of the most rusted-on Social-Darwinist. It is these powerfully articulated critiques, consistently arising it must be said, out of her long-held beliefs about the true, spiritual and relationship enhancing function of language that are probably the real background to her belief that Graves, through the publication of W.G., distorted important aspects of her own message due to his subservience to the nefarious literary culture imperatives she was critiquingparticularly b) and c) listed above. Part 6 - Building a Creative Herm at the Periphery Reading the various literary works, biographies and autobiographies of Robert Graves and Laura Riding (Jackson) one quickly has the sense of being placed in the middle of a particularly rancorous domestic dispute, a kind of domestic civil warone that even appears to have

outlived the deaths of both initiators. It is easy indeed to get caught up in the dispute and unconsciously take sides in the 70 year conflict. The bitterness on both sidesenveloping family, friends, acquaintances, literary academics, reviewers etc. is ironic given together the two poets helped outline an important corrective to male-dominated perspectives on the history of human creativity that had dominated for so many centuries. Given I must count myself, at least in part, a literary-child of the Graves-Riding (Jackson) intellectual unionthrough the influence of the W.G. on my own early-adult development as a writer-poetit was difficult, initially, to reassess the spell [Riding (Jacksons) precise terminology] W.G. had cast over mea spell, as discussed above, rooted in the dramas of late-teenage identity formation. Currently I see Riding (Jacksons) more down-to-earth perspective on the male-female issue in history and mythic history (as expressed In the Word Woman and elsewhere) as a useful corrective to the mythopoetic, scholastic and moral excesses Graves launched in W.G..7 I say this, however, without rejecting Gravess overall achievement a corrective is not an outright rejection. I am also tempted to declare The White Goddess a joint project, at least in terms of its thematic concerns. I currently find Riding (Jacksons) critique of the underlying structures and assumptions of our contemporary literary culture personally inspirational. In reading about her notoriously ambivalent relationship tofor want of a better termthe literary establishment, it occurred to me that this is also my fundamental stance to that world. Like her Im ambivalent on psychospiritual groundsand feel it important to resist and critique the three nefarious trends discussed above. I also tend to seek the periphery (the boundary zone) of the nebulous phenomenon these days labeled literary culture often I operate in an indeterminate zone between disciplines (most often between literature and psychology, literature and history, literature and popular fiction, and even, as a teacher, between academic literature and the more practical world of technical-craft teaching of writing). In these zones Ive gradually assembled my own very modest creative herm (collection of stones/texts) by instinctively bypassing aspects of the publishing, reviewing/critiquing industry. This poetics of the zone has been reasonably free of the intellectual (and thus psycho-spiritual) constraints imposed on many writers by aspects of conventional literary culture. From such a vantage point (ever in danger of complete disappearance/obscurity it is true) I have at least been able to experience a life-enhancing relationship to literatureand, miraculously, whilst making a reasonable living in the process. What then is my final verdict on The White Goddess and its influence on my own creative development? I remain very glad that I came across the book in the early 1980sthough Ive yet to completely work through the consequen ces of the three drops of inspiration I accidentally tasted back then . Mischievously, however, Id like to add Riding (Jacksons) The Word Woman, as well as her critique of W.G., as appendices. (Of course, I fancy she would vehemently object
7

Though, in fact, I hold Clayton Eshlemans more recent essay on the topic to be an equally useful corrective to some of those excesses.

to such an inclusion!). All this is to say: Robert, Id like to request a number of amendments to the spell as cast PS: thanks for the poems and songs indeed a poem I wrote in 2010 after visiting Mount Snowdon and Bala Lake for the first time (sites traditionally associated with Cerridwen) follows
Image: On the Shoreline of Bala Lake, traditional site for the Cerridwen-Taliesin Cauldron story. Copyright Ian Irvine, 2010.

The Witch Goddess of Snowdonia

(by Ian Irvine, copyright 2010)

On the way down throb of injured knee I rest above the lake, the desolate lake, its slate rubble banks (snow-worn), its sheer, dark escarpments, the remains of a stone house jumble-tumbled now to a stark ridge of blue and jagged rocks. Ideal abode for a witch goddess Her countryI do not doubt it especially in winter at three thousand feet. Cerridwen: queen of bards, cauldrons and mountain scree! And what was it she left here (at the Panting Cliff) a wolf or an eagle? I dont remember Im sweating, and nothing pure to drink. I check my watch, notice clouds thicken about the cliff-top and the sun is weaker now the sensation of coldness as a soft white mist wind-stirred spreads slowly across the lake the impression of a cauldron bubbling, brewing, frothing. Its getting late I pack up my epiphany and trudge downwards, one step at a time, (twingy knee)

in the direction of Mona Isle of druids and fighter-jets, burial mounds and helicopters. As a witch-goddess, of course, shed fly to Mona She still had wings at the close of the Bronze Age.

Image: Lake at the Panting Cliff (mount Snowdon) (North Wales), copyright Ian Irvine (2010).

Author Bio (as at April 2013)

Dr. Ian Irvine (Hobson) is an Australian-based poet/lyricist, writer and non-fiction writer. His work has featured in publications as diverse as Humanitas (USA), The Antigonish Review (Canada), Tears in the Fence (UK), Linq (Australia) and Takahe (NZ), as well as in a number of Australian national poetry anthologies: Best Australian Poems 2005 (Black Ink Books) and Agenda: Australian Edition, 2005. He is the author of three books and co-editor of three journals and currently teaches in the Professional Writing and Editing program at BRIT (Bendigo, Australia) as well as the same program at Victoria University, St. Albans, Melbourne. He has also taught history and social theory at La Trobe University (Bendigo, Australia) and holds a PhD for his work on creative, normative and dysfunctional forms of alienation and morbid ennui.