Yesterday was hot and the computers stopped working. Apparently they’ve been suffering under the brief and frightening reign of corrupt local files, which are a little bit like low level North Korean communist officials, (always willing to do their job as long as they get to sell your children to the illegal brick factory). Somewhere at the centre of this vast computer system, it was discovered, is a building just like the one above, the Ryugyong Hotel, which is North Korea’s answer to starvation, with its 2, 999 empty rooms. Apparently Hank Williams is renting the other one. The electricity comes and goes, and the breeze, which comes in through the unfinished windows at 900 feet, obliges him to wear all his clothes at once. The American writer Donald Barthelme, having heard about Hank, once tried to climb the tower with one of those suction tools plumbers use to unblock the sink, during his whirlwind tour of Pyongyang.

In any case, the computer issues yesterday meant that each, half-hour transaction became a chance to meet another nice person – more like slow, platonic speed dating than book selling. There was Larry, who can give speeches about almost any topic, and has based his style on that of the revered progressive Rabbi, Dr Herman Sanger. There was Jerry, who has just started his own website, reviewing books. There’s Les who is undecided about his new moustache, and is a part time private detective. As with Noah, he likes to own two of everything, just in case.

After Les came Louis, an Irish philosopher, who compared the myth of Sisyphus to the films of Werner Herzog. According to Louis, the mountain up which Sisyphus was condemned to push boulders through all eternity was in actual fact a volcano. The myth in this version comes to represent man’s inevitable, irresolvable fascination with death, rather than, as Camus had it, his simple absurdity. Then there was Sophie, who sometimes doesn’t know what to do, or where to go, and follows other people instead, sometimes for days. Years ago she was a maid in a Venetian hotel, where she used to secretly catalogue other people's belongings. She controls the chaos these days by colour-coordinating her meals. On Tuesday’s she only eats blue things, on Wednesday, orange, and so on.

And there were many others who remained patient and happy and genuinely friendly, who spoke of their lives and hopes for the future, while Donald climbed the glass tower in the computer system and Hank Williams coughed in the wind, in a room somewhere in the centre of the world.

It’s been said, and for the most part I agree, that people who enjoy waving flags don’t deserve to have them. Australians did their best to confirm this theory last week, on National be a dickhead day. Acland Street was full of people trying to park their Cadillacs and waving things they’d just bought from the Two Dollar shop, made of Chinese plastic. Writing in the Brisbane Mail, John Birmingham identified a new shift in Australia’s attitude to being a dickhead:

“One of the things I really like about Australia, or I used to anyway, was our quiet reluctance to wave the flag in everyone's face; a reluctance which has gradually given way to an uglier, brutish readiness to paint the flag on our arses and sit on the face of anyone who looks even remotely disinclined to play along.”

As a quick glance at the primary policies of the Australian Protectionist Party will attest to, most of this Fascist flag waving stems from a fear of strangers common to humans during the rudimentary stages of their evolution, The Middle Paleolithic Era, at least 40 000 years ago. The Protectionists, (and you can blink disbelievingly at their website here) are actively working for:

“…sensible immigration programmes that will be geared towards accepting into our country only those people who will readily fit into our society, primarily from traditional sources such as Europe and Britain.”

In direct opposition to this sort of grunting, the philosopher and historian Theodore Zeldin is explicitly concerned with expanding the way in which we identify our roots, or our socio-historical origins. In his groundbreaking study of human emotions An Intimate History of Humanity, Zeldin claims:

“The mind is a refuge for ideas dating from many different centuries, just as cells of the body are of different ages, renewing themselves or decaying at varying speeds. Instead of explaining the peculiarity of individuals by pointing to their family or childhood, I take a longer view: I show how they pay attention to – or ignore – the experience of previous, more distant generations, and how they are continuing the struggles of many other communities all over the world, whether active or extinct, from the Aztecs and the Babylonians to the Zoroastrians, among whom they have more soul-mates than they might realize.”

According to Zeldin, fear has historically been overcome by one of two methods. The first is by replacing the old fear with a new, slightly more hopeful fear. The second is through curiosity, and a willingness to learn and be surprised by what is different or unknown.

Reading Zeldin, whilst at the same time being attacked with Australianess ads and barbeque propaganda has prompted in me the desire to perhaps declare complete and sacred independence from Australia, at least for one day a year. And since furthermore, and against the odds, I do actually enjoy waving a flag, albeit in a kind of pathetic way every night before I go to bed, I am now calling for a new day, on which we can each declare our independence, not just from Australia, but from all nations, organizations, political parties, violent gangs, scout clubs, reading groups, artist collectives, mother’s committees and trout farms. Xenization Day, which is the catchy title I’ve settled on, celebrates the process of being a stranger everywhere, holds sacred our own essential loneliness, promotes the creation of flimsy handmade individual independence flags and encourages adventure to foreign lands where, with every new encounter we might meet a new race of person who will not will readily fit into our society. As Bjork declared on her most recent album, Volta:

Start your own currency Make your own stamp Protect your language Declare independence!

It’s often said that people speak of the weather only when they have nothing else to say. This cliché is an attempt for whatever reason, to separate us from the world, to install us instead in some half furnished future where the air-conditioning works overtime to delude us. “Meteorology”, as W.G. Sebald taught, not long before his death, “is not superfluous to the story. Don't have an aversion to noticing the weather.”

Some day’s ago, in any event, suffering under the sort of malaise beneath which Sebald himself seemed invariably to be struggling, I had the idea to head out toward the coast, with a few members of the Malvern Surrealist Movement, to see the watery part of Sorrento. It’s a way many of us have, if we’re lucky, of driving off the nameless despair, which envelopes us once every while, like a smoky vapour. The purpose of these expeditions, if the truth be known, is merely to notice the weather in a little more detail.

Whenever I find myself growing weary of my own company, whenever a weedy abandoned block opens out in my heart, whenever I find myself wistfully contemplating the precarious height of bridges and window ledges; and especially when old people, far from appearing somehow holy, (by virtue of their being so close to death,) seem exceedingly stupid instead, stumbling unthinkingly as they do across the barren years towards their inevitable and unconsidered end, then I reckon it about time to get out coastward and go snorkelling.

A little while ago, during the 1920’s, the French poet Francis Ponge was a very angry young man. “Too angry”, according to Margaret Guiton, “to commit himself to much more than sporadic gestures of one sort or another. He was angry at all human institutions and arrangements, most particularly the words whereby this sordid state of things insidiously penetrates our minds.” Gradually, Ponge came around, to the point where he was able to declare, that all poems should bear the title “Reasons for Living Happily.”

“At least in my case, he said, each (poem) I write is like a note I try to hit when, during a meditation or contemplation, a rocket of words bursts from my body that refreshes it and encourages it to live a few days longer.”

This self-renewal through language is always initiated, according to Ponge, by the mind’s “return to things.” In the soupy present world, where we are surrounded as much by the absence as by the presence of things; the return to the real, to tangible objects and to the weather, by some careful recognition, almost inevitably precipitates the desire to live happily, at least for a few extra days.

Ponge writes of “things” in a way that few poets have ever been capable, or willing. He writes of “The Mollusk”, “Bread”, “Vegetation,” “The Cigarette”, “Dung”, The Pebble” and “Moss”, but by utilizing a constant process of defamiliarisation and by transforming the language of science with the urgency of an elemental philosophy, these insignificant “things” are revealed again as they might be to a child or to the first human, as essentially miraculous.

Of The Seashore, Ponge writes:

…An elementary concert, made all the more pleasurable and thought-provoking by its discretion, has here been offered to nobody through all eternity. For the first time since it was formed by the insistent action of the wind on a boundless platitude, a wave, come smoothly from a great distance, at last finds someone to defy.

But only a single brief word is vouchsafed to the pebbles and shells, which seem quite moved, and the wave dies uttering it; and all that follow will die uttering the same word, sometimes a bit more loudly. Climbing over one another as they reach the first rows of the orchestra, each draws itself up a bit, bares its head, and gives its name to whomever it is addressing.

To my mind, there is no one who can speak so well about the weather. “If speaking of earth like this makes me a minor poet, Ponge said, “an earth tiller, that’s what I want to be! I do not know a grander subject.”