Tinfoil on the Windows

I am genuinely touched by the outpouring of sympathy and kindness, publically and privately, received following my post on Kayo's passing and my desire to give respect and honour in her memory. I want to emphasise that I'm doing quite fine, despite the initial shock, and not because I have put up walls around this. To further the metaphor, we often used to talk about "the wall of awful" that people with ADHD experience, as skillfully explained by Jessica McCabe), which could be relevant in this context. Rather, there are two old lessons from the ancient Hellenes that particularly relevant; (i) the blunt opening in "The Enchiridion" by Epictetus ("There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power"), and the (ii) a primary life-interest in the Socratic triad of Truth, Justice, and Beauty, not just as ideals, but as a pragmatic interest in how to understand and improve the world. Combined (as Borges wrote in "La escritura del dios"), these two approaches prevent much of the despair caused by calamities or the temptations of hedonistic indulgence, as they give us a glimpse of the workings of the universe.

On the topic of more pragmatic walls, the 2026 Commonwealth Budget has included several significant housing reforms. This is an issue that I have written about many times before, including the Capital Gains Discount and Negative Gearing. When a magazine like "The Economist" calls Australia's policies "crazy", you know there's a problem. House prices have become increasingly unaffordable, especially for young people, and we've subsidised accumulation rather than producing new housing. The budget has reformed both problems; negative gearing now only applies to new buildings, and the capital gains discount is being replaced by cost-based indexation. The effect will be that housing price growth will be closer to the inflation rate, there will be an improvement in new supply, and investors will have to put their money into something actually productive. Naturally enough, the conservative media is fuming because that's what their paymasters have told them to say. But the reality is that this is the most important and necessary change to housing policy in over twenty-five years. To be blunt, it means that young people will have a chance to own a home.

Finally, I wish to talk of fictional walls, or rather the Marlen Haushofer novel "The Wall" (1960). The book was relatively unknown until it was popularised by the German feminist, nuclear disarmament, and environmental movements in the 1980s and wasn't published in English until 1990. It tells the story of a middle-aged woman on holiday in the Austrian countryside who suddenly discovers she is cut off from the outside world by an invisible wall, where all life has ceased. She lives with a stray cat, her dog, and a cow, and with these companions she writes a report of her experience as she tries to recall how to live a subsistence existence. An extraordinary piece of premise fiction, it explores how the protagonist deals with what could be devastating loneliness and fear (and these themes are present) with practical attention to life's details and empathy toward her non-human companions. I have nothing but great thanks to a quasi-anonymous hikikomori Reddit friend who recommended it to me in passing. Even the plot background made me think about the potential to explore the themes in a contemporary urban setting. How would you respond to discovering the rest of the world had ceased to exist, trapped in an area of a few hundred metres with no other living people?

A couple of days ago, I was informed that my former partner, Kayo, had died in her sleep the previous evening. We had been friends, albeit mainly at a distance, for many years. The random moments we had spent together were frozen in time, capturing lightning, light, and colour. In the midst of COVID, I managed to rescue her from being trapped in Thailand as international flights were being cancelled, and got her on the second-last seat of the last plane leaving the country. Months later, we formed a relationship, a partnership, became engaged, purchased a home, and made plans for a future life together. Alas, it didn't work out as expected. Kayo was a person who could show an incredibly deep love, express delightful kindness to others (even and especially to random strangers), and really had a beautiful heart. But, it must be said, she was also a person with emotional and affective instability; in the four years of our partnership, she broke up with me five times (I literally lost teeth over this), and when it became clear that I wasn't going to take her back for a sixth attempt, we parted company and not entirely on the best of terms.

One cannot blame her for this; Kayo's brain was wired very differently as a result of trauma-induced CPTSD, and any recovery from such a condition is difficult, given the profound neurological changes to the amygdala. For my part, I believe I consistently went well beyond reasonable expectations to be helpful, generous, understanding, and to provide a point of stability in her life. Certainly, I educated myself a great deal on mental health issues and, following the completion of a psychology degree, was invited to do postgraduate research by Auckland University. Kayo would tell me that, despite my own fairly rough upbringing, my grounding was "inspirational", and that I was "compassionate", "dedicated", a whole range of other positive descriptors of a different nature; the most important being that she felt safe, secure, and that all her many fears about the world would melt away in my company. I don't think anyone has provided me with such positive and passionate affirmations as she did, and she was one of the few people who could shake me out of a persistent depressive disorder manifested in my own life as driven dysthymia, and that alone speaks volumes about the sort of person she was. It was appropriate that her consistent, decades-long nom de net was a science fiction character who saves the planet through light and love.

There are many wonderful memories of my time with Kayo. We had a couple of delightful nature-immersed regional holidays, innumerable picnics in the best of the local parklands, we would sing whilst preparing food together in the kitchen, dance with our respective cats (who must have thought we were quite mad), we engaged in detailed speculations both practical and ridiculous (such as how we would steal the Star Sapphire of India), and we would study together providing motivation and ideas; her assistance in my MHEd thesis at the University of Otago was especially notable and is recorded for all history. But all of these sweet memories are in the past tense and can never be repeated or elaborated on. I really feel for her family at the moment, especially her parents and her brother, who absolutely adored her. For my own part, I must thank those who have expressed sympathy and care to me, all knowing that Kayo was such a big part of my life. Valedictions, Kayo, there is some small solace for all of us knowing that you are at peace: "Dieu réunit ceux qui s'aiment".