The Lion Speaks Tonight

A few days ago I was in a boulangerie a few blocks from the Champs Élysées ordering a sandwich, drink and dessert in one of those French lunch combinations, or formule, which requires a level of language just one step above rudimentary.

'Ah, you speak French,' the server told me, in French and with a note of praise and excitement.

'No,' I told her, 'my French is terrible!'

But she wouldn't hear of it, and continued to say lovely things about my scratchy facility for her language. I'd already paid for my lunch by this point but, obviously, wanted to stay there and linger like a Cranberry in the validation for as long as possible.

In fact, I live there now.

I moved into that bakehouse and every three hours I order a pain au chocolat up to the ceiling cavity. Not because I'm hungry. Not hungry for food anyhow; hungry for the praise.

Far too early is the day for declaring a language breakthrough. When I'm not meeting up with English-speaking foreigners or the Anglo-fluent French I am still wandering through this city with blocked ears, catching the occasional word here and there but largely moving one beat apart from the same world in which I'm living.

This is a good thing to feel, sometimes. Most migrants throughout history have had, and continue, to live with the fracture of understanding caused by dislocation. Of course, many migrants are bilingual and many Australian-born people, like moi, are not at all.

I have been determined not to turn this newsletter into a travel blog which is quite difficult, actually. And why? Perhaps because I even started to annoy myself. I met someone at the Australian embassy the other night – a gentleman, lovely – who mentioned that he had been following my introduction to France on Instagram.

'I don't think anybody has ever documented Montmartre as thoroughly as you,' he said. A bold claim when the Butte had so influenced and inspired the likes of Marcel Aymé and Toulouse-Lautrec but one that nonetheless struck at my very core.

Oh no, I thought. I've overdone it.

It's just like that time I discovered Jurassic Park and over the next 10 years made my family watch it approximately 87 times. Also if I actually had gone to Jurassic Park I would have taken 1200 photographs, even while the carnivores were escaping their paddocks, and lost six followers (two from direct dinosauria attacks, four from off island for posting too much).

But, I live in language. So travel blog or not, I am thinking about the way we speak and what it means to communicate. Like most young adults with a flourishing personal life, I went through a lusty Wittgenstein phase. Knotty fellow, but charming and once declared that he had solved all philosophical problems and vacated the field because there was nothing left for him to do. Telling people you finished philosophy is like saying you finished the internet. No you haven't, silly sausage, get back in there and keep scrolling.

Witt, to wit, had this fascinating take on language that ran counter to the prevailing views of his contemporaries. I will hopelessly mangle it here – and besides, few have ever agreed on a single interpretation of Wittgenstein's philosophy – but Ludwig W. wrote that if a lion could speak, we still would not understand it.

The interpretation that makes the most sense to me is that language is freighted with cultural and environmental context. The experience of a lion in the world is so different to our own that even if it had the language to communicate with it, the content of that life would still feel alien to us. Unless your friends have a habit of mauling zebras on an open plain, I suppose.

At a soiree in the house of a woman who has lived in Paris for 21 years, I got to talking about the language barriers I was experiencing and how quiet my trips to the cafes are because I just cannot engage in appropriate banter (how I hate that word) or light conversation. The woman told me that even after 21 years, and with more or less totally fluent French, there were some all French jokes and common experiences she just could not crack.

This made me feel at once desperately sad and relieved.

It is not only between countries that we live in this fog, but within.

One of the most complicated federal bureaucracies I have covered is the one belonging to, and created by, the National Disability Insurance Scheme. It is wildly intricate and, unlike the social welfare system, incredibly new which has left it particularly vulnerable to the shifting goalposts of interpretation and political whim. For the now 12 years it has been running – I've covered it in detail from the very first – the agency that oversees the scheme has built, torn down, rebuilt, renovated and otherwise rearranged the lexicon that governs how people can gain access and funding.

Par example, the early childhood intervention component of the NDIS was once known as the early childhood gateway. That name changed to an intervention 'approach' because the agency did not want people to think childhood development concerns would always make it through a gate that leads directly to the scheme. Truly, they did.

Over the same time, a whole ecosystem of advice and support has arisen naturally within the disability community to counter the linguistic defensive strategies of the NDIS. It's like the old battle between the neck and tongue of the giraffe and the height-to-thorn ratio of the acacia.

A great example of this is the NDIS Grassroots Discussion page on farcebook which I've been a member of as an observer and very occasional poster since 2 April 2014.

I see these things as detective fora cross community linguistics diploma, as thousands of people meet to decipher the changing codes and shibboleths of the scheme that was designed to support them. What does this term mean, when they say they will fund X does that include Y? Why does this new law say I can only have one disability? All the questions asked because they were often never answered by the agency itself or, if they were, the answers were cloaked in an impenetrable jungle of verbiage like some lost Aztec city.

But people share. They always have in the face of something bigger than themselves. It's the only way.

So it was, and is, the with NDIS. And so it was, from Paris, I became aware of a staggering series of emails from the very top of the National Disability Insurance Agency which made it the explicit and urgent demand of the CEO Rebecca Falkingham to remove a disability advocate from the scheme as a 'priority'. This was not done out of any sense of due diligence – indeed, there was no investigation and a longstanding internal process was deliberately thwarted – but because conservative, reactionary radio broadcaster Ben Fordham decided to harangue the agency about a participant who was talking about their experience gaining access to the scheme. This participant had produced a series of videos at great length diving into this process which included the accurate observation that there are certain 'buzzwords' favoured by the agency and that this person had detailed their experience of their symptoms for their medical practitioners who subsequently signed off on their diagnoses.

Quelle horreur.

From the story I filed for The Saturday Paper:

“Hi everyone, I just need to be clear my priority is revoking access as quickly as possible for this participant,” NDIA chief executive Rebecca Falkingham wrote to senior colleagues on June 7 last year. “All other issues are a second-order priority.”

Within 18 minutes, immediate blocks had been put on payments and the agency was working on an eligibility reassessment focused on “determining that access revocation is legally defensible”. The process would ultimately cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in time and legal fees. More than 10 months later, the person at the centre of the scandal was reinstated to the NDIS with more officially recognised disabilities than when they had their access revoked.

You read that last part right, yes you did. The participant fought all the way to tribunal and literally as NDIS written submissions were due the agency folded and backed down, reinstating them with an extra disability some 10 months and hundreds of thousands of dollars later not to mention the lost time and resources.

The entire top tier of the agency including the CEO, four deputy CEOs and several branch managers spent all of Friday June 7 last year effecting this abortion of process. This outcome is precisely why big government agencies like the NDIA have internal policies, which were all shared in the course of this day but which were deliberately ignored in order to 'fast track' the express demands of the CEO which themselves were the result of a rightwing radio program.

The similarities to robodebt are extreme.

In a very broad sense, we engage with bureaucracy the way I have been trying to navigate the in-between world of my French language skills. When I order my lunch formula at the bakery, for instance, there are three separate items. Sandwich, drink, dessert. I know the words for all of those things (two of them are the same in English now, one borrowed from English by the French and the other borrowed from French by the English) and can order the formula properly. But every now and then a server will machine gun me with a series of statements (?) or questions (?) that I simply cannot untangle. Once, I found myself responding reflexively with oui or non even though I had no sure idea of what I was signing myself up for.

Similarly, I applied for my residence permit in France (the second step after being granted the longstay visa) I ran particularly difficult sections through Google translate and, at one stage, had to look up the actual French legislation decoding the various subsection shorthand titles for the 20 or so different visa categories in order to choose the correct one. The old guides I found had incorrect subheadings because the legislation had recently been amended, which had the effect of shuffling the deck of cards a little, so I had to go straight to the source. I'm sure there are social media groups and various internet fora dedicated to helping foreigners like me navigate these things but I'm not trying to get on the NDIS, so I suppose that makes it OK!

Last year my uncle was nearing the age at which he would qualify for the age pension and, by virtue of my reporting work, I became the sounding board about the criteria for eligibility, the asset test and various attendant ifs and buts. I was lucky (not sure this qualifies as luck, tbh) to know that what is referenced on the Services Australia website is underpinned by the Guide to Social Security which itself is (supposed) to reflect the law which gives power to all of these various things. It is a lot, for anyone.

For many of us, dealing with our own government is a language we only ever half learn.

We are left asking for guidance from a lion that speaks but which we cannot understand.

Addenda

No He Can't, Can't, Can't

On Tuesday night, immediately after running 5km at the gym, I hauled myself over the butte using a series of carabiners and climbing ropes, clopped across the cobbled streets of old Montmartre like half a horse and met an old friend from Boonah who was in town for a few days with her teenage son. She had invited me along to their viewing of the Moulin Rouge which I understood to be fairly boob adjacent. But I do so love a dance number. She had not briefed her (late) teen son on what to expect which only added to the artistic beauty in the room when the full chorus line hit. His eyes each became as big as the Parkes radio telescope and briefly picked up the signal from the Voyager spacecraft on the edge of the solar system.

Now, I appreciate the human body as a divine objet d'art. And the dancers were, indeed, beautiful if not necessarily broad spectrum. But I have never – never in my life – witnessed a production or a spectacle so determined, so recklessly eager or otherwise hellbent on rendering what appeared to be very attractive men devoid of any sexual appeal whatsoever.

And, reader, I tried to see it. Have you ever watched a man run a little too hard for a bus you and he both know he won't catch and realise, instantly, that you wouldn't want that man to be the father of your imaginary children?

It was like that.

I didn't go to find sexy men. I can do that in my dreams or on the apps. But, having turned up in the audience and seen the gulf that emerged between the dancers on stage, it was hard to avoid the suspicion that somebody, somewhere, had made a creative decision not merely to make the men secondary to the women on stage, which would have been more than appropriate, but to actively damage their sexual credibility both now and for a good many years into the future.

At one point the men were literally dancing in clown costumes to circus music.

We were more than halfway into the show before a single male dancer emerged with a bare chest and I couldn't even be thrilled about it. It made me feel as if I had stumbled across the last merman left alive in the Adriatic. Under any other circumstances you might feel a little frisson of sexual energy but this just made me wonder if he was desperately alone and might wish for nothing more than to be put out of his misery under the keel of a yacht.

The women, though. Such fun. By the time Olga and the Lions came on stage – technically all lionesses by my breast estimate – I was sold on the entire evening. I did wonder how they were going to bring the lions to life and then a dozen or so topless women [sic] came crawling out of a tunnel with big shaggy froufrou manes and I believed then more than I ever have in the transformative power of art.

Wittgenstein was on to something.

All up I counted five male nipples; four were planned and one was an escapee. These are not, in themselves, any great measure of quality but one learns much about oneself when the fifth male nipple pops out of captivity with a humid sheen, gasping for air and the closest thing to a thought that emerges in the mind is that it should be tranquilised and dragged back into the cage, the exhibit permanently closed.

Aye Aye-ful Tower

I think it has been so long since my last update – or so much has happened, at any rate – that I haven't been able to share Mum's impromptu reaction to the Eiffel Tower when I went to visit. I had arrived a day early in the 7th district for a coffee date but, in a happy accident, I had one of those frequent Paris moments when I exited the metro station and walked up the stairs in the middle of a little park to be confronted with an impossible view; the Eiffel Tower stretching above the Haussman buildings in a particularly grand area. I did the same thing more recently at Strasbourg-St Denis when I left the metro and emerged at street level to the Porte Saint-Denis which began construction in 1672 and, I've since learned, is one of the four triumphal arches in Paris, the most famous of which is the titular Arc de Triomphe which is indeed enormous and impressive but I was expecting to see that. The Saint Denis gateway was just plonked there in the middle of an already spectacular streetscape like somebody had taken offence and left the gate. Haw haw haw.

Anyway, I was a day early for coffee so I just went walking and headed for the Eiffel Tower for the first time and it was morning my time so it meant Mum was still awake. I video called her so she could see it, too, and he response was fascinating. She saluted the Eiffel Tower.

Why? We'll never know. I don't think she knows. But it has now caught on.

I am sure there were other things I was reminding myself to write about but that's enough for now. I must away!