WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR TIRED EARS FROM?: MONOLOGUES

7 1 R W H E R E D O Y O U G E T Y O U R T I R E D E A R S F R O M ? M O N O L O G U E S W I L L E A V E S You can get cut o√ by a landslide or a fire. A few months ago, a family down at Abbeyard was isolated by a rockfall, but only for a morning. The greater danger, the one big danger, is fire. The fire in 2010 was caused by lightning strikes along the ridge. The fire ignited in three separate locations, united, rolled down the Sugarloaf Valley, and by the time it got to us it was one giant fireball. It skipped – oil fires crown, which is to say they skip from tree crown to tree crown – and jumped right over the hut. But . . . terrifying, terrifying. It’s 115 degrees, then 120, then more, and the sky goes black with smoke, and you’re ringed by fire, and the oxygen is being sucked out of your patch by the surrounding blaze, and you can’t breathe. And the river’s no refuge. The water heats up, dries out, and the boiling hot sludge coming downstream is full of debris and smoking dead cattle and animals and embers the size of melons and bits of burning tree. You’re covered in all the right guards and soaked in flame retardants and you’ve dug a ditch around the house (if you’re lucky with time and have a digger), and still it’s down to luck. If you’re out of luck, you’re out of luck. • 7 2 E A V E S Y I’m at this conference listening to a brilliant man talk about Charles Babbage’s Di√erence Engine – the precursor to the computer, loosely speaking. He’s describing it as an autonomous construct. I don’t know. I thought the rule for something being autonomous, like a kind of life, is precisely that it has to self-start. It has to be original in the sense that it has to be more than the result of an imposed discipline. And by those standards, Babbage’s beautiful monster, with all its banks of ante-digital data, is no more a selfstarting entity than my laptop. Or my toaster. Lord Byron’s daughter Ada called it a ‘‘calculus of the nervous system,’’ which is a great phrase, but . . . you had to pull a lever to get it going. Even now, you have to turn things on, don’t you? The cry still goes up: Where’s the switch? The number of speakers who couldn’t work the lights onstage ! Or find their way around the desktop. ‘‘Now, I don’t quite know what I’m doing here . . . where’s the file? I thought I moved it . . .’’ So I was feeling stupidly reassured about all this when I saw my neighbor have one of those old-man coughing fits, you know, withthegrislyhiatusbetweentheend-of-the-worldexpectorations and the gurgled apologies. Professor Someone, decorated and retired . I could just see him being wheeled out, packed o√ in an ambulance. And I could also see some nurse picking up the phone to his wife or one of his kids in the middle of the night, and one of them groping for the light, minutes after having made love, and coming to terms with his death, vaguely aware that everything is held in balance, and all at once I saw that we’re not self-starting either, are we? We’re not, as individuals, self-organized. Nothing alive is. Something, whether it’s sex, or a bolt of lightning, has to get us going. Matter began to twitch billions of years ago, but why did that happen? There’s no law of physics saying it has to. Why twitch? Why self-replicate? Why? The leap from the inorganic to the organic – that’s the bullet everyone’s trying to dodge, isn’t it? Where’s the switch? • When I was a child I didn’t have an identity and I didn’t want one...