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it has been good to swim in the ocean almost daily since i've been in sydney but it can leave your body with a sensation of being buffeted around for hours afterwards, and that seems to be my default state at the moment: at the mercy of some greater system. but we all are, all the time.

for the last few days i've been experiencing the general horror at the victorian fires and my heart goes out to all affected. it looks like the apocalypse, and visions of hell are not exaggerations. in these extremities we edge toward religious language. the sense of hopelessness and dread of more and more climate change related disasters coming our way won't be reasoned away.

so i was wondering, do we live in a benevolent universe? physicists see the exactness of the conditions for life on earth as evidence for either god or the multiverse. i'm not about to embrace theism but i have over the years nurtured a wonderment about the seeming benevolence of this particular life which has grown into a kind of shy and wavering optimism. it is hard to sustain that in the face of actual hellfire.

this is the trouble with getting less nihilistic as you grow up: constantly having to recalibrate the meaning of things. pessimism's great reward is being let off that existential hook, i suppose.

i can't help thinking it was easier when we had personifications to placate after a nasty dose of locusts. a mean deity is a tribal responsibility, with clearly defined roles and responsibilities. i guess there still would have been arguments about whose job it was to clean up and do better. now that we are all self-interested neoliberal capitalists there are no checks on our consumption, because we have kept that religious sense of entitlement with none of the inherent responsibilities. and then colonised the world with it. and called ourselves rational.

and then there is an underlying terror in white attitudes to this country that it is essentially hostile and random, plagued and vicious, impossible to placate. the 'plagues of egypt' model doesn't apply here: we don't speak the language of the land well enough. the tension of trying to square that with the imported christian idea that this world was given us by god is, i think, the second great tension of our identity as australians, after an anxiety about belonging as exiles to a stolen country. and those two tensions feed off each other. i must be a novelist by temperament, because i suspect these human anxieties fuel a lot of industrial trampling.

it is obvious that in terms of emissions, etc we are not changing fast enough. but we are not doomed either. i hope it is not too late to seek an equilibrium with ourselves and the planet that is about taking responsibility for our own mess in a rational way that still acknowledges the specialness of life. as in, if the conditions of life on earth are so specific as to seem improbably benevolent, how about we stop fucking with them?