Helen Martineau's Blog

When someone says, ‘I love you’, that potent word ‘love’ can lead to embarrassing misunderstandings. This is because in English it has a range of interpretations and we need to ask, ‘What do you mean by love? Other languages are more efficient. In Greek, there are at least eight different words. Four words in particular mark the evolution of love into its purest expression, with each earlier stage enfolded and enriched within the ‘DNA’ of what follows. These are eros, storge, philia and agapé . Ancient Greek philosophers so revered love in its highest form, they compared the way love transforms and evolves to a fat caterpillar metamorphosing and taking flight as a beautiful butterfly. Eros The first budding of love emerges in passionate infant desire for the one who nurtures it and appeases its hunger. That’s eros – it’s a desire-filled hunger, and it is experienced in all the myriad ways where pleasure is sought, including food and sex . Eros is a life force. We couldn’t...

                                                                                                                                A world of difference Society on Gethen is ambisexual. That is, for most of the time people are androgynous, but once a month at the time of kemmer they become sexually active as either male or female – they never know which it will be. This is the setting for Ursula K Le Guin’s stunning sci-fi novel The Left hand of Darkness. In her mutable fictional culture, the rigid gender divisions we hold have no relevance. I think ambisexuality is worth a close look when the issue of equality in marriage is a hot potato for politicians and a sourc...

  My grumble today! The Arts Party of Australia has a great suggestion - that in innovative, integrative education, STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) needs to become STEAM to include the arts. If anyone cares to look, practising artists, in all fields, work integratively with those STEM areas, so why is the 'A' losing traction in schools? Are we heading towards a Terminator society where mechanistic thinking rules? The arts (including humanities) speak to  thoughtfulness about our place in the wider world and the implications of our actions, past, present and future. That's important! The 'A' areas are not lesser, soft options, lacking rigour and discipline. The thinking involved is creative and imaginative and this is vital for innovation in all fields, but is learned through thoughtful creative activity explored most intensely and openly in ... yes, the arts.

I came across a website by women fed up with the patriarchal church and its centuries-long subjugation of the feminine. I liked their section exploring the importance of women in early Christianity and thought they might like to know about my novel  Marriages of the Magdalene.  S o I made contact. A message came back. ‘Sorry to be blunt when you have been so complimentary, but we couldn’t possibly have anything in common or continue to communicate. It appears to us that you are a Gnostic!’ (they had looked over my website). There was no explanation. Mystified I was motivated to find possible reasons for the rebuff. After all, Gnosticism didn’t  reject the feminine spirit or her human counterpart. Wisdom,  Sophia  in Greek was very much part of it, and Mary Magdalene was often cast as a guide to wisdom. A look at Gnostic origins Gnostic comes from  gnosis,  the  Greek word for knowledge, the kind of knowledge that enables insight into spiri...

Melbourne, my home, is not the only city that has a month-long Comedy Festival. Comedy has always been popular.  It  can be cruel and crass, but good comedy  tweaks reality and tickles the mind and emotions. When we laugh, momentarily we become free as a child, released from what life has thrown at us, from the crises that create personal havoc to the mess the world is in. . Especially through the irony of self-reflective parody and satire we open up and can see the world from a new angle. This doesn’t happen when we choose to enter a comfortable bubble and associate only with those who are like us. Or when we protest until we boil over into anger that only makes everything worse. Or we sink into existential gloom. Better then to throw up our hands and turn despair into comedy – that is, if we can. I have just re-read George Orwell’s famous and bitterly satirical novel 1984, and was shocked agai...

Sometimes during Melbourne’s Summer, it doesn’t rain for weeks. That’s why after a thunderstorm you notice things like the lovely way raindrops on a spider web scintillate in the emerging sunlight. The picture weaves into your dreams, like the night I dreamt I was in my garden peering into one watery orb to see what was reflected there. Suddenly I noticed that it was night. The raindrop became like those photos of earth taken from space, with the darkness of the globe’s surface scattered with the lights of a host of cities, dense in patches, less so in areas with few inhabitants. I leaned even closer and could see now spaces between even the densest clusters. Then something beautiful happened. The lights became miniature dewdrops with fine threads spun out like spider-silk clothing the planet in an exquisite fractal-like garment. And along all these delicate threads I saw human souls moving in each direction as if along highways. Somehow, I knew they were living souls ( n...