Short Takes XII

23/10/09: When Sir has but one option

At the blokes’ Table O’ Knowledge this morning I chatted with an old schoolmate, Dave, who has been a science teacher under various systems. He has a quick and practical turn of mind, and we compared some classroom adventures.

Early in his career Dave served for a spell at Alice Springs where, on a morning, he found himself doing playground duty. To spot trouble, the trick is to look for where there is intentness in the group behaviour.

And there, in a far corner of this playground, a group of the town’s working-class kids had gathered around some spectacle. Dave strolled over to find one young fellow in their midst who appeared to own a brown snake. The serpent was about six inches long and repeatedly striking at the boy’s hand, to the great entertainment of his audience.

A phlegmatic fellow, Dave pointed out there were dangers attendant on this form of amusement. No problems, the young expert assured him, the browns only got dangerous after they grew beyond nine inches long. He demonstrated this length with his hands as his own snake, energised by the heat of the Alice midday, continued to strike at him.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“What could I do?” Dave gave me a quick sideways look at our table. “Confiscated his snake of course.”

24/9/10: Death of the book

Oxford University Press announces it will no longer bring out the famous dictionary between covers. The English language migrates to screen. Pixels and power-grid replace paper, gauze and glue. No more the weight of my mother tongue in kilos on my lap. No more the astonishing strength of those micron-thin pages printed with their columns. Goodbye the art of the papermaker and the bookbinder. A mouse has usurped their long-held skills. Death of the book, long live the book.

This morning I went to the Lifeline Book-fair. A few years ago, this event moved to the Showground premises because all previous book-halls in our town were inadequate to cope with a public ravenous for books. The fair opened at 10 a.m. I arrived at 9.50 when the queue, in its coils, was already one kilometre long. In the ten minutes that elapsed before the gates opened, this queue grew behind me by 300 metres. The glass doors swung open, the queue-serpent convulsed, then uncoiled into the cavernous building and almost instantly dissolved itself among the multitude of tables where tens of thousands of books were for sale. I grabbed a first edition Judith Wright, a Collected Poems by the genial W.H. Davies, and a copy of my own volume of essays. The fair is to continue for three days, those ample tables continually refreshed with titles by the dedicated Lifeline staff, book-buyers streaming in with their bright green shopping bags.

Death of the book, long live the book. In these two events I have a potent signal of changeover, a potent sign of persistence. I am sixty-one and have made my life’s work the business of seeing what effect I can make upon the consciousness of another when a weight of language lies in the human lap. Part of a vocation this, being aware of my reader pressing back the covers of my product in order to better see the thing I have made, licking a finger when turning the page to see what comes next.

17/12/10: Praise for the undesired

For most of my life I think it fair to say I have not been sought after. My works, my presence, my person have compelled no especial attraction, I cannot recall the sensation of being aware I was wanted.

At Wordfest occasions, for instance, I have known what it is like to sit idly as some literary doyenne scribbles signatures for the long queues of her readers while twice, once in Brisbane, once in Adelaide, I have had my chairperson introduce my turn to speak with the disgraceful old gag, “Our next speaker is … what was your name again?” (snigger). I trust that neither my mind nor voice are monotonous, yet at different times I’ve listened with some patience to the views of friends then watched them nod off when I have been in medias res with my own. As a young man I had my share of sexual adventures, but mine was a presence that must press attention, rather than know the experience of how it is to be attractive.

I do not complain at this. It is a texture of my fortune. Self-regarding to note it, neglectful not to see it as entailed by the very necessity of my being.

I could think it a dismal reflection until I recog­­nise it is probably the experience of most people. Nature requires the heat of desire to make things happen, but equally it needs an ambient, neutralising cool to allow respite from attraction and action. It needs desire and the desired to underpin the idea of value, the undesired and consciousness of being undesired to remind that a thing, a life, must reconcile itself with being dispensable. In turn, this awakens the idea of a thing having value despite itself.

26/1/11: Reading for an anthology

Free Verse? Try reading three volumes of this stuff per day for a month—ninety slim vols—then ask yourself how free you feel.

To remove constraint is to impose the tyranny of unconstraint. What is that type of oppression? Essentially the onset of distrust and the intellectual infections that flow from that.

Could this be codified as an offence under The Fraud & Tedium Act?

31/7/11: Authentic living

Again I have been tantalised by that membrane of difference between the authenticity of lived experience and a dreamed simulacrum.

In this dream, I went with company to a pub and we sat with pints. Our company diminished until I was left with one companion. We rose from our bench seats to order new drinks, returned, but no sooner were we seated again than two tall fellows stood behind us claiming these seats as their own.

“This is a matter to settle in the garden,” someone decided, and the four of us trooped out.

My antagonist stood on a path while I found myself at disadvantage on dry, ploughed soil that dustily gave under my weight. So he towered over me as I assessed whether I had a chance against him. Then, as soon as we grappled, I knew I could deal with him and had the grappler’s nous to do so. Partly this was because I could feel, within the dream, his weight and the stringiness of his upper arms as a palpable sensation. He was not what he had seemed. We were, in fact, fairly matched.

But the marvel of this mental processing in the dream was that I had the most intimate sensation of his weight. His lankiness, his stringiness, was indistinguishable from the burden and texture of anyone who, in full wakefulness, I might challenge on my back lawn. Only the undreamed “facts” were that I lay asleep, alone in a bed, with no suggestible objects nearby that I could say were counterfeiting the sensation of weight on my body.

So, in the dream, we grappled, my antagonist and I. Blithely I used wrestling strategies to twist and knot his limbs. Were these derived from television, from strategies I learned during the rough-house of boarding school, or more mystically, race-memory tricks deriving from my Icelandic grandfather’s youthful bouts in the distinctive Icelandic wrestling style I could recall seeing depicted on Iceland’s 1950s postage stamps? Once engaged with my rival, while it never crossed my mind I would necessarily win, I was never in doubt that I was dealing competently with the grapple, even when the fellow’s colleague loomed, having (I assume) demolished my own companion.

Now, removed from dream but recollecting it, I know this is not mystagogic stuff. The armature of my dream seemed to deal with self-confidence, and from it my ego appeared to emerge both undefeated and with a certain knowingness surprising to itself. I did not, as often after nightmare, awake to the aftermath of dismay that persists as a remote tension until at midday one might emit an unobtrusive sigh, thus flushing away the night’s counter-authenticities to those of the day.

So, dreams recycle experience’s trash in order to rehearse the ego for more effective living. I experienced that grappler’s weight as a sensation through my arms of carrying and swinging. I felt that stringiness of biceps between my fingers, and that burden of tension that weighs the mind when it knows a conflict must be resolved. Yet I slept, safe as pie in my policed city, my small dog primed to go ape should even a pair of possums scathe at each other in their love-calls along the wires.

11/10/11: The obvious but tilted

My dream last night was straightforward enough. As part of an endless queue of folk, I moved along a hill’s winding path, pastoral, sunny, intermittently tree’d. Our pace was not hurried, nor was it laggardly. There were occasions when groups of us stopped in a wayside paddock, though this did not afford respite from the impelling sense of moving on, for we remained alert to the milling of people as they backed up behind us. Here was A fair field full of folk. My sensation, among the group of which I seemed to be a part, was that there were no advantages to be gained by going faster, deviating from the winding path. Absolutely, this was not a context for independent action. Things were being said between us in the dream though none of this conversation presented itself as being conspicuous for any reason.

And as I surfaced, taking mental note that I should try and recall its details, I accepted the provenance of the dream that presented itself most immediately, that I was being presented with my self, and the status of my self, in my life-journey. I was conscious of folk before me on the path, behind me, and folk in my immediate vicinity. I was conscious that any number of outcomes could occur to each person on this calm, shambling, relentless progress, but all these outcomes had a parity in their status, one against the other.

And this was marvellous, this dream-pageant of how each person stood in time, that there was a ground where the drama and trauma of individual circumstances were absorbed into a ground-note, a place of comprehending that could not be my own comprehension but which I could trust as being possible.

What was the provenance for this dream? In the last fortnight Gould’s resilient bod has needed to face the notion it is not so resilient. New sites of arthritic pain have colonised my backbone. On two occasions in that time I have woken in the morning to find I have inflicted some reflexive violence on my tongue. My chest cavity has felt hampered by some constriction, and these considerations, all of which I prefer to fend off with a wait-and-see, allow me to form a view of how things might conclude for petit moi. I know Langland’s wonderful poem and accept its Christian vision.

So wherein lies the marvellous? I think in this. Dream is a treasure-house of rehearsals, astonishing in its resource, exquisitely accurate as to the ego’s sense of place in the grander and finer scheme.

28/10/11: The creaks

I call them the creaks because, for the last several years these arthritic anti-thrills in hip, spine, ankle have had my body re-negotiate its capacity for ease with itself. The person habituated to being swimmer, leaper, climber of trees, now wakes in the small hours to calculate how he might roll from his left to his right side with least provocation to The Pain Tribunal, gingerly then squirming to make the rearrangements. How outlandish! How with a sense of the comedy, does life trend from the blithe to the deliberate! The tone of an entire day can be determined on how easy it has been to pull on my socks first thing.

This is the Democracy of Discomfort, and I’ve arrived at my voting rights where votes are wishes from the ether, not the people’s will. For sixty-two years I have, as it were, holidayed abroad, now to be shown the citizenship I knew I would always inherit for all I never found it especially imaginable.

15/11/11: The nerve

Outside our supermarkets or in the niches of our plazas the beggars and the buskers have grown numerous in recent times, and sometimes I drop a coin into hat or guitar-case, sometimes not, untroubled either way.

These days, if challenged, I tell people I’m a Christian. This is because I find a direct appeal in prayer to JC at any moment of moral uncertainty immediately helpful to me in bringing clarity and perspective. This has become an integral part of my mental life.

Today in Civic, coming from coffee with Geoff, I passed a fellow on the corner near the merry-go-round. He sat against a wall, barefooted, head in hands, his limbs at severe angles and this angularity made him resemble a Picasso man. It was a destitution suggesting morale no longer interested in seeking help.

Immediately it struck me what I ought to do. I should pitch no coins, nor interrogate him on his plight. Rather, I should inquire if he would let me take him to one of the cafés of Garema Place and buy him a meal. I had some money, a little free time, and the fellow had been placed in my way. “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” runs the incisive counsel.

In a moment my imagination had processed what my offer would be likely to entail. He accepts, we proceed to a table, he eats and drinks, his pale destitution causing the waitresses to be hesitant, the neighbouring tables to be nervous. But I had sufficient nerve for this spectacle. I would also hear his plight and probably how he might seize opportunity to make further claims on me, for I had enough experience of the destitute to know it was an entanglement.

I also had in mind some of the instinctual Samaritans I have met in life, John Galloway for instance, the medical student I met in Edinburgh in 1973, whose practice when approached by any of the city’s innumerable beggars, was to withhold coin in favour of buying the fellow a cup of tea and bun that his stomach be fortified for the day’s adventures.

But my fellow now was very much more limp than the bristly beggars I recall from Edinburgh ’73.

I have my moral equipment. From old acquaintance I know it lacks that spontaneity of perception and nerve that could have impelled me to act promptly at that corner of Civic’s merry-go-round. Equally I am conscious that in this instance, I was apprised of what I should do in time to effect it. I possessed the knowledge but lacked the nerve.

What does it mean, to lack the nerve? It is not cowardice exactly but the co-ordination of the imagination saying if I pursue this, such-and-such inconvenience might transpire and the intelligence saying but that is to be dealt with in the event, and cannot be dealt with otherwise. It is that part of intelligence equipped to find the prevailing good, not by ignoring impediment, but by spontaneously being able to put impediment in perspective. This, I reckon to be Christ’s genius. So the important thing in my encounter in Civic this morning, in the momentous scheme of Creation, is not my failure to act on a good impulse, but to recognise an aspect of why the Christ-nature is revered by the highest of human intelligence, that it could act at exactly that point where need inspired, foreseeing the incalculable inconveniences that might follow, but taking them on.