Short Takes XIV

17/2/12: Weather extremes and Assisi

When the heavens split, Miso, our short-legged dog, endures the subversion of her home absolutely. If there is a human lap available, she hops up, then folds herself away upon it, to shudder through her long body, exuding a rancid doggy-smell, ill-comforted by my cupping off her ears to shut out the celestial bangs overhead. I can press, I can stroke, but I cannot restore the little dog’s sense that home remains home despite the uproar. And if there is no home, how can there be a future?

There are threats and threats. The barking that erupts in her being every time human or dog passes along the bridle path behind our back fence is essentially an expression of her exuberance. Come any closer, sport, and you will have Miso Anklecruncher to deal with. For what is home if not the ground upon which one asserts presence? But thunder overhead turns the creature’s sense of self to origami. O fold me away to nothing, for to have presence when the very air has become a titan is to rob my doggy understanding of all scale.

Long before it reaches the human ear, Miso hears the approach of thunderstorm. She is an alarmist by conviction as confident as any Anthropogenic Global Warming protagonist with whom she shares that pathos aroused whenever the very foundation of home becomes unseated in the mind. Monstrous disturbance subverts this territory where I feel safe. How can I ever feel secure again? And when a family lap is not available to her, she bunkers down, cowering in a corner of the shower cubicle, will not be budged unless she is allowed to droop like a carcass, will glance momentarily at us where we crowd at the shower-glass. It is a glance reproachful, abashed, and piteous.

And yet it illuminates what, seven centuries ago, might have animated the imagination of Assisi’s St Francis as he sermonised the birds or negotiated with the Wolf of Gubbio, that the Christian “take” on the world, if it is to come into the fullness of its vision, cannot exclude or marginalise any kind of animate suffering, howsoever it occurs within the Creation.

So the dog pulses on my lap as its home becomes an area of its consciousness alien to it. And the climate alarmist looks at an old photo of the iceberg juxtaposed against a more recent, and takes in deeply that fearful dismay at the subversion of the planet he calls home. And here is a common pathos. I intend no putdowns, for all that I am one who presently is more persuaded by the sceptic case in the AGW controversy. I am still mindful of the realness of that dismay. Home is where we grow habituated to how a scale of things might be apprehended and comprehended. I could wish more intelligent mindfulness from those who reflexively demonise the sceptic case I espouse, but is there any more direct appeal to human insecurity than the idea its home planet is under a doom-watch?

And I digress from my closer interest, which is that extraordinary mindfulness brought within the human worldview on those Umbrian hillsides at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Sure, we break the bread, share the wine at the same time as we lead the cows, pigs and sheep to slaughter so that we can obtain our proteins. But we also learn that creature-fear is akin to ours, that to palaver over our butchery, gratuitously smearing blood and strewing guts, is discordant with the nature we prefer to shape to our sense of what is fair at those deeper levels of fairness unconsidered by judicial process. And we can test the authenticity of our feelings in this by our recoil when we watch those Northern Territory cattle that we are perfectly prepared to eat, unshipped, teased, tortured, then butchered in circumstances that are irrespective of how, so readily, our imaginations can construe what a beast might feel where the manner of its slaughter is being protracted and enjoyed.

8/3/12: The tenacious grip

My self is present to myself, but I can recognise this is not identical to my presence in the world. I am important to myself, but likewise see this is not identical to my significance in the world. Realising these distinctions, I can begin to be mindful of The Other and so prise loose the mind’s tenacious grip on childhood.

13/6/12: Particular and continuum

We go to pictures for the particular, we go to music for the continuum. The one invites focus, the other encourages welcome of the inchoate. The art of writing, I might suppose, is the attempt to find the compound bonding between these visual and aural potencies. How obvious at a reading, when some poet has neither eye nor ear and we endure in the expectant dark, somehow unfed, somehow fatigued.

8/7/12: Our snappish dog

Strange fox-otter that she is, in recent days Miso-dog has relinquished the good manners that were expensively inculcated at Obedience School. Descending from the Mount Ainslie saddle a little in front of me this afternoon, she began barking for reasons a turn in the path prevented me from seeing. Then I came upon her snapping at the heels of a bronzed, wild, burly man in a lumpish jacket who had stopped to study the little dog’s frenzy.

“My apologies,” I offered, trying to exert control on the slippery creature.

“No worries,” the fellow assured me. “Your dog can’t really see me.” And I had descended a further fifty yards before the oddity of that smiling confidence struck me.

12/8/12: Upwardly mobile

Corella, you are a bird whose cricket-white plumage looks as though it has been through the washer with some pink garments. You are an edited white cockatoo. I had thought you confined to South Australia but now watch you establish neighbourhoods in our East and West Civic developments. Wonderful, how promptly creatures will extend habitat into new human tenements! Surely it will not be long before your claimant screech gets adopted as a mobile phone call sign.

What do you do at these new high windows? Colonise us? I witness no encampments, but have sat at a table on an East Civic tenth floor judging literary prizes, only to be distracted by your squadrons, white-pink barnstormers scrabbling for purchase on the steep window embrasures. No, you are marauders but not colonists, pecking at the layer of rubbery sealant that cements these non-opening windows in their municipal places. Does sealant have food value for you? Or is that a wrongheaded inquiry because food is not your urgency here? Instead, you have a beak needing exercise, just as a cat will exercise its claws on a tree’s bark or a bit of carpet. Or is this surmise a further error? For our city’s sudden new office blocks must make for intriguing tectonics in your avian world, especially when mysterious, regularly spaced, see-through rectangles disclose our shadowy fish movements behind them and the more luminous fish-flicker from our computer screens. How troubling for you, this alpine addition to landscape, impossible not to investigate.

So you peck at sealant and sheer away loudly. On East Civic tenth floors are the winners of literary competitions screeched abroad by you weeks before the official announcements? Is your furious pecking at sealant a transferred frustration at not being able to govern such outcomes?

And just today I collected Anne from her Drill Hall duties to note how you corellas have spread your stunt-flying to the West Civic high-rise, exercising impatient presences against the greenish, emblazoned structures of ANU’s latest celestial ambitions. Hard yakka for a bird on the qui vive, these sheer, glassy façades with nothing but the narrowest aluminium irregularities on their surfaces to use for claw-hold. Arrivistes, nonetheless I see how you clutch at these nothings, peer inward on our seminars of Creative Riding 2 and Ur-Literature 3. Are you made welcome by nervous tutors? Are there marks for the liveliness of your tutorial contributions? Have I witnessed that Enlightenment ethos of self-help crossing the species barrier, when booklearnin’ was a case of claw-hold, Samuel Smiles now Samuel Screech?

14/8/12: The beggarliness

How dismal, nineteen months off the pension, to deliver some work to audience or editor, and be told not, You’ve thrilled us to our bootstraps … but rather, Look, you know, you definitely have talent …

3/10/12: Against the mongrel

No! For all that I can relish the nonchalance with which a work of art might communicate its presence in the world, I prefer it to show it has been well-made rather than merely lucky in how it has tumbled from someone’s imagining. Why? Because the deliberation of this seems to me inalienable from its beauty.

Yet why so fastidious? When blind circumstances make one rose emerge in perfect interleaving while another presents itself as an ungainly flop of petals, where am I directing credit for that perfection?

31/10/12: Regally

On the track today I met two of the mustard-coloured “dragon” lizards and stopped to observe them. They had lozenge heads, mouths suggesting antique discontent, skins wrinkled in places like an old pippin apple and they held their dark tails erect like two Shakespearean egotists as they sunned themselves on the patch of new bright gravel where a soak had turned the track to sponge. One, the more Falstaffian one might say, scampered into the long grass on its ridiculously short legs, while the other watched me sideways through its small, lidded eye.

The steadiness of that lowly scrutiny had a “brazening out” quality, as of some ancient, long-colonised people before the presence of a civil authority. I stepped to view it from the rear, whereupon it turned and surged toward me.

“OK, Bollocks! Take me on, what are yer?”

I describe a creature the height of my ankle and the length of my foot. The midday sun illumined our disproportion and yet there was something grand and crazy here. King Lear? I withdrew, as regally as I knew from a tense situation, a kind of local Kofi Annan, aware of the exquisite dance of dignity and tact.

12/12/12: The Gospel picaro

In the Gospel accounts, Jesus has a particular birthplace, hometown and death-place. But during most of his adult years, typically we meet him “on the road” and, however close might be its eyewitness element, the story of his activities is picaresque. So our first appreciation of his condition in life is very much as a picaresque hero. This means that, as with other picaresque protagonists in our tradition—Don Quixote, Tom Jones, Huck Finn—our relations with Jesus are, before all, a companionship of the road. We read, and we take our place beside Sancho Panza, Jim the Negro, the twelve Apostles.

Of course it is not quite the knockabout relationship of the first two picaresques mentioned above. Christ’s status among us is more subtle, more tense, but nonetheless clear. He has authority as Quixote, Tom and Huck do not, so he is above us but not outside us along the road. It is abundantly clear, for instance, he is not outside the Law, nor outside the day-to-day encounters with the texture of life as it was two millennia ago. And here lies the essential appeal of the picaresque. Its hero should be companionable, which is to say, amenable to that intimacy of the road that is the substitute for the kinships of fixed address. Tom Jones and Huckleberry Finn could not work unless their protagonists were congenial companions. For all that these stories are works of imagination while the Gospels, fairly, claim to be a historical record, this same congeniality of the road is true for the personality of Jesus. In seeing how he reacts, one gets to know a little how he might react.

So we move about that Palestine countryside, attendant at many plein air occasions. There is the hillock where we listen to those extraordinary Beatitudes that propose a reversal of how human lives are valued. There is a lakeshore where we witness Celebrity taking trouble to arrange the sustenance for his celebrity crowd (imagine Mick Jagger buttering the sandwiches at Altamont). From a boat-deck we watch the profound self-possession of this person as he walks and trusts his fate to deity. On the outskirts of a community we glimpse the measure of his nerve and wit as he intervenes to save a woman from a stoning. And so on. Jesus is on the move, and therefore so are we. Are we a following? Not entirely, because there is a special kind of approachableness afoot. It partakes of that esprit among folk who find themselves together on the road, detached for the moment from the communities where more cemented, more laden kinships occur. And so it is in other works of literature. One has hopes for the happiness of Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy because their story has attracted our sympathy but not an assumption of our company; they occupy objective space. One can have virtual chats with Huck on his broad river because the idyll of a raft on a grand river invites this. One can do the same thing with Jesus because the proposal “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” compels it.

So how does this familiarity sit with Christ’s sovereignty?

One of the extraordinary characteristics of Jesus’s lifetime and counsels is that his story integrates an idea of authority with an idea of companionableness. Authority, in this instance, has neither protocols nor dressings, stems not from on high, but from the person walking beside you on the road. It needs no insistence beyond the naturalness of his assertions.

My own sense of this now is to conclude that Jesus’s particular lifetime forms the most radical revaluation of human values in our history, and I test this proposition against the rigidities of law and cruelties of self-affirmation found in the documents that would have been familiar to those Christ-observing gospel writers like Mark, Matthew and Luke. The perspective on this finds high resolution when Christ’s counsels are compared to the acceptable value placed on human life found in, say The Iliad, or the Old Testament. And yet …

And yet even to use that phrase “most radical” is to provoke antagonism because the nub of this picaresque story is not about supremacy, but companionship, the experience of the “road” and what it is like to be in company.