Short Takes XVII

31/5/11 Outlandish grizzling

A strange thing overtook me yesterday evening. I broke down. This has never been my custom, for I believe my genes and my experience provide me with resilient emotional fibre. But “break down” is the verb accurate for my behaviour, and since this event I puzzle at why I did so.

In the first instance an event took place. The ABC News announced Jim Murphy had died and I felt a sorrow well in me at this information. Very soon I needed to quit the room and hide my wailing from witnesses.

But Jim was not close to me. I knew him as a burly, charitable presence about town, stalwart in a political party for which I have never yet voted. I may have seen him twice in the decades since the Poets’ Lunches he organised at ANU’s Staff Club between roughly 1976 and 1986. Furthermore, even as I grizzled, I guessed it was not Jim’s decease caused my strangeness to myself. I’m self-aware enough to know how emotions transfer, and how dispiriting are the crowd of glooms that attend my writing life at present, how opportunely these attach to convenient substance in my mental marketplace and set up clamour there. What are these glooms?

Disliking quarrel, I have clashed with a colleague over “conflict of interest” issues on a committee where we serve, then, observing the collusive allegiances of my co-panellists in the matter, had my unrepentance on the issue hardened. Why must feral egotism intrude so inevitably on literary fellowship?

Meanwhile the bruises accumulate. My picaresque novel MS, The Poets’ Stairwell, bounces back from Text Publishers with egregious praise for its “disreputable energy” tralala. Simultaneously Salt, my nerveless English publisher, tell me they must remainder Folk Tunes on account of its limp sales, this at a time I cannot obtain copies from the Australian distributor for consumer needs here. And other reverses, other slights.

Dismal catalogue! How practised are these publisher reactions, flattery that tries to disarm relegation, sloth disguised as rationalisation. And under this disaffection, knowledge of how authors teem, MSS deluge, editors in consequence grow coarse or lazy in the face of this spate.

But have I not in the past borne these reversals as they arrived? They cause bitterness, but have never roused histrionics in my person. Now ABC News tells me burly Jim Murphy has died, and I must hide my convulsions from witness, first in the bathroom, then on our wintry hill, indeed anywhere private, anywhere a black treeline might accord with my state of ragged unhappiness. For I am not a Modern when it comes to the display of sorrow. If I must wail, I will first come to terms with the business of wailing before I allow it to belong to anyone else.

I shambled in the dark along the bridle path, jerked by fresh squalls of grief. When had this last happened to me? Was it not, aged seven, when Gouldilocks had owned a Davy Crockett coonskin hat? Oh he had been so, so proud of this furry headwear, so deep in the jocular, heroic Davy Crockett dream, and then on an ordinary English evening some playmate had impulsively yanked off its furry tail and Reality was irretrievably spoiled. Yes, ridiculous self-regard, I was able to think now and subversively, even as I shambled and grizzled.

To say this reaction took me by surprise understates how deeply it reached my sense of self. In time I regained self-control, though simple memory of the event makes me wonder if I have not yet regained self-possession. I came down from the black hillside, re-entered my house, allowed myself to be seen again and ponder what had happened.

Those lunches organised by Jim Murphy had been occasions of fine fellowship among poets and their listeners. I was a poet among colleagues. Some of these poets were venerable, some with but a first book imminent. Nonetheless, young and old, around Jim’s table we recognised a simple equality, that poetry claimed us because, beside its claim, nothing else in life was quite as considerable. And our host, in thus feting us, showed he had a sense of this numinous condition, and that the provision of an annual banquet was a proper recognition by the prosaic world for our poetic calling.

Prior to the event, Bob Brissenden enlisted us, Hope, Dobson, Campbell, Page, Rowland, Grundy, Gould, any handy poet-visitor. Our job was to compose some light verse to be interleaved with the ANU Staff Centre’s Christmas wine list, then recite this during the lunch. In return we got good tucker and flavoursome wines served in genteel order at the Centre’s arcadian precinct, then were sent wobb­ling home with a bottle of port. All this courtesy of Jim Murphy esquire, ex-rugby player who had come late to a liking for poetry and poets. Invariably the event attracted generous performances from non-poets; in particular I recall the PNG scholar Jim Griffin exercising his magnificent voice on “Danny Boy”. And Jim Murphy’s quality as host consisted of a watchful kindliness, tactful managerial efficiency and a certain quiet deference when he spoke of how it pleased him to honour “his” poets.

Each year the tables multiplied, and the good-humoured iambics dedicated to JM esq flowed from the pens of Hope, Brissenden et al. Then Jim left the Staff Club, became a vintner and Canberra philanthropist, Campbell, Rowland, Brissenden, Grundy in turn died and a spirit of generous, equable, natural fellowship converted to a polyglot, fancy dress hoopla when the lunches were revived in the ’90’s. Now Jim has died on us and several charities in our city have been voicing their tributes to him.

All this I could recall, yet still had no insight into the extravagance of my emotion. Was it entirely sorrow at the loss of a generous spirit to the world? Yes and no. Was it personal despair at the beggarliness of the vocation I follow? Yes and no. Certainly my mountainside heard the poet wail protest that there could come nothing to a literary fortune that would not be subverted by deviousness, collusion, gross egotism. Yet I knew equally I had never heard a scathing word from Brissenden, Hope, Campbell, Dobson et al. And equally I knew myself to be no innocent, having puddled in scathing often enough. My mind pulled many ways and that, also, was the pity of it.

The night wind blew from the Pole, a possum trotted along the wires. Good things in the world got abruptly cancelled, ego ravened upon the chance for profile. Works of craft and painstaking got fobbed off by glib or harassed editors. Yet the world also included a burly ex-rugby player who decided in middle life that he liked poetry and poets, and would use his entrepreneurial skills to give them their place in the world once a year. All these things had attended my wails, or rather, the dynamic of their encounter, chain-reacting like some rare convention of molecules.

30/12/11 Wannabe

“For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business,” wrote T.S. Eliot. Spot on, you Old Pernickety!

Intentness upon the making of a literary work can still botch it, but the integrity of the trying means that the emergent piece will suffer from being either makeshift or, more grievously, mis-shapen or misconceived. It will not be inherently mediocre.

Intentness upon being a writer must always result in something distracted and therefore inferior to an artist’s botch-up because it overlays the trying with a pretension to status.

Sure, Gouldilocks, but apply this observation to the authors you know and the membrane dividing where one kind of intentness ends and the other begins. A rather difficult point of crossover, is it not?

14/1/12 A fishnet stocking in our garden

When we moved to our hillside I expected snakes. But for five years I have roamed our slopes by paths and pathless, and not sighted a one. Like Adam in the Garden, I considerately scan before I make a footfall lest I tread on some twig that recoils in a fury. Now twice in three days I have encountered eastern browns, reputedly the deadliest serpent on the planet.

The first creature I all but trod on. A three-foot, youngish snake, it evaded with a whip’s fluidity where I had intended my footfall on the bridle path behind our houses. In the blink of that encounter, what would my memo be to Adam? O Ur-father, one consequence of your Fall is the adrenalin spurt that will deflect a descending footfall sideways at a millisecond’s forewarning—humans recovering the dragonfly dance that hides in their nature.

Then today son George called me to say we had a snake in our garden. Here was a reckoning for me deep as babyhood. From thirteen years old when I lived in Singapore with its krait, cobras and shoelace snakes, whole continents of my mental life have devised how to discourage snake neighbourliness. But I went out to discover a four-foot brown with its head grotesquely distended and the torso of a healthy bluetongue lizard protruding from its mouth, gradually vanishing in small convulsive movements.

I was struck by the ordinariness of the spectacle. Was this lizard, no doubt thoroughly envenomed, still alive at this juncture? What then might it perceive? Something of how routine the digestion of itself was? Might such an idea of the ordinary intrude on the mental landscape of some poor victim bowing for the headsman or showing patience for the hangman’s adjustments? Our serpent remained under our linden tree for a long while, its body like Wurst wrapped in fishnet stocking, curled about its digestive task, presumably aware of the four humans who had gathered to watch. And watch we did, took photographs with a mobile phone, saw our visitor recover its small, deadly head, then slowly ease itself under a paling into the neighbour yard.

Snakes hold our minds at the place where terror and fascination knot together. Genesis, the Pelasgian Ophiolatry, and so on through Cleopatra, D.H. Lawrence and the snake-charmers of Cunard liners.

Place a possum at my compost bin or kangaroo droppings on my lawn, and I look directly for the material explanation of such presences. Put a snake under my linden tree and I am removed from garden to Garden. Only later does the material explanation follow, of recent mouse-and-rat plague etcetera, and this only because a material explanation exerts its obscure pressure upon the bald fact that my thought had enchanted this creature from the levels of myth to bring new startlement to the everyday.

But good luck to that dangerous enchantment. Snakes, you shy creatures lacking a shoulder girdle, long may you resist all the trawls of reductionism to keep our human imagining and observation within one whole and intelligent decorum.

19/1/12 So, extinction

So, extinction. The material world requires no further progress for my being and recycles me.

Is my superfluity true of whatever Reality includes, this material world being but one of its features? How so, when even from our own tiny perspective, so much is irresolved—of value, of justice—and immaterial matters like these appear so energised? Yes, how so, when all that we know of Reality is its tendency towards the whole story?

1/12/13 Dis content

Haiku, tanka and renga; why does one feel wearied after an afternoon of these, whether recited or read?

They overcharge us with sensibility and short­change us on experience.

8/12/13 Gravity field

Can we suppose that the Universe, if it unfolds toward a completeness, will include all that might have happened but did not, as well as all that did, in order to have its full expression as Universe? How is a story to be experienced as a wholeness if not as the balance of its illumined matter and its dark matter, the events reflecting light and the poss­ibilities that give actuality its gravity field?

14/12/13 Persuaded by the poetic language

My rascally handyman mate Bernard was offering a “mate’s rate” to provide and fit a bidet. We sat in an evening circle, barbecue fumes in our nostrils, eating good food, drinking good wines. Beside me, Annie had become attentive.

“Why would anyone want a bidet,” a voice from our circle spoke in the dark.

“Well, imagine this,” rejoined Bernard immediately. “A lump of smooth peanut butter has been trodden into a valuable shag-pile carpet, and you are trying to clean it with paper that disintegrates in your hand …”

“I’ll buy one,” interposed my darling, alert, cheerful.

“Done,” rejoined Bern with equal alertness, and by the following afternoon the device had been fitted at a most fair “mate’s rate”.

For myself, I eye the new tech and remain a sceptic. It has a hygienic switch. Turned one way, it sluices our parts as designed. Turned the other, it directs the water to clean itself as circumstances require. On first trying the thing and requiring the latter function, I twiddled the control and was shot squarely in the chest by a powerful jet of water. My reaction was in curt prose.

4/1/14 When his fabric became my fabric

The work of Joseph Conrad has enchanted me since I was fifteen when two of his novels —Lord Jim and Under Western Eyes—were set for my (UK) O Level exams.

On first encounter they flummoxed me. How impenetrable seemed the prose, how ungraspable the story, how very perverse was a curriculum that set this dense matter, English Literature written by a Pole, for me to make sense of in the most critical examinations of my life!

But exams are exams, one must prepare. So I packed the two novels in my valise for the Christmas vacation of 1964-65, flew out to my family in Singapore, put my nose to the Conradian page and did not leave it until I was happy I had understood completely what I had read. And by this application at fifteen, I emerged an enchanted being.

Why so? It was because my idea as to how mind receives and organises experience had grown inalterably. The age of fifteen is a good age for this to happen; I became a Conrad fan, which is to say sufficiently alert to a sensibility to know how that monocled spirit might raise his Polish eyebrow upon hearing such a newfangled notion that he possessed anything so vulgar as “fans”.

In the last few days I have re-read his A Personal Record, published in 1912, when his reputation had, after seventeen years writing, still failed to notch a popular success; this came in 1915 with Chance.

Yet what an exquisite weave this Record is. He breathes in the room. One hears his armchair creak.

10/2/14 Night sowing

I am re-reading Blake and today, coming across his lines in the second of the “Songs of Experience”,

Does the sower

Sow by night,

Or the plowman in darkness plow?

I discover the starting point for David Campbell’s lovely lyric, “Night Sowing”.

One recalls DC’s pre-war Cambridge career, how thoroughly he absorbed the tradition of English lyric poetry from Wyatt to Yeats, but one forgets the Australian lightness with which he applied it to his own poems.

Here is Blake, earnest, declamatory, speaking in this “song” with the voice of earth itself, for whom the idea of nocturnal seed-sowing is outlandish, outside the routines from which experience comes.

And here is Campbell, sowing his paddocks in the dark, expressing through that activity a countryman’s rapture for his piece of country, but in the context of witty subversion of the Blake and of agrarian custom in the Old World. Rapture draws part of its attitude from this mischief, but where mischief inflicts no loss to the rapture or patriotism. Here, complex, delicate, mischievous, is DC’s charm and Australian distinctness.

21/2/14 Ur-music

Years ago I read a book called The Winter War about the Russian invasion of Finland in 1939 and the fierce Finnish resistance that attained a military supremacy only to have the consequent peace treaty subvert this in an arrangement of restored stability, if not peace. The book marvelled at the shrewdness, resilience, heroism of the Finn resistance, the win against the odds.

And today I have listened once more to Sibelius’s “Karelia Suite”. Is the anthem that breaks so lucidly from the suite’s matrix of other orchestral activity Finland’s national anthem? I don’t know. But listening to it with a memory of that account of the Winter War, my reaction is this: Of course they won! Imbalance in troop numbers has nothing to do with triumph when an anthem like this is the nucleus of your effort.

20/3/14 The disbelief factor

How can I tell when a poem I have composed has been effective? When I can’t quite believe it was petit moi who wrote it.

29/3/14 After rain, the slapping

The torrents have come to our hillside and the bullants swarm around their inundated cities. They are in their millions, they blacken whole sections of our fawn-coloured path. Impossible not to tread on them.

And for this clumsy footwork I must pay. I arrive home to sit at my ease, but suddenly am nipped, and nipped, and nipped in unreachable places, instep, crotch, belly, calf. How many crowded onto my sandals as I gingerly hopped past their inundated cities, to arrive here at my dry house? Hardy little boat people, instinct with resource for the serendipity.

“Ouch!” protests Anne, dropping her book and slapping her leg. “Now they’re on me.”