Short Takes XVIII

23/5/00 The ghosts that walk beside us

Today a postcard arrived from Les telling how he has met my army cousin, Richard, during a poetry tour of East Anglia and shared an Indian meal with him.

“I was amused to note less of the army manner in him than I see in your good self,” writes Leslie, who hits a mark with this observation, what mark I’m not sure, but a mark nonetheless.

For in career-soldiering lies what has been the most claimant of my alternate selves. I know there is nothing in me that relishes destroying or mutilating other lives, nor taking wanton risks with my own. But to live days where the hours wear crisp edges, where sharp presence of mind and steadiness of nerve are routinely cultivated, where the focus of my allegiance is clear, these things remain attractive to me and in marked contrast to this life-of-imagining I have actually adopted over four decades, where allegiances are vexed, and crisp outlines for the working day and its duties are perversely disarranged in pursuit of vital dreaming. “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier,” observed Sam Johnson, one of my fellow vital dreamers.

29/4/14 A lifeline

My darling is not keen on spiders. But she is also a tender beast and this morning she wished, before the plumber arrived, to warn me about a ticklish matter.

“O yes?”

Last night, in preparing our bathroom for this plumber’s visit, she had tried to relocate the spider that dwells in our bath. But the creature had evaded her efforts and retreated down the plughole. “It will be flooded,” Anne predicted, anticipating that the plumber would turn on the bathwater to ease the passage of his electric eel as he cleared our sewer pipe.

“It will.”

“So I have attached a length of dentifloss to dangle down the plughole for the spider to climb up and escape by.”

“O good.”

“The trouble is …” my love gave me a sheepish smile, “… it is still down there.”

“It has not availed itself of your escape plan?”

“I fear not.”

“I’ll instruct the plumber to be careful,” I assured.

7/5/14 Tuning the fine instrument

Kindly my scientist sister-in-law has subscribed our household to the journal New Scientist, in part because she has heard I am unreliable concerning climate change. She wants me to have, as she put it, “proper thoughts” on the matter. Now this week’s edition features an article on how the human population might look if it succeeded in ridding itself of God and god-clutter.

Percentages are streamed into this scenario essay, of decline in church attendance and faith allegiance, of the proportions of children who will flow from religious or irreligious homes respectively, of the proportions, where faith has lapsed, of those who will be unadulterated atheists and those who will be merely “apathist”. There are photographs to illustrate the hiccups in this smooth descent into secularity that arise from catastrophe and death, Christchurch’s earthquake-wrecked cathedral, a gravestone with withered flowers. A new worldwide movement of godless congregations is heralded, a “church” minus deity but retaining the tea-and-biscuit. It is a tidy presentation, the triumphalism of secular advance more mooted than it might have been, the relevance of its discussion to scientific knowledge unclear.

But then scientists (not all) are tireless on this topic, habituate themselves to anti-clericalism, apply their discipline as an instrument to re-tool the human mind, replacing its dark room of superstition with a well-lit lab for adducing “proper thoughts”. And as one whose vocation has made me watchful of what text does, I am taken aback by how this voluminous, anti-religious discourse lacks any innate watch on its own character, on how its evangelism in favour of godlessness is identical in fervour and trope to the ardent religious proselytising it pillories.

The trope in the New Scientist article is the usual implication of authority in such presentations. What follows brings you the dispassion of our discipline to the mirages of credulity; how can you not trust us? The author is careful to locate his credentials as a free-thinker, assumes for his readers they would wish inclusion in the same free-thinking colloquium once they rid themselves of God and god-clutter. And it is true, I like free-thinking …

… So why do I distrust arguments from this quarter, why do I court the mirages of credulity? Or rather, what makes me look to the language of such polemic in the same glance I assess its claims? I think it is because the very process of this discourse seeks to entrench the mechanistic in the human intellectual resource and this does not free us, but serves to contain us. A pretended agenda of chasing out chimaeras is in fact a materialist-reductionist program aimed at disabling the mind of its wider and more ancient powers acquired in humanity’s very dealing with fantasy, phobia, metaphysical perplexity. I mean those incalculable mental powers of intimation, wondering, recourse to metaphor, allusion, dream.

I assume deliberation in the language of this polemic, but I may be wrong. Are our evangelising reductionists simply unconscious of how an intention to elucidate can be a puppet of the doctrinaire? My own smallish scientific acquaintance suggests well-meaning folk, fastidious as to data, but often ingenu as to how text communicates beyond the factual. When does the stream-of-percentages spur human wondering, when does it disable it for the scale and unexpectedness of truth’s possibilities? When does data-presentation become data-preach?

I have my own bias. I accept the proposition that there is in us a religious instinct, ancient in its genesis, various over the millennia in how human culture has found its expression for it and, in so doing, enhanced, modified, exercised our mental resource. By this “instinct” I mean a natural orientation in a creature that knows it will die towards a viewpoint that encompasses the Sum Of Things. Whether expressed as need or more mildly as natural interest, it looks towards that Viewpoint for an answer to the questions, “Why is there Being?” and, “What relationship does my small interval of being have with a Whole I can conceive but not know in this life?”

I value this bias, so look to its well-being, conclude that it fares better when all the faculties of mind accrued over the millennia from our forebears’ engagement with religion—those intimations, dreamings, fancyings, metaphor-weaving, myth-making, whatever that inchoate mindfulness is that is aroused by listening to music, as well, of course, as lucid reasoning—are available for our meditation, rather than the tabula rasa scoured in preparation for efficient rationalisation.

Do we, the religiously disposed, in our several approaches to that Viewpoint, accumulate god-clutter? Of course. And secularists who take The Seven Days Of Creation literally are as dim as the Creationists who do the same, both mistaking inspired fable for reportage. Religious mind evolves like anything else in the unfolding story of evolution. Because my time and my place limit what I can come to understand, I cannot bring myself to say I believe in God. Equally I cannot desist from wondering about Deity. If I quiz the sensation of that wondering, I find myself nearer the presence of music than of argument, where evanescence experiences no bother with the resilience of its being. And when I read articles that stream secular-charged percentages at me, or polemic that ignores its own ill-habits of caricaturing all that does not submit to utilitarian sense, then I find myself in the presence of something paltry rather than illumining.

I use prayer. Do I therefore converse with God? Who knows? Certainly I know how I put myself in the way of the above caricaturists—talking to my little friend (wink-wink, simper). I also know how the mirage itself is charged with actuality because the very activity of prayer keeps open a dimension of the immeasurable—of spirit’s claim to entity, of immanence, of a being’s fascination with the wholeness of Being, why! the very idea of meaning itself. And I know, data-wise from the archaeology, how prayer is conversation old as Neanderthal. Proper thoughts? No! I look for a mindset more open than propriety, because the openness is deeply the point.

13/5/14 At a poetry reading

We heard topical poems tonight, poems at the cusp of breaking news. Can the topical charm me into the poetic experience? Is it not the place of journalism to be up-to-the-minute, while poetry’s place is to find for that minute its attendant music, which is to say how the minute places itself simultaneously in a flow and at a cusp?

17/5/14 Our Bookshow

Why do I find the ABC’s Bookshow so repellent? My immediate response is to say it is because, however engagé the panellists appear, their engagement inevitably looks pretended. Whatever flair the interviewed authors might possess for cogent answering, answers proceed wrapped in a kind of career-stupor. But if I ponder further, I wonder if there is a fundamental mismatch between staging discussion about books and the intimacy and quietism of both imaginary composition and the reading of it.

What is missing in these televised symposiums? It is a sense of authentic love for the actual vibrancy of words on a page of effective literary art. We hear commentary, enthused or measured, but intrinsically stagy because how can the cameras participate in the life of books unless “action” is somehow adducible from such a sedate set-up. We see and hear the featured authors, these convenient birds-of-paradise each on their branch where media hype has placed them. For here is television’s gesture towards staging intimacy—the book-behind-the-book, alas equally pretended because moiled by career, by the need to make plausible show because television is an art that must produce actual animation as opposed to virtual.

Yet I know how the excitement aroused by text will convert itself to animated display where the illumination of real feeling is incontrovertible. I think of my university lecturers, Bob Brissenden or Fred Langman, behind their lecterns, delivering on Tristram Shandy or The Rainbow, how they would erupt into quotation, the words of Sterne or Lawrence flaunted, tumbling, as though they had reached the loveable part of their livelihoods as English academics. And whether the hundred or so listening undergraduates had read their texts or not, what they heard was a message that these books were demonstrably loved by the fellow at the lectern and words-on-the-page put themselves in the way of such love.

This next illumination of the love-of-text I know only by report. It tells of the Melbourne academic Ian Maxwell, lecturing on Milton’s Paradise Lost. I gather his delivery embraced much quotation, and as the old gentleman recited Milton’s sonorous lines a bead of moisture visible to his audience was wont to congeal at the end of his nose. To deal with this, absently and without interruption to his recital, he would reach for his handkerchief and his students could watch its slow approach to his nose. But then the Milton would become particularly intense and the handkerchief would descend and the bead of moisture would swell, and it was a rather tense matter for the audience in that lecture hall as to whether the bead of moisture would be dealt with in a passage of relative calm, or whether it would drop to asterisk the Miltonic page.

Perhaps it is the case that television is incompetent to “do” literary texts, that response to books dwells at a place of inadvertency that must always make the staging of that response appear stilted, howsoever the effusions of a panel might try to signal otherwise.

18/5/14 I wanna hear from you

E-mail-jabber, talk-show, panel-show, twitter. If time is the fourth dimension, is iteration the fifth?

On the bridle path behind our house people walk their dogs back and forth, pouring imperative substance into their mobile phones as samoyed and pug haul them along.

And here’s a poignant memory—a lady in the front seat of her car at Bermagui’s stunning Blue Pool on a luminous spring day, reiterating into her mobile for some ten minutes the single trochee, “Listen … listen … listen,” to some intimate acquaintance, the tone slightly variant on each repeat.

So we get talkative after fifty. So we must watch whether our talk converses, or disguises an urgent need for witness or approval before extinction silences us.

But here is parlance converting speech to the condition of noise, distinct voice usurped by claimant voice. Will utterance ever be restored to circumstances where it is welcomed?

21/5/14 VW’s “Running Set”

I know why I prefer, say, Vaughan Williams’s “The Running Set” to any of the stridor I hear from rock music or jazz. It is because the VW music hears human gaiety at the same time as it hears itself, illumines the insouciance of human abandon without needing an annotation of lifestyle.

Nonetheless, this is insufficient as an explanation because it does not account for the instantaneity of my preference. I hear the VW and my atoms dance; I hear the stridor and my atoms seize up. This is chemical reaction, not process, as a dog knows when an owner sings and it must ululate too.

11/6/14 The Rap, the wrap

Of the three poets last night, the burly, almond-eyed Rap artist was by far the most energised. He compelled attention with his polish, his continuum, his several spiels flowing in their sing-song, their shameless rhymes, their gestures garnered from music hall, stand-up comedy and the like.

But if it is poetry being presented here, how abandoned to the plain gestural has our art become! How distracted from the impulse to inform these arrangements of phrase and cantation are! What I heard was a fascination for authority, a facility with disdain, a reliance on the momentum of the utterance to incant slippery assertions at speeds that could outpace objection; I’ve heard manics do the same. Here is eloquence in full session but no articulacy. Here is assertion but no proposal. Here is harangue without argument.

For all its showoffy charm, I fear Rap because it is unfriendly to thinking, anathema to understanding. It asserts rather than proposes or suggests. Expectant of applause, it seems more to sneer at appreciation than welcome it. Being so slippery in its particular attitudes, it overpaints the particular with a gloss of disdain. The targets of this disdain, and why they prompt such relegation, are not quite clear. It seems not so much to rap as to swim in a vat of topicalities chopped small, and to do so self-righteously, parodying compassion.

1/8/14 Dad’s defence of Ali Baba

Dad’s name for me was Ali Baba, which made me wince somewhat and was a part of the small, lifelong mismatch in our relations. Nonetheless, I recognise it was from the genie of his buoyant egotism, and from the complete confidence Dad had in his powers of English expression that I found my own way into this author-biz where the English language became my means of livelihood.

The outset was unpromising. At age fifteen I had an English teacher called Doc Thornbery. He was (and I believe still is) a short, lively, man with a lateral mind and an animated dedication to the teaching profession. These two things made his classes occasions to look forward to in the otherwise grey patches of the school timetable. But moiled in the harassments of the time, I failed to shine in any part of that timetable, including English. So, in his end-of-year report on me, the Doc wrote that Gould “tries hard for the limited ability he has in this subject”.

This was typically direct of the Doc, whose teaching at the time charmed me, and whose good nerve in stating his feelings exactly was an attribute I needed to become an adult to recognise. Indeed his judgment agreed roughly with my own assessment of Ali Baba’s ability in the subject. However, the comment so infuriated my father when he read it that he annotated the sacrosanct report book by fearsomely telling off the Doc. “The entry under English is calculated to demoralise,” Dad scathed, and gave his reasons.

Bless him. In the long run he was right, but not back then. Back then, in those dispassionate terms doctors and schoolteachers must use for their charges, the Doc had scouted the ground to find there was not much that promised articulacy in Gould. One can have a rich phantasmagoria, but a poor imagination, and this was true of Ali Baba, whose genie luxuriated in phantasmagoria much of the time he was in class.

If teaching English to fifteen-year-olds consists of encouraging skills in speaking, listening, reading and writing, I was a poor pupil because for me the only activity of these four competencies allowing freedom from self-consciousness was reading; one could lose oneself in reading. I was conflicted by Dad’s defence of Ali Baba at the time because the Doc had shown how English on a curriculum could glimmer with exhilaration from class to class. Did his power to magnetise the attention of fifteen-year-old boys supplant the interest this adolescent age awakens in one’s Dad? My own Dad was far away in Singapore and I would see him once a year for the six-week vacation. My everyday was therefore more susceptible to where exhilaration lay, a classroom where a short fellow did outlandish things and somehow conveyed the idea that the English language was involved in what might jump out of those forty pots in their cave. Resourceful, impish, true, the Doc was paterfamilias for thirty-odd boarding-school boys in any given class, and he stimulated me in his classes at just that age where an adult male leads sub-adult males from the protected life to the strange. And it seemed his view of my prospects in that passage were unhopeful. By contrast, one-eyed, like Odin, Dad thought I might come to something, and left his scrawl over the sacrosanct report book, to embarrass, to support.