To Go Out into the Dark I Know Knows Me

I choose my title from the last line of “Galaxies”, a poem from “The End of Sail”, the second of my several maritime sequences. This was composed about 1980 during Malcolm Fraser’s “Razor Gang” era, when there was high unemployment in Canberra, by which I was intermittently affected. So my day-to-day imagining used to brood on how a person’s well-being reacted to the sensations of redundancy. How might I depict morale as a historical condition whenever the planet seemed to say to a person, You are no longer needed? At that time I wrote in the mornings, then devoted my afternoons to making ship-models, following the exactitudes of shipyard practice as closely as my miniaturisation allowed. Ship-modelling a cute hobby? Pfui! It is one of the enchantments of thoroughgoing historical mindfulness.

This sequence of twelve poems is spoken in the one voice, that of a mariner trying to earn a livelihood in the last age of working-sail before the Second World War. He is mindful how his era witnesses the inexorable demise of ten thousand years of maritime nous and experience. Inexorable demise, of course, is the condition of all matter, and yet …

And yet the human impetus is to remember and to want to remember, because we cannot help finding value in what has become materially irrecoverable. Furthermore, this value lies as much in the texture of what has once been lived, its nimbus of emotion, assumption, difference, as in its doings. Here, I suggest, is the ignition chamber for poetry, and anciently we invented poetry as the instrument of our remembrancing. Only bring pattern to words according to their musical properties and we make utterance convenient to recall exactly. Only pass through imagination those actions and sensations that press themselves to be remembered and we can tilt and charge their vibrancy to give them resilience to pass down the generations.

In composing these dozen dramatic monologues, what did I come to know? A voice certainly, but this voice was an animation more searching than mere familiarity of utterance like a TV newsreader. Here was an intimacy that welcomed me into that curious human attribute we call character. I call character curious because, inalienable from its place and time, irrecoverable at death, nonetheless its sorcery is to depict a particular in the same moment it foreshadows a more complete necessity for that particularity. Character must include and will not reduce. Its incipience is the undercoat of presence. So as I composed the poems, as I glimpsed their reflective speaker, so I sensed in him further reaches of presence, and these aligned themselves without, as it were, disclosing themselves.

He spoke to me from that strange dream-frequency of so much poetry, where voice, action, manner, have a remoteness that insists on their immediacy in the same weird equation that this immediacy insists on its strangeness. From this source I learned my fellow’s distinct temper, his puzzlements, his ethical sense, and his reflective quietism. I grew acquainted with the parts of a distinctive sea-going experience, the hazards and delicacies hived in an unsettled life, the knockabout and squalor of dockside sprees, the conversion of sea-work into moral being.

But at the nub, I grew familiar with an individual intelligence. It was clear-eyed as to the demise of the ancient vocation it has served in the very moments it comes to recognise sea-work’s exacting claim on the wholeness of his being. As his person grew before my understanding, I found my affection for him was engaged. I was in a relationship with someone who lacked a birth certificate and yet it was real and he has stayed with me through subsequent poems; indeed, we spoke earlier this year.

Is Aristotle correct to insist knowledge can only be empirical; there’s no special pleading; you admit knowledge after the evidence of the sense has satisfied the most rigorous intellectual challenge, and then only provisionally? Our scientists call this Method and, being an author gladly married into a scientific family, that verb “to know” places me on epistemological red alert. How, when I conjure a figment, colour it with terms like “intimacy” and “affection”, can I claim knowledge of how Being is constituted?

I can. I do. Of course I’m aware my mariner comes from imagination’s workshop, the haphazard of my reading, the co-opting of suggestible parts of my own experience, my phantasmagoria; of course, as a poet, I trade in the vicarious. Yet my man was there before me, akin in presence, say, to a late Rembrandt self-portrait where the chiaroscuro illumines vivid salients of the old bloke at the same time it steals around the dark side to establish an intimation of the figure’s completeness.

Is this intimation equivalent to knowledge? No. But I suggest it is tantamount to it. It cannot produce a genome, but it can create a real relationship between actual beholder and virtual subject where the exchange extends in the former an appreciation of what it is like to exist. Look at how the old gent in the self-portrait (say that of 1660) gazes back at us … Stranger, he says, I am so intimate to myself and this is the fact you behold here. Note how I resist being the thing you are in the very instance I overlap the thing you are. For I am both particular and universal, able to surprise you in the same moment I meet your expectations. This is how it is to exist in human art whenever human artfulness has been both skilful and knowing. And as I look at the painting I see I have been charmed by the possible.

For what is charm if not that solution between my credulity and outside circumstance that establishes trust whenever there is uncertain presence? In this sense, charm reaches back into human pre-history, the breakout into possibility from wired-in reflex, that deflection of hostility or indifference with an open smile, a shrug of fellow-feeling, or flicker of intrigue. In the Rembrandt this trust stems from a few brilliantly knowing touches of paint. If I turn to the canon of our dramatic monologues it lies in a fabric of words allowing me to translate, say, Donne’s lovers, Browning’s Duke or Eliot’s Prufrock from arbitrary spoken events to human familiars whose roundness as people I do not doubt for all I lack their birthdates.

But let me return to my mariner. In “Galaxies” we see him at the window of a Hamburg brothel, gazing out on the River Elbe in that quiescent mood after transactional sex. Above him the stars. Before him shimmer the city lights at the same time as an immense liner passes down the river, its own myriad lights both distinct from the lights it passes through and yet of a piece with them. The image comes to him of a galaxy passing through another galaxy, a cosmic event, so the astronomy runs, that happens largely without collision of stars but in serene accommodation, one galaxy with the other. I anticipate the astronomy here—galactic collision was a conversation of the 1960s, not the 1920s—but I’m satisfied the vagary is plausible for an untutored but intelligent curiosity. My fellow has this, together with his arcane knowledge and his sense of being naturalised within the immensities of scale where he is an infinitesimal, but observant, consciousness.

So my first hope for this image of galaxy interpenetration is that it makes lucid for a reader the particularity of this intellect. To seize the distinctiveness of thinking is a trick we learn from Shakespeare, whose brilliance in characterisation lies in establishing the calibre of an intelligence as the pre-condition for the illumination of the whole person; learn from the very texture of the words how someone receives the world, and the rest of character becomes vividly knowable from this most intimate source.

But the galaxy image speaks through my mariner outwardly to one of the conundrums of the world, namely that we act freely in the same moment we are acted upon and this simultaneity is one of the conditions of our being. So I picture my fellow in the comedown from his debauchery, allowed this clinching galaxy image for contrary systems within singular Being. And his comprehension occurs in an inclusive calm. His girl smokes and gets dressed, the liner glides, the city lights abide. Their small room includes the immensities of space, these two living persons and their remotest lineage. Past, present and future are invoked, and an inference of my fellow’s naturalisation in this kind of thinking that encompasses the scale possible in human meditation. His knowing is not simply inclusive, which is to say, unreductive, it is, of its very nature, about inclusion, of sensation, observation, understanding, all the particularities of presence that cannot help themselves seeking integration. And my knowing that, as maker and reader of the poem, is of course identical to this mariner who has made free with my imagination.

Of course the scientist at my shoulder reminds me that my page evokes mere figments; nothing actually quivers on a microscope’s slide. The poem may give me the experience of knowingness, but that is different from making an identification. And I must concede, while knowing how my mariner thinks, I cannot construe his actual face, nor that of Prufrock or indeed any literary protagonist. Why is this? I think it is because a poem engages our understanding from the interior of the face. As writer, as reader, I depend on visual imagery to give my character a ground, yet I find the character before my mind’s eye lingers slightly previous to visualisation. Yes, immediately it goes looking for imagery in which to live (“a patient etherised upon a table”, for example) because only by what can be seen, heard, smelt, can a presence be trusted. But this presence and the reader, see, hear, smell with the same organs. And this absence of a secure face, this in-your-face intimacy we call “engagement”, is literature’s particular contribution to knowing. Rembrandt’s old man looks back at us and we read there a pathology created marvellously by the artist squinting along his pencil to get proportion and angle. Prufrock or my mariner look out with us, look inward with us.

Now! Look how, in one aspect of his presence, my mariner might be any voice from any poem ever written because all poems, in their first instance, are dramatic, occasions of utterance where the reader is taken into that intimacy behind the face. In this elision the particular and the universal exist together like galaxies that pass through one another. I read a poem and I visit one of the reaches of human imagining, that curious expressive power that registers the world in the same moment it particularises its own character. Whether it is Alexander Pope having fun with his dunces, Judith Wright talking to her beloved in the moments before childbirth, John Berryman nervily negotiating the entrance of Henry Pussycat, we learn what it is to be within Being. It is intimate, exquisitely particular and polarised toward wholeness. From antique squiggles on a page have materialised this mindfulness, these qualities inalienable from the texture of living.

                               Galaxies

                  (from The End of Sail)

Hamburg; the clockhands move upon their star.

A liner glides along the Elbe, its lights

move through the city’s lights, a galaxy

passing in silence through a galaxy.

My girl’s behind me on the bed. She smokes

and minutes tick. Her time is waiting for

a time to end, a time to start. As mine is.

We are the flowers of our lineage,

were sinuous, bluff-mannered in the wine-room

with all our company at like pursuits,

transactions that the liquor tantalised,

that led into this silence and this calm.

Yes, here I took myself, yes, here was taken.

And here she chose to lie and here was laid.

Our choices and our fates, we house them both

like galaxies that pass through one another.

The liner disappears behind the docklands;

my girl is getting dressed again behind me.

I’ll close the curtain on this night sky’s map,

step out into the dark I know knows me.