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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Extract 3 from Draft of Autumn Testament

Extract 3 from Draft of Autumn Testament

My wife works at the library. My son Hoani sits at home on a suspended sentence. The fuzz grabbed him for being in a flat where somebody else had drugs. My daughter works in town.

It would be easy to settle down again in this house, ten minutes and two hills and several tunnels away from Wellington. Love of family would make it seem the obvious thing to do, now that the book of Jerusalem is closed.

The possibility of peace tugs at the very roots of my soul. The old wooden bridge across the creek at the bottom of our bush section needs mending. There is wood to be chopped. I tuck my grand-daughter down at night, and she shouts and plays a game of raising her feet in the air. Charity begins at home.

Precisely. This power will strangle my life as a vine chokes a tree. The poor are having their heads banged on the walls of prison cells while I watch a TV programme on yachting. It is simply not possible to open the doors of this house to thirty or sixty people. Yet our . . . society can reach into this house, freezing the heart, deciding conversation, peddling drugs and . . . My granddaughter can grow up and find herself at fifteen in Arohata Borstal.

For twenty years I fought in the home front. Now I fight in the open ground. It is the same battle.

I need a house that will hold at least thirty people.

page 385

*

My friend T— was arrested in Auckland for the crime of not having a job. He is Maori. At the police station he sat down on a chair and began to examine a wall chart. The sergeant who had arrested him kicked the chair out from under him and said – ‘Don’t pretend you can read, you illiterate black shit! You know you can’t. There should be a law to exterminate people like you.’

Later that day I was walking up the road with T—. ‘I want to get hold of some speed,’ he said. ‘In the town we need drugs as a shield.’

This is the black gap underneath the Tower of Babel, the cellar in which our social problems lie and stink, unresolved. The sergeant who abused T— was a Catholic. It’s no good condemning him. No doubt a Catholic school taught him that the greatest evil in life was to masturbate, but left him without even the ghost of a social conscience.

All the same, he should be out of the police force. When men like T— get guns instead of drugs, most people won’t understand what is happening. They will want to build labour camps to house the dangerous element among the Maori or Island population. And the labour camps will be staffed by men like the sergeant.

Discussion is not enough. Contrition is not enough. One has to think in terms of militant social action, directed not against persons but against patterns that obstruct humane behaviour.

*

It is very difficult to have a clear mind in the towns. One’s thoughts are not one’s own. They are cluttered over with the rubbish of the mass media. It is also hard to keep a loving will. Everything here can be bought or sold. The advertisements for electric fires or insulating wallboard show smiling families, fat-cheeked babies, wives about to kiss their husbands. What right has the demon of lucre and boredom to use the images of domestic love for his disgusting purposes? This is the deepest pornography, the twisting of all things for the purpose of getting money.

One can only [escape?] the jail of that demon by sharing one’s goods and ignoring the acquisitive obsessions of the building of the Tower.

*

I— rings me up. His fifteen-year-old daughter has vanished from home. He thinks I might know where she is. I don’t know. He has travelled up here from the South Island to find her. She could be in any one of a thousand flats.

‘I don’t mean to lock her in the cellar,’ he says. ‘It’s just that I want her to keep contact with me.’

page 386

He is an idealistic man, a good father. But family can’t fill the gap left by the broken communities – tribe, village, township, ground to pieces as the revolting dinosaur of commerce and technology moves around. Mr Muldoon tells us we are all shareholders in the firm of New Zealand Ltd. I prefer not to be a shareholder in that firm. . . .

I give him a couple of possible addresses and advise him to pray to God. He is absurdly grateful. But there are no answers. His daughter has outgrown the nest. The town flats, the graveyard, Arohata Borstal: some of the possible destinations. Birds have to fly somewhere.

*

B— asks me the big question – ‘What do you think will happen to us all, Hemi?’

‘Who? You and me and the ones we know.’

‘No. Everybody.’

I’m tempted to say we will all die one day. Instead I begin a political resume. ‘The Government is always there. As troubles multiply, it will take more and more control. The Churches depress me. The young churchgoers sit in their groups and swap bars of chocolate, and hope to reform a market that scares them stiff . . .’.

B— is nearly twenty-one. She has used all the drugs and is still using them. She loves her parents, but she doesn’t want to get married.

‘I’d like to have children, but not to get married. When people get married they take one another for granted. It’s better to live together . . .’.

I agree that there is something in what she says.

‘I’d like to be quite mad – mad and happy! The truth is, we all have minds . . .’.

The failure of nerve is what troubles me. It has never occurred to B— that she might have the power and the right to join with others in militant action. To squat in old houses and wait to be arrested . . . To use one’s noggin constructively . . .

B— is one of the gentlest and most equable people I know. I . . . the drugs to offer her. Not now that the community at Jerusalem has closed down.

*

My old sins speed up like . . . to devour me. Lechery, vanity, apathy, self-hatred and foolishness towards others. It even seems to me on a fine October morning, in a sunny room where the green . . . of the bush belt, that whisky might be a cure for my terror. Whisky would probably give me a wet brain. How stupid can a man get?

Let the communal Christ deliver me. And us.

page 387

A cycle of compulsive stupidity and self . . . is just what Satan would recommend. That way he can make a man dig his own grave.

I need to turn my attention to the Tribe. I need a house with three storeys, that will hold forty people. To try to be of use to my own family is not enough. Too many are being crushed into pulp in the suburbs of Wellington.

*

Then the voices of the drowning flow through the telephone wires. C— rings me up and tells me she is going mad. I visit her in her glass barn in the suburbs. Three young children and the telly. She has already been in the mental hospital several times.

I take her on my knees and try to comfort her. The baby howls when it sees a stranger with his own . . . Mum. Gradually she stops shaking and begins to talk vehemently.

She has what others have – a husband, three children and the telly. That is all she has. Her eyes . . . she is no less than that of an African villager impaled on a fire-hardened stake.

There are three standard solutions for C—’s condition – psychological, religious and political. She can go back to the bin and dig into her early life in the company of an intelligent psychiatrist. Her early life was probably no different from yours or mine. She may learn that she loved her father and hated her mother. She may learn that she loved her mother and hated her father. Either way, the past will . . . very little . . . in the present.

She could return to the Catholic Church. But I gather she regards the solutions the Church might offer – ‘Carry your Cross . . . Christ is suffering with you’ as a glass or rubber pipe attached to the living plant. She might become a Protestant Pentecostal . . . to exorcise her many possible demons. I don’t think C— is likely to do this.

She might become a militant Marxist. This might be the most sensible solution. The demons of lucre and boredom let loose by our intrusive common anxiety are feeding on her day by day. But I don’t think C— has the makings of a revolutionary.

C— is a normal woman. When I left her today she was cool and collected and her eyes glowed with the light of hope and friendship. I think she will leave the glass barn and [rejoin] a workless boyfriend. And from time to time she will know that God is putting her in Hell for leaving her husband and children.

*

My son makes a Japanese bird out of paper. When you pull its tail, its wings flap. ‘Don’t you think it’s a remarkable work of boredom?’

page 388

My grand-daughter wants me to help her build a house with hollow plastic bricks. I gave her the bricks for her birthday. They are of three kinds, yellow, blue and red, with letters embossed on them. Each time we build a house she knocks it down and laughs.

There is a tiny red lump in my groin. It has been growing there for two months, like a finger or nodule of extra flesh. Now it has become too sore to touch. I imagine cancer. Rebellious fibres . . . chewing at my testicles . . .

I was born under the Sign of Cancer. The crab is a sign of my subconscious life history. Easy to think of this new visitation as a punishment for lifelong transgressions against chastity.

Nonsense. . . .

[Draft of ‘Black Marigold Song’, CP 527]

*

Coming past the Royal Oak about ten o’clock, I saw G— standing with a group of men by the taxi stand. Most of them were drunk. When she saw me, she ran across the road and embraced me.

‘I’m going to crack it with some sailors,’ she said. At ten dollars each, I’ll hate it, but I should make eighty dollars.’

Then she moved back to join her acquaintances. I feel sorry for G—. She is an attractive girl of eighteen. The sailors are unlikely to care to understand her many troubles, and she will injure her sexual nature by sleeping with them without love.

The problem is basically economic. In a society where dollars are more important than people, people can be bought for dollars. And G— may well have been living for several days without food. Her own private problem is that she is not prepared to live without the minor luxuries. For a girl out of work in Wellington, who has been refused the Unemployment Benefit because she left her last job voluntarily, food is one of the luxuries. One can live for twenty-five days without food. I have now done it several times, and my health has not been injured. In our MacDonald Crescent community she might not always get a full meal a day, and she would have to share . . . But if she chose to sleep with a man there, it would not be for money.

After all, G—’s attitude is entirely conventional. Most middle class girls are brought up to believe that a life without good meals, sheets on the bed, music and cosmetics, is intolerable. When they lack these things, because the society is shifting its gears and can’t give them work and won’t give them money prostitution can be a real and forceful temptation. A money-centred society will inevitably include a hidden phalanx of prostitutes. But the money-bought women make good revolutionaries, because from the bottom of their souls they loathe the society that ignores and misuses and destroys page 389 their capacity for sexual love.

G—’s saying, ‘I’ll hate it,’ gives me a certain bitter hope. Her embrace was wholehearted and full of a person-to-person love. She knows that only the group she despises would want to buy her. Her friends would never do such a thing. They would not be her friends if they did.

G— will come back to us. But her eyes will look like black stones for a while, and her adolescent body will look as if it is made out of some [corrosive] substance. People treated as objects begin to resemble objects.

I don’t blame the sailors. They live in the same half-world as G—. They may even be deluded enough to think one can buy her.

To meet G— in these circumstances is like a knife thrust through me. I carry the pain till I sleep at night.

As long as our society is unconcerned to see its children destitute, it will be unconcerned to see them become prostitutes. You will understand why I desire a revolution. A spiritual revolution, not necessarily an overtly political one. Our towns are often hells. I want to break down the moods of these many hells. The Pentecostals won’t do it. They lack sufficient openness and social [analysis?]. Their Jesus is simply a personal [spring?].

My Jesus is G—, because she is a person. It is something that she knows I love her.

‘I have met prostitutes, male and female, much younger than G—. Some of them began at thirteen. May God curse the society that fosters their self-injury, and preserve each soul involved in that society.

G— does not need reformation. What she needs is to strip off her conventional conditioning and become a good revolutionary. But for that to happen there have to be places she can come to and people she can meet. The love of this old man will never be enough on its own. He is an exhausted sack of guts and he could die tomorrow. There have to be groups dedicated to the art and success of being well. There have to be communities.

The pain of meeting G— is still with me. But her expression of love towards me balances the pain. Thank God for the pain. It helps me to keep moving in the great social desert . . . when otherwise I would fall asleep. Thank God for the love. It keeps me human.

*

If G— desired it, she could accompany one of the sailors to the film called ‘Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’. In that gustatory old paranoid factory, aged benign workers like animated plaster gnomes produce chocolate by the ton and sail in boats down chocolate rivers. Remembering Pope Paul’s words, that industrialism is not itself to blame for our values of injustice but rather the ‘woeful system’ that accompanies it, I find the film a thousand times more obscene than my view of a woman being . . . with a donkey. page 390 What will a girl without a job, about to sell herself for ten bucks, make of this rigmarole? Probably she will look at it quite carefully. She will not connect her own situation with the marked dignity of the actors performing their obscene dance to get dollars, who are being . . . to tie bows and ribbons around the very machine that is killing them.

I have worked in these hell holes for years. In them servility [invades?] the soul of the slaveowner and the slave alike. I tell the young ones – ‘If you get a job, you owe the boss the normal amount of work people are doing in that job. You also owe politeness, unless the boss begins to swear at you or ride you. And you owe obedience, within the precise limits of the job itself. But if he wants you to cut your hair or beard off, tell him publicly that you’ll do that the minute he shaves the hair around his private parts. You see, there has to be a bargain.’

QUOTE – ‘Ballad of the Stonegut Sugar Works’.

*

It was a relief getting that off my chest, brothers. Indeed it gave me a ferocious joy to speak up for the slaves. However much he is paid, a man is a slave who has to shake like an old moll when the boss goes past.

There are two kinds of payment for any work done. The first kind is financial. It comes from man. The second kind is spiritual. It is the joy given by God to . . . the worker. The practice of servility takes away that joy. The joy doesn’t go to the boss. No, he has robbed a man of something that is of no benefit to him at all. It goes back to God, and turns into the judgment reserved for those who defraud the labourer of his hire.

Let us be merciful. By calling a man to be a slave-owner, nobody is calling him to damn himself.

[‘Ballad of the Third Boobhead’, CP 525]

1971 (665)