Extract 5 from Draft of Autumn Testament

1

I sit down with a new red check coverlet on the table. It is luxury perhaps. But the mugs are still [spread] around. Don sits at the fire with his pipe. He says – ‘I’ll just tack that skin up and bury the guts. I should have done it long ago. But I’m getting dozier and dozier.’ He is talking to Kat. Today he shot a goat, and he and I ate its testicles, along with other organs. Tomorrow we will eat the carcass.

Siân and Kat and Francie, the three girls develop their own pattern. Siân prefers a good deal of solitude. Francie is thrown up and down by her feelings, like a boat in a rough sea. You will recognise the Jerusalem style of normality, the unfolding of personalities, even in this beginning of a sketch.

I have come back with permission from the house owners and the pa people, to be here with my family. Family means extended family in Maori terms, but it is still a limited structure. Indeed I am glad it is so. Already the peace is strong. I should thank those who wanted the community to be dissolved, three months ago, even if their reasons came from the bullshit they believed in the newspapers, and the noises of hearsay.

You are the man who helps me to focus my thinking. Why I am not sure – friendship would not be the only reason, one has friends to whom one cannot speak much – perhaps I feel that you are already attuned to the changes of the times, you suffer them as I do, you obey the God who is always being born, and I have a wish to comfort you in your own difficulties, earned by obedience. It seems unfair that I should have peace in my heart, because I am allowed to be in Jerusalem, while you have to struggle with the chimeras of the towns, I think I will write chiefly about those terrible chimeras.

No doubt these letters will one day be published, like the Jerusalem Sonnets I also wrote to you. Frankly it is not for kudos. I see it rather as the attempt to answer a need for documents of the slow-burning social and spiritual revolution, subconscious, sub-Christian, sub-Marxist, that is turning both the young and the old in and out of society. I remember G— who hanged himself in his people’s garden. When J— came to me the day afterwards I think I was able to help her to see his death as part of the Lord’s agony. We did the Stations of the Cross together. If people can think straight, perhaps they will not need to kill themselves or at least, their suffering will change its character.

We Christians lack an adequate social philosophy. What we do have is too tired, too gradualist, too uselessly pious, when it should be [protective?] and militant. There was that other lad who hanged himself in his borstal cell. I know these are the spurs, like a thousand similar happenings, that drive you on and drive me on. We can’t be smooth about it.

page 419

In a book by Règis Debray (he is doing thirty years in a Bolivian jail for writing it) I find this passage –

The jungle of the city is not so brutal . . . Life is for all – unequally given, but given nevertheless. It exists in the shops, in the form of finished products – butcher’s meat; baked bread . . . the possibility of sleeping under a roof, sheltered from the rain, without the need to stand guard; electricity lit streets; medicines at the pharmacy or hospital. It is said that we are immersed in the social, and prolonged immersion debilitates. Nothing like getting out to realise to what extent those lukewarm insulations make one infertile and bourgeois. In the first stages of life in the mountains, in the sector of the so-called virgin forest, life is simply a daily battle in its smallest detail; especially is it a battle within the guerillero himself to overcome his old habits, to erase the marks left on his body by the incubation – his weakness. In the early months the enemy to be conquered is himself, and he does not always emerge victorious from this battle . . .

I know this necessary ordeal of deprivation: the [ordeal] of the revolutionary. My thoughts in the town are Marxist, but up here they are Gandhijian. He is talking about a remarkable metanoia . . . It is familiar to both of us, Colin. To me, most of all in this first month when I went up the Island without a cent in my pocket. To you, in the loss of familiar securities at the university when you shifted into the gap, before the borstal job came up. Now there is no borstal job. I take it that you are back in the gap. Our strength comes from accepting the gap. The piercing sense of being out of joint comes chiefly from the suffering of our families, who may not accept what we have to accept. I think it is identical to the suffering of the revolutionary.

My foot seems to be rotting. The small lumps began when I was walking the streets of Wellington in hot weather. The asphalt roasted my feet and one of them became infected. Over several weeks it developed large lumps filled with lymphatic fluid. These lumps, like the smaller ones, itched abominably and left me . . The doctors prescribed ointment but did not have a cure. Now I sprinkle salt on the sores in the instep, and I think it has begun to dry up. As you know, it is necessary for me to go barefooted. This sore foot is the kind of thing Debray is talking about, incomprehensible to the bourgeoisie, because . . . they come to regard comfort as their normal right.

The Marxists have a way of coping with graft, prostitution and destitution, the great social ulcers of the poor victims. . . . they do remove despair as well, but at a cost of forced technological development and desacralisation; or, more recently, they create a cult of hominist technology. From a transcendental point of view it is inadequate. But to accept the winning way of the [grafter?], and acquiesce in the jailing of the destitute, and talk about God to the prostitute, is the Christian [method] that has been stinking in the nostrils of the poor for too many generations.

page 420

The Marxist appeal is not isolated, even in this century. What has made it seem irrelevant is chiefly that our local Marxists have stressed material hardships which are not . . . intolerable among us, and lacked the subtlety to develop a means of identifying and coping with emotional and spiritual hardships. Yet the same kind of hardships may have come from an economic pattern of unjust self-interest which the Marxists desire to annihilate.

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

But of course it will never be Lenin; not in practice. The masters of our affluent society are too cunning and too . . . . The men who are so demoralised by loneliness will stick to their wine bottles because it seems the safest thing.

I have been walking for three months in the city that drives old men to drink in a vacuum and young ones to hang themselves. If I had been longer there, I might have succumbed to despair myself. I have sat in . . . rooms and seen the well-brought-up children of the owner wander in, looking for aid, smack or speed. No doubt the adopted children of Mao Tse Tung are not like this. I fell asleep in great tiredness and had a dream. And in that dream I dreamt the city had a conscience and cared bitterly whether its children lived or died, whether they stayed sane or not, whether they had hope of meaning on earth or fell into despair. And I woke up and found the city had a conscience, but a formless one, because neither home nor school nor Church nor State had given the people a coherent social philosophy to indicate what was wrong and what could be done about it. Therefore the people themselves despised and hated anybody who tried to shift them away from their TV screens where enquiry followed enquiry with no hint of a solution. Then I left the city. . . .

[Draft of ‘Autumn Testament 3’, CP 542]

The basic problem of community life is one of mental health. Nearly all the people who came to Jerusalem, and stayed for any length of time, were aware that their conditioning in the majority culture robbed them both of genuine autonomy of choice and also of a loving relation to other people. They had been acting out imposed roles that bore little relation to their inner need to grow into maturity in the giving and receiving of love and knowledge. They had been what others expected them to be. Here they were free to be who they actually were.

I can recognise this polarity in my own life. Yesterday I went to Mass. Before the Mass began, I went on my own into the church, partly to pray, partly to avoid contact with Father D—, the priest who took the view that I was running a brothel at Jerusalem. A clash with him would have been painful and fruitless. His expectations are of a kind I find myself wholly page 421 unable to fulfil. The road I think he wants me to walk on would lead precisely to the kind of mannered and neo-Jansenistic Catholicism that turns God into an executioner and the Church into a jail that promotes spiritual infantilism. Furthermore, that road is at loggerheads with the deepest principles of the Maori culture. I fear Father D— because I fear to present him with a false self, that of a pious and mystical ‘reformer’, or else clash with him. And I don’t want to hurt Father D— as a man, or expose myself to the brutalities of a Puritan inspector of my life, or indeed show lack of respect for his position as a priest.

But Father D— comes into the church in a frank and friendly manner. This touched me deeply. He asked me to take the Second Reading, one about the removal of Jacob and the tribes. After Mass, I approached him in the sacristy, and said, ‘Father, when the community was abolished, I had very mixed feelings. Now I accept it as the will of God.’

‘You are always welcome,’ he replied.

There are priests with whom I can be the man I actually am. They know perfectly well from their own experience the complications of a life connected with radical group developments. One becomes the captain, as it were, of an old unseaworthy fishing boat, not the third mate employed to supervise meals and bedding in a floating hotel. The captain of such a boat said once, ‘The only virgins on board this ship are myself and my dog.’ Yet the fish came into his net.

The road to one’s own normality can be terrifying. One undergoes the tensions that Debray describes in his book about guerrilla activity in Latin America: the privations and terrors of a radical ascesis. Debray is now serving thirty years in a Bolivian jail for writing the book.

I recall the dream I had when the community was still living in the nun’s cottage. It seemed that I was trying to keep the door of the cottage closed against an irresistible force, a black turbulent mist and fog that pushed it open against the full weight of my body. A cat with half its head shot away was riding the storm like a demon. If Father D— has such dreams, in which the community features as the Devil’s playground, I can understand his negative view of us. He can retreat to the world of the missal and convert instruction classes, where a lighted candle will drive away the psychological demons, Indeed I myself burn candles before the big crucifix Father Theodore gave us whenever irrational fears grow strong among us.

I would like to walk hand in hand with Father D— but I can’t do it. The cost of manufacturing a fictitious self is to lack the power to reveal one’s real self to others, and encounter the real selves when communal occasions demand it. I know the community was never a brothel. But I can’t prove it to Father D—, who did not put his foot inside our door. His opinion would be formed partly by the newspapers, those fountains of misinformation and partly by the subjective fears I too endure, though we go by different roads.

page 422

Father D— and I are brothers, the children of our paranoid father, Adam, who saw demons in every grass-root after the Fall, and began to fear his failures . . .

*

A dry place to lie down, some kai to eat, some simple tasks to do – these are the ingredients of peace. The soul begins to find space to be itself. Now that I am up here at Jerusalem, I notice the nervous tone of the tourists who visit us.

One came out of the church and pointed over at the big hall at one end of the pa, built out of shining corrugated iron. ‘That’s where Baxter’s community lived,’ he said authoritatively.

‘Oh, was that where?’ said another one.

The first man looked at the five or six houses and the two meeting houses that are the visible [signs] of the existence of the Jerusalem pa. ‘They couldn’t do much harm in this place,’ he said.

They were restless people. They knew we lived where we didn’t live, and they knew we had done harm we hadn’t done. Beyond that knowledge, I doubt if they were much aware of the place. I hope that they went into the church to pray, not just to look at it.

I don’t think they wanted to be poor. If you don’t want to be poor, it’s useless coming to Jerusalem. Nga pukapuka o Karaiti, the trees are there, the books of Christ, with their leaves spread open. The river water could lead you deeper and deeper into the peace of God. I think even our haywire community knew this.

‘I’m high already. I don’t need drugs here,’ they would say.

Or else – ‘I’m going to be celibate. Something new is happening inside me.’

But they have the advantages of poverty. The ones who learnt most, the ones whose faces began to shine like lamps, were the ones who objected most to keep anything from themselves.

I realise that all this is a great scandal. If people don’t want what the world has to offer, what will there be to make the wheels keep turning faster and faster? The wheels might stop. The world of noise and suspicion and boredom might begin to die. I can promise, though, that this won’t happen until the wheels themselves fly apart. . . .

Because of the nature of the majority culture it is extremely difficult for the boobheads to keep out of jail or mentally disturbed people to get well. A loud laugh, periods of depression, a tendency to swear, the incapacity to hold a job, bizarre clothes, bisexuality, even long hair or old clothes – and social or psychological quirks or maladies that differ from a rigid norm are enough to earn ostracism. Most regular drug-users are trying to ‘normalise’ themselves page 423 by the use of a chemist. Most recidivists could stay out of jail in a community that was tolerant of them as persons.

The tyranny of the norm means a virtual crucifixion of the oddball. When N— came to us, out of the mental hospital, where she had slashed her wrists regularly and been shoved into solitary confinement, nga mokai used to sit beside her and comb her hair. ‘It’s good to be with Mumma,’ they would say. She got well. Her private norm was a robust, swearing, vigorous one, a thousand miles from respectability.

*

G—’s mother has sent her a tract with Helpful Thoughts for every day of the month. She passes it on to me as part of a permanent charade in which she is my severe theological instructor, a mother trying to bring up her imbecile son. This morning is the twenty-fourth. I open it at the appropriate text – Psalm 1: 3. ‘His leaf also shall not wither.’

The commentator has added – ‘The hardy evergreen not only lives, but maintains its leaf, and all the more conspicuously because of the naked branches around. The life within is too strong to fear the shortest day, the cold blast, or the falling snow. So with the man of God, where life is maintained by communion; adversity only brings out the strength and reality of the life within.’

I play a Balancing Game with G—. I tell her that the ‘leaf’ is a phallic emblem, and that the text and commentary are a message from God to me to the effect that my sexual prowess will remain undiminished till the age of eighty. She falls into paroxysms of laughter and tells me I am a dirty old bastard.

Balancing Games are essential with the schizoid members of the ‘family’. G— went into the bin after a childhood and adolescence spent in the shadow of a hell-fire . . . fundamentalist religion.

‘I was such an innocent child when I came here,’ she says to L—, in a mock-childish voice. ‘Then I fell under evil influences.’ A Balancing Game always contains two parts: a limited truth and a reaction against that limit. The conditional self and the moralistic self play a game together, each accepting the other in a serious charade. In the language of the game, ‘bastard’ means ‘my friend’, ‘evil’ means ‘good’, ‘innocent child’ means ‘a woman pretending out of fear to be a child’.

If I did not use the tract, half the equation might be missing. If I did not explode the tract, G— would still be under the old shadow. One has to undo the terrors that the mind itself proposes. These games are necessary for growth.

1972 (677)