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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Things and Idols

Things and Idols

Cam and her de facto husband Ricky are staying with us at Jerusalem. Ricky sits on the verandah, wearing a long white flowered robe, and plays the guitar. He also does other things. Today he is helping Steve and Gregg put up some wire netting round the magnificent fowl run we have constructed for the two hens and the rooster who have just arrived from Wanganui in a small brown box.

page 432

I love Ricky for his constant good humour, his great honesty, his phallic jokes, his love for Cam, and his awareness of substance that makes him for the moment the guts of the group. His personality is solar, like that of my friend Michael Illingworth the painter.

I love Cam for her petite catlike beauty, her generosity, and the warmth of her smile. She was one of the bright stars of the original Jerusalem community. But Cam and Ricky will have to shift on. Yesterday I was gorging myself on ripe blackberries, close to the garden, kneedeep in brambles, and wearing Steve’s shoes to protect my feet from the spikes under the grass. I looked up and saw a remarkable sight. Cam was digging the garden. She had no clothes on. She was naked to the hot sun and the hot wind, frowning a little with concentration as she shoved the spade into the loose ground.

I have rarely seen anything more beautiful. She resembled our young mother Eve digging the ground in the Garden of Eden before the Fall of Man, before the day of the serpent. A sense of awe took charge of me, and my first impulse was to go away and leave her to it. Instead I went up to her and said, ‘Cam, you’re a very beautiful sight, one of the finest works of God I’ve seen in a long while. Personally I’m not complaining if you go round without your clothes on. But if the pa people came over the hill, there would be trouble.’

‘Would there really, Hemi?’ She felt that my statement was a kind of intrusion. It worried her.

‘Definitely there would.’

So the garden remained undug. And Cam put on her clothes and sat inside with her husband Ricky. The episode worried me too, as if I had gratuitously trodden on some beautiful dragon-fly, which could harm nobody. But there were reasons for it.

The pa people had been conditioned for ninety years by the pakeha society and the Church I belong to, to regard nakedness as immoral. Pakeha visitors would immediately see possible erotic connotations. Imagine what a newspaper reporter would make of it –

As I came over the hill I saw a girl standing stark naked in the garden. Then I knew I was in the hippie world of flowers and drugs and free love and mantras. Naturally I was astonished. I met Jim Baxter, with his long scruffy beard and old clothes and bare feet. I mentioned what I had seen. ‘Aren’t you trying to escape from reality?’ I said.

‘If she wants to go naked that’s her business,’ he replied.

I began to see why any ordinary mother would be distressed at the thought of her daughter coming to Jerusalem. Inside the house there were beds still unmade at ten o’clock in the morning, and a Maori girl in an old pink dressing gown and slippers was frying some concoction on the stove. I pushed open the door of one of the rooms. A young couple were lying page 433 in bed with their arms round one another. There were cigarette butts and some dirty underclothes on the floor beside the bed . . .

This is the kind of garbage that keeps reporters in their jobs and makes money hand over fist for newspapers like Truth. It is extremely difficult to show that it is garbage – that de facto couples have a right to their privacy – that unmade beds or cigarette butts don’t exactly mean the death of God – that drugs are much easier to obtain in a suburban chemist’s shop than forty miles up a river – especially, that a naked girl is no more than a naked girl.

Figleaves are essential. If we go without them, we will have to go without a house. The house-owners, Mrs Winterburn and her sisters, to whom we owe a great debt for their hospitality and protection, are sensitive people. They are especially sensitive because they are Maori. For a hundred years the Churches have been teaching Maori people to be ashamed of being Maori, and members of the pakeha culture have been telling them that they are dirty, lazy and immoral. Rumours and the garbage in the Press jab directly at this old wound. They have no defence when people say to them – ‘What the hell are you doing, giving your house to those filthy hippies?’

The house owners are Catholics, and the priest may tell them that I am running a brothel up here. The local pakeha farmers want to see us go. These things pulled down the original community, and now I have come back with one or two of an adoptive ‘family’, the same forces will operate to get rid of us again.

Cam and Ricky will have to go. Their style is too open and free for our circumstances.

Four young people call on us from Wanganui. Zayma comes down to the presbytery, where I am writing, to tell they have come here in a converted car. ‘I feel horrible telling you,’ she says. ‘I feel like an informer.’

I know that theft goes hand in hand with the obsession with private property so characteristic of the majority culture. Here we don’t steal because we share our goods in common. Theft is a kind of left-handed capitalism. I tell the young ones to shift on, not mentioning the car. Again there could be a headline in the newspapers –

‘Hippies Convert Car. Police Investigations at Jerusalem. Local inhabitant says, “We don’t want them here. We’re honest people . . .”’.

Mrs Winterburn does ring us up and tells us we will have to get out by the weekend. I calm her down and tell her that I am here only with my ‘family’, that the house is in good order, that I ask visitors to shift on. She agrees to my limit of ten people.

What is the problem? I don’t think our way of life is the real problem. Our one real problem last year was overcrowding, but that ceases if there are only ten of us and the occasional visitor. The problem is that the majority culture has its graven images – work, cleanliness, chastity, tidy clothes, polite speech, and sometimes church-going. Some of them carry a moral connotation. Some page 434 do not. But if we go away from these idols, then we belong to the Devil’s party, and no good can be expected of us.

I know the boobheads – the recidivists, the ones who are in and out of jail like a yo-yo, for having no work, for getting drunk, for swearing, for not paying fines, for offences against property, sometimes simply for existing. The offences for which they appear in Court cover only a fraction of their life and personality. Often they are generous, loyal, capable of being good friends, once you get past the scar tissue that has grown up on account of their many conflicts with a punitive and basically unintelligent authority.

Marie, at fifteen, does a month in solitary confinement, without books or bedding, for calling a female member of the staff of a girls’ home – ‘a fucking old bitch’. The first week, she says, made her meditate and decide to play it quietly. The last three weeks made her increasingly bitter and determined to fight the authorities to the bitter end.

Trish, one of our four new visitors, looks at the cottage below the big house, and says to me wistfully – ‘It looks good there.’ But she will definitely have to go – back to the town, and back to jail – for car conversion, or else for not holding a job. There is nowhere else for her to go. She talks of possible refuges as one might talk of the mountains of the moon.

The boat is more than full with ten on board. Our neighbours may not even tolerate that number. If it will sink with more than ten, what about the thousands who are swimming and drowning? I puzzle my head with these matters. Am I the only man in the country who cares whether these vivid, passionate young ones live or die? There is only one other semi-stable communal house I know of; it is run by a priest and some of the laity in Wellington. It also can hold ten people.

I want to see a hundred boats. I want to see the drowning taken on board. Perhaps I want too much. God is present in the jails, in the girls’ homes, in the mental hospitals, in the hideously demoralising jobs many of them are pushed into, in the death by speed or smack, or on the back of a swerving motor bike. He is present wherever mercy is present, wherever the poor continue to love one another. Mercy is his manifestation. The only reason he is not in Hell is because there is no mercy there. I will row my own boat and pray to God to look after the drowning. But it bruises my heart to have to give them a limited embrace and send them on their way.

To me it sees right to bow the head to our Maori benefactors. If they insisted we should leave tomorrow, I would go with no complaint. My sense of obligation to the local pakeha farmers is much less. I have from time to time had a cup of tea in their houses. But I doubt if they ever regarded the community as something worth preserving. Many of the people in my Church would probably share their opinion. But the Maori people, having suffered poverty and humiliation themselves, are commonly merciful to the wounds of the poor, whether the poverty is material or psychological.

page 435

I know that we desecrated one idol – the dollar note – when, over two years, visitors to the community killed two sheep for eating. If the farmers had approached me, I would have paid the price of the sheep twice over. But I remember that in Tasmania the aboriginals, following their ancestral hunting pattern, killed some of the cattle of the white settlers. The settlers formed a cordon across the country and killed off all the aboriginals. Thus today there are no native Tasmanians. It shows that a farmer’s stock can be very dear to him, and this is a stock-breeding country. Money, status, one’s image of one’s own identity, may be carried on the wool of a sheep’s back. Perhaps we were lucky to get off with a simple eviction.

Respectability would be the concern of my Church. I remember how, when a certain priest of the old school was hauling me over the coals, as an immoralist and a possible follower of Satan, I said to him – ‘Father, is it my sins you are referring to?’ I thought he might be motivated by a charitable concern for the state of my soul, which would always make good sense to me, since I have to live with myself.

‘No,’ he said, ‘your sins are between you and Almighty God. It’s the image you present that troubles me, both of yourself and of the Church.’ Then I knew he was referring to the great and strongly rooted idol of respectability. It made it a little less painful for me to have to differ with him.

The aim of the original Jerusalem community was to perform works of mercy – to share material goods and console the lonely. In part it succeeded. No doubt in part it failed. What then is the aim of the ‘family’ to which I now belong? If we can’t take the drowning on board, what good is our boat?

Well – we might set an example, as any family can, by the peacefulness of our life, our lack of quarrelling, the way we share things, the way we love one another. We are certainly in a better position than the original community to absorb the principles of Maoritanga. We can on occasion feed a guest and put him up for the night. I suppose that our direction is ultimately a religious one.

The majority culture is founded on the dominance of that part of the human soul which can be called the animus – the part of myself that says, ‘I am; I have; I want’ – in Martin Buber’s terms, that part of the ‘I’ which regards everything else as ‘It’, living in a universe comprised of a series of objects grasped and possessed by a process of conceptualisation. In that universe, a people are what we label them; and God, in the deepest sense, is permanently unknown, because the active intellect can grasp ideas about God but cannot grasp God. God is not a possession. That is why a world dominated by the animus (as the world of modern education in particular tends to be) drifts inevitably towards atheism.

Beyond the animus there are other parts of the soul – anima and spiritus. To enter these areas is a contemplative journey. I would describe the anima as the yin principle, the hidden self, passive and feminine in quality, which grasps reality through sensation and intuition:

page 436

Now in the darkness of the moon
The wind blows this way from the graveyard,

And my heart is failing – so long a journey
I have to undertake, setting aside

The lips and hands of women
That guarded and imprisoned me

Since the day that I was born. It may be, my friend,
After the ninth or the twenty-seventh day

The wind that carries dust will bring the smell
Of flowers growing. To be no longer man

Is what I fear, bending my head
In the darkness of this cave. The face I see

Is not the face of love but the face of night.
I am drinking the waters of the underworld. (Uncollected)

The first experience when one goes beyond the animus – negatively, by drugs, as many try to, or more positively, by fasting or other types of ordeal – it is the experience of the preternatural – not experience of God, who alone is supernatural, but experience of elements in nature and elements in one’s own soul – perhaps even an obscure experience of angels, demons, and the spirits of the living and the dead.

Nothing is certain in this area. In fact certainty will lead to superstition. The fears of childhood are revived. I remember how, in my first six months at Jerusalem, when I lived there as a hermit, I used to go step by step up a certain dusty dark road – moving my feet very slowly as if they were in deep sand – towards an old broken house smothered in bramble which my anima told me was haunted – possibly by the anima itself, since that part of one’s soul is often experienced as a destructive power.

I would force myself to go in through the brambles, alone, at midnight, right into the dark door of the house – my heart pounding, sweat running off my body. To retreat to the area of the animus – to cast aside the experience of fear as being irrational – this would have been useless to me, because to transcend my own culture, to make a journey on the Maori side of the fence, I had to go beyond rational concepts, into the preternatural area.

The ordeal was necessary to diminish my fears. What good would I be as a father to a fearful tribe – most of them aged seventeen to twenty-five – if I could not myself go against the fears that tended to swallow them up. page 437 Those early ordeals – of which there were many – did pay off. Today I can sit calmly while the ‘family’ discuss ghosts, demons and astral travel – all the unidentifiable experiences of the night life of the soul – and with a calm mind escort them, shuddering, to the outdoor lavatory where two large spiders sit on the back wall.

I have had to get to know the preternatural area of my own soul – to be, if you like, more familiar with the dead than the living – in Jerusalem which is a village of graveyards. Perhaps this is to be a good tohunga. One has to cease – at least, in measure – to fear death or the dead or the dark abyss of one’s own soul. Curiously, one’s sensual temptations then tend to diminish. Perhaps they always included a desire to huddle in the warmth of one’s mother’s arms as the cold night came on.

The Maori culture, so spiritually vigorous, is loaded with preternatural elements – dream, omen, Kehua, taniwha. The only times I have ever thought I would actually die of fear were when I exposed myself to the full blast of the Maori unconscious.

I remember one girl who came to Jerusalem out of the mental hospital. The doctors had labelled her schizophrenic and put a number of electric shocks through her head. She arrived believing in no one and nothing. The Maori culture frightened her. To counteract this fear she put herself through the ordeal of sleeping in the open air, away from the rest of us, on a mattress in a grove of trees. There she lay awake, shivering under the stars, while the opossums coughed around her – and then fell asleep and had a violent fear dream. A crowd of the old Maori people surrounded her, the spirits of the dead – so it seemed to her – from the Jerusalem area. They wanted to drive her away. She offered herself as a sacrifice, for the faults of her people – the land-grabbing, the humiliation of Maori by pakeha, the partial genocide, the continuing forced assimilation. She said – ‘Kill me, if you like. Do what you like with me.’

Then the dream changed. The spirits conferred again and decided to adopt and protect her. She woke up in a cheerful frame of mind, and from that time forward was able to go into the Maori pa without shrinking.

Later on, she wrote a poem. She called it ‘Hymn to the Father’. This is how it went.

Blessed are you, my father, friend above friends and light which shines
when the darkness is greatest.

Blessed are you, my father, splendour to the eyes of your daughter, sprung
from the womb of our holy dove in the darkness beyond time, who will
climb your heights to sit on your mountainous shoulders and drowse in
the peace of your sacred brow for ever.

page 438

Blessed are you, my father, because when I fell from you – and what a long
way – you made it possible for me to crawl back crying to your warmth,
calling, and draw comfort from your love more precious than jewels in
the eyes of gazelles.

Blessed are you, father, because the grass breathes in late day, the trees sing
in the evening, and plants that have waited in mid-fierce-heat lift their
leaves to the water of sunset.

Blessed are you, father, for the love with which I love you is the love you
have given me passed through my bones like light through glass with the
blood-thunder at heart and wrist adding the faith of the flesh and the
friendship of all feeling.

Blessed are you, father of all fathers, friend of friends, for the dove’s peace
brooding on the heartbeat of every being.

Blessed are you, father, for the tears that heal, the love that makes love,
and for peace on earth which is a living dream of you.

Blessed, blessed are you, my father! Bless the souls that long for you, the
bodies that are blunted on the sharp edge of your light, and the hearts that
hear from far away the beat of one heart. Bless on – Bless in your mercy
mankind.

The girl is no longer schizophrenic, whatever that may mean. She is a very joyful, intelligent, free person, individual, humorous, abundant in practical thoughts and works of love. I doubt if the mental hospital could do more than give her the eye of the needle to go through.

Love implies freedom. I doubt if the mental hospital would have given her the inward freedom to come to terms, by love, with the terrors of the anima, and the absolute demand of the Spirit. Perhaps I am wrong to speak ill of hospitals. But hospitals are too like jails. An unrelieved diet of inertia or anguish are not good for the soul. They are like rough meat on a tender stomach.

The journey first into anima, then into spiritus – for spiritus is the height of the soul where that hymn was made – had to occur through the medium of an actual, loving, living adult ‘family’ – and moreover one that was open to some of the darker side of Maoritanga. Then her sickness reversed itself and became health.

Of course God did it – Te Atua, the Spirit above all spirits – but a context of unrejecting friendship was necessary. Perhaps that is why I think it right to remain a member of a ‘family’ at Jerusalem.

page 439

If we have to go, because we offend the idols of the majority culture – money, respectability, education – then I suppose we will have to go. I try to avoid offending more than I can help. I realise idols are very dear to those who possess them

Unfortunately, in the towns, where the effect of these idols is omnipresent, I find my soul gets exhausted, I lose my joy, I find it intensely difficult to meditate. I realise businessmen have a right to sell their soap. But I feel forced, as it were, to meditate on soap – instead of, say, the Incarnation – if the TV is on in a friend’s house. I realise many of my fellow citizens honestly think that the best place for the urban poor to be is in a prison cell – yet when I go in the mornings to the Magistrate’s Court to see my friends being sentenced for being out of work bitterness tends to cloud my soul. I realise that drugs are a necessary part of our culture, to relieve the pains of urbanisation, which Pope Paul describes in one letterby a very strong term – ‘intolerable’. Yet when I see people blind drunk or stoned on drugs, it fills me with melancholy, because I want to communicate with them.

These are weaknesses of mine. Stronger men may be able to remain sane, robust, even joyful, in our towns, and occupy themselves with the works of mercy which so desperately need to be done.

Yet my retreat is not uncharitable. I recognise, for example, that the girl who lost her schizophrenia at Jerusalem would in time become mad again, like a bird in a foul, narrow, dark, ill-smelling coop, if she had to work for long in an office or a factory. She would be too much aware of the sufferings of her neighbours. I have seen her weep for a day when a friend was beaten up in the cells for being an out-of-work Islander. I shrug things off, myself. Suffering is part of life. But where would she go, in our lamentable culture, except, eventually, back to the bin. Better she should write poems to the Father of life at Jerusalem, and cook meals, and laugh with joy and swear like a trooper.

Spiritus is, I think, the point of healing. There have to be already a few grains of peace in the soul before it can happen. Spiritus unites anima and animus. To reach that mountain top, that tabernacle in the soul where the unimaginable Father, out of mercy, takes the poor and hopeless in his arms, is the goal of meditation. My friend who wrote the hymn lives always, I think, on that level. I have to stand a long way off. Perhaps one day I too will be there.

1972? (680)