Autumn Testament

*

Under the cold high stars here at Jerusalem it is not easy to recall the mood of rage and rock-bottom frustration that led me, in the town, to think for several months that I was becoming a Marxist. It is difficult to go back in spirit to that claustrophobic labyrinth. Yet all experience asks to be understood.

B— made a good comment this morning, referring to my stay at Macdonald Crescent. ‘It must have been a very barren time for you, Hemi,’ he said. ‘But those experiences often turn out to be the most fruitful in the long run.’

He could be right.

Depersonalisation, centralisation, desacralisation: the three chief scourges of the urban culture. One has to look squarely at the Medusa’s head that turns so many into stone before one can even begin to smile again. But one has to do it without anger. Otherwise the light of the Holy Spirit is excluded from one’s meditation and darkness conquers the soul.

*

When I was in Wellington, F— rang me up. His fifteen-year-old daughter had vanished from home. He thought I might know where she was. I didn’t know. He had travelled up from the South Island to look for her. She might have been in any one of a thousand flats.

‘I don’t intend to lock her in the cellar,’ he explained. ‘It’s just that I want her to keep contact with us.’

He is an idealistic man and a good father. But the families can’t fill the gap left by the broken communities. For years now, the headless growth of commerce and technology has been smashing down all the fences. The bill has to be paid, in death, crime, insanity, social dislocation. And men like F— are terrified of the anarchic society they have unintentionally helped to make.

I gave him a couple of addresses and suggested he should pray to God. The town flats, the borstal, the cabin of a coastal boat, even the morgue: she could be anywhere.

Anarchism, not anarchy, that is what I want. Then I could say to F—, ‘Oh yes, your daughter is in the Y— Street community. She’s not doing too page 472 badly. Go and see her there and have a yarn with her.’

*

Here at Jerusalem the blowflies pour into the kitchen and settle on the meat. When Keri had brought up a parcel of pork bones for us from the pa, the flies climbed under the paper and laid their clusters of eggs in every crevice. It was impossible to shut them out. We do not have the money to buy a fridge. I had to wash each piece of bone and meat separately under the tap before putting it in the pot. The majority of the reporters are very like the blowflies. They add their own deposit of irrelevant half-truths to whatever is happening, and they do this for money. Reporters helped to pull down the original community here. If they come again, I think I’ll say, ‘There’s nothing to report, brother. I’m here with my family. Do you want photographs of us adding milk to coffee? Do you want to come out to the lavatory and watch us shit?

*

In the town, at my wife’s place, the telephone rings continually. When I pick it up, I hear the voices of the drowning.

‘Hemi, they’ve picked L— up on an I. and D. charge . . .’.

‘I can’t believe in God . . .’.

‘Last night I cried and cried, and then I slashed my wrists . . .’.

‘I’ve got a habit on smack, and I want to get off it outside the hospital . . .’.

‘They won’t let me keep my baby . . .’.

‘I need bread, Hemi. The Social Security buggers won’t put me on the dole because I left the last job of my own accord. There’s no jobs going and the fuzz are on my back . . .’.

C— rings me up and tells me she is going mad again. I go out and visit her in her glass barn in the suburbs. She has what others have: a husband, three children and the telly.

‘I was all right at Jerusalem,’ she says. ‘But here there’s nobody. Nobody to see. Nobody to talk to.’

C— is a normal woman, I think. One day she will leave the glass barn and go to work, and move in the company of other people. She will not live at home. She will stay sane then. But from time to time she will dream that God is putting her in Hell for leaving her husband and children.

Be married and go mad; or be single and stay sane. The choice is Draconian. The problem is not lack of love. C— loves her husband and children. The problem is lack of community.

*

page 473

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?’ he asks me.

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

*

My friend Tom is picked up by the police on an Auckland street for the double crime of being out of work and being Maori. It is the second crime that scandalises most the Catholic pakeha sergeant who arrests him. Escorted into the police station, Tom sits down on a chair and looks at the wall chart.

The sergeant kicks the chair out from under him. ‘Don’t look at that!’ he shouts. ‘Don’t pretend you can read, you illiterate black shit! There should be a law to exterminate people like you.’

Tom feels very depressed. After he has spent a few days in Mount Eden on remand, he is released on bail. As we walk down the street together, he says to me, ‘Man, I’d like to get some speed!’

‘What the hell do you want speed for? It’ll kill you quicker than smack.’

In the town we need drugs as a shield.’

Tom is now in jail for two years on a drug charge. Who precisely is the criminal? Tom, for being out of work and for being Maori; the sergeant, for the misfortune of having been brought up in a traditional Catholic environment, with a wholly uneducated social conscience, apart from the usual steel-strong injunction not to masturbate and a racial prejudice as big as a house; myself, for worrying about both of them? Tama Hemahema used to tell me, ‘If a dog worries, they shoot it.’

What I fear is Fascism under a different name, or very likely under no name at all. By a layman’s definition, Fascism is atrocity accepted by all (except the victims) with the deepest equanimity. I think the seed of it is already with us.

*

I said to my wife Te Kare, ‘I can’t bring thirty people here. And you can’t shift into a community house.’

‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘But I can put up one or two who are sick. They need a place where they can rest.’

Where she is, the water begins to flow from the rock.

*

page 474

Two jet planes fly over like gigantic metal birds. They have their own beauty. I think I worship them. It would not matter what Party or Power they belonged to, if they scattered bombs down the length of this valley, I think one’s soul would secretly acquiesce. Such energy and such precise destruction would seem just, simply because it was happening. There is nothing uncertain in their movement overhead.

Then the pa children
Run out to stare at
The iron dove whose thunder
Crucifies the spirit.

No doubt the cost of the fuel for a day’s flight of one of those extraordinary machines could keep us in kai for a month. Is it necessary for them to fly? It is certainly necessary for us to eat.

I find myself able to withdraw that first temporary act of worship. Our century has made it plain that great machines are commonly controlled by uncharitable wills and limited minds. I remember what my father told me about his mother. When she saw the first aeroplane she had ever seen pass slowly overhead, she ran into her house, and cried out, ‘It’s the Devil in his chariot!’

Two World Wars later, one might begin to see her point. Machines have not made us kinder or wiser. Do the means of destruction have to be so skilled and so immense? Christ was killed painfully and efficiently (pain being one purpose of that efficiency) on an ordinary wooden Cross.

[In the separately published volume a group of 48 poems followed this prose text.]

Letter to Colin [Durning]

*

They are building a hinaki out of wire in the middle room tonight. I think it will be successful. It is about eight feet long – or looks so, from this end of the table – and the entrance funnel for the eels is promisingly small. Taraiwa told us last night that the funnel opening should face downstream, because the eels smell the bait and move upstream to get at it, but are not intelligent enough to do more than nose around the end of the hinaki that faces towards them, if it is the end that has a lid on it.

I get up from my sleeping bag to write this note. The family have gone to bed. It is after midnight. The tensions in my body (a legacy from alcoholism to which I am well used) will not allow me to sleep. It is a good time for writing.

page 475

My family are hard-working these days. They have built a large strong hen-run and coop for the two hens and rooster we have had sent up from Wanganui. They have painted it red. There seems to be some danger that the rooster may have taken monastic vows. So far he has shown no interest in his two wives, apart from some short union discussions about the superfluity of vegetable scraps and the absence of wheat. A pity. We could do with some fertilised eggs for them to hatch into chickens.

I have agreed with the house-owner, Mrs Winterburn, to keep the number of the family down to ten. She rang us up the other day, disturbed because she had heard rumours that I was reopening the original open-door community. I can’t blame her for feeling worried. She and her sisters have had to put up with endless unwelcome publicity and criticism, so prolonged that it looks at times like the work of te taipo. As you know well, Colin, by visiting us, nine-tenths of what the papers said about us was nonsense, and the other tenth came from the inevitable problems of overcrowding if you decide not to turn people away.

It is not possible for us to re-open the community. No doubt it served its purpose. I accept the present arrangement as the will of God. We owe a great debt to Mrs Winterburn and her sisters. I do not intend to lay another boulder on their backs.

This way it is more peaceful for us too. We are a cheerful family. It does hurt me at times to send visitors on their way. They go back so often to a labyrinth from which there is no apparent exit. But I am learning to leave such matters to Te Atua. Undoubtedly, when the open-door community was here, the house was often overcrowded, the sense of Maoritanga was frequently cloudy, and it was hard to get work done. Mahi was the little finger on our hand. Now it has begun to grow. Two of my family are carpenters, and the girls keep the house clean, mopping it out with water and disinfectant daily. In the family we have a good balance of Maori and pakeha members.

I have fallen away from the Franciscan spirit. The other morning I took a tin of fly-spray and sprayed the two gigantic spiders who had long been roosting at the back of our outdoor lavatory. They used to sit there at the door of their private tunnel, legs and jaws ready for action, among carefully constructed platforms and fly-traps of web, apparently in a state of connubial concord. The female showed no signs of eating the male. Perhaps they had been affected by our atmosphere of family peace.

Recently I had been training myself to love spiders. But I confess I took a savage joy in spraying these two remarkable works of God, till they dangled by their forelegs and dropped down our bottomless pit. There has been a spiritual backlash. My imagination tells me that one day God, tired of my barren spirit, will spray me with a great jet of Aerosol, and leave me to drop into Hell. But I have to remember that God is merciful to unmerciful creatures.

page 476

When I met you at Port Chalmers I would have liked to stay with you. After leaving the varsity job, and losing the borstal job, I knew you were travelling in a gap of uncertainty where no one can be fully at peace. Yet I felt peace in your company. It is often like that. Here too I have my own variety of suffering. There are wounds in my soul which God probably means to leave open. But those who come here always comment on the peace of the place, and indeed we are at peace. Peace and pain are often intimately connected.

My conscience accused me this morning, after breakfast, because for a few minutes I had it in mind to keep for myself the last packet of family cigarettes, which Steve had brought out from the cupboard in the pataka. I repented, Colin, but it was a severe breach of the spirit of poverty. I gave the packet to another member of the family, the least certain of himself, and told him to take one and put the packet on the table where everybody would be able to help themselves.

To kill a spider; to keep cigarettes for one’s own use; to worry about food bills; to lie awake and feel discouraged by the auto-erotic tensions of an ageing body – these are my sins, and very likely no priest in his right mind would take much notice of them. But they reveal, as usual, an unconscious egoism which only God can cure. I come here to give him the opportunity to cure it.

In myself what is not myself, the rind of lifelong egoism, is an obstacle to his mercy. His mercy is perfectly signified by the sun and the calm autumn trees loaded with fruit and the great cliff of treeferns that rises mound after mound behind this house. The maternal richness of nature is part of the redemptive equation which our measuring, grabbing mind can never grasp.

At Hiruharama we go beyond the conscious shell of knowledge, that part of the soul which says – ‘I want; I have; I am’ – into the darkness of the anima, the yin principle in the mind which may be compared to the night itself. It is necessary to make this journey. The anima is the area familiar to Maori thought, the place of fear, the passive night from which dreams come, where one encounters the spirits of nature and the spirits of the dead. At times the journey may be agonising. It may demand the last ounce of oneself, to go beyond oneself, to walk the waters of availability to all things and all persons. But there is always peace beyond the agony. We wait to be turned into entire creatures. At the centre of the darkness we wait for the light of the spiritus to shine, the light that the disciples saw on the Mountain of Transfiguration.

I go to Auckland soon for a day or two. May God bless you and keep you. Pray for us. Our boat is small. I would like to see other boats set floating. There are so many people drowning. The towns are becoming intolerable to me. I cannot stay in them long without beginning to ask for the help of Father Lenin. But perhaps God sees a value in the smoky passages of that burning page 477 house out of which his mercy delivers us. My greatest dread is that one day God may ask me to go back and live in comfort.

I embrace you.

*

Some of the local people are not entirely happy with my recently published Daybook. I say to them, ‘I’ve tried not to hang out anybody’s washing.’

‘The swear words you have in the book should not be there.’

‘If you’re making porridge,’ I reply, ‘you need some salt. A man can put in too much salt or too little. I didn’t think I’d put in too much.’

Not all of them are convinced. Perhaps I should say, ‘When you put a hinaki in the water, you don’t use fresh meat for a bait inside it. You wait till the meat smells a bit. Then you can catch many tuna.’

Or else – ‘If you eat the fresh karaka berries they will poison you. But if you boil them for a few hours, then you can eat them.’

In a sense I agree with the people. To write a book is always to do some harm. There are far too many books in the world. And any child, or person not used to different styles of writing, can pick up a book and be shocked or worried by it. Yet I do not think the harm done by an honest book will lead to the death of anyone’s soul. Honesty is like an axe. No doubt it hurts the wood to be turned into posts and strainers.

Politeness is a different thing from courtesy. Politeness may come from fear. Courtesy always comes from love. A courteous man may swear at his friend either to make a strong point or to put him at ease. Yet to stick the words down in a book is another matter, I know. Perhaps all the books I write are like letters to friends, and I would prefer those who don’t understand them to put them quietly down again.

I think Te Atua wanted me to write the book just as I wrote it. But Te Atua would know that some suffering would come from it. The suffering that comes to myself I should learn to welcome. The suffering that comes to others I should regret. Yet suffering seems to be a side effect of any action.

*

On the second Sunday of Lent Father Te Awhitu gives us a brief sermon about the Transfiguration. ‘I think it was like Heaven,’ he says. ‘They were up the mountain, nobody else there, with Our Lord and Moses and Elias. It was like in a family. Our Lord told them not to speak about it. You don’t talk about what happens in a family to everybody.’

He also says, ‘Peter wanted to make houses, for Our Lord and for Moses and for Elias.’ And – ‘They adored Him.’

This sermon sheds more light than many books. I had never understood page 478 Peter’s wish to make arbours out of leaves. It would come from a memory of the Jewish ceremony where the people made tents of leaves in the courtyards, and it would also be the natural thought of a poor man on a journey, to make a shelter for those whom he served and loved. To make huts in Heaven.

I speak myself, as Father Te Awhitu has asked me to, about prayer, but to less effect. Last week I compared Our Lord to the Wharepuni, which is the body of the ancestor sheltering the tribe with his arms and ribs.

Te Atua sent me a good instructor in Father Te Awhitu. His few words have the weight of wedges splitting timber. His soul speaks of God because it is at rest in God.

*

Te Huinga comes to me, and speaks of the inertness of spirit she finds burdensome in herself. She says, ‘I cannot believe, Hemi.’

I say, ‘Your soul is like the earth. It has a lot of strength. But your pains will be slow to shift and the joy slow to come. It is like a woman waiting nine months for a child to be born.

‘God will give each of us a white stone at the end of the world. The secret name of each of us will be written there, the name we are given, and only that person will be able to read it. I can’t tell what your name will be. But I think in my own mind it will be “Mercy” – not just the mercy God shows to you, but the mercy as well that you show to others.’

Her face shines with love. I suppose these are the times of transfiguration that should not be mentioned outside the family. There are many of them. But the world would see only our bare feet and old clothes.

*

Tonight again Te Atua presses heavy on me and will not let me sleep. I itch all over, but not from insects. The griefs of the tribe have communicated themselves to me – six of them had their difficulties to be resolved before and after midnight, and when I embraced them, I think, as often happens, their tensions flowed into me as electricity flows into the wire that conducts it to the ground. My muscles ache and my body is cold.

In the darkness before dawn I put on my coat. I go outside to urinate. The stars are pure and high and the moon is going down behind the big poplar. The beauty of Te Atua’s night shames me. My praise cannot rise as high as Heaven. I want, not Te Atua’s pain, nor cold, but the peace-giving friendship and the ointment of welcome of Father Eugene in Auckland. There I will sleep like a child.

Te Atua does not want us always to be children. I had forgotten it is Lent, though I sat at Mass yesterday – ‘Ko te mahi mo tenei Reneti, ko nga page 479 karakia.’ Instead of praying, I write to you.

Te Ariki tells us – ‘What sorrow is like my sorrow?’ If it were incommunicable, though, he would not express it to us. His sorrow is both ours and not ours. It is beyond us, yet spears slide out of it to pierce our little hearts. I say to him, ‘Let me have your sorrow,’ but probably I am insincere. I love him, yet his sorrow terrifies me. To go into it, out of the arms of the tribe, is too like dying before death.

Come gently to me, Ariki rite ki Te Ra, I am not used to your pain. I have to learn to bear it by degrees. You are the heart of every heart and the meaning of all meaning. To die in your company is better than to be brought to Heaven. If I wince and complain every hour of my life, it is not me but my idiot brother, my second self. He tino pai te mate. This is the only place where I can be I, by being not I but the other I was born to be.

Kua mutu. Kaore. Kua ara te ra o nga tangata. Kua ara Te Ariki rite ki Te Ra.

*

I could be happy if I had no evil dreams. In the bog of my dreams I suffer whatever I have been or could be, whatever is exiled from the peace and love and simple activity of this house. I am scattered among corpses and demons. I am tossed up and down like a leaf on a black wind. Yet this may mean no more than that my soul is open to the world we live in. What right has a man to peace in the century of Hiroshima? Or when in his own country men and women go mad daily because they can see no sense in the lives they live and the deaths they are going to die? The doctrine of Original Sin is the most peace-giving of Christian doctrines. To name the incubus is also to recognise that we share the burden in common with all people. That is to take the first step on the road of liberation.

Tom Hepi is dead now. In his son’s house on Taumarunui I had a dream. I was back in Auckland. Great heaps of rags and rubbish, tarry with filth, like ancient hospital bandages, were burning in the streets, on iron brackets, and men in greasy clothes were tending the fires. The smoke blew through the town, through the otherwise empty squares, among buildings of high concrete with windows like blank eyes. The wind came from the horizon, over the harbour, under a lid of cloud, as if from the space behind the stars.

The wind overturned one of the rusty brackets and sent it spinning in my direction, bashing against the walls of the buildings like a huge bird. I had the sense of panic that comes from life out of control. The pain of sharing the world’s evil, of being a leper in a city of lepers – this clung to me like the drifting smoke.

I think it was a dream of Gehenna. A true dream. The valley of Gehenna was the rubbish dump of Jerusalem. They tipped out there everything they page 480 had no use for, and the fires burned night and day.

The wind is the Holy Spirit blowing in Gehenna. The fire is the fire of the Divine Love consuming our hearts. Whatever peace of joy I may have for a while, I know I belong there, in the valley of Gehenna, because Te Ariki walks there till the world ends. God has gone deeper even than our despair. God chooses to live in Gehenna, in the acrid company of the true selves we cannot hide from God, though we hide them from others and even disastrously from our own knowledge. God’s mercy raises the dead.

Here in this house I have the pain and peace of Lazarus. But the agony of Dives is what I felt in my dream: the plague city he calls a civilisation, a culture that cannot understand itself because it dare not accept its own spiritual strangulation and need of mercy. Instead it chooses guns and money and the badges of education. The agony of Dives is shaking the world to pieces. It is my leprous brother Dives whom I have to embrace, and that is why I shudder and cry out in my dreams.

*

God makes each thing and all things out of nothing. Nobody else can. We make something out of something – houses out of timber, or bread out of wheat. But the Devil wants to imitate God. The Devil makes a nothing out of nothing: that is a lie. The Devil has nothing positive to contribute, only wars, quarrels, lies, ulcers, deformations, the absence of good. People are silly enough to imitate the Devil. They too tell lies. A lie that is believed becomes an idol. Lies have an apparent positive reality. They provoke acts of fear and violence. Sincerity is no help. Most people sincerely believe the lies they tell and hear. We need truth. Sincerity comes from humans; but truth comes from God.

Fear and anger are always absurd. They come from a misunderstanding of the nature of reality. Let us love the true self in each person: that is, the unborn Christ. Let us empty our hearts of possessiveness and receive through our senses what is, the pure and abundant creation that God made for us and for itself. Let us forget even the finest lies and accept the Word who is Truth springing up endlessly from the centre of our souls. Then we can be ourselves and live at peace with everyone. The road is poverty.

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