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Conversation with an Ancestor

In this talk I will be speaking as much about myself as about the standards and problems of art – that is, I will speak about the situation of being Robert Burns Fellow: about the implications for me of a return to the town in which I grew up; and about those changes which one is obliged to face at the beginning of the second half of life. This talk, then, will turn to a large extent on myself – not, I hope, without some value as entertainment – but there is a difference between being self-centred and self-involved. His self is an artist’s baggage, his burden, his problem, his doubtful treasure, which he must come to understand on his own terms under pain of losing his gift: thus he is unable to surrender to the apparently ethical demands of communal utility. His job is to be useless and creative – resembling by analogy the apparently useless page 131 exercises of the Trappist monk, who may feed pigs or build walls or plant vegetables, but whose real work is an endless struggle in silence to find in the abyss of his own soul the source of holiness and the meaning of the creation. Nothing second-hand will do in that work; and it is hardly a sinecure. I remember a monk at Kopua in Hawke’s Bay saying to me, ‘Jimmy, they say that when we come here first, God gives us bread and butter and honey; then, after a while, He takes away the honey; then the butter; and sometimes, the bread as well.’ Especially in the modern world of noise, falseness, staleness and repetition, it seems to me a vital necessity that there should be monks, who will not accept a second-hand version of God; and equally that there should be artists, though their work is one of natural contemplation, not supernatural – the difficult gaining of a first-hand intuition into things and the relation between things, which, as Aquinas tells us, constitutes the creation. In another sense, you could call an artist a tribesman cut off from his tribe – perhaps they never existed; perhaps they did exist, when men were aware of a sacred relation between themselves, as a local interdependent group, and the life of nature, that other half of the creation which passively or actively confronted them. I have seen inwardly my first ancestors in this country, those Gaelic-speaking men and women, descending with their bullock drays and baggage to cross the mouth of what is now the Brighton river; near to sunset, when the black and red of the sky intimated a new thing, a radical loss and a radical beginning; and the earth lay before them, for that one moment of history, as a primitive and sacred Bride, unentered and unexploited. Those people, whose bones are in our cemeteries, are the only tribe I know of; and though they were scattered and lost, their unfulfilled intention of charity, peace, and a survival that is more than self-preservation, burns like radium in the cells of my body; and perhaps a fragment of their intention is fulfilled in me, because of my works of art, the poems that are a permanent sign of contradiction in a world where the pound note and the lens of the analytical Western mind are the only things held sacred. I stand then as a tribesman left over from the dissolution of the tribes. The Bride, however, the earth itself, is still there to keep me company.

In a painting which hangs in my house, painted by Drew Peters, a Dutchman who lived until recently in Wellington, I see the New Zealand version of the juxtaposition of man and nature. An old man, perhaps in his eighties, is bending to drag an opossum out of a trap. There is great vitality in his posture. The shoulders, in a red check shirt, are hunched, almost deformed, in a shape which Peters habitually uses to indicate the imminence of death – a curved massive shape that plunges downward like the hawk on its prey. The arms are sinewy, long, and very white; they grasp the grey, furred, female body of the opossum like talons. The head, bent to show only the hair, is a white oval, the blank centre of the upper part of the picture. For background, as if in a tapestry, one sees the smashed mutilated trunks of page 132 trees, green and black, with ferns among them: the kind of desert swampland which we so often create in this country.

I see in the figure of the old ’possum trapper an ikon of the solitary vitality of man joined to nature only insofar as he can use her; and, less certainly, a figure of Time or Death, those two remaining gods of the modern Western world. Peters gave me this splendid painting as a reminder of what New Zealand is, and as a much-too-generous reward for opening a one-man show of his. Naturally almost none of his paintings have been sold. The eunuch does not like to see the work of the man who is able to look on the Bride. The critics would prefer a bit of wood that had been burnt a little and roughed with a chainsaw. They could then admire their own intellectual up-to-dateness without being disturbed by any sign of contradiction. To admit the necessity for a third factor in any work of art, beyond the artist and his material – that is, an experience, a sacred event, or, in the case of Peters’ picture, an event of desecration, standing above, behind, or inside the work – this would shatter entirely that brittle and exhausted world where only the lens, the instrument of intellectual analysis, is regarded as sacred; for it to happen, the critics would have to become contemplatives, and that would destroy their scaffolding of self-approval. On the night of that one-man show I recited a small quatrain:

Here comes the mirror-gazing multitude,
Bureaucrat, yahoo, statistician, prude;
And who’s that standing at the corner pissing?
Why – old Utrillo with a brain-lobe missing!

It was not entirely well received; but it may stand as my only contribution to the field of art criticism.

But here and now, in this town, I speak simultaneously as a Robert Burns Fellow and a New Zealand writer – that is, a donkey who is able from time to time to excrete gold – and there are several reasons why I should not feel comfortable. For example, I remember a visit I paid some years ago to a friend who was being held in the Dunedin Gaol for floating dud cheques. I had come down from Wellington by air, hoping to help him in some way – perhaps even to convince him that his situation was not wholly the result of the malice of detectives and moneyed individuals, but that his own carelessness might have played a part. In this I had no success whatever. But while we stood in the prison corridor, he pointed out certain mounds or humps in the asphalt of the interior yard, and told me that these marked the graves of men who had been executed there in the early days.

He could of course have been mistaken; but it helps me to think about my own situation, and to avoid floating the intellectual equivalent of a dud cheque, if I remember that occasion. The men under the asphalt, our founding fathers, would almost certainly have been poor men; and whatever page 133 money comes my way, directly or indirectly, from the benefactions of Caesar, was taken from them, perhaps before they were born. I must apologise to their bones.

You may have read about the work of levelling and reclamation by which Dunedin was built, how the drains were dug and the bogs filled in, until it became the quiet, well-ordered town we now see from our windows; but that labour did not abolish, it rather extended, the great swamp of economic liberalism in which we are obliged to think and act. I see it as my own chief function, as a man and a writer, to struggle – by whatever means I find available, including gross satire – against the devil of acedia who rises from that swamp and inhabits, like an honoured guest, our Government Departments, our business offices, our churches, our schools, our places of entertainment, our art galleries and our homes. Perhaps, by accepting this Fellowship, I give an inch or two of ground in that lifelong battle; because there is always a connection, however tenuous, between the university and the administrative machines which act out the fantasies of the dull, man-killing brain of Caesar – a connection which university men themselves would deplore and attempt to diminish. In a recent poem I express a sense of unease about this connection:

On Possessing the Burns Fellowship 1966

(to Nicholas Zissermann)

Trees move slowly. The rain drops arrows
As on the Spartans from the Persian bowstring
Some while ago, across the tennis court
Behind the convent they hope to pull down,

And I who wrote in ’62,
Dear ghosts, let me abandon
What cannot be held against
Hangmen and educators, the city of youth! –

Drink fresh percolated coffee, lounging
In the new house, at the flash red kitchen table,
A Varsity person, with an office
Just round the corner – what nonsense!

If there is any culture here
It comes from the black south wind
Howling above the factories
A handsbreadth from Antarctica,

page 134

Whatever the architect and planner
Least understand – not impossibly the voice
Of an oracle rising from that
Old battered green verandah

Beyond the board fence: a blood transfusion
From the earth’s thick veins! As if
Caesar had died, and clouds, leaves, conspired to make
A dark mocking funeral wreath. (CP 335)

It may seem to you that I am too touchy; that I exaggerate the dangers of compromise between individual thought and the patterns of institutions. Girls who are virgins are touchy in the same way: they are inclined to resent the suggestion that their sex, after all, is a commodity and could be put quietly on the market. Like the virgin, the artist has nothing but a primitive, barbarous answer: ‘I have only one hymen. If it goes, I am no longer the same person.’ Of course, after the event, the whole thing might seem not worth caring about; but that is only because nothing is worth caring about very much; because one has moved a stage nearer the destination of mental and moral imbecility which does not seem out of place in our unhappy culture. Virginities can be restored, by the hand of God; but this does not happen without some profound reversal of one’s readiness to be bought; and one may get very touchy indeed if anybody tries to remove the second virginity. It is worth remembering that the devil of acedia is the most subtle as well as the most brutal of the masters of Hell. For your meditation I offer one of his works, an article on trout-fishing published in the New Zealand Weekly News; it discusses the prospects for good fishing on the Tongariro Prison Farm:

‘. . . Briefly, any angler commits an offence who converses with an inmate, gives him anything whatsoever, takes anything from him for delivery outside the property or photographs him.

‘But what of the fishing itself? It becomes progressively more difficult to fish the lower the water falls. If the fish are taking a dry fly at such times, angling becomes indubitably a fine art indeed. But if they are only interested in a lure, fished downstream to them, angling becomes merely a matter of letting line down to them and recovering it slowly.

‘As for the best patterns of fly, who shall say? One of the prison officers who is a keen angler – and who, incidentally, will have to seek a permit for a beat just like anyone else – fishes the wet fly downstream and uses nothing else but a Parson’s Glory . . .’.

As for the best patterns of fly, who shall say? Perhaps there is some part of Purgatory where one can fish for ten thousand years, in rivers of molten lead, using the wet fly, the dry fly, and above all the Parson’s Glory; but in the meantime the brain has to be kept alive. What is less objectionable than trout- page 135 fishing? The Florentines used to bury their thieves alive head downwards in a pit; Dante mentions it, and describes how the priest would kneel beside the suspended man to hear his last Confession; but I do not recall anything about trout-fishing. When the prisoners in Mount Eden revolted, and among them George Wilder, our local Spartacus, whose mind and physique are now being destroyed by solitary confinement, they called out to the people watching, ‘Don’t help the screws; they are crucifying us!’ No doubt they had a partisan view of it. But when I consider those monasteries of pain, our prisons, and the people who are afflicted there – men without skins, compulsive men, alcoholics, poor sex mechanics who mistake the nut for the bolt and walk into tribulation – nothing inside seems as terrible as the man outside, wading the stream in gumboots, using the wet fly and the dry fly, justified by the approval of Caesar, while the devil of acedia reduces his mind to nullity. This is my private war, against that spirit; and the fear remains in my mind that by accepting any gift, honour, or public position, one may appear to condone our society, the clumsy nurse who smothers the children committed to her care.

In a sense the Fellowship was awarded to the wrong man: my shadow, my enemy, my monster: the public person who would destroy if he could whatever gifts I possess. Art, the mainstay of culture, is not bred by culture but by its opposite: that level of hardship or awareness of moral chaos where the soul is too destitute to be able to lie to itself. Thus the Fellowship should have been awarded, if at all, not to me – a family man, teetotal, moderately pious, not offensive to sight or smell, able to say the right thing in a drawing-room – but to my collaborator, my schizophrenic twin, who has always provided me with poems. I see him as a Dunedinite. He, or somebody rather like him, inhabited this town twenty years ago, daring to use my name and wear my features. I have described him in an unpublished and unpublishable novel. There his name is ‘Horse’, because he is frequently being ridden by everybody he knows, including Fern, his girlfriend, the university which he regards as the abode of crocodiles, the police, the Almighty, and Dead Loss Voss, the head man in the ironworks where he is holding down a job with difficulty. His public name is Timothy Harold Glass, granted to him by me in honour of his glass belly and the twelve labours of Hercules. In this episode from the novel, he wakes up with a hangover in the kitchen of a friend’s house somewhere in Roslyn or Maori Hill:

The next morning, when Horse clambered up to daylight from his burrow, he was far from happy. Impaled on a bamboo stake in a schist-rock desert under the merciless sun of a hangover conscience, he did not dare to make a movement of mind or body in case his bowels should burst open, his brain explode, and the walls of the kitchen fall in on him. He knew that he, Timothy Harold Glass, had poisoned the tribal wells. And to him, lying speechless, there came a strange procession. Old men in page 136 tartan kilts with bagpipes under their arms, housewives with faces as long as their aprons, the dead and living burghers of Dunedin accompanied by their apple-cheeked women and their subnormal Sunday-loving children. His mother and Old Voss led them. They halted and gazed at the humped mutilated shape of one who had offended against God and the brotherhood.

‘I wanted to treat him right,’ said Old Voss. ‘I tried to be a second father to him. But he’s a waster. He’ll never do any good.’

‘He has no self-control,’ said his mother sadly.

‘He has rejected Jesus,’ said Brian, who now wore his collar back to front.

‘He is a vile drunkard,’ groaned an emaciated widow, her tattered lace shawl smeared with cat manure. ‘He drank a pint of milk from my doorstep while passing intoxicated at five in the morning. Then he urinated in the bottle and left it there. My cat and I have both been poisoned.’

‘He was looking at the hole in my knickers,’ said a girl of eight, ‘When I was swinging in the park. I knew he was a bad man.’

‘He is a constitutional psychopath,’ said Professor Wardle of the Practical Psychology Department.

‘He’s a sexual maniac,’ grieved Fern, who had joined the accusers. ‘He tried to make me do it three times when I had my period . . .’.

A shower sprinkled the kitchen window. Horse’s right leg muscle, maltreated by rum, swelled agonisingly like a cricket ball. He twisted on the sofa and banged it flat again with his fist. A regular thudding noise came from the yard where the wind was slamming the washhouse door. At this sad moment Horse raised his eyes and saw a deeply consoling vision.

A Japanese girl, plump in a filmy kimono, smiled at him from the greengrocer’s calendar above the range. The sun rose behind her, across a vague sea, and a spray of cherry-blossom hid her more intimate charms. There was no shadow of accusation in her gaze. Like the mirrors hung in a Shinto temple, her eyes reflected the secret purity that exists in the soul of every believer. I am eternal, she murmured. I am the living heart of the world. Cherryblossoms began to fall like snow from the space behind the clouds. They covered the mica desert. And the accusers, ravaged by the Horse demon, melted away one by one. Horse fell back into easy sleep and did not wake till Ivan came in the door . . .

The publishers apparently did not find this work either funny or instructive. That doesn’t really matter much. But it would be very dangerous for me to forget Timothy Harold Glass. He has done the suffering and I have done the writing. Occasionally I visit the cellblock in the basement of my mind where he still lives, incorrigible, ineducable, unemployable; and through the bars he will pass me a message written on the back of a tobacco packet. Something page 137 like this – ‘Look out, you bloody fool! What will happen if I die? I’ll tell you. One by one you’re going to lose your sex, your art and your sense of humour. All the Fellowships in the world won’t make up for that. I am it; and you can’t do without me . ..’ .

Or it might be the beginning of a poem that he hands me, in exchange for a crude joke and a cigar: something cryptic which I have to unravel, three or four words perhaps. Recently he gave me the phrase – Suffer the autumn of the succubus – and I was able to build a poem round it:

Spring, the time of evasion – such as
Ferns that part like hair beyond the
Double-bunking climbers’ hut,
Branches of pungas opening as if
The rock of ideas would split
At any moment and bring us

Home to the arms of the great nurse
Half outside time: fingers gripping
The surprises of the flesh,
Labia or shoulderbone . . .
But those who have drunk the potion,
Not yet all turned to stone,

In some cold café or a library
Suffer the autumn of the succubus:
Her gliding walk, entering a room,
Her hair that sprouted in the tomb
Or mummy-case. They wait for
Her ice-cold gift, exile from self,

Upstairs at dawn, cutting the party’s throat,
Quoting thin proverbs to the dark
As the gin runs out, and one
Who trembles watching her, remembering how
A blacksmith at that cloven anvil
Toiled once and woke unfit for other work. (‘The Succubus’, CP 330)

I can’t interpret my own poems infallibly; but the message of this one seems to be that the Venus of the greengrocer’s calendar who gives life becomes in the long run the succubus who gives death. An ordinary enough conclusion; but the meat of the poem contains a good deal more than that; and this kind of knowledge would escape me if I were to nail down the trapdoor and never visit my collaborator in his kennel under the stairs.

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Timothy Harold Glass is my Pig Island version of natural man, that is, in theological terms, the fallen Adam who remembers, as if in a dream, his first state. He endorses the dying words of Dylan Thomas: ‘I want to go back to the Garden of Eden’. In this context I would like to explore a little the conflict of bourgeois and Bohemian values.

In this perennial battle, a complete adherence to one side or the other is probably fatal for an artist. The bourgeois family man – ape in an overcoat, donkey with a crown of thorns – will always have the burden of maintaining most of the values of civilised life. His necessary virtues – amiability, patience, prudence, punctuality, whimsicality, thrift and caution – enable him to make many difficult adjustments and keep the rudder of the boat steady in a rough sea; and if they are tempered by a genuine self-forgetting love, he may approach the model of the Christian hero. But in this social dialectic the natural man may easily be forgotten – not consciously rejected, but set on one side, like an old heirloom which has no obvious practical use. To do the Bohemian justice, he does not usually object so much to bourgeois virtues as to bourgeois neurosis – the edge of falseness, the thin fog of complacency, the intellectual blindness of a person who has forgotten who he is – the extreme vulnerability to the devil of boredom. After twenty years of doubt and fumbling, I have come to the conclusion that the problem is an intellectual one involving the historical development of Christianity. The Calvinist thesis that the Fall is absolute and the natural man totally depraved has led, by devious byways, to a kind of idolatry – a deep reliance, torn still by an anguish of uncertainty, on the civilising influence of education, culture and the power of the State – as if these could eradicate the turbulence of the passions and put in their place an abstract social benevolence. Yet the equation never quite works out. Modern Western man resembles the Norse god Odin, who went to the secret well which lay in the roots of Ygdrasil, the tree of life, and demanded some of the water to drink, so that he would have the power of wisdom and foreknowledge. The guardian of the well demanded that he should tear out his right eye and give it to him before he could drink the water. Odin did so, and achieved knowledge at the cost of partial blindness – an image, I think of the loss of the religious and aesthetic vision.

The Bohemian refuses to make this sacrifice. He values too much his contact with the natural man, l’ homme donné; and it can be argued that he has the best authority on his side. If, as the Catholic thinkers have always taught, the Fall was not complete, and the natural man, though wounded, is still the earth lamp who holds the oil of grace – then the only viable solution is a difficult humanism which works towards an understanding of the passions without being overthrown by them. In that case, art does not have to be abandoned; and one can hold in the mind a knowledge of the temporary, provisional nature of the compromises of civilisation. It turns perhaps on the ancient bond – The earth is the Lord’sand the fullness thereof – which a Naga page 139 tribesman may understand better than a diplomat of the United Nations, who, in the person of his forefathers, tore out the communal vision of those who love the sacred earth in order to achieve the knowledge of technological power which does not love but uses her, and remains in itself barren.

I don’t suggest that the Bohemian is a whole man and the bourgeois a half-man; both are half-men, in my view of it, because each turns away from some essential aspect of life; but I have noticed that nearly every capable writer in this country whom I have met has passed through a time of radical revolt, of cutting the apron strings of the social nursery, and that their later balance, if they achieve it, includes a direct knowledge of those aspects of human nature which a neo-Calvinist would ignore or repudiate. They work continually with two sides of the life of man – the instinctive and the social, the wild and the domestic, the passionate and the rational – and their art is the fruit of this radical tension.

To put it bluntly – how do you yourselves regard the boy who drives his motorbike much too fast, or the girl who seems to be quite unaware of the dangers of sex? Do you regard them as a kind of plague? Or do you regard them as enemies who endanger an otherwise satisfactory order? Or do you regard them as non-existent? I suggest that it is impossible for a poet or novelist to write well unless they regard such people as their difficult alter egos, emblematic of the natural man, the living proof that no temporal order is ever satisfactory; and to this extent a writer is obliged to be Bohemian in thought, not moralising but mythologising, rediscovering his or her own buried natural self. One has to put off the policeman’s overcoat. I remember a poem of my own which my fellow-members of the New Zealand State Literary Fund Advisory Committee felt they could not accept as part of an anthology to be sponsored by public money, because it would not meet with the approval of all members of the public. Some of my fellow-members considered it pornographic; some considered it just unsuitable; and one member, a woman, left the Committee for good because she thought the controversy nonsensical. This was the poem –

The Girl in Yellow Jeans

‘Let’s love’ said the poster in the Tourist Bureau,
And the man behind the desk was nice;
He didn’t ask if she was a virgin, or
Offer all kinds of prissy advice. No;
He complimented her on her yellow jeans
And took her sixpence and swung the poster back
And showed her a funny round stone door
(Like a safe, she thought) – well, there could be no harm
In paying a visit. The tunnel was black;
page 140 (Soon, she thought, I’ ll know what it means,
But she would have cried if he hadn’t held her arm
Very tight) . . . Out into a coffee bar
That she knew already. The band struck up.
Harry tooted his horn and gave her a grin
And Wally was tuning a new guitar.
Her companion had gone. She settled herself in the far
Corner; the Dutch waitress was very slow;
The band stopped. She felt the silence grow;
Wondered, How soon does the telly show begin? –
Looked down; and suddenly screamed at the blood in her cup. (CP 254)

I think my fellow-members were troubled by the appearance of blood in this modern fairytale. They thought it might be hymeneal blood. I would not wish to deny their literary intuition (most of them were in one way or another connected with the universities) but there are other symbolic possibilities – the blood which might be drunk at a cannibal feast; the blood of the sacrificial animal which an initiate might be obliged to consume as part, say, of a Mau-Mau ritual; or even the Blood of Christ which is given to the believer, when he is united to Him by means of the Holy Eucharist. The point is, though, that my fellow-members took a magical view of the poem. They understood obscurely that it presented the loss of innocence as if in a dream; but symbolically, by writing the poem, I was the violator, the Satan in their Garden of Eden. Poetry is not magical but mythical. It presents the crises, violations and reconciliations of the spiritual life in mythical form because this is the only way in which the conscious mind can assimilate them. Of course I had desecrated the tribal totem – the three monkeys, Hear-no-evil, See-no-evil and Speak-no-evil, whom I often carry with me, as a reminder, in my pocket – but these three monkeys have never been patrons of art; they prefer to read about cases of criminal assault in the pages of the yellow Press. It was a valuable experience for me to be a member of the State Literary Fund Committee.

Recently I paid a visit with my family to the spit on the north side of the Dunedin harbour, and walked out on the long mole that juts into the sea there. As we came to the end of the mole, the godwits rose up in great clouds; and later, remembering this, I constructed a poem, inside a formal straitjacket of seven syllables to the line. This is the way it went –

At Aramoana

Boulders interrupt the long
jetty from whose black asphalt
tongue the godwits fly to their
page 141 Siberian lakes, or – Abba,
father! – melt like ash or salt
in the void white thundering

wilderness. Yet on the spit
sheaves of water bow as if
to the sickle, and boys make
from earth, air, a goatskin ark,
each watching the same girl of
blood and fibreglass go out

into the surf and shake back
the hanging gardens of her
sun-bleached hair. I turn also
to my dream, in nooks below
the sandhill cone, where Gea
speaks in parables of rock,

wordless, unconnected with
the acedia of a tribe
never once happy, never
at peace . . . There is no other
rest for the heart, but these drab
mats of cutty-grass, no truth

outside her changing and austere
testament of sand. Beyond
her breast, though, I must walk on
towhere the black swellsbegin
Abba, father – to swamp, pound
and hurt the land – on further,

where the serpent current flows
out of the harbour gates, long-
flowing, strongly tugging at
the roots of the world. The night
sky tells that after singing
silence is the only voice. (CP 336)

Apart from the pleasure of having made a particular poem (that is, a souvenir of reality) there are certain intuitions in the poem which I would like to make more explicit – especially, intuitions about death. The godwits represent those God-witted souls who have to make the last migration from this life to the page 142 fatherland of Heaven – the mole’s black asphalt tongue represents the tongue of a dead man – and on that flight some will stay air-borne and some will fall into the sea – the void white thundering wilderness – which symbolises the negative side of God’s mercy, what we, perhaps for want of a better name, have called his justice. I break the logical structure of the poem to call out to the Father, using and translating the words of St Paul, because it is the point where the ground fails under one’s feet – and remembering the words of my master Dylan Thomas –

. . . the led-astray birds whom God, for their breast of whistles,
Have mercy on,
God in his whirlwind silence save, who marks the sparrows hail,
For their soul’s song . . .

But meantime the prodigies of nature continue. I describe the sheaves of water bowing as if to the sickle, an image of the obedience of nature that does not resist death; and the young lads on the sand construct their sensual fantasy which is also sacred, each observing the image of Venus not rising from the sea but going out into it. The hanging gardens of her hair I took directly from the words of my wife; yet this Venus is in some degree an artificial image, she is half woman and half surfboard, the modern Venus who is so much an object, made of blood and fibreglass; and my own dream, my way of hiding myself from death, from the lack of spiritual support in all created things, is to turn to the least demanding and most supporting reality, Gea, the earth herself, the oldest of the tribe of gods. The sandhill cone is her breast, the mats of cuttygrass cover her ancient vagina – my words, if they are to make sense, depend on her and return to her as the symbolic ground of existence – away from her I feel lost; yet because all people die, she can only comfort, never save, and I go on from her towards the sea, which is the image of death, the separating and dividing void, which nevertheless is the source of my joy. The serpent current betrays the world by delivering it into the hand of God; yet we are not creatures of earth, our renewal can only come out of the storm, out of the void, out of the depths of God. And the serenity of God’s silence is the answer to our prayer.

To say that there is no other truth than that which Gea, the earth itself, conveys to us, may seem a contradiction of the Christian revelation; it is not intended so. The point is rather that natural contemplation is by its very function agnostic, depending on images provided by the senses; and I place the testament of sand and the parables of rock – those very humble, very obscure communications from nature, who stand symbolically in the same relation to man as a bride does to her husband – I place them in contradiction to the work of lucre and boredom by which we continually poison the waters of our own souls.

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My wife had said to me, looking at the boulders at Aramoana – ‘It disturbs me that these will be here when I am gone.’ And I had said – ‘No; the earth is very young compared to us, it is only the first cradle of man; we will exist when the whole globe has gone back into the sun’ Later I saw my mistake. She had spoken her mind very honestly, as an artist should, going by what she could feel and see; whereas I spoke from belief, not from knowledge. And so in the poem it is her thought that survives. You will have gathered that I feel the need for a spirit of destitution, if one is to remain untroubled in this century of massacres and empty miracles. That spirit is not hard to find. When I consider the certainty of death – the subconscious problem of everyone who is lucky enough to reach the age of forty – the austere and loving voice of the Church tells me that to live is to die – that is, that to live is to accept all things willingly from the hands of God, including death – and that no one can escape this issue by fantasy or art. In the words of Teilhard de Chardin –

At every moment we see diminishment, both in us and around us, which does not seem to be compensated by advantages on any perceptible plane: premature deaths, stupid accidents, weaknesses affecting the highest reaches of our being. Under blows such as these, man does not move upward in any direction that we can perceive; he disappears or remains grievously diminished. How can these diminishments which are altogether without compensation, wherein we see death at its most deathly, become for us a good? . . .

God must, in some way or other, make room for himself, hollowing us out and emptying us, if he is finally to penetrate into us. And in order to assimilate us in him, he must break the molecules of our being so as to re-cast and re-model us. The function of death is to provide the necessary entrance into our inmost selves. It will make us undergo the required dissociation . . .

In the light of these words, or rather in the light of the truth behind them, one comes to see the dead as one’s destitute brothers and sisters, hidden in the silence of God, to whom one may speak, and receive an imperceptible reply – no longer as robbers and enemies. But this is difficult for modern man. He has no ancestor, no tribal matrix that will carry him in its love through the narrow gate of dissolution, and beyond it. Through his lifelong intellectual solitude he remains in a deeper more terrifying poverty than that of the Gabon pygmies, who have never learnt agriculture. They sing this chant above their dead, the eldest son and the maternal uncle pronouncing alternate lines:

‘The animal runs, it passes, it dies. And it is the great cold.’
‘– It is the great cold of the night, it is the dark.’
‘The bird flies, it passes, it dies. And it is the great cold.’
‘– It is the great cold of the night, it is the dark.’
‘The fish flees, it passes, it dies. And it is the great cold.’
‘– It is the great cold of the night, it is the dark.’
page 144 ‘Man eats and sleeps, He dies. And it is the great cold.’
‘– It is the great cold of the night, it is the dark.’
‘There is light in the sky, the eyes are extinguished, the star shines.’
‘– The cold is below, the light is on high.’
‘The man has passed, the shade has vanished, the prisoner is free.
‘Khvum, Khvum, come in answer to our call!’

Khvum is their God. By contrast the progress of a civilised man from home to hospital to sedation by impersonal if kindly nurses to death to the undertaker to the crematorium is remarkably barren. But what can a tribesman do when he has no tribe? Even the Church, with her great care for the soul and respect for the body, and her gift of sacramental life before, during and after death, cannot give another thing, what the Maoris call aroha, the bond of love that springs from a tribal matrix.

For me it is not death itself but the knowledge of death that makes me reach out to the tribe that no longer exists. As I have done time after time in imagination, looking for some fragment of the lost unity on which to build a poem, but now for a different reason, I go along the river track towards that gully where the clan built their houses, washed their linen, made their music, harvested their crops, bore their children and watched over their dead. It is half way towards night. The gully is choked with broom and gorse. The sods of their houses have vanished. I do not recognise the man who meets me there, beside the river where the sandflies are gathering in clouds, but his eyes hold my attention –

The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable . . .

He wears a plaid over his shoulders and in his hand he carries large needles made of shiny black wood, such as the clan used for thatching their houses. A smallish wiry man, well into his eighties – it is, I think, Chennor, my greatgreat-grandfather who came to this country when he was over eighty and lived for six or eight years afterwards. When he speaks to me his language is the Gaelic; I understand the meaning of the words but not the words spoken.

– Do you still wear the tartan?

The answer is not an easy one; for the tartan is the sign of the identity of the clan. Who can be sure of his own identity when it is a changing thing reflected back to him by the eyes of strangers? It is also a sign of contact with the land held in common. I have never owned a square foot of ground. But it may also signify the coloured cloth of individuality, kept alive by the mutual working of the conscious and subconscious mind, the coat woven from the page 145 four coloured strands of reason, feeling, sensation and intuition. In my case it is often threadbare. But I answer carefully –

‘Either I wear it or else go naked.’

He seems to be content with that answer. The next question is a sharper one.

– Have you ever taken the Queen’s money?

Not a matter of theft; but a matter of my relationship to the secular power of the State. The breaking of the clans by the State began at Culloden, when Cumberland piled up the bodies of the wounded and used them as targets for his cannon. It was hastened when the redcoats marched up the seashore, smashing the mussels on the rocks with their army boots, so that the hungry would be unable to get sea food, and also when the wearing of the tartan was forbidden. It was completed, more or less, by the ejection of the clansmen from their houses when the progressive landlords and statesmen required hills for deer and moors for grouse. In each case the State was on the side of the strong, not just because the strong support the State, but also because the regional mind is anathema to Caesar. Wherever a tribe is left, he feels it itching like a flea, and will rub till he kills it. This is because the autonomous tribal authority has no need of his power to govern its own affairs and will not readily join itself to his plans for organisation, subjugation or conquest. But when the clans were being broken, some of the young men, for lack of employment, would sell themselves to Caesar’s army. There they were permitted to wear the tartan, not as a sign of tribal unity, but as a regimental badge like the collar put on a trained monkey or a savage dog.

The Church will tell me that Caesar has the right to command civil obedience. Yet there is an ambiguity in the argument for the man who recognises not two but three authorities – the authority of God, mediated by the Church, the authority of Caesar, and the authority of the tribe, the local community of neighbours. Should one obey Caesar when his authority is directed against one’s neighbour? The voice of the tribe is not explicit; it seems to speak from the earth itself, in a low voice; one has to listen carefully to hear it when the megaphones are shouting round about. I hear it in these words quoted by Pira Kanungsattam in an article in Landfall No. 75:

The last letter from home arrived many months ago. It runs: ‘My dear Brother, I write to tell you not to come home. I think you should stay away if you can find somewhere to live happily. It is not safe here any more. Terrible things are happening to us. They began when strangers came and took command in our village. There has been fighting with guns, and rice was left unreaped. Every day people have been shot and killed; and one day another troop of strangers ransacked the village. There were violent explosions, and confusion everywhere. Huts were set on fire. Men and page 146 women and children lay dead in the village street. I do not understand exactly what has happened. I only know that it is terribly bad, and we are in great danger. We are hiding in fear. . . .

‘Our rice and animals have been plundered and Father has been seriously wounded. If he could be moved I would take him with me, and escape to the forest. But now the hills and bush and the rice fields have become hostile. They are full of men prowling to kill each other.

‘I do not know how long we shall be in this state. I am weary in spirit and body. But I shall protect Father as best I can. He is the only one I have left to care for. As for you, I do not know whether we shall see each other again. Take care of yourself. Remember that I always love you and shall think of you to the last moment of my life.’

Our own Caesar would claim that we are protecting the villagers of South-East Asia against a heartless Communist domination. I doubt if his objective is wholly philanthropic. The face of the war god, turned in our direction, is honourable and smiling; but to the man of the tribe it is instead a bloody and tormented skull, the face of nihilism. The economic liberal Caesar and the Communist Caesar, for complex public reasons, are tearing the world apart; in order to die differently, I listen instead to the voice that speaks to me out of the ground. I will never take up arms for any Caesar.

Perhaps the man who works for the State, in a civil capacity, has in a sense been bought by the Queen’s money. But still, unlike the soldier who sells his life and his power of moral choice, he may choose how much he sells. I have sold as little as I can – the use of the hands and a little of the brain – like a woman in a brothel who merely serves food to the guests. I can answer a provisional No to the second question.

– Can you hide from the keepers in a bush?

The third question of Chennor is connected with the migration of the clan, or his section of it, from their ancestral valley. The young men had become pugnacious. Some of them had threatened that if they were caught by the keepers when they were engaged in hunting deer, they would shoot their way out of it. For a clansman the fault of poaching was a legal fault, not moral. The new laws had come between them and the exercise of their old hunting rights as free-born masters of the land. Thus to hide from the keeper signifies the cunning and protection of himself and others necessary for the man who recognises the great gap between legality and morality.

To put it in modern terms: An old man, who has fought perhaps in the wars of Caesar and kept most of his sanity, except for a weakness for the drink, and who has no family, and no money in his pocket except for a few shillings of his pension money, has too much to drink with a friend at the hotel. Then, having perhaps nowhere to sleep, he walks up the road. He relieves himself against the wall at the gate of a timber yard, pushes the gate open, and goes page 147 to lie down and shelter for the night beside a stack of timber. After midnight, when the policeman shines a torch in his face and questions him and grabs him by the collar, he is upset and tries to get free of him. And out in the street he uses some of the words that any man who was angry might use in private conversation: the language of the boats, the freezing works, the pub and the trenches.

The next day, when he comes up in Court, he is legally convicted under the following charges: being drunk; being idle and disorderly, a rogue and a vagabond without lawful means of support; breaking and entering; loitering with felonious intent; casting offensive matter in a public place; assaulting a policeman; using obscene language . . .

This farrago of bitter nonsense, the persecution of the poor, the sick and the old, happens every day of the week in our own country. It illustrates the gap between legality and morality. So it is necessary for the tribesman who has no tribe to learn to hide himself and his friends from the hard hand of Caesar; to ignore the regulations; to give no information; to keep a blank face.

Even when the matter does involve some moral lapse – one’s own or somebody else’s – one hides in the bush till the keeper goes past; one keeps it as a private matter to be dealt with in private. So I am able to answer the third question in the affirmative.

– Have you got a woman with child and then left her?

That’s a hard one; the hardest of them all for any man who is not a eunuch or a saint. It is no good my pointing out to Chennor that this is the age of birth control. The question works on many levels. It does not signify a fault against chastity – that could be accepted within the general tolerance of the tribe extended to human weakness – but a fault against the ancient tribal charity and responsibility. It is hard to see how men and women can have anything to do with each other without some kind of betrayal – to leave one for another, to abandon the one who depends on you to her own resources. The young are more careless in these matters because they cannot see the depth or extent of the wounds they inflict. As a man gets older he begins to have more pity. Perhaps the protective decisions of family life, even though ruthless at times in a love that excludes responsibility to the rest of the world, are sufficient to allow me to answer No. It seems that Chennor himself does not expect a too rigorous examination of motives. The last question, though, is unexpected:

– Can you bait a hook to hide the barb?

I was never an expert fisherman; but I know the meat has to hide the steel or else the fish will leave it alone. The question is obscure. But for myself it page 148 may signify the combination of boldness and prudence – not so much in dealings with other people, as in the craft of verse-making, where boldness is the matter and prudence is the form. Sometimes the fish bite and sometimes they leave it alone. On my own terms, I can answer Yes.

The five questions of Chennor have not been well answered; but it seems that he is satisfied. He puts his hand on my shoulder and breathes on my forehead. And when I go from the place, the breath of the ancestor goes with me, before me, behind me, around me, to defeat the enemies of the heart and give me strength at the hour of death. With that protection, under God, I do not require any other.

Before I came from Wellington to Dunedin I wrote a poem in anticipation. It sums up a certain number of the themes I have touched on in this talk. The metre, though not the content, was borrowed from the American poet Allen Tate. The language is perhaps more explicitly Christian than I would usually allow myself in a poem. In the third stanza I address the Church, my Mother; and the Scroggs Hill farm is the place where my own father was born, in a sod house:

Soon I will go South
To my birth land,
Island and river mouth
Under the sun’s face,
From whose body, as if damned,
I fled towards the night,
Burnt black – till the axe of dawn
Rise up from a hidden place
To show our flesh, burnt white,
That the furious Christ is born

Among straight candles in
Some church or pre-fab shack;
And where all wars begin,
On His anvil reconciled
We will kneel down, deaf rock,
To eat the God of Bread
Whose flesh received our scorn,
In the nail-struck hands of a child
Perceiving the hope of the dead
And the sorrow of all men born.

Speak from the chains of the sea,
Mother of martyrs! Teach
Your sons by the mystery
page 149 How they, burnt black, may learn
The vowels of human speech,
Lest we achieve damnation
In the fields of untilled corn
Where souls, uprooted, spurn
The stable of contemplation
Where the midnight sun is born.

I imagine a limestone cave
Under a green bush wall
That was a Maori grave
That the pioneering men
Had used as a cattle stall.
To the desecrated earth
Under the hooked lawyer thorn
We come – like a beast to its den –
Desiring no second birth
But the sleep of the unborn.

Since man looks for a shroud
Either by gun or blade
Or by the atom cloud,
To be rid of the corpse curled
Shrunk small in the ambuscade
Of the soul – our Christ of death
For whom the midwives mourn –
Deaf monster of a world,
A child that has no breath
Not able to be born!

Yet a drunk who goes by night
Towards the Scroggs Hill farm
May see a blaze of light
In a sod hut, and there
A girl with a child on her arm,
The rounded Maori face,
A blue dress loosely worn,
And mercy to swamp despair
At the gorgehead of grace
Where the Christ of fire is born,

From which he would come down
To the bride no worm can touch,
page 150 To the gravel roads of the town,
School, store and bowling green,
To the old in their bleak hutch
And the chaingangs of the young
Struck wild by summer’s horn,
And praise the living scene
With an unwounded tongue
In the land where I was born. (‘Ode’, CP 305)

I think that is enough for one man to say in a single talk, about himself, the enigmatic authority of Caesar, and the possible sources of art. I do not think I have spoken with an unwounded tongue; but to speak at all from the place where the poems and the dreams begin becomes increasingly difficult, and often I would prefer to be silent, and let the younger ones do the talking. I hope my comments are of use.