Kiwi Habits [1]

It was more than 20 years ago. I was sitting on a gate at the bottom of Scroggs Hill, with a good view of the sea coast along to Taieri Mouth, watching a cobber of mine who was engaged in topping a big macrocarpa tree. In a page 392 notebook where I also sometimes wrote verse I had set down a new Rule of Life:

(1)	Stop drinking.
(2)	Stop smoking.
(3)	Stop masturbating.
(4)	Work harder.

None of these plans were finally effective; at least not through any deliberate choice. Perhaps, like my cobber, I was trying to top the Tree of Life at the point where it seemed likely to strike the electric wires. It wasn’t really necessary. The booze ran its course, and no doubt taught me something before the keg was empty. One day I may have lung cancer from smoking; but they say the last ten years are the worst, whatever you happen to die of. Age itself gradually takes care of the sexual problem; and most people secretly regret the cure more than the affliction. As for working harder, idleness is the ground from which anything worth anything will spring up. In a sense the big macrocarpa tree is still standing. I didn’t know then that the macrocarpa is actually a variety of cypress, the traditional inhabitant of graveyards. But I do now:

The wind blew from the south with rain to follow
The hour I woke unfree,
And three old women put beside my pillow
The nuts of the cypress tree . . . (Uncollected)

The dark; the heavy; the cold – the facts that work against life are what give strength to the poem. If poems are footprints, then to write well, one has to have a heavy weight on the back, to sink into the ground up to the knees at every step. Tiredness also is an ally.

*

I had written a letter to the newspaper saying how much it had cheered me up to see the film of James Joyce’s book, Ulysses, even if it had to be in male company. And the other day I received a note through the post, unsigned but with a St Kilda postmark, printed large and clear on a sheet of lined paper: ‘Cranks – and the mad world is full of them – are always ready to express their opinions – because they couldn’t be wrong. They are, also, usually on the side of filth.’

Along with the note my correspondent had sent back to me my letter to the paper carefully clipped out. The note set my mind at ease. It told me I was still in contact with the great white heart of Pig Island, that wild interior page 393 island of the mind where even the Bible has not yet penetrated. In a way it was a love-note. She (it nearly always turns out to be a ‘her’) was addressing me in person, from her Delphic tripod erected in front of the kitchen range, in a cave where the windows are fogged with drizzle and the oven is always full of salty scones. To that source I owe my best poems and the energy to keep on moving.

*

The permanent atheist in the human heart cannot, I think, be fully included in a Protestant pattern of devotion without an erosion of belief. But in Catholic liturgy, on Good Friday when the nails are hammered in, and the Incarnate God dies on the Cross, the moment of religious atheism is fully included. One inhabits a universe from which God has departed. Perhaps for some of us the moment is intended to last for a lifetime, without ikons without usable knowledge, without sensible reassurance. Yet one does not cease to believe because the Ground of belief has departed. One is able to move freely in the gap.

Once I was stuck for part of an evening in a house at the end of one of the shorter railway lines that lead mercifully out of Wellington. The other people in the house were Communists. Unwisely they gave me some money to go and get more grog; and as I recall the occasion, I got the grog all right but drank it myself. It was one way of preserving them from insobriety. Perhaps I should have paid the money back into the Party funds.

There was a young Chinese student in the house. A thin sad-looking boy with glasses. His bedroom had hardly any furniture in it. But on the wall alongside the head of the bed he had pasted a photograph of Joe Stalin, to keep away the bad dreams and to make life in the Kiwi paradise a little more endurable. A much more effective ikon than a film star with big tits. I admired that Chinese boy. He wasn’t going to let anybody deprive him. He wasn’t going to have his belief taken away from him simply because a capitalist society had given him an overseas bursary. Belief cheers me up. I hope he didn’t ever become a crypto-Fascist hyena. I hope he’s growing spuds now in Yenan province, or whatever kind of tuber crop they grow there.

Any quarrel I’ve ever had with Communists was never about atheism. Atheism when it’s strongly held is itself a form of belief. The only real difficulty I’ve found with them is that some of them want to improve the human condition. They hope for more than a drink and a feed and somebody to shack up with – a religious hope no doubt, but it generally means that somebody’s liberty to cut their own throat is going to be restricted. The only human right I would really insist on is the right to be in the wrong.

*

page 394

The problem of an artist is always the problem of Noah – how to get all the animals on board without sinking the Ark. I’ve never seen anybody solve it satisfactorily yet.

Brendan Behan made a good point when he said he’d known people with tuberculosis and people with homosexuality, and they didn’t resemble one another in the slightest. If homosexuality is a disease, I’ve never heard of anybody dying of it. A while back I was sitting in a car with a young man who was trying to ease himself off the grog.

‘I’ve been under a psychiatrist,’ he said. ‘He reckons my real trouble is homosexuality. He says if I’m cured of that, I’ll be able to drink all right. But I’m not sure I want to be cured.’

‘Are you living with another bloke?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you love him?’

‘Yes, I do. I love him more than I’ve ever loved anybody.’

‘Well, you should count yourself lucky, mate. That’s more than most people could say. You know, I didn’t write the Book of Leviticus. If you want to get off the grog, I might be able to help. As far as the other matter goes, it’s your business. I’ve never seen anyone yet who wanted to be cured of love.’

*

I suspect that all human beings are unicorns. A man cannot know himself. If he looks into his own heart, what he finds there is not a self at all, but a cloud formation of associations and memories. If he tries to look into the heart of another, he meets a wall of fire that throws him back. What we commonly call love is a moment of empathy when one seems to know another creature in his or her subjectivity; yet a moment later one finds perhaps that the knowledge was erroneous. The unicorn is a creature whose element is absolute solitude. To avoid despair, one is obliged to postulate an All-Knowing Being by whom each of us is fully known in his or her subjectivity.

These hypotheses are closely related to art. A society founded on a togetherness that only torments people by the illusion of mutual knowledge cannot sustain art, because art needs truth, not illusion, for its sustenance. The sources of art lie in absolute solitude, like artesian wells sunk a thousand feet to bring up water in Central Australia. Perhaps it is harder for our women to become artists because they are more likely to be dominated by the illusion of togetherness. Yet we are joined, as leaves, though separate, are joined to the same branch; and in solitude we obscurely know each other.

*

page 395

A boy grew up in a house that had an inner room that nobody ever entered. That is, nobody admitted to having entered it. But at puberty he found himself outside the door of this room, and pushed the door open and went in. There he saw, as his eyes became accustomed to the half-darkness, a raised stone rim on the floor like the rim of a well. He went over to it and looked down. He could not see the bottom of the well or shaft. He dropped a piece of quartz that he carried in his pocket into it, then waited for several minutes; but there was no answering thud or echo to indicate that the shaft had any bottom. He rushed from the room and sought out his grandfather.

‘Grandfather, what’s that hole in the centre of the house? Who made it? What’s it used for? Has it got any bottom?’

The old man’s face sagged as if age were gripping him harder than before. ‘It’s a – it’s a mystery,’ he said. ‘You notice how the whole house is built to face away from it. At the end of our lives each of us has to go into that room and jump down that shaft. Nobody likes the idea of it. But in the meantime the best thing we can do is forget about it.’

‘I can’t forget about it,’ said the adolescent.

‘You can think about it as much as you like,’ said the old man irritably. ‘But it won’t do you any good. You can’t abolish it and you can’t change it. And for God’s sake, don’t mention it in the hearing of your grandmother! She hates the very notion of it.’ He turned away and began planing a piece of wood.

But the boy did not take his grandfather’s advice. From time to time he returned to the shaft at the centre of the house. He used to sit beside it meditating. His images and ideas seemed to have greater depth when he was there. By degrees he learnt to make poems out of them.

When he fell in love and got married and built a house of his own, he intended to build it without any such central chasm. But strangely, when the house was built, the hole in the ground was there as well, at the centre of it, with the same stone rim; and the architect grew annoyed when he complained about it.

‘I didn’t put it there,’ he said. ‘Don’t blame me. I didn’t make the world. If you had any decency you wouldn’t talk about these things in other people’s hearing.’ He took his fee and left. And the young man raised a family in a house just like those that his neighbours had. But he noticed more and more than his neighbours were loath to admit that any such thing existed in their houses. And on the rare occasions when he started to talk about it to his own children, his wife looked troubled and asked him not to say such things.

‘Not in front of the children, Jack,’ she said. ‘You and I know the world’s not perfect, but we can’t do anything about it. And the children will find out soon enough. In the meantime they need the greatest degree of emotional security we can give them.’ She used to read a great many books written by psychologists about the care of young children; and these all stressed that the page 396 mention of such things was most upsetting for the young.

But one day the man found his son making a model of a house out of plasticine. And in the centre of it he had left a gap.

‘What’s that gap for, Peter?’ asked the man. ‘You don’t leave a gap in the centre of a house.’

‘Every house has a gap in the centre,’ said the boy. ‘It has to be there for people to jump into when they come to the end of their lives.’

And the man said nothing. But he was glad that the boy was not a fool. And he continued to write poems; and the boy continued to make houses out of plasticine, each of them with a gap at the centre.

*

There is no adequate theory of art. This slogan would do as well as any other: To express the thoughts of a dead man among the living and the thoughts of a living man among the dead. An unending coitus interruptus with the world.

What is it that lies behind the love words and the swear words and the poems? The ferocious Earth our mother whose vulvae are a million graves. To come near her, you have to do without anything else; to become part of her, you have to do without your flesh as well. To be very close but not quite part of her – that’s the point where the poems are likely to spring into being. A bareness; an austerity; an entry into a terrible and all-but absolute freedom – the freedom depends on wanting nothing else.

Once in Dannevirke I had an hour or two to wait for a bus. And I looked in the pub window and saw a bottle of vodka and a tin of tomato juice. And I thought – ‘I’ve never tried that mixture.’ Then the second thought arrived – ‘If you get on the grog, mate, you’ll be here for a month.’ So I went and bought some three-penny bars of chocolate wrapped in silver paper. I ate the chocolate and I made boats out of the silver paper. And I sailed the silver paper boats for an hour down the gutters of Dannevirke, which run as full as watercourses all day long. It was a moment of all-but-absolute freedom.

*

An inexplicable happiness often seizes me by the throat; sometimes in company, but more often when I am entirely on my own. I could compare it with the feelings of a man who had had a long liaison with a difficult mistress, an affair crowded with agonies and misunderstandings and soul-searchings, and had come to regard this affair as the centre of his life. And then he sees his mistress, after a final thundering upheaval, walk away from him down the street for the last time; and feels most strangely a vast spirit of exhilaration rise like air or water in the gap she has left, so that he lies on the ground and page 397 rolls over and over in spasms of uncontrollable laughter. And when he gets to his feet he sees another world: the sun, the actual sun, a bare globe of fire; the earth, the actual earth, a huge maternal wilderness; the houses and the people, exact and precise as if hewn out of rock – and in the air, the voices of the living and the dead mingling to form the vowels of a new language. The woman of my parable is perhaps the Tragic Muse. Its final meaning can hardly be stated, but it could be expressed very roughly in these terms: The living and the dead are now a single tribe.

1967 (458)