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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Extract 6 from Draft of Autumn Testament

page 469

Extract 6 from Draft of Autumn Testament

Dear Colin,

When I was at Port Chalmers, and your boy cousin came in carrying a plastic bag of fish he had caught at the wharves, I thought, ‘I’d like to stay here, with Colin and Eve. I’d like to rest myself, to share Colin’s peace.

Of course, it would not seem peace to you. After leaving the job at the university and after losing the job at the borstal pre-release hostel, you would be travelling in a gap, the gap I know so well myself where we have our troubling anxiety and our sense of vertigo, and have to depend wholly on God, though the emotions and imagination drag [us] away from him. The peace we want to share in another man’s life is often not apparent to him.

It is the same with this peace. People come and say, ‘You must find it so peaceful.’ Indeed the peace of God is present at Hiruharama. But I lie awake at night, as usual, with tremors in my body. I have worried for a month about the impossibility of paying a final bill of a hundred and seventy dollars when I have only ninety dollars in the bank. I offer the whole matter up to God, but my emotions and imagination insist on bringing it back into my own stupid life. Now, today, Keith Laslen sends me fifty dollars as the first instalment of royalties due to me for the ‘Jerusalem Sonnets’. I have almost enough to pay the bill, and my heart is at rest. But in no time at all it will contain other worries for me. It is impossible, apparently, for this man’s soul to learn detachment. Or perhaps detachment is to comfort the welter of our feelings with a painful equanimity.

This morning I go out to the lavatory, and sit and have a smoke, looking at the conifers that circle round that place and the great cliff of treeferns that slopes up to the sky, as evident a sign as any man could wish for, of the mercy of God. The cigarette I smoke is taken from a new packet that was stored in the pataka for emergencies, Steve brought it out yesterday. I’m tempted not to open the packet. What silliness! I go against the temptation. After I have finished my shit and smoke, I go in and give the packet to Colin, a Maori lad of nineteen who is a member of my ‘family’. Poutini has offered him a job. His relatives need not worry that he will be idle at Hiruharama.

‘Have a smoke, Colin,’ I say. ‘And then put the packet on the table in the middle room, Let everybody have one.’

I sprayed the two gigantic spiders who sat in the corner above the lavatory seat with an insect-killing spray. They were a curious couple. Apparently the female did not wish to eat the male. They were living at peace in their tunnel-shaped web with its many levels and fly-traps. The atmosphere of rangimarie must have touched them. Yet I sprayed them with a touch of sadistic joy, thinking ‘That’ll finish you off!’ I have an instant fear of spiders, especially the largest ones. They huddled up, being suspended by a foreleg, and dropped into the lobster pot.

page 470

God made the spiders. Who am I to kill what I can’t create?

To kill a spider, to keep a pack of cigarettes for oneself; to yield to an auto-erotic reaction after lying awake for five hours with cramps in one’s body. These are my hara, my sins; yet I do not confess them to a priest. How can I say – ‘The faults seem to my conscience to be more or less equal before God, Father. I doubt if they are fully deliberate. The worst is probably my yielding for a moment to the temptation to keep the packet of cigarettes, because God gave us some dominion over the creatures, to kill or save, and God gave us bodies that have peculiar tensions, but to put property before people is the cause of nine-tenths of the evil in the world.’ I can think of very few priests who would understand this Confession. And it would be difficult for a priest to give absolution without understanding.

The condition of scorned, misshapen helplessness before God is the condition I recognise in myself. What is not me in me is an obstacle to his mercy. My foolish imagination will tell me . . . that I will dangle by one foreleg then drop into Hell. But he is wholly merciful even to his unmerciful creatures. It consoles me that Pope John describes himself as a tarantula hidden in the crevice of the rock. No doubt he was speaking the exact truth.

An abyss does open in the rock of my . . . ossification. What comes from there is anguish, a constant flow of pain on account of our . . . [separation] from the transcendent One whom we can’t know by any trick or concept of the active intellect. I trust this anguish. It tells me that God exists and that he is our Father.

The people in the pa are in two minds about the Jerusalem Daybook. Some don’t like the one or two swear words that occur in it. As Father Te Awhitu explained mildly and carefully to me, ‘The Maori is not used to that in books.’

‘When they come in from the hedges and the ditches, does it matter if they swear?’ I asked him.

He is still my good friend.

Any pain for the pa people is very painful to me. Yet I think the book had to be written. It could be the first poor plank of a bridge by which those who have lost Maoritanga, or have never known that it existed, may be able to begin to regain it.

To me it seems right to bow the head to our Maori benefactors. If they insisted we should leave . . . – my ‘family’ . . . that have come in place of the open-door community that was dissolved last year – I would go at once with no complaint. My sense of obligation to the local pakeha farmers is much less. I have from time to time been given a cup of tea in their houses. [The following two sentences are scored through: ‘To some I have feelings of friendship. There are some to whom I feel hostile.’] But I doubt if they ever regarded the community as something worth preserving. Most of the people in our Church would probably share their opinion.

The aim of the original Jerusalem community was to perform works of page 471 mercy and spiritual rehabilitation – to share material goods, to comfort the lonely, to help the soul to become fruitful. In part it succeeded. In part it may have failed. What is the aim of the ‘family’ to which I now belong? If we can’t allow the drowning on board, what good is our boat?

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