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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

I Care

I Care

(a report by Karl du Fresne)

James K. Baxter has spent a major slice of his life writing about society’s ills. Only more recently has he seen fit to actively seek a cure for them.

Baxter – poet and playwright, sometime philosopher and former postman – has become an institution of anti-institutionalism in New Zealand.

In his speech, even more than in his writing, he is devoutly, almost fanatically, and very fluently anti-system. The dollar and modern society – and the system which has made them interdependent – are his prime targets.

Yet unlike some others who preach a similar gospel of non-conformity, Jim Baxter is a living example of his own ideals brought to fruition. He cannot be begrudged his eccentricities because he is a complete and sincere individual.

He plays out his self-adopted role – the undernourished stout defender of personal freedom – to the hilt. Individuality and personal freedom make up a large slice of his credo.

He has only recently sprouted a Christlike beard, but in contemporary terms James K. was a hippy before the ‘now’ generation ever dreamed of taking over Albert Park.

His latest project is, in fact very hip. But at the same time it’s an expression of his dissatisfaction with the way things are going, and his own way of coming to grips with problems that haven’t been sorted out otherwise.

His project is a commune – situated very aptly, at Jerusalem on the Wanganui River. There the bearded Baxter and his disciples live a calm and unfettered life. His disciples include drug addicts, the people who, he claims, have been ‘treated as objects to be pushed about like chessmen’.

He maintains that no cures come out of hospitals and jails, where such page 187 people are commonly sent. His own solution lies in communal life – ‘You must have it if you’re going to get anywhere’.

Baxter’s first experiments with the commune took place in Auckland, with an old house full of young people. He decided later that his Jerusalem retreat – given to him by the Catholic mission nuns there – was better equipped for the job.

For a basis to work on he took, ‘perhaps half-consciously’, Maori social life. Aroha, a Maori term for what Baxter calls communal love, and which more ordinary folk would possibly call non-sexual group affection, if they had ever heard of such a thing in the first place, plays a significant part in the Jerusalem project.

He considers New Zealanders to be in short supply of mutual affection: ‘If I met a friend in the street and embraced him, a rugby type would probably regard me as a homosexual. People in this country are very reserved emotionally.’

His assumption isn’t based merely on the Maori example. He has seen his ideal of communal love flourishing in South-East Asia, India and France, in small rural communities that are deprived materially but stronger than ours in a spiritual sense.

The advice Baxter gives – free of charge – to friends at his commune is: ‘Love one another; hold the head up – do not allow yourself to be browbeaten; share things; and speak the truth, except where it will be used against you.’

Sharing is vital to the success of the project: ‘You offer twenty cigarettes around a group of people and the cigarette packet becomes a sort of sacrificial offering of deep religious significance.’

All that is available in James K. Baxter’s commune is what he describes as the basic necessities: food, shelter, clothing, company and, for him, an altar (he is a devout Catholic).

‘I do not necessarily advocate this (the commune) as a majority solution,’ he says, ‘but I will try to practise it as a minority solution for those who have been hardest-hit.’

He means the hardest hit by society. And his digressions on the shortcomings of society are long and fervent, interrupted only by an occasional scratch at his flowing beard.

He attacks the hard, middle-class core whose security is ‘totally dependent on their bank account’.

He attacks materialism and could even be regarded as a rebel against the law-and-order system. In fact, he admits he is – but only to a certain extent.

He says we value property to an extraordinary degree, and cites armed bank guards and security couriers as an example that human life is regarded as less important than money.

He admits a need for law and order. If he had a maniac on his doorstep, he says, he’d call the police if there was nothing he could do himself.

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He accepts the need for laws against harmful drugs and against sexual assault, but tempers this by saying property laws are excessive.

He claims law impinges too much upon personal freedom and deals wrongly with those people who cannot ‘adjust’.

He regards his commune as an escape from normality – a normality characterised by dullness, a perpetual worried expression and by domestic disorders. Our society, he says, is not characteristically joyful.

He describes people who ‘cannot adjust’ as those who cannot regard the dollar sign and a good education as the criteria of normality, in which case he himself is a good case of maladjustment. And he’d be the first to admit it.

In five years, according to Baxter, the use of drugs and other ‘symptoms of disorder’ will have multiplied. But he suggests they are only symptoms of disorder because they are a means of alleviating pain.

‘A man has an operation so he uses morphine. That’s reasonable. A man’s wife dies, so he goes out and gets stoned – that’s reasonable.’

But the pain Baxter talks about is pain which he considers has been inflicted by society. So for the time being he has laid down his pen to work on his own pet painkiller, his commune.

Perhaps he might now be experiencing the doubts expressed by another poet, W.H. Auden, when he wrote: ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’.

The commune, Baxter says, is the beginning of a beginning.

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