Rebel Finds Peace in Sanctuary

(by Barry Watts)

Drop-outs and self-propelled outcasts visit Jim Baxter. Society’s deserters. The hunted, the haunted, the hung-up and the hung-over. Society’s miscarriages. Also individuals who nurse an incubating distaste for conformity, and the page 195 disaffected who are increasingly out of sorts with the quality of contemporary life. Society’s rebels and its potential reformers.

No one goes to see Baxter on a whim. Baxter is about as inaccessible as modern man can volunteer to be. Few people are more physically removed from the world this side of the sexton’s shovel. Nor are his visitors invited. But they are welcome if they can find him.

He is secluded in a rent-free unfurnished cottage half-hidden by rank grass and walnut trees so suffused with ancient damp that lichen drips from their uppermost branches, in the paddocks of a dying bush town called Jerusalem. It is damnably difficult to get to. And damnably uncomfortable when you get there. It has no shop, no pub, no conventional conveniences.

To want to see Baxter is to want to see him badly. ‘If a person makes the effort to come here,’ he said, ‘I take it for granted that person is serious about it.’ In the last six months there about been about one hundred and fifty such people. Men, women, girls and youths. Most were unknown to him. All arrived looking for something, and some he says, found it. Whatever they found was largely in their own minds. Baxter pretends no advice, exercises no deliberate influence, demands no involvement, presumes no reform.

If he is anything to them it is a catalyst, and an activist. ‘People come to me because they hope there is something here or something in me that might help them find what they need,’ says Baxter. ‘They had their reasons. Two came looking for a mental as well as physical refuge from the police. Since then the police, too, have come looking.’ He isn’t bothered by it particularly. ‘Some others come to find out who I am, I suppose, and some to find out who they are. Most to find out where they’re going in life, I think. If they find it, that’s good, eh. If they don’t, that’s all right. They’ve lost nothing.’

In his own fashion Baxter has found himself. Or, maybe, a different self. He has left his family, makes no apology for it and admits no guilt, still sees them occasionally and says they understand.

As James K. Baxter he was a poet, established darling of literary lickspittlers, cutely esteemed but safely at arms-length iconoclast of an Establishment whose acclaim and rewards he has ceased to seek. As Jim Baxter, who went to Jerusalem on a purely personal quest and became by accident a confessor to the troubled and a compass rose to the lost, he has no other commitment than selflessness and his ideal of a sane sanctuary for anyone who wants to share it. ‘I see Jerusalem in the future as a mutually supporting community of souls,’ he says. ‘I see it as a prototype, if you like, of places up and down the country where people love each other and live with each other in simplicity and produce no hurt, and where others from the world outside can come to recharge their batteries before they go back.’

Up to ten at a time have stayed with him, bunked on the cold bare boards for a night or a week or a month. Some arrive as others leave, but there are days at a stretch when Baxter is alone. A few come back, two or three more page 196 than once. To them he extends a writer’s hand as yet uncallused: ‘Good to see you, brother.’ Eventually, he hopes, some will choose not to leave.

Undoubtedly part of the grail many pursue to Jerusalem is the primitive appeal of Jerusalemitself. Infantasy itis remote,not easily accessible,unsung. In reality it is the same, and therefore demanding. It is conceivable that some who stay the shortest time can’t take it.

Pilgrims have three ways in. One is up, or down the Wanganui River. At a point where the forest is at its most spectacularly oppressive the white wooden spire of Jerusalem’s old Catholic mission, now all but closed, appears high above the water on a shrouded headland. This is the tourist’s fleeting view. The jet boat makes no stop.

The second access is a joyless backwoods road from Raetihi through another decaying settlement at Pipiriki. It is subject to slips, mud troughs and sudden crumbling precipices.

The third way, the longest but the most pleasing, is by Gentle Annie. Gentle Annie is a romantic portion of forty-odd miles of unsealed track that skirts the river, climbing to magnificent panoramas of the river valley. It is reached from a turnoff north of Wanganui on the Parapara route to the King Country. Farm vehicles, a few freight trucks and the occasional car use Gentle Annie. Baxter has walked it on his infrequent journeys to the main road and a hitched ride down to his family in Wellington.

Baxter has nothing against cities as such, but Wellington is his devil. Apart from his friends there he speaks of it entirely negatively, sees it as a repository of all New Zealand’s anti-virtues, and evidently regards it as a major affirmation of his life and purpose in Jerusalem.

In Jerusalem, he says, he has peace and freedom from the imposition of fake values and society’s authoritarian demands. ‘It’s a very small Maori village. About twenty-five people, or thereabouts. But they accept me. I’m not encroaching. Maoris are brothers, you see. It’s a heritage we’re trying to take from them. We’re forcing them to give it up, just as we’ve robbed them of everything else.’

Jerusalem would stick in a land-grabber’s craw. It is a quiet affront to the sub-division and supermarket mentality. There are no Joneses.

Baxter’s cottage, lent to him by the nuns when the mission staff moved out, has a garden at the back. He is neither a good nor a careful gardener, but this plot has been reasonably provident.

Visitors sometimes bring food and cigarettes, or share the money they have. Baxter earns a little, probably not as much or as often as he needs, writing for newspapers and periodicals. He is not self-sufficient, or even really close to it. It isn’t his ambition. To achieve true sufficiency unto the day thereof Baxter will require the commune of his dreams.

Accusations could be levelled at Baxter. A devout Catholic, it might be said he has aspirations to a spurious sainthood, a manic desire to establish page 197 his own religious order. It might be said that in solitude he covets company, in isolation he craves contact, in poverty he solicits welfare. It would be easy to make him out pompous, contrived, self-satisfied and self-idolatrous – Baxter in his smug little retreat, copping out from reality and responsibility, surrounded by misfits, attended by half-wit sycophants and thrill chasers. Or that he fancies himself a medical mystic to the spiritually maimed.

If he is this dishonest it won’t necessarily show up in his explanations of his motive. Without contrary evidence they have to be taken at face value. In any case it does no harm to give him the benefit of the doubt. And that may be the least justice to which he is entitled.

Baxter will be forty-five this month. His road to Jerusalem took a turning point in Auckland last year. There he was attracted to unemployed people. Their mutual concern for each other and communal attitudes deeply interested him. ‘They worried about each other, helped each other, and shared what they could when it was needed. If one had food they all had food. If one had a dollar they all had a dollar.’ They were anachronisms in an environment devoted to the conventional ethics of getting ahead, beating the other man, accumulating money and status, token gestures to charity.

Baxter was intrigued. Selfless collectives, he decided, pointed to a genuine social alternative. The germ of it was that if compulsory poverty produced Christian responses in those affected, what might voluntary poverty achieve? It’s hardly a new idea. But Baxter brought to it an important modification. It resulted from his concern about the disturbing effects of barren suburban life. He saw them manifested in drug-taking and mental illness.

‘Go into a New Zealand town and you’d think you were in the Gobi Desert,’ he says. ‘They engender loneliness like few places on earth. We’ve got housewives pouring into Kingseat, driven mad with solitude, and kids who smoke pot or inject themselves with junk to escape the crushing emptiness of their parents’ lives. Sterility is a thing we’ve done to ourselves. We have created a mass society in which the irony is that we don’t know how to live together any more.’

Searching for possession of this wisdom Baxter left the dispossessed. Equipped with a poet’s insight he set out almost ritualistically on a private odyssey. He arrived in Jerusalem.

Jerusalem, he says, represents his crossroads. ‘It’s a Catholic town. It has the comfort of my Church. Second, it’s Maori – I think there may be something to be learned from things Maori. Maoris know how to live together. They practise the bigger collective unity principle. It’s highly civilised. That’s the essence of the marae system, and it’s why individual Maoris become so easily lost when they move away from it into the cities and towns.

‘Urban town society has what I call the nuclear family unit, the separate family in a separate house. It exists of itself but often not really for itself. It has destructive tendencies because it’s too bloody small. I’m not against families – page 198 but they’re too small and getting smaller. Mum, dad and two and a half kids. They go mad in each other’s company. People live like this, going mad, and don’t even know their neighbours’ names. This is a well-known absurdity.’

In Jerusalem he sought and found the same comradeship he had discovered among Auckland’s unemployed. He also found that Jerusalem’s style of collective security produced a rare contentment.

Then the callers came, searching in part for something similar, hoping to share Baxter’s perspective. ‘I’ve talked a bit when I’ve gone out of Jerusalem,’ he says. ‘The word gets around.’ From the people who came to see him grew his idea of communes so integrated that its components might better be able to survive as individuals. He saw these communes as also therapeutic. Rehabilitative centres in which a visitor, as a sort of out-patient, could get his life back into perspective through simplicity and example.

Jerusalem is a beginning. At the moment that’s all it is. Baxter claims nothing else. ‘I’m not planning Utopia,’ he says, ‘and I’m not interested in reforming the world. But it seems to me there’s a chance of extending what I have to others. Sure, there are people who are doing well in New Zealand, in their own sense of doing well, but there are others who are caught up in the wheels and being torn to bloody pieces. If we try to fix it that’s good eh.’

His cottage in Jerusalem, he says is too small for his purposes – ‘not that they’re grandiose. If things work out I’ll try to get another place here later. Maybe a cow and some hens to reduce my reliance on getting money. But anything I do will definitely have to depend on the approval of the local community.’

There must be at least a possibility that the sanctity of Jerusalem, so dear to Baxter, would disappear precisely because the success of his hoped-for commune would ruin it. But he doesn’t believe that can happen. Jerusalem’s virtues will remain intact, he says, because there is no real reason why outsiders can’t simply fit in, becoming insiders. ‘You’d need to be sincere to want to come here in the first place,’ he says. ‘There would be no question that the local population would in effect be usurped in any way.’

Which is one reason he is not planning to buy Jerusalem land or property. ‘There has been too much of that done to the Maori in New Zealand already. The Maori Lands Act is the last wringer, designed to squeeze the remaining drop of land ownership from the Maori fabric. Law will take from them what hasn’t already been stolen.’ So he intends to remain dependent on ‘the friendly sufferance, if you like, of the people who own Jerusalem.’ But can he be confident that they will tolerate him extending their sufferance to others?

‘Gently,’ he says. ‘I’ll approach it gently. I’m not going to push it. Put it this way – a cow can wander into a kumara patch, mess it up with its hooves and wander out again. The owners say that’s a shame and clean it up. The other way is not to be a cow. You come in gently, watching where you put your feet, and you help look after the kumara patch. You become one of the page 199 community.’ It sounds good philosophy. Allied to the commune dream it has a genuine spark of conceptual genius. It makes good sense.

Whether Baxter can make it work is something else. Maybe it’s enough for him that, when all or nothing is said and done, he at least will have discovered something worthwhile for himself. He has perhaps disclosed acceptance of this limitation in the poem published with this story that he wrote while we talked. In the meantime he maintains his curiously passive passion. ‘I won’t lose sight of the ideal,’ he says. ‘You can count on that.’

Back in the Wellington of Baxter’s loathing, removed from his contagious tranquillity, it’s hard to tell exactly how or what he communicates to those who go to him to find communication. I can’t even say if he really has helped anyone. The answer is in Jerusalem. If you want it – that’s where you’d have to go.

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