Sunday

brief #55 Supplement: Babylon (2016)



brief: The other New Zealand literary journal

Issue 55 Supplement: How Many Miles To Babylon:

How Many Miles to Babylon?
Three Faces of Mike Johnson’s Lear


"Did Mike Johnson know that there had once been a “Babylon” on the Kaipara when he chose that name for his imaginary village? I don’t know. I haven’t asked him.

Even if he had, would it make much difference to the nature of the novel he dreamt up: that strange mixture of courtly erudition and intense, provincial ignorance? Not directly, no. His larger point would, I’m sure, remain valid in either case.

Why bother to go and look for it, then?

I suppose, if I were to be honest, that the impetus for this quest – and the larger study of “Speculative Fictional” landscapes within New Zealand which it forms a part of – is largely supplied by its paradoxical nature …

– Jack Ross

The following is a colour supplement for Jack Ross‘ essay, How Many Miles to Babylon? which appears in brief issue 55. All photographs: Bronwyn Lloyd (5/8/16).



Mike Johnson: Lear (1986)


Mike Johnson's dystopian SF novel is set on a waterway described only as "the river," in a tiny settlement called "Babylon."



Tangiteroria


Scaffolding at Tangiteroria, on SH14 between Whangarei and Dargaville.



Northern Wairoa River




Northern Wairoa River


The upper reaches of "the river" - at Tangiteroria.



The view


The view from Tangiteroria, looking towards the West Coast.



Tangowahine


A prototype for Babylon? The tiny settlement of Tangowahine, on the way towards the coast.



Wairoa River (Dargaville)


Funnily enough, the Wairoa River was always referred to simply as “the river” by the inhabitants of the Kapipara. Here it is at its widest, looking over towards Te Kopuru.



Babylon Coast Road


The sign is on SH 12, 6 kms north of Dargaville.



Babylon Coast Road




Stop!




Babylon Coast Road


Storm clouds coming over the hills from Babylon: the former gum-digging settlement down near Baylys Beach.

The full text of How Many Miles to Babylon? Three Faces of Mike Johnson’s Lear by Jack Ross appears in brief issue 55.




(2-25/12/16)

The brief blog: [available at: http://www.briefthejournal.nz/issue-55-babylon/].

[157 wds]






Friday

Poetry Shelf, Poets' Choice (2016)



[NZ Poetry Shelf]

Paula Green:
Poetry Shelf’s Annual-Books-We-Loved-in -2016 Lists



    Jen Crawford: Koel (2016)


  • Jen Crawford. Koel. Introduction by Divya Victor (Melbourne: Cordite Books, 2016).

  • Jen Crawford’s wonderful new book of poems is my first pick for 2016. Mind you, there’s been nothing simple or straightforward about Jen’s development as a poet – from the fractured narratives of Admissions or Pop Riveter to the post or trans-human thoughtscapes of her latest book. Anything can speak in a Crawford poem: a rock, a bird, a human – but does it choose to? That’s the question. Also, what might it have to say? The world can no longer be divided up neatly into natural and artificial halves in her vision: nor is it any longer talking to us or trying to instil moral lessons. Rather, it is, and the question of what it is (or might be) is a matter of pressing concern to Jen. The Koel is a bird with a particularly loud and raucous call – a little like the dredgers that inhabit the canals, half-amphibious, half-land-creatures, in the Eastern cities where so many of these poems were written in (as she tells us) a hypnagogic state between waking and sleeping. This is a book to read over and over again – to experience in many moods.



  • Christopher Ricks & Jim McCue, ed. The Poems of T. S. Eliot: The Annotated Text. 2 vols (London: Faber, 2015).

  • Ever since I first picked up The Waste Land as a teenager and fell under its spell, I’ve been wondering just how Eliot got there – and what happened to him afterwards. If any of you have similar questions then this rather monstrous version of his complete poetical works will offer you as many answers as there have been commentators on his immense, almost unprecedented eminence over modern English-language poetry. There’s a tidied-up version of the “original” Waste Land here – free of its editing by Ezra Pound. There are notes and drafts and commentaries beyond all reason and proportion. It’s either a treasure trove or a madhouse: it’s hard to decide which. I certainly wouldn’t be without it, though – and while it may not be all that easy to read through, it’s very rewarding to browse in.



    Erin McPhee: Anne Carson's Float (2016)


  • Anne Carson. Float: "A collection of twenty-two chapbooks whose order is unfixed and whose topics are various. Reading can be freefall" (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016).

  • It’s quite funny to see just how mixed is the response on Amazon.com to this, Anne Carson’s latest opus. The fans are fine with it, of course: yet another example of her wide-ranging erudition and versatility of invention. The less whole-hearted complain about the difficulty of actually reading this collection of mini-chapbooks. And, to be honest, the whole thing does resemble the little sets of pamphlets one often gets issued with in offices far more than the kind of arthouse production represented by NOX or Antigonick. One guy actually said he was waiting for the hardback version (I presume there will never be a hardback version?). Needless to say (for anyone who’s ever looked into one of my own books), I’m fine with gimmicky layouts, so I’m really just looking forward to getting to grips with the wide-ranging set of Carsonian idées fixes on offer here.



  • Don W. King, ed. The Collected Poems of C. S Lewis: A Critical Edition (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 2015).

  • I don’t quite know why I have such a soft spot for C. S. Lewis’s poetry. I was brought up on the Narnia books, then switched my allegiance to the science fiction trilogy and Till We Have Faces when I got a bit older. But why the poetry? How could the same person who enjoyed the fractured Modernist deathscapes of Eliot and Pound enjoy the simple pieties of C. S. Lewis? I guess because there’s nothing simple about them: from his early attempts to write long narratives in verse, to the wonderfully crafted (albeit somewhat occasional) poems he produced in later life, there’s a definite charm to almost all of his work in this genre. While his First World War poems cannot bear comparison to Owen’s or Rosenberg’s, they do have their own logic and place in his development as one of the most arrestingly visual of Fantasy writers. Some of the early pieces about his love for his birthplace, County Down in Ireland, are also beautiful: quite perfect in their way. Who cares whether a poet can be called “major” or not? Writing a few poems a reader feels compelled to go back to is, to my mind, the only distinction worth having.


(25/11/16)

'Poetry Shelf’s Annual-Books-We-Loved-in -2016 Lists.' Ed. Paula Green.
NZ Poetry Shelf: a poetry page with reviews, interviews, and other things.
[Available at: https://nzpoetryshelf.com/2016/12/05/poetry-shelfs-annual-books-we-loved-in-2016-lists/ (5/12/16)]

[757 wds]


Poetry Box: Paula Green






Thursday

Catching a ride on a paradox (2016)



Keith Nunes: catching a ride on a paradox (2016)


It was apparent to me when I first started to read Keith Nunes' poems - at any rate those first few that crossed my desk as an editor - that there was a freshness and directness to his view of the world which I found immensely appealing. I don't mean to imply that they seemed artless - rather, that they were artful in the best way: concealing their subtleties of craft beneath that effortless vernacular voice Keith can, apparently, summon at will. They were about very real things, too: love, lust, landscape, leisure, longing. Since then he's gone on from strength to strength, but never losing that initial acuity and lack of vainglorious display.


(28/9/16)

Keith Nunes, catching a ride on a paradox: poetry and short fiction (Rotorua, 2016): blurb.

[114 wds]






Saturday

On the Road to Nowhere (2016)



Ingrid Horrocks & Cherie Lacey, ed.: Extraordinary Anywhere: Essays from Aotearoa New Zealand (2016)

On the Road to Nowhere:
Revisiting Samuel Butler's Erewhon



Samuel Butler: Erewhon (1872 / 1973)



Over the Range

The Erewhonians say that we are drawn through life backwards; or again, that we go onwards into the future as into a dark corridor. Time walks beside us and flings back shutters as we advance; but the light thus given often dazzles us, and deepens the darkness which is in front. We can see but little at a time, and heed that little far less than our apprehension of what we shall see next . . .
(Samuel Butler, Erewhon)[1]

Samuel Butler's Erewhon is, literally, nowhere: an inversion of Utopia, Thomas More’s imaginary state in (or near) South America. It is, however, reachable from somewhere — or rather, from Erewhemos, the state contiguous to Erewhon described at the end of its 1901 sequel, Erewhon Revisited.

People often forget that the subtitle of Erewhon is ‘Over the Range.’ I have in my mind’s eye the cover of the mid-1970s edition of Erewhon, in the Golden Press series of New Zealand classics. It shows a lone rider in a Southern Alpine landscape — a detail from a 19th-century realist landscape painting called ‘The Waimakariri River Bed’.[2] This image, evoking the mood of James K. Baxter’s ‘High Country Weather’ (‘Upon the upland road/ Ride easy, stranger’), certainly had the effect of reinscribing the story’s New Zealand setting in my imagination when I first came across it as a teenager.

As a born-and-bred Aucklander, I had few associations with the South Island and the Canterbury Plains beyond a few family camping trips. My father lived in Templeton, outside Christchurch, for a single year during his childhood, but his principal memory seemed to be of the long straight roads, with deep drainage ditches on either side, which my grandfather would cycle along—his two boys taking turns to ride pillion behind him.

Nevertheless, when I came across the following description of Erewhon in Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi’s otherwise authoritative Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1980), I felt almost offended:
. . . a kingdom probably in central or northern Australia [my emphasis], though its location has been deliberately concealed by travellers who have visited it. Those geographers who have placed it in New Zealand (Upper Rangitata district, Canterbury) have not taken into account the sheer immensity of its land surface.[3]
Given the deliberately over-literal and tongue-in-cheek nature of Manguel and Guadalupi’s book, it would be silly to resent too strongly their reassignment of Erewhon to our larger, brasher neighbour (though precedents such as Pavlova, Phar Lap and Crowded House do spring to mind). It still seems a bit odd, though, that a place so unequivocally nowhere should have to be so firmly located somewhere.

Perhaps that subtitle ‘Over the Range’ becomes particularly significant here. It denotes movement from here to there, from the known to the unknown, from the closely observed (by Butler himself, among others) Canterbury of the 1860s, to the Otherwhere of the imagination.

We need to go somewhere else to see where we’ve been: to the unknown place to look back on what we thought we knew. And, like all binaries, this dichotomy between nowhere and somewhere, Erewhon and Erewhemos, suggests something in between: the true subject of investigation, albeit one which can only be taken by surprise, as in a Knight’s move.




Arthur’s Pass


An old friend of mine, whom I’ll be calling Graeme for the purposes of this essay, owned a bach in Arthur’s Pass for a few years in the late 1990s. We were close at school and university, but I’d seen little of him since he moved to the small Canterbury town of Darfield to work as their rural GP.

I only visited his bach (or should I say ‘crib’?) once, for a single night. I’d often wondered why he talked about it so much, and went to such extraordinary lengths to get there. From the road it looked like nothing much: a rough discoloured shed with walls of corrugated iron.

But then I walked inside and saw the view.

It’s not that it was particularly grandiose: no Albert Bierstadt ranges of snowy mountains towering up into infinity. Rather, it was the more intimate charm of forest and valley, with a single rocky stream. When I awoke next morning, the fog had already rolled in.

Graeme had gone for a walk, and I was left alone in the cabin. I looked out the window at the trees looming through the mist, and felt a kind of joy at the perfection of this place, a mood of quiet contentment such as I hardly remember experiencing anywhere else.

‘This would make the perfect location for a writers’ retreat,’ I thought, and later, after we’d driven back down to the Plains, hinted as much to Graeme. He didn’t take the bait. I never succeeded in making my way back there again—though not for want of trying.

Later, when he moved down to Dunedin after a marriage breakup, he was forced to sell it in order to make up the price of a house deposit. I’m sure he’s regretted it many times since—as have I. Perhaps it couldn’t have lived up to that miraculous first impression if I’d gone back there later, on my own, but I doubt that. It was just a magical spot, a place of peace and refreshment.

My friend the Christchurch poet John O’Connor once told me of an experience he’d had during his teens, when he and a few friends drove out of the city and the working-class suburb he’d grown up in, and stopped for a short walk in the hills on the way to Arthur’s Pass.

The others got bored quite fast, he said, but (as he put it), ‘I felt like I wanted to sing, as if I couldn’t believe anything could possibly be so beautiful.’ John died earlier this year, but I can’t help remembering that story whenever I think about Canterbury and the Southern Alps.




The Statues

A few steps brought me nearer, and a shudder of unutterable horror ran through me when I saw a circle of gigantic forms, many times higher than myself, upstanding grim and grey through the veil of cloud before me.
One of the strangest things in Erewhon (not to mention its sequel) are the repeated references to the ring of statues which guard the unnamed colony the narrator lives in from the imaginary country which borders it: ‘a sort of Stonehenge of rude and barbaric figures . . . [with a] superhumanly malevolent expression upon their faces.’

It actually takes the narrator some time to realise that these ‘were not living beings, but statues.’
They were barbarous — neither Egyptian, nor Assyrian, nor Japanese—different from any of these, and yet akin to all. They were six or seven times larger than life, of great antiquity, worn and lichen-grown. They were ten in number.
What’s more, not only do they look forbidding — ‘Each was terrible after a different kind. One was raging furiously, as in pain and great despair; another was lean and cadaverous with famine; another cruel and idiotic’ — but they sound frightening, too:
The inhuman beings into whose hearts the Evil One had put it to conceive these statues, had made their heads into a sort of organ-pipe, so that their mouths should catch the wind and sound with its blowing. It was horrible. However brave a man might be, he could never stand such a concert, from such lips and in such a place.[4]
In narrative terms, too, one could say that these figures constitute a barrier: between the circumstantial verisimilitude of his opening chapters, so clearly drawn from Butler’s own observations of the Canterbury colony (as recorded in his 1863 book A First Year in Canterbury Settlement)[5] and the fantastic inversions which characterise the No-place his protagonist would shortly enter.




The Cautery


It was the early 90s. I’d been at an academic conference in Dunedin, and thought I’d take the opportunity to drop in on Graeme on my way home. I accordingly took the bus from Dunedin to Christchurch, which was (in retrospect) a pretty stupid thing to do.

Tempers were already wearing thin when I came rolling into the depot a couple of hours late—due to various misadventures on the way— and I could see that Graeme’s family could probably have done without this lengthy interruption to their day. So tense, in fact, was the atmosphere on the way back to his place that I began to wonder if it would even be possible to last out the weekend I’d budgeted on staying.

I mentioned to Graeme, more to make conversation than anything else, that I’d been having trouble with nosebleeds all through my stay in Dunedin, and had had to run out of a couple of sessions with blood on my shirt and two fingers pinched shut on my nasal passages.

Nothing could be easier to fix, he told me. He could cauterize my nose: seal shut the vein which must be causing the problem. He had the tools to hand in his surgery down the road.

Since both of my parents were GPs, I’d got into the bad habit of relying on family and friends for medical advice, and — as the youngest of three brothers — had (in any case) a certain ingrained tendency to see doctors as authority figures. Reluctant though I was to go along with this plan, I let him persuade me to climb back into the car.

It was long after hours, and we were the only ones in the surgery. It was a modern pre-fab, but the garish religious pamphlets and posters which his partner, an evangelical Christian, had left lying around the place gave it a strange gothic atmosphere. He told me to strip, then strapped me down on the table (‘In case you flinch too much when I put it in and it ends up in the wrong place.’)

The cautery, the small metal rod he was proposing to stick up my nose, took a while to heat up, and — in the meantime — he took a good look up my nostril to see the exposed vein. It was, it seemed, quite visible and ready to be seared shut.

The process was quite intrusive (as you might expect): not directly painful, exactly, but certainly very uncomfortable. Nor is snuffing the scent of one’s own scorched flesh ever exactly pleasant.

I did think of some things while I lay there, though. What was I doing there, for one thing? Why had I agreed to this bizarre procedure in the first place? ‘Never again, under any circumstances,’ was my main thought. The next was to wonder how many more minutes I would have to endure before I could leave.

After that trip we didn’t make contact again for several years.




Leap, John, leap!


However peculiar Erewhon may seem to contemporary readers, so many of the attitudes and controversies it mocks having faded away over the intervening century and a half, Erewhon Revisited is stranger.

Even the way it’s told, a deathbed account by ‘George Higgs’ (the original narrator, named now for the first time) of his return to Erewhon, recounted secondhand by his son John, seems so diffuse and clumsy as to call into question the accuracy of everything that’s being reported.

Perhaps this was originally designed as a sly dig at the authenticity of the Gospels—the main target of Butler’s satire this time round—but it ends up sounding more like a tribute to other fin-de-siècle novels by the likes of Conrad and James, with their unreliable narrators and obsession with the vagaries of human psychology.

Even the ring of statues appears to have changed in the intervening twenty years. His English-born son John reports that his father found them ‘smaller than he had expected’:
He had said in his book—written many months after he had seen them—that they were about six times the size of life, but he now thought that four or five times would have been enough to say.
But if these statues had ‘grown’ in his imagination, what of the far more startling discoveries he had made in Erewhon itself? Were those to be called into question, too? Certain other important aspects of their appearance seem curiously altered, also:
Their mouths were much clogged with snow, so that even though there had been a strong wind (which there was not) they would not have chanted.
The statues recur in the story when Higgs is being assisted in his escape over the range by his newly encountered Erewhonian son George: ‘Towards noon they caught sight of the statues and a halt was made which gave my father the first pang he had felt that morning, for he knew that the statues would be the beginning of the end.’ Higgs and his son do, however, make a ‘solemn covenant’ at the statues that they will meet again:
‘XXI. i. 3, i.e. our December 9, 1891, I am to meet George at the statues, at twelve o’clock, and if he does not come, I am to be there again on the following day.’
Higgs adds one proviso: ‘if I cannot come I will send your brother.’

The next chapter of the book, however, is headed ‘My Father reaches Home, and Dies not long Afterwards.’

John is nevertheless determined to meet his long-lost Erewhonian brother, and travels out to the colonies to try to make this rendezvous. He finally succeeds in reaching the statues on the appointed day, but ‘could not refrain from some disappointment at finding them a good deal smaller than I had expected’:
My father, correcting the measurement he had given in his book, said he thought that they were about four or five times the size of life; but really I don’t think they were more than twenty feet high, any one of them . . . There was no wind, and as matter of course, therefore, they were not chanting.
This constant insistence that they are somehow reducing in size – from the forty or fifty feet of the first estimate, to the thirty-odd feet of the second, to no ‘more than twenty feet high, any one of them’ — seems a curious point to stress, even in context. Why, too, should their failure to chant be considered such a ‘matter of course’?
. . . when sleep came it was accompanied by a strange dream. I dreamed that I was by my father’s bedside, watching his last flicker of intelligence, and vainly trying to catch the words that he was not less vainly trying to utter. All of a sudden the bed seemed to be at my camping-ground, and the largest of the statues appeared, quite small, high up the mountain side, but striding down like a giant in seven-league boots till it stood over me and my father, and shouted out, ‘Leap, John, leap!’ In the horror of this vision I woke.[6]
The meeting of the two brothers takes place a day late, due to the fact that ‘the year XX had been a leap year with the Erewhonians, and 1891 in England had not.’ This, it appears, is the true meaning behind that strange cry in his dream: ‘Leap, John, leap!’ Our narrator also remarks that ‘George gained an immediate ascendancy over me, but ascendancy is not the word—he took me by storm; how, or why, I neither know nor want to know.’

Disproportionate emphasis is, I think, the predominant impression given by the constant recurrence of these statues in Butler’s two books about Erewhon. They are (we are told initially) ‘terrible,’ ‘barbarous’ — and musical, but only in a ‘horrible’ way. Their size, moreover, seems to fluctuate inexplicably.

Either, one is forced to conclude, they serve as a rather redundant addition to Butler’s otherwise fairly straightforward satire on the mores and opinions of Victorian England, or they have some other function in his narrative, express some anxiety which cannot find a clearer voice there.




North East Valley


Last year I visited Graeme again, this time at his house in North East Valley, Dunedin.

I’d stayed there before a couple of times, and had watched its gradual decline from a basically functional living space — albeit with a few too many boxes stacked in odd corners — into a warren of unread papers and books. Even so, seeing it now came as a bit of a shock.

The steeply sloping section was completely overgrown. The lawn had been left unmown for so long that the grass was higher than my waist. Neighbourhood cats had scoured tunnels through the high grass, and mewed in protest as I tried to beat a way up along the path.

I’d warned him what time I’d be arriving, but even so there was no answer to my repeated knocking and ringing of the bell at the back door. In desperation, I made the long, perilous journey to the front door, which had not been used for years, and could only be reached by pushing right through the heart of the jungle.

No answer there, either: I could see that there was a light on inside, but the porch was overgrown and dusty, with an old rotting cushion disintegrating on one of the wicker chairs.

I made my way back. Eventually, after further knocking, he did answer the door, explaining that he’d been listening to the radio and had lost track of time.

It didn’t look as if there had been any attempt to tidy up in advance of my visit, but Graeme claimed this was not the case—that if I’d come to the house a week or so before I’d have found it impossible to move from room to room.

He admitted to suffering from a lack of energy and motivation, and even to the probability that one might have to describe this condition as a kind of depression. He did not, however, think that treatment or counselling would be likely to help (‘There are so many factors involved, most of which they wouldn’t be able to help with.’)

The visit cannot be said to have gone well. I learned quite quickly that it was unwise to let him drive me anywhere (he had a habit of overtaking trucks on blind corners which was disconcerting, to say the least). It was his behaviour in public which was really awkward, though.

On the one occasion we went out to dinner together, he distinguished himself by dropping his fork on the floor and demanding a clean one to replace it. No sooner had the new one arrived than he dropped that on the floor, too — or, rather, catapulted it there while banging the table to emphasise some loud point he was making. He was about to call out for a new one when he caught my eye. After that he contented himself with making an immense fuss over the amount of butter they’d put on the Naan bread, then complaining about the dessert.

His property in the valley was a couple of blocks down from that ‘steepest street in the world’ which the local scarfies like to roll down in wheelie bins (until one of them got killed doing it, that is). It’s a beautiful spot, with a great view of the wooded hills opposite, and even a certain amount of sunlight — for Dunedin.

As for the house itself, it’s well-built and sound, though certainly suffering from neglect. Before flying out, I took the gamble of doing some tidying up: pinning up a few of the beautiful Indonesian and Indian artefacts Graeme had picked up in his travels, purging a few hundred kgs of old magazines and waste paper, and rearranging his lounge and dining room so one had space to sit down in them.

Graeme seemed quite grateful that I’d taken the trouble, which was a relief. People don’t always like you to go sorting through their stuff while they’re out for the day. Who knows what you might find?




A Field Guide to the Other World


I remember once trying to explain to the arch-sceptic Graeme my interest in occultism and the supernatural. I’d just been reading Patrick Harpur’s Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Other World, so I tried to account for this fascination using one of Harpur’s paradigms:
The Otherworld mirrors ours. It can be benign, like the paradises that reverse this world’s suffering; or it can be uncanny, like the realm some tribes ascribe to witches who walk or talk backwards, wear their heads upside down, their legs back to front.
What better analogy could one find to Erewhon? Its names — ‘Senoj Nosnibor, Ydgrun, Thims’ — that run backwards; its location in the Antipodes where everything is ‘upside down’; even its clothes worn, like Professor Panky’s, ‘like an Englishman . . . but turned the wrong way round, so that when his face was towards my father his body seemed to have its back towards him and vice versa’?

The basic point of Harpur’s book, I told Graeme, was to postulate a ‘daimonic reality’ which exists — either literally or psychologically (Harpur sees little distinction between the two) — as a contrast to our world of causation and certainty. Ghosts, poltergeists, UFOs, lake monsters, Bigfoot, the yeti, fairies, angels, demons all inhabit this reality, but not — for the most part — as we see them.

The ‘glamour’ which these beings are able to throw across the perceptions of mortals who chance into this uncanny sphere means that the size, shape and essential nature of all that they see there, including its inhabitants, is always open to question: hence Harpur’s contention that the description of a haunting and a UFO abduction narrative may be basically the same thing.

This approach is indebted to C.G. Jung’s classic Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, where the Swiss psychologist sets to one side the question of the objective existence of such phenomena, but rather looks into the psychological implications of this transformation of the more traditional apparitions of folklore into spaceships and aliens. Fear was behind it, he concluded: anxiety over the atom bomb and the accelerating rate of post-war technological change.

Harpur, too, wishes to see some larger significance in the exponentially multiplying field of anecdotal and analytical accounts of paranormal events. The fact that people continue to experience such things and to ascribe so much personal significance to these encounters and sightings is, in his view, far more important than whether they can be claimed to be ‘real’.

Real in what sense? The fact that such phenomena can seldom be persuaded to recur in laboratories does not, in itself, render them ‘non-existent’. Can feelings such as love, hatred or even pain be measured according to objective outside criteria? Does this make them, too, unreal?

Pain is only too real to those who suffer from it. It can come as a shock to the congenitally literal-minded to realise that the extent of any pain — physical or psychological — can only be determined anecdotally, by asking the person experiencing it.

My own repeated readings of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon at different points of my life cannot be said to add to much more than a series of indeterminable questions.

Where is the book set? What is the true significance of the statues? Why does Butler (or rather, his narrator) stress their reduction in size over time? Why, in particular, does he take the trouble to transcribe the particular musical phrase from Handel that their moanings most resemble?

One of the few constants at all stages of my friend Graeme’s life has been a love for music: choral music in particular. He’s sung in choirs for many years, and can improvise effortlessly on virtually any musical instrument: pianos, recorders — organs.

I suppose, for him, this constitutes the best way to step out of his life: ignore the frustrations and rages which seem to haunt him like furies, and disappear into a counter-realm of order and harmony.

The composition of Erewhon must have served a similar purpose for Butler: a way of examining the assumptions — religious, colonialist, racist — of his upbringing: from the distance not just of the farthest point on Earth from the oppressive values of his father’s rectory, but from a new world altogether. He stepped through the looking-glass into another place in order to look back. Or, as he himself puts it in ‘the world of the unborn’:
. . . we presage the leading lines of that which is before us, by faintly reflected lights from dull mirrors that are behind.
For me, I suppose that this account of a few visits to the South Island is a way of talking about how the story of a friendship can mirror our feelings both about a place and the progress of a life. For me, Dunedin and the Alps are inextricably bound up with my meetings with Graeme: the original affection overlaid with a certain frustration at where he’s ended up now. But it also constitutes a gauge: a mirror of the nowheres I’ve been, in light of the somewhere I hope I’m approaching.

Patrick Harpur’s rules for travel in the Otherworld seem to ring only too true for all these contingencies:
Travel light. Don’t believe everything you’ve been told, either for good or ill . . . Observe local customs; respect local gods. Talk less than you listen. Try to see as well as sightsee. Be polite but firm; take advice but do not be gullible. If in doubt, smile. Do not laugh at the natives, but don’t be afraid to laugh ... Don’t join in the dancing unless you really have learnt the steps.[7]





Notes:

1. Samuel Butler. Erewhon, or Over the Range. 1872. New Zealand Classics (Auckland: Golden Press Pty Ltd., in association with Whitcombe and Tombs Limited, 1973), 156.

2. by one “J. Attwood” (= T. R. [Thomas Reginald] Attwood) [information from Una Platts. Nineteenth Century New Zealand Artists: A Guide & Handbook (Christchurch: Avon Fine Prints Limited, 1980), 27. Available at: http://christchurchcitylibraries.com/Heritage/Publications/Art/Platts-19thC/Platts-19thCArtists.pdf.

3. Alberto Manguel & Gianni Guadalupi. The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Illustrated by Graham Greenfield. Maps & Charts by James Cook. 1980 (London: Granada, 1981), 113.

4. This, and the previous two quotations, come from Butler, 1973, pp. 47–48.

5. Compiled by his father, the Rev Thomas Butler, from essays and letters sent home, but subsequently repudiated by Butler himself, who would not allow it to be reprinted in his lifetime (information from Samuel Butler. A First Year in Canterbury Settlement. 1863. Ed. A.C. Brassington & P.B. Maling. Auckland & Hamilton: Blackwood & Janet Paul, 1964).

6. This, and the previous four quotations, come from Samuel Butler, Erewhon Revisited, The Travellers’ Library, 1901 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927) 37, 279, 281 and 301–1.

7. Patrick Harpur. Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Other World. 1994 (Ravensdale, WA: Pine Winds Press, 2003), 174.





(18/2-1/12/15)

Extraordinary Anywhere: Essays on Place from Aotearoa New Zealand. Edited by Ingrid Horrocks & Cherie Lacey. ISBN 978-177-65607-0-7 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2016): 135-49.

[4702 wds]






Friday

The Psychopathic God (2016)



Landfall 231 (Autumn 2016)

The Psychopathic God


Tim Corballis. R.H.I. ISBN 978-086473-982-7. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2015. 208 pp. RRP $NZ 30.00.



Tim Corballis: R.H.I. (2015)


It reminded me of the idea of a language game that the philosopher Wittgenstein used to talk about, not really meaning that language games were things that happened but that language is like a game, and that we play games with who we are and with our language, not real games but that it’s all make believe, even if it’s not. (pp.22-23)
In many ways it’s easier to say what Tim Corballis’s new book isn’t than what it is. It certainly doesn’t constitute a conventional novel, even by the most liberal definition. Nor, really, do its two discrete sections operate as independent (or even co-dependent) novellas. They’re much stranger and more fragmentary than that.

The author claims to detect in his own work “a history of the twentieth century,” – albeit an “incomplete” one, “produced by accident” – but working out precisely what he means by that is almost as complex as trying to make sense of the stories themselves (if they really are stories, sustained pieces of make believe, that is).
Having started I had to carry on. Doing what? … I had to admit that I was here mostly for a warm place to sit.
How true that is of so much research, particularly in those strange repositories of obsolete intellectual endeavour called archives. Corballis has clearly caught the archival bug with a vengeance, but the larger significance of the bits and pieces of information he unearthed in Berlin and London, and (later) back home in New Zealand, seems mostly to have emerged in retrospect.

There’s a revealing remark near the beginning of the second novella, “H”:
Did the sense of a PRESENCE simply grow out of my research? It should be clear that I absolutely do not believe in ghosts, or in any kind of special paranormal sensitivity on my part—these documents are the products of an ordinary person, and at times seem like simple diaries, at others like works of fiction, and at others still like the rough notes of a historian or biographer.
I share Corballis’s fascination with the early history of the psychoanalytical movement, and the curious texture of his prose – the almost Janet-and-John-like simplicity of alternating questions and answers – does have the effect of recreating something of the rather uncanny atmosphere surrounding these pioneers in the unmapped regions of the unconscious.

It’s hard, then, to believe that he means this disavowal of the reality of the “floating agents” (as he calls them: though he also refers to them as “ghosts”) to be taken entirely at face value. The idea that a too-vehement negation of any proposition is a clue that its author secretly suspects the opposite is one of the most familiar truisms in the Freudian lexicon, and it’s probably also the one that operates best as a rule of thumb in everyday life.

I take with a considerable grain of salt our author’s claim to be “an ordinary person”. I don’t think we would bother with these notes if they were purely the product of random gleanings in the archives. A considerable amount of shaping intelligence has been devoted to these twin stories, or assemblages, or collages, or whatever you want to call them.

Part One, “R,” about Joan R (or Joan Riviere) and her various experiences before and after the First World War, is probably the more approachable of the two. The territory it investigates is familiar enough from such works as Pat Barker’s Regeneration, or (to go back a bit further) D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel.

Naming these precedents does have the effect of isolating some of the oddness in Corballis’s method, however. The tales these two earlier authors tell are still, recognisably, novels: fictional recreations of the past – the compositions of true believers in the value of make-believe.

It’s hard to believe that Corballis is simply failing to carry out a similarly seamless act of retrieval and reconstruction. It seems far more probable to me that these roughnesses and jump-cuts and refusals to round off his narrative strands are due to a loss of faith in what Lallans poet Hugh MacDiarmid once referred to as “the haill clanjamfrie”.

And, if one accepts this hypothesis, the structure of his book begins at once to make more sense. Part Two, “H,” about the German architect Hermann Henselmann, takes us straight into the aftermath of another war, amid the ruins of post-war Berlin.

After the proclamation of the death of God by Nietzsche in the 1880s (whether you attribute the act itself to him, to Darwinism, or to Scientific Method itself), the two principal belief systems which have dominated the modern age are undoubtedly Marxism, the idea of history as a shaping force, interpreted by its own priesthood the Communist Party; and Psychoanalysis, the study of the unconscious, the shaping force behind the seemingly irrational and inexplicable acts that dominate human lives.




Joan R’s failed analysis with Ernest Jones, Freud’s biographer, and his first English disciple, dramatises her own conflict with the absolute faith required of adherents to the psychoanalytic cause (studded, like most dogmatic systems, with great heresies and expulsions from the pure stream of belief: Adler, Jung, Otto Rank …).

One of the most amusing strands in Hermann H’s story is his own series of on-again, off-again attempts to flee to West Berlin. He talks his girlfriend, Anita R, into coming with him, only to be swayed into staying by her counter-arguments, only to find that she’s now decided to go, leading him to decide to accompany her, only to find that she’s now been persuaded by his own misgivings to stay, and so on and so forth, the whole accompanied by ironic interpolations by Bertolt Brecht.

Faith, once again, is at the root of it all. As H makes his little compromises, deciding to go along with the purging of a colleague, to accept the (considerable) leg-up it offers him, we observe first hand his attempts to keep alive the flame of the new Utopia that might rise from these ruins: the architectural solution it might offer to the problem of man’s inhumanity to man.

There’s nothing here (except by implication) about the Stasi, no attempt to dramatise – as in Gunter Grass’s The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising – the irony of Brecht’s staging a play about proletarian revolt while the workers are literally fighting and dying in the streets outside his theatre. This is not that sort of story.

It’s hard, at times, to avoid a snort of contemptuous disbelief as the characters in Corballis’s story attribute the continuing disunity of Germany to the West’s callous refusal to accept Stalin’s grand proposal for re-unification. And yet that very scepticism is, I suppose, the point.

There’s nothing easier than to write po-faced books of “warnings from the past” like Martin Amis’s Koba the Dread. Harder, much harder, is to recreate that atmosphere of the true (albeit, at times, wavering) believer. Corballlis’s virtue is his refusal to editorialise, to put facts in their “true perspective”, to supply the party line on what we now “know” to be true.

What he’s created is, I suppose, a kind of anti-narrative: not so much a Freudian case-study, in which the details are all eventually supposed to cohere into a larger reading, or even a Marxist analysis of the economic and class relationships of the various “floating agents” whom we are forced by narrative convention (perhaps F. R. Leavis might provide a third member of his trinity, to set beside Freud and Marx) to regard as fictional “characters.”

Psychoanalysis took its emphasis from the devastation of the First World War. What was, before, an intellectual movement confined to the analysis of the neuroses of certain wealthy members of the middle classes in Mitteleuropa spread to England and America largely as an antidote to the shell-shock and despair of the lost generation.

The inability of psychoanalysts to diagnose Europe’s ills sufficiently to prevent yet another war, did rather put paid to that particular system of faith: What huge imago made / A psychopathic god, as W. H. Auden presciently asks in his poem “September 1, 1939”.

Marxism is treated in a rather more allusive way in Corballlis’s second section: partly, I suppose, due to its far greater longevity (“A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism” is a statement that dates back to the Communist Manifesto of 1848). Also, perhaps, because it needs less fleshing out – and refutation – for contemporary readers.

Corballis’s book, then, part fiction, part history, part archival research, part imaginative projection is (at any rate in this reading) an attempt to analyse all these losses of faith: faith in ideologies that probably never deserved it in the first place, but which nevertheless started off as attempts to taxonomise and interpret the realities around us, only to end up as codified sets of dogmas, valuable only as control mechanisms for the masses.

It’s hard, too, to argue too vigorously with Corballis’s loss of faith in fiction itself. What is left, after all, of all those Leavisite claims about the English Department as the “natural centre of a university” – of the function of literature to promote alert, enquring minds within healthy, organic communities? Little enough, I fear.

“By their fruits ye shall know them,” says the Gospel of Matthew, of Jesus’s followers. I’m afraid that Gibbon’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire put paid to any naïve notions we might have that the warring communities of the early church showed any greater charity to one another than was meted out to them by Emperors such as Commodus or Domitian.

“Great Marxist Humanitarians” – that was one of Kingsley Amis’s suggestions for world’s shortest book. I guess one could add "The Tolerance of Dissent within the Psychoanalytic Movement" and "Lives of the Saintly Literature Professors" as alternative candidates.

But even if these systems of faith now seem less compelling than absurd, what is one left with once they’re gone? The pen may still be moving across the paper in Corballis’s increasingly bleak and Beckettian universe, but one can’t help but wonder for how long?

And yet, is his dilemma so very different from that of Matthew Arnold in “Dover Beach”?
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Corballis has reminded us just how dark and inhospitable those “naked shingles of the world” can be, but also how fascinating and various. There’s always been something a bit unconvincing about the resolution of Arnold’s poem: “Ah, love, let us be true / To one another.” The despair in his poem speaks louder.

Corballis, a hundred years on, may have more ruins to survey, but his solution – to delve and to taxonomise – remains, I have to admit, the best we have.


(22-27/1/16)

Landfall 231 (2016): 182-85.

[1844 wds]






Thursday

The skeleton of a kitten killed by frost (2016)



TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses

I am ‘modern’ but want to go back


John Hawke. Aurelia. Introduction by Gig Ryan. ISBN 978-0-9942596-1-5. Melbourne: Cordite Books, 2015. xiv + 43 pp. RRP $AU20.00.



Cover design: Zoë Sadokierski (2015)


An arresting image, “The skeleton of a kitten killed by frost” – certainly no minimalist understatement there – was my first impression of John Hawke’s collection Aurelia, which has won the 2015 Anne Elder Award for a first book of poetry. The line which contains the image, quoted below in full, reveals the book's defining qualities: its richness and luxuriance of language, its revelling in the long line, in poems that turn the page and then have to turn it again, so much material does he have to pack into them.
Under a gnarled quince tree the ghosts of three children
guard the skeleton of a kitten killed by frost. [‘What Was There,’ 11]
It’s not as simple as that, of course. This is no poet intoxicated by his own verbiage. Looking again at those lines, one senses a certain despair, a deep pain behind them. Nor is it really clear if it’s the author’s childhood or someone else’s that’s being evoked – that detail later in the poem about “the two old sisters who shut themselves / inside this house for twenty years” sounds a little too baroque to be strictly autobiographical – but then, how would I know?

How could I know? There is, admittedly, a good deal to be known about Hawke’s book. Some of the information is provided in his own preface; even more in the short introduction by Gig Ryan. Ryan is particularly useful in providing details about “Aurelia,” the title-poem of the volume – or, more specifically, about Gérard de Nerval’s Aurélia ou la rêve et la vie, the novella / prose poem the latter had just completed at the time of his suicide in 1855.

Ryan, however, does not choose to emphasise that final connection, explaining instead that:'Aurelia is a manifestation of art – "I first fell in love with Aurelia / in the face of that woman painted by Giovanni Bellini" – that is, love clasps the actual simultaneously with its ideal, just as Proust’s Swann imagines in embracing Odette, he embraces Botticelli’s Zipporah, whom she resembles' (xi). Hawke, in his preface, appears to agree:
When Nerval writes that dreams are a second life, he not only refers to the dreams we experience in sleep, but also to the dreams that arise as a consequence of lost desires, dreams perhaps thwarted by chance: of lives once meant, but never lived. (ix)
Aurélia is as much a record of Nerval’s own descent into madness as the simultaneous love story / dream diary it purports to be on the surface. Is it this Hawke has in mind when he claims that “to write is always to admit to, but also to dwell with, loss – to experience the loss of a once-loved person as a mode of living”?

It’s no use: such biographical hints and semi-deductions bear little fruit. Too much is hidden, half-hinted-at, veiled in the ambiguity between poem and reader – what Ryan refers to as the “labyrinth between world and Being”. This could be a collection centred around a defunct love affair, or a series of elegies to one (or more) “once-loved persons.” It seems too various, the product of too many different moods and times to fit easily into such a definition, however.

Nor is that surprising in a writer who seems to aspire to be some kind of latter-day Symbolist. One can imagine Hawke – from his poems, at least – as an eager attendee at Mallarmé's famous Tuesdays, perhaps even a satellite of Proust’s Madame Verdurin. He is, after all, the author of a 2009 monograph on the influence of the Symbolist movement in Australia, which argues (according to David Callahan in Reviews in Australian Studies) that “Symbolism is as important as Nationalism in the development of Australian literature.”

It all sounds a bit old-fashioned, one must admit: Art for Art’s sake against the Art of Social Utility: Walter Pater vs. John Ruskin. Just because it’s an old argument doesn’t mean it can ever be resolved, however: like that other perennial, content versus form, the answer is – inevitably – both, and neither.

Reviving old forms and ideas can have its uses, though. T. S. Eliot’s revaluation (one can hardly call it rediscovery) of the seventeenth-century Metaphysicals gave impetus to the whole of New Criticism, not to mention opening fresh perspectives on such “difficult” new poets as Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore.

Has Hawke had similar success in plumbing this strange territory between reality and dream – between the lofty European artists he fantasises about and the Australian here-and-now he inhabits? It hardly seems probable in prospect, but I believe he goes a long way towards carrying it off.

There are some breathtaking poems here. My favourite, “The Point,” does a wonderful job of blending the two themes. First:
this is the place where a foreign novelist
once stood briefly before continuing his pilgrimage:
a part of my spirit will always remain here,
gazing like a ghost across this dark line of hills
(18)
Then returning to the more quotidian: “I simply halted where the bitumen ran out, / banking the car against the tussocky sand” (19). Novelist, narrator, and Aboriginal land protestors combine to construct a kind of epiphanic vision of Australia today.

Ryan, in her introduction, singles out its longest poem, “The Conscience of Avimael Guzman” – about Peru’s Communist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) leader – for particular praise. Certainly Hawke balances Guzman against his fellow mythomane, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, with consummate skill. For myself, as a fellow colonial (albeit one raised in New Zealand rather than Australia) I have to admit to a preference for those poems where the garish colours of our part of the world seem to leak in most strongly. “Pietà,” for instance, with its:
five degrees of nostalgia:
bad posture, imposture,
A glossy Ted Nugent poster, post-it notes in a volume
of Rameau’s Nephew … (5)
Or Hawke’s opening piece “Reliquary,” where “somewhere it is September 1986”:
And I’m feeling sorry for all the noise
beautiful poems will never contain,
because I am ‘modern’ but want to go back
for a few words, not many (1)
There are so many things that John Hawke does well, that it seems almost insulting to single out only these few strands. I’d like to keep quoting, pointing out particular pages and lines for praise, but perhaps it’s more useful at this stage to reiterate how churlish it would be to criticise Hawke’s desire to go back as far as the nineteenth century for those “few words, not many” (1).

This is no phony Aestheticist posturing – no attempt to “maintain ‘the sublime’ / In the old sense. Wrong from the start” (as in Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” sequence). Hawke is most definitely modern (with or without the screamers). He has a sense of humour, for a start (anyone who’s ever had to live with a Ted Nugent poster could hardly doubt it).

He’s a devilishly efficient poet. It’s hard to catch him out. No plangent last lines, no Ashberyesque cadences (for all that he undoubtedly owes to that poet). My one quarrel with this book is that its 40-odd pages have made me impatient to read more from the same pen, soon.

Works cited

Callahan D 2010 'Australian Literature and the Symbolist Movement by John Hawke.' Reviews in Australian Studies 4(4). Available at http://www.nla.gov.au/ojs/index.php/ras/article/view/1716 [accessed 31 March 2016]

Pound E 1920 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley' [Part 1]. Available at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174181 [accessed 31 March 2016]



Dr Jack Ross works as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University’s Auckland Campus. His latest poetry book A Clearer View of the Hinterland appeared in 2014 from HeadworX in Wellington. His other publications include four full-length poetry collections, three novels, and three volumes of short fiction. He has also edited a number of anthologies and literary magazines, including (from 2014) Poetry NZ. He blogs at: http://mairangibay.blogspot.com



(31/3-4/4/16)

TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses (April 2016).
[Available at: http://www.textjournal.com.au/april16/ross_rev.htm]

[1254 wds]