Showing posts with label Malcolm Lowry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Malcolm Lowry. Show all posts
Saturday, January 14, 2017
THE BEACH REPORT, 12/14-1-17
At this level of reality (or do i mean perception?) --Malcolm Lowry's, mine, even Dad's (his rhetorical question regarding the overwhelmingly attractive thought that a journey might continue infinitely, --to keep walking to wherever & as long as the path or landscape, the amplified energies, led one on), & if Dad's then, with all due respect, anyone's, everyone's --the journey isn't particular though abounding in particularities. No, it's the ultimate generality whose idea suffuses one from even before the outset, aggregating every step, minute, mile, --filling, fulfilling, fuelling expectation --the promise inherent in Journey…
*
Freighters in the Bay, near horizon. The first one with green flanks carrying red containers; the second, smaller, rust-brown painted. Clear blue sky. White-caps on the shoreline, & gulls sitting in the sand, nestled, nesting. Even from a distance see a large man in long grey shirt, brown trousers, sock & shoeless, curled beside the gulls, his head supported with right hand, left hand on upjutting left hip. Canary Row i'm thinking : fellow stumbles out of alley, first light of day, shuffles to the beach, follows gulls' example, snuggles into nest of sand. Falls into sudden deep sleep, Rock Candy Mountain sheer relief. Awoken by sea's soughing & feels the spears of sun warming one or other side of face. On the street dosser can be moved-on but not i suspect on the beach. Darkness benevolent in that respect, daylight a dobber. In 2016 this is how it is in a novel because, apparently, city by-laws no longer apply to pavement sitting or sleeping --corollary of which, no contemporary bum distinguished by epithets of nobility including freedom, or rather, no erstwhile bum today would associate with the misfits on the city's streets since, motivated by self-respect (unless also banned by Health & Safety cum Human Rights regimen?), sufficient to cobble together minimum dollars for a room or accept the Salvo's dormitory rather than lay-about in sorry stupor or sometimes belligerent bravado beneath the necessarily purposeful feet of the citizenry.
Now, where's his shoes? But rolls over, then's sitting facing the sea and i realise she's no more derelict than i am, has a mobile-phone as well in which she's more interested than the tidal oscillation a hop & a jump ahead of her. It's a gardener's hat pulled down her face, the beach must be bottom of the old suburban block, this her daily constitutional. Stands up, collects sandals & is on her way. Trudge.
*
Couple of years ago wholesale change of staff at the kiosque. --the mix of English & Spanish replaced next season by the current local boy & girl. Even so recognition's still champion. Third season's hello ("How's the family?" "All well, the kids are at home driving tier mother mad!") bestows consummate belongingness. Come to think of it, never see the old parents now. Passed on? But old cant be older than me!
*
Seagull gives me the stare. Surely toasted sandwich crumbs not as good for you as plankton? Go on! Get out of here…
[12-14/01/2017]
Monday, December 26, 2016
THIS WRITING LIFE
Introducing novelists Colin Talbot & Shane Maloney at Collected Works Bookshop recently, for the former's book launch on December 9th, '16, I described a potential customer's enquiry as to whether we stocked any "amusing travel books"… Jules Verne? I wondered to our audience. Joseph Conrad? Malcolm Lowry? B Traven? Traven Collins aka Colin Talbot?
Long captivated by the splicing of author & character(s) in novels, I'm led to ask the question What is "fiction"? --what is fiction for Colin Talbot, for example, who's first to confess that his form of detective fiction isn't concerned with serial killers! He'll say it's his vehicle for writing, writing per se. There'll be another opportunity to discuss Talbot's work, but since mentioning Lowry that night the latter has been in my mind, and only yesterday did I select Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place as my travelling companion to & fro' the sea on the 246 bus, & whose author was then quoted into my Christmas Day "Beach Report" largely written in situ (posted on F/book & the Poetry & Ideas blog).
Thinking about Malcolm Lowry and reading the collection's first couple of stories, The Bravest Boat & Through the Panama, moved to say that it's a writing laden with 'the art of'. Author's investment in novel as if mythology --concurrent levels of the revelatory fiction. Author here symbolist but not psycho-analyst whatever the volition of his time. He is artist projecting own system of significance but intuits there's no interpretation ahead of the experience which, for consummate writer, is doubly recollected --by & as intense memory & intense invention, & remembered again & again.
Imagine Lowry --poet, poetic intellectual, novelist in age of realism become more-or-less reportage --Bellow, for example, in the '40s, memorably exploiting one of Joyce's tricks without concomitant commitment to larger scheme or idea --story-telling entirely within rhythm of the colloquial, sounding out 'as we think & speak' which was called, when we were young, "contemporary", meaning, I think, post-literary --H E Bates for example, as present-time D H Lawrence one thought then, having cut to the vernacular chase, as earthy & corporeal as DHL but novelistically one-dimensional… Imagine Lowry seeking something else, perhaps as something-else's conduit… Doesn't he let it all slip there on p27 of the paperback collection (leapt when I read it)? "The further point is that the novel is about a character who becomes enmeshed in the plot of the novel he has written, as I did in Mexico. But now I am becoming enmeshed in the plot of a novel I have scarcely begun. Idea is not new, at least so far as enmeshment with characters is concerned. Goethe, Wilhelm von Scholz, 'The Race with a Shadow.' Pirandello, etc. But did these people ever have it happen to them?
Turn this into triumph : the furies into mercies.
-- The inenarrable inconceivably desolate sense of having no right to be where you are; the billows of inexhaustible anguish haunted by the insatiable albatross of self."
Philosophical complexity of 'having no right' allows practical translation at least as no ease with conventional relations, that is regarding definition of the story & story-telling, where elegance & efficacy congeal, & the edges refined, the bumps & whorls of perception's plenitude eliminated…
26-12-16
Sunday, December 25, 2016
THE BEACH REPORT, Christmas Day, 2016
Malcolm Lowry's Hemensley is no Old Man of the Sea --how could he be? so grounded (Lowry & Hemensley both) in --in his books -- so enfolded in ground, exactly like the longed-for earth after weeks at sea on one's sole working voyage --Perth wasn't it? maniacal drive with the Ship Shop's manager & deputy --Fremantle to Perth --is that possible? -- t'other end of which kicking a football around on the dewy lawn of house of Shop manager's Australian mate --one starlit night on the Earth in 1965 --& heaven on earth after the constant heave of ocean --yet that billowing, sometimes bellowing push & pull of sea is solid ground's eternal counterpoint --and the rest of it, fierce wind, rain-like spray, errant waves, from which any Crew Only door's an escape but full roar & only man on deck's the opportunity usually experienced in books, best written when author's unhooked from feather-down suburbia -- bliss though in quiet room in quiet street, reading, writing…
"…in the park of the seaport…" our Lowry will write --understanding, like his Hemensley, that even the terrestrial accoutrement is suffused with sea --for example, that bunch of men in the parcels section of the Post Office, Southampton, Christmas '65 & again in 1970 --one of those forever available jobs, you'd simply turn up & apply, last years of the industrial age --a bunch of men in-between ships, best bets for unflagging labour, night shift --of course they were sailors but their camaraderie & gusto surely inspired the landlubber casuals, transformed the parcels room into ship's hold, the parcels into slithering fish, the parcel sacks into overflowing fishing nets--
"…in the park of the seaport…" --first sight of Elwood's grassed & shrubbed foreshore, before the sand & the bay of blue sea, the entirely blue sky…
Saturday, June 6, 2015
THE BEACH REPORT, 2015
[16-20, January, '15]
Last Friday night at Kerford Road Pier (how long refurbished?) admired first large swell of the season --the facts probably contradict me but 'season' is the present's accumulation of summer sights & sensations comprising anybody's personal calendar --the first swell, of course tidal but suggests the oceanic, that potentially unbounded heave… Fishermen camped there, solo, pairs, families, like they're parts of the pier or shadows of parts, leaning over the railing, winding up long throw of line, or wandering a few steps to the left then back, in a little circle, leaving the rods to their own devices, bait in buckets, hands in pockets, some Greek, some Vietnamese, some Lebanese, one old Australian family, catching supper, grown old in their routine, three generations, old ways the best but approving of the new planks replacing the worst of the pier, that is I am, remembering it was broken, possibly bound for dismantling…
Mid-afternoon the next day at Elwood there's a surf, line upon line of frothing & crashing white water presaged in last night's churning dark green. On the Sunday I'm the only one in the sea --larger swell but warmer than before. Impossible not to go in. It's in my blood now, in my head. Two beached jellyfish hardly portend harm. But there are rocks now, uncovered or shoved there by the violent water. The force of the waves prevents swimming, but crouching then standing up as the large waves hit, or falling down before them, or floating in the furrows interspersing successive onslaught is exhilarating. A quiet bay-beach's version of staring down the sea…
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[21-25, January, '15]
It was never a 'milk pond' was it? --notwithstanding the Queen of Sheba in an encyclopaedia at nine or ten, or Krishna bathing in the pool with the Gopis, story discovered during Indian reread in the '80s, voyage through seas of etymology en route intimations of the larger meaning. Yet the water's flat-white of cloud & lambent light rehabilitates misnomer invested in the remembered lines of dairy cows moving indomitably across farm yard, leaving behind the inviting, therefore warm, surface of shit & piss & mud & milk. And before it's lost or I squeamishly censor, include in this sensation of gentle ooze or curdle, imagery of the lactations & ministrations of the multitude of breast-feeding mothers one's naturally known as oldest son to young mum, or lover & chum of the women of my own generations… '50s Nursing Home --floral, sunlit, balmy --or parental bedroom's built-up pillows, starched sheets, redecorated by dad for the event… For sure, another temperament in the New Age & Feminist '70s, but same mother & child contiguity of major & minor face, throat, arms, breast, mouth-- and amidst the sometime struggle, remember long moments of their imperturbability, as the sea is, which is what this is all about, forever & ever-ness…
But mill-pond it is, in particular Elwood's on the 20th January, a ten out of ten --warm water, sweetly welling waves, regatta flotilla out to sea whose racing dinghies equip first glance's dhows from out of Egyptian infancy, divine shape I constantly reproduced back home in first English school '52, '53, --Australian high summer's cliche sumptuously achieved. Another day I rate it the impossible Eleven because the sunbathing crowd's suddenly here as well. Beach comes into its own. Pods of swimmers but mostly well-oiled, sitting or lying on the sand, with or without umbrellas, young families, children & teens, young male & female singles, tats (sleeves, calligraphies, figures) abundant as the traditionally, now Brazilianly, bare.
But the suburb's elders, especially the matted & thatched, the double & treble tyred, where are they? Probably back in St Kilda, blackening all day, up against walls or rocks, pier rampart, dug-in --dug into Odessa's lingering dream, the older scales of St Kilda's dream, Post-War, pre-development, the old St Kilda which is my own St Kilda even from the '60s, enough of all-that's-left to attach historically --amalgamation of histories intersecting one's own to which one adds the emigrant's. Native's the one whose particulars are inherently the time & place, sung as sprung, conversely subject of emigrant's eternal wondering…
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[early a.m., 7th February, '15]
Yesterday's long dash (yes, that's a contradiction but good intentions (leaving Shop at 5 for immediate train from City to the 'Garth, then change into trunks & up the road with Loretta for the 6-15 or so 246 to Elwood, but crikey! gone 7 by the time we crossed the main road & onto the beach
Long time between dips (o summer where art thou? (("Hey-la-day-la my summer's back" (a kind of Death in Venice white light of sand & smooth sea suspension, whole beach of all-day-&-night bathers ahead of us
And into the water (colder than the air temp suggested or account of L. & cousin's morning stroll there anticipated (and everything's returned, everything the ten day hiatus rescinded (other world, summer world, water world
Can't help thinking every time I'm sitting at the kiosque (this time beneath umbrella (cuppa & etc, notebook, luxuriating in the balmy air (how Dad would have relished this and did in fact when he sat back after exertion of swimming & beach games (ah, Isle of Wight memories, Whitecliff Bay etc (suddenly & poignantly in sync with the world
Young proprietor (shorter hair than last year, black crew-cut rising out of sheer scalp style (serves beverages (Ah, I say, the real English Breakfast Tea, and he says And the real French doughnut made by a real Frenchman, no kidding (ring doughnut, sugared (hugely satisfied with his lot Dad would breathe in & out audibly, comment This is the life
And it is (transformative (weight of working day lifted, dissolved (I'm still finding the words for the equation recalled from Spengler of forest & cathedral, a little piece I'm scribbling about train-carriage view of the country from Bendigo to the City but harnessed to description of the great Sacred Heart church, the art within it, the art of itself, stone & wood (in my battered green-covered notebook
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[8th February,'15]
Morning to afternoon the weather turns around. Nothing else for it to do or for its word to exist, otherwise non-differentiation's literatureless world. Try saying that with the sun in your eyes or a gobfull of wave. Said by whom, to whom? Rummage old shelves for the answer. Brighton Rock for sandy, salty, mouldering hotel airs; Malcolm Lowry for solitary, strung-out soliloquy. Racier, Wide Sargasso Sea? Rowdier, La Bateau Ivre?
I take the chance, depart autumnal, overcast; arrive summer once more. Most people seem to have been discouraged. Not for the first time I'm by myself in the sea, which is tantamount to owning it. Disowning it is the fully dressed man face down in the sand five metres from similarly hung woman whose afternoon began & ended when her Weekend Magazine threatened to fly away in the breeze.
I glance at them from the good sea. The size & force of the waves increases. I'm unconcerned. Footing's secure, drowning's someone else's fear : aged three, clinging to mother's neck, screaming blue murder.
oOo
[12th February, '15]
One-fifteen I'm the only swimmer but five minutes more and there's another, in his own space to the left of me. Entered the sea Point Ormond side of the kiosque & delightedly found it rock free. This day the water is clear again & the extreme saltiness gone. Whitecapped waves enlarge through the afternoon. It's become a day for sailboarders. How would youngest brother Robin have coped with Australia (imagine him twenty years ago in wet suit on Weymouth Bay, ahead of England's fashion have to say)? An afternoon but never a life. Go for the afternoon & stay for life? Life as though an afternoon? Does or doesn't bear thinking about? Old guys' contemplations --old emigres --old old --osteo-, arthurio-, rheumatico-, heaven help us! But sea & salt & sun surely soaking one with the necessaries. Ah, Lorenzo, escaping English constraint, embracing Idea entwined with whichever of the Elements inspired it…
Walking back from the Beach down Byrne Avenue to the bus-stop in Elwood's bright little bustle, the skipper of old terrace house, sitting on sun-caught pavement wall, legs extended across the tarmac like a shadow, greets us Good evening, adds Sorry for my smoke! But we love it, I say --which I wouldn't offer any regular chimney. Perverse if you like but daily defining individuality, autonomy… It wasn't a Sobrani (Black Russian) or Gauloise or even Camel, perhaps an aromatic roll-your-own, but rare enough this H&S era to momentarily restore an ancien regime of the senses' maximum value --smelling, seeing, tasting, --apertures of life's far-outest education… Joined the old guy's laughter as though schoolboy found-out revolved through wheel of bravado --but quite properly his right, our right --that crucial bug in our humanity increasingly stomped on by the H&S. They want H&S clones, automatons, --docility reformulated as the social norm, sterility as health --all that & more. Excuse my smoke? Excuse us for living!
oOo
[February 19th, '15]
Alternatively driftwood, sea-snake, dog, but suddenly identify the shape as large ocean gull beside me, bottom up, fishing. Two flew over the waves the length of the beach last time I was here --index of nothing of Nature, only would-be beach bum's peregrinations. (Peregrine? Nah, language isn't that helpful! --more helpless in language than the sea, tossed or becalmed, at elements' mercy.) Long skein of seaweed looks like a strayed squid. Severally folded width of white cloth-like jelly-fish. My own left-hand unintentionally brushing hip jumping me out of my skin.
At the bus-stop made to pay for Famous Five unheroics when bird on wing shits on me, wishfully misapprehended at first as leaking air-con from adjacent cafe or even broken pipe from same building's bathroom above the pavement. Bird's shit wakes me up to real world. Evidence of what food that grey brown muck smear on my house-brick coloured cotton shirt? Thank God no flying quadrupeds!
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[28th February/1st March,
Summer into Autumn, 2015]
Sea's stillness last calendar day of Summer instills the timelessness often adduced. 'Time out of time' I say, as though the Beach is a self-contained cylinder, propelled from suburb to sea & back again, or even a tunnel --Wellesian, Vernean? (--image born of industrial age's sky's-the-limit inventiveness, centre of the earth & outer-space alternate playgrounds of scientific dreams --& any such dreamer an engineer on frontier of mind & matter, pith helmet optional, blessed by commerce & empire--
remember saying to my brother & father "Everything conceived eventually materialises", watching telly, 1970 or so, visiting home in what had been the village of young family's growing up, --in bed-sit now, in the Docks district across town, --prodigal's return from Oz. As a kid would have it, our eternal & infinite address : "Mon Reve", Shelley Road, Thornhill, Southampton, Hampshire, England, United Kingdom, Great Britain, Europe, The World, The Earth, The Milky Way, The Solar System, The Universe. No where else it could be! Thought but not spoken before : "anything imagined will come about!" Really? Actually? brother exclaims with troubled look. Yes, the mind's like a computer; we put in the questions & out come the answers : whatever can be imagined will eventuate… Dad straightens tighter to himself, maximising attention to the story on TV, leaves speculation to his sons. What was that film? From an elapse of 45 years, brother suggests Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner… I'm thinking of a sci-fi thriller --maybe a better episode of Dr Who, in which a diabolical telepathic & shape-changing battle or duel with cosmic consequences ensues in rural southern England where sharp moustached army officer with detachment of men run around like headless chooks, plainly out of their depth & probably in the wrong film let alone dimension? Or could it have been Doomwatch, or even UFO?)
*
Such stillness, transfixion, I saw in Seurat's painting, Bathers at Asnieres, hanging at the National Gallery in London. In the piece I wrote in 1975 for my ABC BOOK, jumped from French riverscape to Melbourne's seaside, explicating the figures' "pink rotundity" & "torpor : "Even on a bay beach, where only a minor bend of the imagination recalls the Ocean & states of being not contained within a pretty border, the men & women occupy the sands & changing currents as solidly as they did the green bank. It is most of all a domestic scene, the installation of soft cubes. The seven-eighths naked men & women blob the sand. The gulls blob the first height of air. It is on the cards the tableau melts at nightfall. Each succeeding day has the sand a trifle whiter, requires a fuller foot to tread it, a wider posterior to settle upon it. Summer's seven years pass slowly."
*
Different friends ask if I'd ever consider moving to Elwood, but perhaps as L says our cottage at the other end of the bus line already is that house by the sea. But, seed sown, where in Elwood would it be? Byrne Avenue, old & new dwellings, renovated homes & apartments, old fences, new walls, old & young happy families, hippies, professionals, laid-back first timers, old timers, dogs, cats… Normandy Street, larger detached houses, mansions, grand in the white-glossed way, nobody & nothing along the street except luxury cars…
*
Big seas, surf, winds, inaugurate first day of Autumn. Couldn't be larger contrast with yesterday. The contradiction includes another : grey brown green water beneath black hills of cloud on the Point Ormond / Port Melbourne side, and clear blue sky scudded with cirrus on the Elwood Lifesaving Club side. Remarkably warm water following previous night's wind & thunderstorm, though dirty with storm detritus. As life is…
[28th February/1st March, 2015]
Saturday, January 19, 2008
ON JOHN MATEER'S SOUTHERN BARBARIANS
Such presence in John Mateer's Southern Barbarians (Zero Press, Johannesburg, 2007), bolstered by plenty of first person and maybe that's the reason it's so pleasurable to read --first person & present tense & what I'll record as whole sentences. Post-colonialism or Mateer's post-colonialist reflex is part & parcel of this book as it has always been in his oeuvre, and I'm not sorry to say that it irks me politically & poetically! Naturally, ideas & narratives are interwoven here as with every writing, so it's almost passe to say that ultimately "attitude" doesnt reduce the collection's pleasure, and what provokes thought & reaction, as Mateer's writing does, should be music to one's ears...
Regarding whole sentences --what a relief after contemporary poetry's inexhaustible anthology of fragment & discontinuity! I dont, of course, mean the single words & phrases, rhythmic explosions or embellishments, abundant in poetry, guaranteed to either shake up patter or create another timbre. More so, the attenuation of thought & address in favour of the flatly annotated inventory which has overseen a relegation of the very discoursive language John Mateer resourcefully indulges. Sometimes what one wants is a narrator and not a breathless reporter --sentences to breathe in and to hear poet hold breath, that is nerve, as narrator.
Southern Barbarians is another of Mateer's non-commercial books from Zero, the collectively run South African little press, the second since The Ancient Capital of Images (FACP, 2005), which in turn was his fifth major collection.
Ten, fifteen years since I first met him & his work. A double emigrant, as I was also, in a way --he, young South African living in Western Australia, exiled to the extent that the Apartheid republic was an impossible homeland and the new South Africa no less difficult, come to Melbourne in what seemed a steady flow of West Australians to our seemingly greener fields --Philip Salom, Marion Campbell, Micheal Heald amongst others. And I, half English in England after infancy in Egypt, then English migrant to Melbourne. Apart from the Alexandrian heritage through my mother, I had South African Huguenot (grandmother Rose Waterina de Vaal) on my father's side. We've talked about this as some kind of actual basis for an outsiderness we may share as poets in Australia --agreeing about the need for an international perspective, sharing enthusiasms for art & artists, disagreeing about the status of American poetry & poets, courteous about one's politics & religious beliefs!
*
"What is another English word, he mused, that rhymes with sadness?" (p11, Southern Barbarians) The protagonist is Xanana, probably the first president & now prime minister of the independent East Timor... Another English word? Gladness? Badness? Madness? Depends how strong you want the rhyme. Plenty to echo "ess" --"less", for example. But that would be an odd word for this poet of baroque expansion, of a conceptual & verbal density that makes the most of every morsel of the matter that comes to hand.
John Mateer is the poet behind that hand. One'd like to say, the Noh-actor's fan-fluttering hand or as thief passing on the gen, shading mouth with quicksilver fingers, or the spy, happy to be identified as either of the others --except that Mateer's already given us as disquieting a narrative as could hang on an image in The Ancient Capital of Images : he comes to us as the poet of the grotesque white hand...
The scenario is fraught : "The poet, a New South African, holds his fist out to me. / I extend mine to meet his, our knuckles snug as in a knuckle-duster. / "Welcome home," he says, swaying his fist back to his chest, his heart. / I do likewise, but feebly, and mutter, "This is strange..." // Earlier he'd told of when they'd razed his grandmother's house with her inside. / In the interrogation he'd been asked, "What do you think of your comrades now?" / And he had shouted back: "Every revolution has its casualties!" / But when in gaol, alone, he wept for her for the first time. // I look at my hand on the table between us: a pale, grotesque thing. / Why without reticence, did I press that against his dark fist?" ("Ethekweni, #1, The Poet", p 11)
The black fighter's belated tears hardly expiate the immorality of the revolutionary modus operandi. (I also squirm, recalling the justifications one uttered, as an anti-Vietnam War activist, for a similar level of atrocity.) But the white poet's mae culpa --and the poem of & as mae culpa-- is dishonoured in that degree of self-abnegation. Political guilt has become pathology. Fair enough, as they say, it's only a line in a poem in one of the three recent books and, of course, its author is the brilliant maker of the fictions stimulating one here, but this colour consciousness, so candidly expressed, is the failure of person that distorted logic always produces. The mis-perception --typical of John Mateer's candor --mocks the intelligence one's want to trust of the visionary poet, where the quality of perception is the measure of truth. Mateer's rhetorical question might well be truth to the person which poem forms, but only transiently like a thought best let pass, as Buddhists would have it. Existence is not a contortion, nor is its poetry. And self-excoriation is not humility...
*
John Mateer is the author of this book of questions even as he is one of its characters. It is a Portuguese book of questions necessarily skirting the adopted & natal countries previously encountered in his work. However both Australia & South Africa continue to be impugned in a serious & lyrical interrogation of the first person & several personae.
Mention Portuguese and English-language readers will pronounce the name Pessoa. And Pessoa meets us in the epigraph ("I write to forget") & every so often in the book. Southern Barbarians (and who are they? Australians? South Africans? 16th Century Portuguese?) is a Pessoan book if the slipping in & out of legal & imagined selves is a further meaning of the increasingly invoked 20th Century European master --a quality one identified in all things Borges too in the ever so recent past. But fantasy it isnt since spectral shivers & metaphysical speculations arent Mateer's purpose. Rather, it's history & politics, the burden of knowledge, in the already full rucksack of our peripatetic existentialist --as though doomed to wandering as the price of revelation. History & politics not so much counterpointed by the erotic as punctuated by it --a chapter in itself in the eventual Mateer monograph. (Regarding eroticism in its explicitly sexual form, it's instructive that one poem here, "Heard in a geijin-house in Kyoto" (p48), isnt about the contrast between fucking & masturbation, which would be juvenile to say the least , but its receipt as language; thus the difference for this poet between Japanese --a traveller's "gagged whispers" --& Brasilian --"the woman's urging in that tongue / I love, of slurs and growls and lisping" --requiring eroticism's necessary conclusion in what should be the poet's rhetorical question, "Is that what makes of my listening a poetry?")
And history & politics also feeds his fine topographical lyricism...
Compelling, marvellous, but that irk will not leave me as sympathy for the poems leads me closer than I like to the post-colonial attitude I almost always find wearisome as polemic & gratuitous as poetry (either the only point of the poem or an unwieldy embellishment)... Much more of it in Words In the Mouth of a Holy Ghost (Zero Press, 2006) than the present collection, and particularly annoying because of the juxtaposition of the mellifluously insightful and the stridently pat. "Composition of Unease" (p15) a perfect example : "With the deceptive ease that the Dutch / swapped Manhattan for a now forgotten isle laden with cloves, / the biochemistry in my brain catalyzes / the enormity of ice-blue sky between downtown skyscrapers / into a sensationism of memories and concepts, / the question of the composition of this unease: / For what may Ground Zero be exchanged?"
Whoa!... For what may Ground Zero be exchanged? How about the Twin Towers & three thousand lives? How about Bin Laden's head? What is Mateer's question but naive poeticism, a quirk of the brain of the poet's biochemistry? It could simply be pure contempt for the USA, for the West --in which case, why not dance on the monster's grave and spare us the tease? (Sometimes a poet must surely overcome the compulsion to write another poem!) Gripped by the narrative finesse of the opening line; gnashing my teeth at the last!
The 2006 chapbook wears post-colonialist stripes on its globe-trotting narrator's combat-jacket! The Aussie-South African's "I,being Americanized" ("Empire", p9) is the manner in which the subject problematizes the conventional first person, yet it's also the means by which subject is let off the hook, seduced by rhetoric (Gold Coast bikini'd chherleaders, astroturf, moon flag)... In "The College Girl as Cypher", she's code for America, obviously ("bountiful college girl among bored nations"), and owns sufficient particularity ("bounding along in your new sneakers, / your wit openly declared on your t-shirt") for the cliche to work --but "Desire / streamlined, sans memory" is cliche colluding with cant. Recalls Gertrude Stein's quip, possibly riposte for that earlier era's European tub-thumping, that one ought not forget America is the oldest country of the modern world, a comment stronger now with the conflation of America & global modernity. Mateer's "Americanization" is as quaint as post WW2's "coca-cola-ization" in this time of the world wide web & the satellite-dish. Arguably, his earnest, rather than zealous, post-colonialism delivers as recherche a sensibility as its other side, the unselfconscious colonial, the unabashed imperial, and is as emphatically upstaged by history as Malcolm Lowry's tragic, dipso consul in Under the Volcano, and for all his perspicacity, any protagonist of Graham Greene's, whose foreign correspondences might be as hummable now as Noel Coward!
Irony, of course, that the erstwhile Developing World (--oh yes, developing into modernity, which is the psychology behind "everyone wants to be an American", thus Ed Dorn, the first of the Anglo-American New Poetry's post-colonials, calling the shots in The North Atlantic Turbine (1967)) doesnt distinguish between one American (Australian, British, South African, European...) & another. Indisputable too that Chinese & Indian have joined Japanese & Korean et al in modernity's new imperial order, who're recognized for what they are everywhere in the "developing world" despite the non-white camouflage... Doesnt John Mateer wonder how it could be that post-colonialist poet & friend are greeted "Hey snowflakes..." ("Salutation Heard up in Harlem", p17)? Isnt Harlem's 'greeting' the racial underpinning of that recently surpassed epoch (post-colonialism) which might henceforth be applied to the entire motley of perceived & attributed trespass? Of course, the pungency's retained either side of the snipe but the Great Wheel keeps spinning and the arguments flap dizzy as 16th Century Portuguese circumnavigator's sailcloth in each qualitatively different sphere.
Yet, "First Person"(p12) tenders Mateer's identity question's classiest pun. "Barns and schools and houses hovered over the harvested fields / as he spoke, hesitant parenthesis around his words, / that Mesquakie telling of what was before the Americans." Poem reports rather than bewailing or heavying the message. Poet is the listener whose heart & mind the reader is trusted to understand, and so the first line's imagery guilessly combines environment & occasion of vital communication & political sentiment. One's given the crucial contradiction of the collection : listener & teller. "I have inadvertently been born as karaoke." ("Thoughts of Employment", p27) : the paradox at the heart of lyrical poetry.
*
So...Southern Barbarians is John Mateer's Portuguese book. I cant remember another collection where he has been as enlivened. Traveling always has this affect upon him, 'grounding' his rootlessness, but Portugal & the Portuguese is more than ambient here (--in the previous collection, "metaphysics funked-up by a black college band / on a corner of Michigan Avenue where the whole of Chicago is musical theatre", no more than travel-writer's tic-tac, and there's some of that in Southern Barbarians too) : it's what home often is --the place from which to resist, the mind-set with which to resist & re-engage with the questions of the world.
If Pessoa is the Portuguese book's predictable node, guarantor of the plural identity, implying its own negation ("I am your own surviving heteronym", p17), then Luis de Camoens (Camoes) as the figure of the once glorious Portuguese Empire, glorifier of the great mariner, Vasco da Gama, in his epic poem, The Lusiads, is our own wanderer's barely known (like all our classics) guiding star... And Portugal is where the racial & ethnic stereotypes besetting the poet are lost in a new tempo. Portugal, only two or three decades beyond its own fascist dictatorship at home, its colonialism in Africa & Timor, is an aroma, a taste, & a tongue from which he has created fantastical wings. In this Portugal, Mateer can securely be a native, in his case African; that is, where the contortion meted upon the poet's soul by politics & psychology can conjure paradise of weirdest paradox. Portugal, where he's confrere to the Mozambicans & Angolans, who doubtless suffered at the hands of these same Portuguese, who jib the Afrikaaner on his father's sins...
From the beginning John Mateer has spoken as an emissary of African writing. I remember him telling me about the prodigious Tatamkhulu Africa -- the equal of Senghor & Cesaire & a school text in England now. "I am reliving Uncle's poems -- They people the streets / with slaves named by the hinterland, Afrikas ..." ("Uit Mantra", p7; The Ancient Capital of Images) --Tatamkhulu, the "grandfather" of the new South Africa's African poetry... Fully realizing now the complexity of Tatamkhula's ethnicity & personality, I can perceive Mateer in a self-creation that recalls Tatamkhula as a reflecting mirror. And what a complexity : Egyptian boy whose parents were Arab & Turk, fostered at age two by a Christian family in South Africa after parents death, who appeals his "white" status at age thirty and chooses "coloured", and in later life, whilst involved in the guerilla war against the apartheid regime, adopts Islam as an Arabic-Afrikaans Chan dialect speaker.
If that incredible pot-pourri can be African then surely the African John Mateer can be Australian or Mexican (Spanish or Indian) (see the "That I Might be Mexican" section, p21-32, Words In the Mouth of a Holy Ghost) or Japanese (where I suspect his Zen yen has taken him) or Portuguese as seen in the new book.
Of course, born of the complex, through complexity the only way to go...The problematised subject may always be John Mateer's self-representation although the defining language will surely change. The Post-colonial with its anti-Western reflex has provided the poet with a ticket to negotiate the complexity, but evidently so does his immersion in palpable life, all around the world, which is how & where I feel his gift will continue to prosper. And I wonder if he'd agree that ultimately Tatamkhulu's dictum is better than all the isms strung together : "Poetry must stem from the self, not outside the self. Indeed, it records the landscape of the heart, not the mind."
--Kris Hemensley,
November, December 2007/ January 2008
Regarding whole sentences --what a relief after contemporary poetry's inexhaustible anthology of fragment & discontinuity! I dont, of course, mean the single words & phrases, rhythmic explosions or embellishments, abundant in poetry, guaranteed to either shake up patter or create another timbre. More so, the attenuation of thought & address in favour of the flatly annotated inventory which has overseen a relegation of the very discoursive language John Mateer resourcefully indulges. Sometimes what one wants is a narrator and not a breathless reporter --sentences to breathe in and to hear poet hold breath, that is nerve, as narrator.
Southern Barbarians is another of Mateer's non-commercial books from Zero, the collectively run South African little press, the second since The Ancient Capital of Images (FACP, 2005), which in turn was his fifth major collection.
Ten, fifteen years since I first met him & his work. A double emigrant, as I was also, in a way --he, young South African living in Western Australia, exiled to the extent that the Apartheid republic was an impossible homeland and the new South Africa no less difficult, come to Melbourne in what seemed a steady flow of West Australians to our seemingly greener fields --Philip Salom, Marion Campbell, Micheal Heald amongst others. And I, half English in England after infancy in Egypt, then English migrant to Melbourne. Apart from the Alexandrian heritage through my mother, I had South African Huguenot (grandmother Rose Waterina de Vaal) on my father's side. We've talked about this as some kind of actual basis for an outsiderness we may share as poets in Australia --agreeing about the need for an international perspective, sharing enthusiasms for art & artists, disagreeing about the status of American poetry & poets, courteous about one's politics & religious beliefs!
*
"What is another English word, he mused, that rhymes with sadness?" (p11, Southern Barbarians) The protagonist is Xanana, probably the first president & now prime minister of the independent East Timor... Another English word? Gladness? Badness? Madness? Depends how strong you want the rhyme. Plenty to echo "ess" --"less", for example. But that would be an odd word for this poet of baroque expansion, of a conceptual & verbal density that makes the most of every morsel of the matter that comes to hand.
John Mateer is the poet behind that hand. One'd like to say, the Noh-actor's fan-fluttering hand or as thief passing on the gen, shading mouth with quicksilver fingers, or the spy, happy to be identified as either of the others --except that Mateer's already given us as disquieting a narrative as could hang on an image in The Ancient Capital of Images : he comes to us as the poet of the grotesque white hand...
The scenario is fraught : "The poet, a New South African, holds his fist out to me. / I extend mine to meet his, our knuckles snug as in a knuckle-duster. / "Welcome home," he says, swaying his fist back to his chest, his heart. / I do likewise, but feebly, and mutter, "This is strange..." // Earlier he'd told of when they'd razed his grandmother's house with her inside. / In the interrogation he'd been asked, "What do you think of your comrades now?" / And he had shouted back: "Every revolution has its casualties!" / But when in gaol, alone, he wept for her for the first time. // I look at my hand on the table between us: a pale, grotesque thing. / Why without reticence, did I press that against his dark fist?" ("Ethekweni, #1, The Poet", p 11)
The black fighter's belated tears hardly expiate the immorality of the revolutionary modus operandi. (I also squirm, recalling the justifications one uttered, as an anti-Vietnam War activist, for a similar level of atrocity.) But the white poet's mae culpa --and the poem of & as mae culpa-- is dishonoured in that degree of self-abnegation. Political guilt has become pathology. Fair enough, as they say, it's only a line in a poem in one of the three recent books and, of course, its author is the brilliant maker of the fictions stimulating one here, but this colour consciousness, so candidly expressed, is the failure of person that distorted logic always produces. The mis-perception --typical of John Mateer's candor --mocks the intelligence one's want to trust of the visionary poet, where the quality of perception is the measure of truth. Mateer's rhetorical question might well be truth to the person which poem forms, but only transiently like a thought best let pass, as Buddhists would have it. Existence is not a contortion, nor is its poetry. And self-excoriation is not humility...
*
John Mateer is the author of this book of questions even as he is one of its characters. It is a Portuguese book of questions necessarily skirting the adopted & natal countries previously encountered in his work. However both Australia & South Africa continue to be impugned in a serious & lyrical interrogation of the first person & several personae.
Mention Portuguese and English-language readers will pronounce the name Pessoa. And Pessoa meets us in the epigraph ("I write to forget") & every so often in the book. Southern Barbarians (and who are they? Australians? South Africans? 16th Century Portuguese?) is a Pessoan book if the slipping in & out of legal & imagined selves is a further meaning of the increasingly invoked 20th Century European master --a quality one identified in all things Borges too in the ever so recent past. But fantasy it isnt since spectral shivers & metaphysical speculations arent Mateer's purpose. Rather, it's history & politics, the burden of knowledge, in the already full rucksack of our peripatetic existentialist --as though doomed to wandering as the price of revelation. History & politics not so much counterpointed by the erotic as punctuated by it --a chapter in itself in the eventual Mateer monograph. (Regarding eroticism in its explicitly sexual form, it's instructive that one poem here, "Heard in a geijin-house in Kyoto" (p48), isnt about the contrast between fucking & masturbation, which would be juvenile to say the least , but its receipt as language; thus the difference for this poet between Japanese --a traveller's "gagged whispers" --& Brasilian --"the woman's urging in that tongue / I love, of slurs and growls and lisping" --requiring eroticism's necessary conclusion in what should be the poet's rhetorical question, "Is that what makes of my listening a poetry?")
And history & politics also feeds his fine topographical lyricism...
Compelling, marvellous, but that irk will not leave me as sympathy for the poems leads me closer than I like to the post-colonial attitude I almost always find wearisome as polemic & gratuitous as poetry (either the only point of the poem or an unwieldy embellishment)... Much more of it in Words In the Mouth of a Holy Ghost (Zero Press, 2006) than the present collection, and particularly annoying because of the juxtaposition of the mellifluously insightful and the stridently pat. "Composition of Unease" (p15) a perfect example : "With the deceptive ease that the Dutch / swapped Manhattan for a now forgotten isle laden with cloves, / the biochemistry in my brain catalyzes / the enormity of ice-blue sky between downtown skyscrapers / into a sensationism of memories and concepts, / the question of the composition of this unease: / For what may Ground Zero be exchanged?"
Whoa!... For what may Ground Zero be exchanged? How about the Twin Towers & three thousand lives? How about Bin Laden's head? What is Mateer's question but naive poeticism, a quirk of the brain of the poet's biochemistry? It could simply be pure contempt for the USA, for the West --in which case, why not dance on the monster's grave and spare us the tease? (Sometimes a poet must surely overcome the compulsion to write another poem!) Gripped by the narrative finesse of the opening line; gnashing my teeth at the last!
The 2006 chapbook wears post-colonialist stripes on its globe-trotting narrator's combat-jacket! The Aussie-South African's "I,being Americanized" ("Empire", p9) is the manner in which the subject problematizes the conventional first person, yet it's also the means by which subject is let off the hook, seduced by rhetoric (Gold Coast bikini'd chherleaders, astroturf, moon flag)... In "The College Girl as Cypher", she's code for America, obviously ("bountiful college girl among bored nations"), and owns sufficient particularity ("bounding along in your new sneakers, / your wit openly declared on your t-shirt") for the cliche to work --but "Desire / streamlined, sans memory" is cliche colluding with cant. Recalls Gertrude Stein's quip, possibly riposte for that earlier era's European tub-thumping, that one ought not forget America is the oldest country of the modern world, a comment stronger now with the conflation of America & global modernity. Mateer's "Americanization" is as quaint as post WW2's "coca-cola-ization" in this time of the world wide web & the satellite-dish. Arguably, his earnest, rather than zealous, post-colonialism delivers as recherche a sensibility as its other side, the unselfconscious colonial, the unabashed imperial, and is as emphatically upstaged by history as Malcolm Lowry's tragic, dipso consul in Under the Volcano, and for all his perspicacity, any protagonist of Graham Greene's, whose foreign correspondences might be as hummable now as Noel Coward!
Irony, of course, that the erstwhile Developing World (--oh yes, developing into modernity, which is the psychology behind "everyone wants to be an American", thus Ed Dorn, the first of the Anglo-American New Poetry's post-colonials, calling the shots in The North Atlantic Turbine (1967)) doesnt distinguish between one American (Australian, British, South African, European...) & another. Indisputable too that Chinese & Indian have joined Japanese & Korean et al in modernity's new imperial order, who're recognized for what they are everywhere in the "developing world" despite the non-white camouflage... Doesnt John Mateer wonder how it could be that post-colonialist poet & friend are greeted "Hey snowflakes..." ("Salutation Heard up in Harlem", p17)? Isnt Harlem's 'greeting' the racial underpinning of that recently surpassed epoch (post-colonialism) which might henceforth be applied to the entire motley of perceived & attributed trespass? Of course, the pungency's retained either side of the snipe but the Great Wheel keeps spinning and the arguments flap dizzy as 16th Century Portuguese circumnavigator's sailcloth in each qualitatively different sphere.
Yet, "First Person"(p12) tenders Mateer's identity question's classiest pun. "Barns and schools and houses hovered over the harvested fields / as he spoke, hesitant parenthesis around his words, / that Mesquakie telling of what was before the Americans." Poem reports rather than bewailing or heavying the message. Poet is the listener whose heart & mind the reader is trusted to understand, and so the first line's imagery guilessly combines environment & occasion of vital communication & political sentiment. One's given the crucial contradiction of the collection : listener & teller. "I have inadvertently been born as karaoke." ("Thoughts of Employment", p27) : the paradox at the heart of lyrical poetry.
*
So...Southern Barbarians is John Mateer's Portuguese book. I cant remember another collection where he has been as enlivened. Traveling always has this affect upon him, 'grounding' his rootlessness, but Portugal & the Portuguese is more than ambient here (--in the previous collection, "metaphysics funked-up by a black college band / on a corner of Michigan Avenue where the whole of Chicago is musical theatre", no more than travel-writer's tic-tac, and there's some of that in Southern Barbarians too) : it's what home often is --the place from which to resist, the mind-set with which to resist & re-engage with the questions of the world.
If Pessoa is the Portuguese book's predictable node, guarantor of the plural identity, implying its own negation ("I am your own surviving heteronym", p17), then Luis de Camoens (Camoes) as the figure of the once glorious Portuguese Empire, glorifier of the great mariner, Vasco da Gama, in his epic poem, The Lusiads, is our own wanderer's barely known (like all our classics) guiding star... And Portugal is where the racial & ethnic stereotypes besetting the poet are lost in a new tempo. Portugal, only two or three decades beyond its own fascist dictatorship at home, its colonialism in Africa & Timor, is an aroma, a taste, & a tongue from which he has created fantastical wings. In this Portugal, Mateer can securely be a native, in his case African; that is, where the contortion meted upon the poet's soul by politics & psychology can conjure paradise of weirdest paradox. Portugal, where he's confrere to the Mozambicans & Angolans, who doubtless suffered at the hands of these same Portuguese, who jib the Afrikaaner on his father's sins...
From the beginning John Mateer has spoken as an emissary of African writing. I remember him telling me about the prodigious Tatamkhulu Africa -- the equal of Senghor & Cesaire & a school text in England now. "I am reliving Uncle's poems -- They people the streets / with slaves named by the hinterland, Afrikas ..." ("Uit Mantra", p7; The Ancient Capital of Images) --Tatamkhulu, the "grandfather" of the new South Africa's African poetry... Fully realizing now the complexity of Tatamkhula's ethnicity & personality, I can perceive Mateer in a self-creation that recalls Tatamkhula as a reflecting mirror. And what a complexity : Egyptian boy whose parents were Arab & Turk, fostered at age two by a Christian family in South Africa after parents death, who appeals his "white" status at age thirty and chooses "coloured", and in later life, whilst involved in the guerilla war against the apartheid regime, adopts Islam as an Arabic-Afrikaans Chan dialect speaker.
If that incredible pot-pourri can be African then surely the African John Mateer can be Australian or Mexican (Spanish or Indian) (see the "That I Might be Mexican" section, p21-32, Words In the Mouth of a Holy Ghost) or Japanese (where I suspect his Zen yen has taken him) or Portuguese as seen in the new book.
Of course, born of the complex, through complexity the only way to go...The problematised subject may always be John Mateer's self-representation although the defining language will surely change. The Post-colonial with its anti-Western reflex has provided the poet with a ticket to negotiate the complexity, but evidently so does his immersion in palpable life, all around the world, which is how & where I feel his gift will continue to prosper. And I wonder if he'd agree that ultimately Tatamkhulu's dictum is better than all the isms strung together : "Poetry must stem from the self, not outside the self. Indeed, it records the landscape of the heart, not the mind."
--Kris Hemensley,
November, December 2007/ January 2008
Saturday, April 7, 2007
ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) , continued (2)
May 31st, 2006
Melbourne, Oz
Dear Bernard, Two things for starters : Firstly, your pile of Buddhist literature beside TDB -- and "diverted" would be a censure were it not that our book is also a Buddhist novel or, shall we say, a novel in which 1950s Californian Buddhism is evoked; and secondly, the experience of literally sitting down to read the book...
I wrote in my notebook, "Never forget that the extraordinary amount of biography [i.e., Beat generally and Kerouac in particular] stands upon the actual words of the biography's subject. Here is that subject [Kerouac] as author. These are the words, the sentences, the pages; THIS IS THE BOOK! (May13/06)" Incidentally, I think that a famous book has the same aura as a famous poem. Lines of prose generally arent memorable as those in a poem, although there are great passages in TDB , but the aura of author & book bestows upon the words the expectation of the memorable. From another angle,one returns from the biography (which has come to parallel a particular social & cultural history) to the book & the story & the words. The whole edifice is stripped back. The opening sentence, quite formal in comparison to the confidential chat (epistolary) he largely disports, is poignantly transparent. There's more than a touch of Hemingway about it. "Hopping a freight out of Los Angeles at high noon one day in late September 1955 I got on a gondola and lay down with my duffle bag under my head and my knees crossed and contemplated the clouds as we rolled north to Santa Barbara." I did this, I did that, I did the other; that is, in order to arrive at the graceful pass this was done in that circumstance. The reader also hears the sound of his story. He's talkin' to ya!
Regarding the Buddhism : Preceeding or outside of this novel resides the story of how & where Ray Smith (Kerouac) came upon Buddhism, of a kind distinguished from but compatible with Japhy Ryder (Snyder)'s. In the novel one realizes that Beat's physical expedition , the journeys & kicks as it were, is saved by & savoured through the mystical lens. It's easy to forget this or for it to be displaced in the Proust/Joyce absorption of daily life whether reminisced, observed or cogitated. The characters strive to overcome the contradiction. Life is the practice -- Ray & Japhy are dharma bums after all -- and the point of it is self-realization & good old pilgrimage as its own justification. Concepts like salvation & revelation occur to me too but in the sense of redeeming or restoring wonder to a ransacked & mindless contemporary life.
I do agree that it's our "true calling" as you suggest! We'd be among the lost without it. Mind you, Kerouac lost it too and a book like Big Sur is as eloquent a document of self-destruction as Malcolm Lowry's Dark As the Grave... My thought in 1965 or so was that my life should be devoted to the search for truth and that one had to go out into the world, away from hometown, to discover it. Travel related to encountering & experiencing the unfamiliar. I was learning about hitch-hiking before I'd heard of Kerouac's (Japhy's words actually) "ruck- sack revolution". And as children we both knew about India (the Budhha, brahmans, the Hindu stories, yoga etc) & about China & Japan from Dad, inheriting his references (the Upanishads, Paul Brunton for example) ahead of anything from or about the Beats.
I do think of you as the "Abbot of Goldy Abbey" in all seriousness! "Poet" is also a matter of self-appointment. The fancy, "abbot", more truly describes your life than anything else and that's surely the point? You are willing to bear the real burden which the fantasy imposes. Ditto, poet -- after & because of which the mystery gradually opens up to one. Your extensive reading in Buddhism and many years of various meditation practice in your sangha of one confirm your title! "Goldy Abbey" -- amongst all that Weymouth bucket & spade who could guess what was going on in Goldcroft Road? Rather like Dad's secret life in Shelley Road, Thornhill when we were growing up -- who would have guessed the yoga, the trances, the vegetarianism, the interest in UFOs & astral travel? A great pity he didnt relate to our expeditions when we got to adolescence...
A NOTE ON & ABOUT KO UN
31/5/06 When you mentioned Ko Un to me one time, I confused him with the Korean poet published by Forest Books,London -- I thought we had two of his titles in the Shop. I checked & saw we had two other Korean poets, Kwang-ku Kim & Ku Sang, both translated by Brother Anthony of Taize. Then, synchronistically, I found Ko Un in the new University of California catalogue, his Selected Poems with, as you say, Snyder's introduction. When David Prater, who edits Cordite magazine, on-line nowadays, came by the Shop one day he told me he'd recently returned from tremendously enjoyable stay in -- surprise -- Korea! I said how Korea was beginning to feature in my life, for example Kris Coad's selection for the international ceramic award in Seoul, and then your interest in Ko Un. His eyes lit up! On this & subsequent occasion he's described Ko Un's unique standing in Korea, and Brother Anthony's work there.
5/6/06 Visited Ko un's & Brother Anthony's web-sites this morning before hurrying through winter fog & cold to the train -- both of them appear to be remarkable men. Brother Anthony, for instance, is now a naturalised Korean, still with the Taize community & teaching at Sogang University. Ko Un's statement on his life & poetics is unusual & attractive. He doesnt believe in the poem as a text but as belonging to the universe. (An echo of Olson there, "a thing of nature" & etc.) His poetry, he says, relates to the present & not to any literary history. (And yet very early in his Selected he's referring to Han Shan...)
Love, Kris
18th June, 2006
Weymouth
Dear Kris, I was sitting-up in bed early this morning with "our book", reading, at about 5.30 a.m. I suppose, by rights, as Abbot of Goldy, I should have stirred even earlier to "do" zazen, set a good example, but early morning zazen never suited me. And, of late, zazen doesn't suit me full stop. It's something about that upright posture. It is posture and not the concentration. It's a pity. A pity, also, I don't have a sangha about me. I don't want to be too secret. Don't want to be as isolated as Dad was. The trance visions he saw were too much to bear by himself. So he stopped. I think he stopped as soon as he saw the emenations of devils appearing out of his skull. And also maybe his chakras were too open due to vibration of Om chanting. I don't know. It's not really my area. I did mention the UFO stuff to him the other day. "What about George Adamski?" I asked him. (He had the book, Inside the Space-ships .) But he agreed it had been a false trail. In fact all his "interests" disappeared and he was not to lead us anywhere in life. Though probably my ongoing interest in yoga & vegan diet stem from him. And of his children I probably take the most from him...
I must tell you about a great synchronicity that occurred the other day. Mum & I caught the early Jurassic Coast bus to Bridport and I took The Dharma Bums along with me in case I needed to have a little read during the day. It proved to be talismanic. I called into the second-hand bookshop I always look in on and what do I find among all the usual books (no one buys from the poetry section) but Mexico City Blues, Grove Press, only L3.50p. I don't have it in my collection. I was ecstatic. Then, on way home, back in Weymouth again, staring me in the face in W.H.Smith's are a pile of copies of Big Sur -- this time only 99pence! Brand new paperback. What a successful day. A great trip. Mind you, I'd rather be with Japhy & Ray, where I am in our book, hiking up Matterhorn, composing haiku as I go...
Love, Bernard
--------------------------------------------------------------------
(to be continued)
Melbourne, Oz
Dear Bernard, Two things for starters : Firstly, your pile of Buddhist literature beside TDB -- and "diverted" would be a censure were it not that our book is also a Buddhist novel or, shall we say, a novel in which 1950s Californian Buddhism is evoked; and secondly, the experience of literally sitting down to read the book...
I wrote in my notebook, "Never forget that the extraordinary amount of biography [i.e., Beat generally and Kerouac in particular] stands upon the actual words of the biography's subject. Here is that subject [Kerouac] as author. These are the words, the sentences, the pages; THIS IS THE BOOK! (May13/06)" Incidentally, I think that a famous book has the same aura as a famous poem. Lines of prose generally arent memorable as those in a poem, although there are great passages in TDB , but the aura of author & book bestows upon the words the expectation of the memorable. From another angle,one returns from the biography (which has come to parallel a particular social & cultural history) to the book & the story & the words. The whole edifice is stripped back. The opening sentence, quite formal in comparison to the confidential chat (epistolary) he largely disports, is poignantly transparent. There's more than a touch of Hemingway about it. "Hopping a freight out of Los Angeles at high noon one day in late September 1955 I got on a gondola and lay down with my duffle bag under my head and my knees crossed and contemplated the clouds as we rolled north to Santa Barbara." I did this, I did that, I did the other; that is, in order to arrive at the graceful pass this was done in that circumstance. The reader also hears the sound of his story. He's talkin' to ya!
Regarding the Buddhism : Preceeding or outside of this novel resides the story of how & where Ray Smith (Kerouac) came upon Buddhism, of a kind distinguished from but compatible with Japhy Ryder (Snyder)'s. In the novel one realizes that Beat's physical expedition , the journeys & kicks as it were, is saved by & savoured through the mystical lens. It's easy to forget this or for it to be displaced in the Proust/Joyce absorption of daily life whether reminisced, observed or cogitated. The characters strive to overcome the contradiction. Life is the practice -- Ray & Japhy are dharma bums after all -- and the point of it is self-realization & good old pilgrimage as its own justification. Concepts like salvation & revelation occur to me too but in the sense of redeeming or restoring wonder to a ransacked & mindless contemporary life.
I do agree that it's our "true calling" as you suggest! We'd be among the lost without it. Mind you, Kerouac lost it too and a book like Big Sur is as eloquent a document of self-destruction as Malcolm Lowry's Dark As the Grave... My thought in 1965 or so was that my life should be devoted to the search for truth and that one had to go out into the world, away from hometown, to discover it. Travel related to encountering & experiencing the unfamiliar. I was learning about hitch-hiking before I'd heard of Kerouac's (Japhy's words actually) "ruck- sack revolution". And as children we both knew about India (the Budhha, brahmans, the Hindu stories, yoga etc) & about China & Japan from Dad, inheriting his references (the Upanishads, Paul Brunton for example) ahead of anything from or about the Beats.
I do think of you as the "Abbot of Goldy Abbey" in all seriousness! "Poet" is also a matter of self-appointment. The fancy, "abbot", more truly describes your life than anything else and that's surely the point? You are willing to bear the real burden which the fantasy imposes. Ditto, poet -- after & because of which the mystery gradually opens up to one. Your extensive reading in Buddhism and many years of various meditation practice in your sangha of one confirm your title! "Goldy Abbey" -- amongst all that Weymouth bucket & spade who could guess what was going on in Goldcroft Road? Rather like Dad's secret life in Shelley Road, Thornhill when we were growing up -- who would have guessed the yoga, the trances, the vegetarianism, the interest in UFOs & astral travel? A great pity he didnt relate to our expeditions when we got to adolescence...
A NOTE ON & ABOUT KO UN
31/5/06 When you mentioned Ko Un to me one time, I confused him with the Korean poet published by Forest Books,London -- I thought we had two of his titles in the Shop. I checked & saw we had two other Korean poets, Kwang-ku Kim & Ku Sang, both translated by Brother Anthony of Taize. Then, synchronistically, I found Ko Un in the new University of California catalogue, his Selected Poems with, as you say, Snyder's introduction. When David Prater, who edits Cordite magazine, on-line nowadays, came by the Shop one day he told me he'd recently returned from tremendously enjoyable stay in -- surprise -- Korea! I said how Korea was beginning to feature in my life, for example Kris Coad's selection for the international ceramic award in Seoul, and then your interest in Ko Un. His eyes lit up! On this & subsequent occasion he's described Ko Un's unique standing in Korea, and Brother Anthony's work there.
5/6/06 Visited Ko un's & Brother Anthony's web-sites this morning before hurrying through winter fog & cold to the train -- both of them appear to be remarkable men. Brother Anthony, for instance, is now a naturalised Korean, still with the Taize community & teaching at Sogang University. Ko Un's statement on his life & poetics is unusual & attractive. He doesnt believe in the poem as a text but as belonging to the universe. (An echo of Olson there, "a thing of nature" & etc.) His poetry, he says, relates to the present & not to any literary history. (And yet very early in his Selected he's referring to Han Shan...)
Love, Kris
18th June, 2006
Weymouth
Dear Kris, I was sitting-up in bed early this morning with "our book", reading, at about 5.30 a.m. I suppose, by rights, as Abbot of Goldy, I should have stirred even earlier to "do" zazen, set a good example, but early morning zazen never suited me. And, of late, zazen doesn't suit me full stop. It's something about that upright posture. It is posture and not the concentration. It's a pity. A pity, also, I don't have a sangha about me. I don't want to be too secret. Don't want to be as isolated as Dad was. The trance visions he saw were too much to bear by himself. So he stopped. I think he stopped as soon as he saw the emenations of devils appearing out of his skull. And also maybe his chakras were too open due to vibration of Om chanting. I don't know. It's not really my area. I did mention the UFO stuff to him the other day. "What about George Adamski?" I asked him. (He had the book, Inside the Space-ships .) But he agreed it had been a false trail. In fact all his "interests" disappeared and he was not to lead us anywhere in life. Though probably my ongoing interest in yoga & vegan diet stem from him. And of his children I probably take the most from him...
I must tell you about a great synchronicity that occurred the other day. Mum & I caught the early Jurassic Coast bus to Bridport and I took The Dharma Bums along with me in case I needed to have a little read during the day. It proved to be talismanic. I called into the second-hand bookshop I always look in on and what do I find among all the usual books (no one buys from the poetry section) but Mexico City Blues, Grove Press, only L3.50p. I don't have it in my collection. I was ecstatic. Then, on way home, back in Weymouth again, staring me in the face in W.H.Smith's are a pile of copies of Big Sur -- this time only 99pence! Brand new paperback. What a successful day. A great trip. Mind you, I'd rather be with Japhy & Ray, where I am in our book, hiking up Matterhorn, composing haiku as I go...
Love, Bernard
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(to be continued)
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