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A Pig Island Journal
(comments on the art of poetry)
Not long ago, in the scuffle after a verse-reading at which my confrères and I read our own verse, a charming woman spoke to me: ‘I liked your poems, Mr Baxter,’ she said. ‘But you’re too young to be disillusioned.’
It woke me a little out of my after-reading stupor. By ‘disillusioned’ I think she meant something more – misanthropy perhaps. I have thought about her remark several times since then. And the poem that follows, and the comments on the poem, may go some distance towards answering it. The poem is about Rotorua, and also about the human condition . . .
I see the skull moon reddened by
Scrub fires, a summer gorgon,
Shoot arrows down into the dream
Where golden girl and tousled boy
On creaking camp-beds tabernacled
Repeat, repeat the act of kind
As if to the bone flute of Tutanekai.
Their eyes control the dying summer.
But I am friendlier with those Puritans,
The dead who rot on single beds
Of concrete where the steam-vents rise,
Beyond misapprehension, drugs, and those
Demons of lucre and great boredom
The living cannot exorcise:
Close, close, it seems, to the neglected powers
Our lives have lost the use of,
A pain that is its own instruction,
The resignation of a stone or bone. (‘At Rotorua’, CP 228)
A poem is a symbolic microcosm of the known universe of the man who writes it. Looking at this poem, I can see what the lady meant by ‘disillusionment’ – not political, say, or social, but sexual disillusionment. The poem also contains some pieces of Rotorua – scrub fires, campers, a snippet of local legend, the Maori cemetery where steam-vents come up through the concrete) but the central action of the poem is a shift of maturity – a shift from double-bed to single-bed thinking. The lady was wrong if she thought I denied this shift. I had fought it strenuously for a number of years. But lately I had woken up on several winter nights, and seen that dark hole in the ground towards which the years were taking me, with no romantic satisfaction whatsoever. Before thirty, death is a theme for interesting romantic speculation. (A.R.D. Fairburn’s ‘Disquisition on Death’, for example, is the poem of a young man.) After thirty, it is a hard undodgeable fact related directly to oneself. A number of my recent poems have been death poems.
Inevitable physical death is not exactly the most disquieting thing. One does not have to struggle against what is not yet occurring. It is rather the state of death-in-life, life lived without profound organic satisfaction or significant communications with others, which disturbs most. Indeed, granted Catholicpage 525 teaching, physical death could engineer a release from death-in-life.
Some comment on the plagues of the human condition which I encounter in the poem may be called for:
. . . misapprehensions, drugs, and those
Demons of lucre and great boredom
The living cannot exorcise . . .
Misapprehensions I conceive of as being the customary plagues of those who love one another. Some people may remember a poem of mine called ‘Ballad of Calvary Street’, in which an old couple proceeds to the grave without the power in either to recognise the other’s true face or loving intention. It is not a defection from an impossible harmony between lovers or friends or married people which I regret; but the bungling due to habitual fear and habitual prejudices, which insists that one should wear a mask, displaying only a portion of one’s true face to even the most intimate, and the misapprehension that follows any effort to remove the mask. One does not have to be an anthropologist to see that the relations between men and women . . . are riddled with misapprehensions.
There are drugs offering on every street-corner – alcohol, the Reader’s Digest, meaningless liaisons, refrigerators, films, Adult Education groups. In my own experience, before thirty, the drugs were effective enough; if one faded, there was normally a stronger one at hand. But after thirty, the drugs lose their power. I remember smoking hashish in Calcutta, and realising after one night of it, that it could do nothing except strum tunes on the nerves which I knew already. Drugs provoke fantasy. But one loses the taste for being a one-man menagerie.
The demon of lucre is a powerful enemy, chiefly because of his thorough respectability. I have seen good friends butchered by him, one by one. He works on the paternal and uxorious feelings. An artist who [dreams of ] selling himself for money alone, who knows that money is poisonous dirt, will produce glib drugs for an advertising agency or castrated scripts for radio, because his wife needs a washing-machine or his children coats to wear. Perhaps only the destitute, the hobos who sleep in railway carriages have a chance of evading this demon; and they must lie to get there . . .
The demon of ennui, in my experience, is the constant companion of bureaucrats. I think it is because Caesar rules by dividing symbols from facts, a practice painfully obnoxious to poets. Anyone who can read one of the reports that function as ballast to prevent the Wellington offices from toppling in a high wind – just one report, let us say, on ‘Cultural Integration in the Field of Education’ – and does not emerge paralysed with boredom, has my envious admiration. It is Caesar’s logic that prevails when fishermen are arrested for using exact four-letter words in town, while bureaucrats arepage 526 promoted for writing a million words that mean, if anything, ‘Caesar is both good and great.’ I am by profession a bureaucrat.
1962? (276)