Extract 1 from Draft of Autumn Testament

To write a revolutionary handbook for the benefit of those who feel that our civilisation is holding a gun at their heads. A peculiar intention no doubt. Yet here in the city I find despair is the commonest disease. And each person thinks that he or she alone is suffering from it. Not a theological despair, since theological hope has rarely been present in their souls at any conscious level. Despair rather in the viability of human relations.

Nobody is dying of hunger in our streets. Nobody has to organise the sexual love of his wife or mother or sister or daughter to visiting tourists in order to save his whole family from starvation. Graft exists but it is hardly our biggest problem: our blockages of feeling and conscience occur at other levels. In Calcutta a Marxist revolution might seem highly desirable simply because it may offer the only immediate solution to the gigantic problems of the Eastern poor: destitution, prostitution, graft. In Wellington a Marxist revolution would be wholly irrelevant, and would moreover be wisely left unsupported by the great bulk of the labouring classes. Yet people go mad here with loneliness. They die on self-administered drugs. They are hauled off to jail for being out of work when there is no work available. In many of our factories and offices they have to lick the boss’s arse to keep the job. Our marriages decay from worry and irritation. Most of our population lack a workable philosophy of living. The schoolteachers make them stupid, the jails turn them into criminals, the schools put them on the rack and the mental hospitals drive them mad.

In the great boneyards of the town, where conversation in the streets is drowned by the roar of traffic, I work by Gandhijian methods for the nonviolent revolution. My aim is communality, not conflict. Its Sacrament is the page 383 public embrace. I expect a constant succession of failures in my own lifetime, Perhaps I am like a man who is trying to obstruct a railway train by laying his own body across the tracks.

He has to choose exactly the right time and place to be of any use to his problems. The railway train of our conflict and [many-centred?] civilisation will not be derailed easily.

*

The deathly trembling that invades my body and will comes, I think, from two sources: from the twenty-five day fast I [undertook?] recently in order to learn detachment of spirit and through the pains of those others who are dying of stomach cancers; but equally from the sense of being always at loggerheads with most of my fellows. Nobody but myself prevents me from doing these things. I would like to sit at a fire with my family. I would like to work in a Wellington job that asked for only a minimal performance and spend my leisure time making poems. . . . But the telephone would ring all day; and when I lifted it I would hear the voices of the living –

‘Hemi, they’ve picked up Y— on an I. and D. charge . . . ’.

‘I’m going mad out here. P— says that he’s going to divorce me . . .’.

‘I can’t believe in God.’

‘I’ve just swallowed twenty-eight amphetamine pills . . .’.

‘They won’t let me keep my baby . . .’.

‘I can’t find a job and the Social Security people won’t put me on the dole because I left my last job voluntarily . . .’.

‘. . . the fuzz are trying to hang a charge around my neck . . .’.

Once you have raised the banner of change you can’t put it down again. You belong to the others. You have brought to life in their minds the all-butdead hope of living in a human fashion. So, tired or not, you have to keep on raising [it] till you die.

1971 (663)