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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Extract 4 from Draft of Autumn Testament

Extract 4 from Draft of Autumn Testament

The rain is falling outside. Four men who are travelling down the river in kayaks have asked permission to stay the night.

‘Pipiriki, Jerusalem,’ one of them says. ‘These old places have a history.’

By ‘a history’ he does not mean the history of the Maori Resistance, or even the more recent growth of the Maori Mission, that Catholic group which might seem to have been precisely designed to remove Maori people from the state of being Maori. He means something much vaguer.

‘It’s strange that the River’s being opened up again,’ he says.

‘How do you mean?’

‘For the tourists . . .’.

‘But that’s a great pity,’ says Francie. She is [privately?] committed to Maoritanga, though she is not quite sure what Maoritanga is.

Don comes up the path carrying a goat on his shoulders. ‘Do you know anything about butchering?’ he asks me.

‘Not a bloody thing, man.’

‘All right. I’ll do what I can with it. And I’ll hang it in a tree for a day.’

The heads of cocksfoot grass hang over the track. After nearly four months of absence from Jerusalem, I come back as usual looking for peace. The peace is here all right. I felt it from the moment when Wehe gave me the key to reopen the wharepuni. Now I am free to be selfish and share the house with a selected few, my family, either by kinship or informal adoption. It would be ungrateful of me to grow irritable with the local pakeha farmers who saw the original community as a danger to their social equilibrium, or the priest who formed the [view] I was running a brothel up here. . . . But I accept their intervention as the will of God. It leaves me free to enter this peace.

This morning I paid Koro Rangi a visit, and shared a cup of tea with him. He is the elder of the pa, fluent in Maori. His mind is a treasurehouse of information . . .

‘Are you glad to be here?’ he asks me.

‘Yes. Always.’

‘I saw your face on the TV.’

‘That’s right. I was in the town. But I’m glad to be out of it. Too many police.’

page 417

He nods. He knows that police are not the most desirable neighbours.

*

Some time I will have to go against this fear a little. I have to remember that there is a world where people swallow drugs . . . are schooled in subjects that have no interest for them, go to jail for being out of work, or go to the bin . . . On this last issue Shona had some comments to make.

I went to her this morning. ‘We seem to breed schizophrenes in this culture.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘most straight people are more or less schiz.’

‘Because they have to play a role?’

‘They can’t accept one another as they are. I think I was partly joking for a while.’

‘Why?’

‘I had to pretend all the time that I was interested in things that didn’t really interest me at all.’

. . . Schizophrenia is nearly always an induced state. Then what is the solution? I can’t say to friends who are being driven mad by our culture, ‘Come to Jerusalem, brother.’ There is no Jerusalem for them to come to. God has permitted the community to terminate. That’s all right with me. I can sit in the old cottage with a joyful heart. My joy is rooted in the excellent freedom of poverty. It is a joy to me to see the wind move the plastic curtain decorated with fishes that Kat has hung in the doorway.

If I try to share this joy in a direct fashion it may lead to scandal. Parents will feel I’m corrupting their adult children. Priests may fear (I think without foundation) that people may sleep together who would not otherwise do so. Farmers may fear, not wholly without reason, that somebody may kill one of their sheep instead of a goat. I accept the popular verdict.

But the problems of the town culture will return to haunt me. Is a culture less self-destructive if it drives people mad than another poorer culture that lets them die of hunger in the streets? The answer to the problem of world destitution lies probably in the hands of the Marxists, because only the Marxists have exhibited the sacrificial perseverance necessary to solve it. In whose hands do the solution of our own problems lie?

At times even in this country a Marxist approach has seemed to me the only one that possesses the necessary cutting edge.

[‘Ballad of the Third Boobhead’ (CP 525) and ‘Ballad of Firetrap Castle’ (CP 527)] 1972 (676)