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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

A Problem of Authorship

A Problem of Authorship

Except in the foggy burrows of adolescence, I don’t remember ever having had a curiosity about the state of the dead; and even then it came chiefly from boredom. I had bought a little dark-blue book for a shilling at a second-hand book mart. It enumerated the seven levels of the Astral Plane, from the bogs and chasms where murderers were yoked to the corpses of their victims to the pleasure-gardens of the spiritual elite where golden birds flew among the crystal trees. It fascinated me. I could hardly wait to die. Even the astral bogs would be more satisfying than a wet Sunday at home with a well-fingered copy of Marie Stopes’ Married Love, and myself meditating gloomily on the sofa in the small upstairs room that had a view of the gulls and the bluegums and the monotonous surf. But the interest in theosophy did not last much longer than six months. I think I began to realise that death was death, and that the actual gardens and abysses belonged to the present moment.

Some of my relatives had attended sessions of table-tilting; I never did. And when the people I loved best died of drink or unsuccessful abortions, or hurried themselves into the next world with the help of pills or bullets, what I noticed most about them was their absence. This was no doubt as it should be. The Blessed are perhaps called the Blessed precisely because they are free of the inanities of the living; and even if one had the bad luck to land in Hell, it would be even more depressing to be summoned back to a dreary darkened parlour to inhabit for half an hour the body of an hysterical medium in grubby underclothes and be asked by an ex-girlfriend with a one-track mind whether or not one was still thinking about her.

Non-communication is the habit of the dead. I like it that way. Therefore what follows disturbed my equilibrium a little. It had been my custom for several years now, whenever I was able, to come home from work and lie down on my face for at least twenty minutes on the white counterpane of my bed – not an abdication, simply a small self-indulgence, like that of an old horse who lies down for a little between the shafts and ignores the blows page 49 of the carter. Without it I would be useless for the dramas of the evening – phone calls from those who both like and dislike drinking; a ferrying of my children by car to various places of exhausting entertainment; a discussion with my wife about the merits of different varieties of soap; a decade of the Rosary said hurriedly for those in the psychiatric wards; news of war, economic deflation, starvation, murder, adultery, and other perennial states and habits of the human species. These twenty minutes of tobogganing downhill into the valley of coma, muscles relaxed, brain switched off, are in many ways the sweetest time of the day. I come out of the trance more or less functional.

One late afternoon at the beginning of November (I cannot identify the actual day) I came home, went down the passage, and stretched out on the bed with my shoes as usual tidily projecting over the end of it, expecting, as usual – no dreams, no words, no images, nothing but a blessed blankness. For a short while that was what I had. Then I found myself inside a small stone room. My presence there was definitely not physical; but there were a number of physical impressions. A sense that the walls were extremely thick; a sense of physical malaise and some pain in the abdomen; an awareness that the stones of the room had all at one time or another been touched and left layered with invisible grime by previous occupants; and another sense (not physical) of pain and long-endured darkness and a misery belonging not to myself but somebody else – extreme loneliness, and inner cold, as if flesh that desired warmth were exposed to a constant searching bitter wind. But this cold was a climate not of the flesh but of the soul.

There was also a visual impression. I suspect that it was what the psychologists call an eidetic image; for it was extremely distinct, but there was no movement in it while it lasted. I saw a man seated at a high narrow table. A little light fell on it from a gap in the wall. He had a quill pen in his hand, slightly transparent to the light; and he was engaged in writing with it. The man wore dark clothes – I do not know the style, but it reminded me somewhat of Elizabethan costumes – the waist drawn in an hourglass shape – but there was greasy leather around his chest and some kind of leather lacing left untied – the whole impression, however, was one of darkness – dark cloth, dark-brown leather, the clothes of a man who had allowed himself to become untidy through sickness, or on account of a journey, or for some other reason.

The face was in profile and partly in shadow. It had a beard and a longish drooping moustache. The corners of the mouth drooped down and the eyes also slanted downwards, it seemed, towards their outer edges. The face was pale. Its expression was chiefly of self-pity or at least of affliction endured without resignation. If I had seen such a face in the street, I would have thought – ‘This man will find it difficult to be happy, whatever his circumstances. He will be unhappy because he expects evil from life, and because his sensitivity will interpret every event as a blow or rebuff.’

page 50

None of these things are perhaps remarkable. We have all seen unknown faces in the rooms of our minds, and forgotten them a moment later. The mind is incurably prone to populate its vacancy with images. But there was also an auditory impression. I heard a voice repeating slowly the words of a poem. The voice had a thick heavy accent – a kind of open burr, which I had not heard in any living voice. And these were the words, as I wrote them down later:

I have seen on a day the young goddess
Walking towards the woods, whom I had long
Pursued (alas) much galled by wretchedness;
A souple bow upon her shoulder slung
With which she is wont to kill the running deer;
Toward me she did her visage turn
And say – ‘Sir fool, what fashion brings you here
With dinted blade and appetite to mourn?
Be warned that the woods of High Brazil
Give ne succour to him who cannot bear
To hazard on a kiss a lifetime’s ill,
To spit upon the rood and break his fare
With owls and adders . . .’
Thereat, she laughed and strode
In anger to the thickets of the wood . . .

One line I have patched as I cannot remember it exactly – the one beginning, ‘To hazard on a kiss’ – but the rest were either the way I have set them down or near enough to it. There were a few points of unfamiliar pronunciation – strictly I should have transcribed ‘souple’ as ‘soople’; ‘turn’ was pronounced ‘toorn’, and ‘mourn’ was ‘moorn’; ‘succour’ was pronounced ‘succoor’, with the emphasis on the second syllable. The only archaism was ‘ne’ instead of ‘no’ – perhaps I should have transcribed itas ‘nay’ – but ‘wood’ sounded more like ‘wode’ than like the modern sound. Perhaps too I should have shown that ‘warned’ comprised two syllables.

There is one other factor. While the voice was speaking – or, if you like, while I was undergoing this auditory hallucination – the eidetic image of the man in black shifted and was replaced by another image of a barefoot young woman. Her face was dark, not beautiful, but full of a subtle vigour. Her eyes in particular were very dark and piercing. She held with one hand her nightgown (for that is what we would call it) somewhat bunched together below her throat. I think it was the right hand. There was a prominent wart beside the knuckle of her little finger.

I got up off the bed and went to my own desk and wrote the words down as well as I could remember them. Then I occupied myself as usual with page 51 trying to calm the whirlwinds of my household.

If anyone tells me that the whole experience was a subconscious creative process, and that I – since I am accustomed to write verse – subconsciously composed this poem, I am quite prepared to believe them. My habits of composition are usually conscious and logical. I have never been accustomed to refer to the crucifix as ‘the rood’ and I cannot imagine myself referring in any poem to the jungles of Brazil as ‘woods’; but I do grant that, like any other writer, I depend for a fair proportion of my material on an obscure assistant who mutters things from a place somewhere below my diaphragm. If anyone tells me that I am in need of psychiatric attention, I will simply reply – ‘Not any more than you, mate.’ As for the theory that I am myself a reincarnation of some obscure and gloomy Elizabethan sonneteer, I repudiate it on the grounds of good Catholic doctrine.

On the other hand, there are strong objections to the theory that the same Elizabethan sonneteer was trying to get into communication with me from Purgatory. I am sure they have better things to do in that place; and he could have chosen a better subject than a jaded New Zealander who does not like the Elizabethan period. Why not a Professor of English with a special interest in dialect? As for table-tilting, I still regard it as a blind alley.

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