Ode to the West Wind

A reflection on Issue #2, and an introduction to Issue #3:

I am eighteen, supposedly come-of-age, and am not equipped with, nor for, much. I possess little, but for the yearning for encounters. Perhaps it is not true to say that I possess even this; perhaps it is truer to say that it possesses me. I am spirited, but still, I am only here: I want to be spirited away. So I move out - this is the year that I go to college - yet moving out is not the same as moving away. Still, it is enough to fan a kindled spirit. The college is just out from the city, but not away from it. Despite the proximity to the chaos of the urban sprawl, however, the immediate surrounds are still. To this stillness, come kindred spirits. This stillness is the first hint at the nature of what is possible, beyond the tumult of the sea that rings the great and untidy cities that line its coast.

It takes a journey along that coast for me to get to college. At the outset of the week, I depart before the dawn. The sun rises over the sea halfway along the route. When it comes time to disembark the train, the morning sun is piercing a dried and half-dead countryside. Its bright loomings hint at the threat of the desert, somewhere distant to the west. The farms around, beset by drought for some years, buy water from the city whose coast and rivers I see as the train translates me from night to daybreak at the inception of each week. The college must buy water, too. It rests upon a hill with dead grass and cracked earth around it. Beneath the hill, the train passes along the boundary of the bare back paddock. The dry dearth is both contrasted and confirmed by the trees: no native gums in sight, only brazen evergreens from the Old World which are slowly dying in a row along the hillside. Their leaves are turning lustreless bronze as they irretrievably succumb to the reminder that is a desert nation; a desert island. 

We kindred spirits have all come from coastal cities, fresh with memories of the sea which once our ancestors crossed as criminals and colonists. Their own journeys ended, they birthed our present state on the bright, sandy shores, with the shadow of dark, redder sands hanging over them where the sun sets. Like the evergreens they thought to bring with them, the spirit of the Old World had its limit: it does not take too great a journey west to find soil and sun that will slowly let it die. The spirit of the desert was not native to the Europe that banished the forerunners of our class, here, to New South Wales. The spirit of the West means something very different in this land. The leaves of the books written in a foreign spirit of the West can still enchant in this land, so long as they keep true to an evergreen identity. Yet when the poetry of Europe meets red dirt desert desolation, seldom does it survive. 

Yet and yet again, there is a call that even that spirit could not, and cannot, deny. Perhaps in the Old World, it was mixed up with and tied into a lust for a different horizon; bound to orientalism and the rising sun. At the end of the World, staring at the setting sun fans a different flame - one can only imagine the deserts beyond that still feel the heat of that dying light in the west. Out there, it waits for someone to move away from the safety brought by the cool of the sea, and encounter it.

Once, I found myself in trouble because of the still burning, everlasting want that already had possession of me: a desire to encounter, and to move away. It was not only myself, but a kindred spirit with whom I slipped away one night from the dormitory at college to camp the next hill over. Here, we read the poems from a world that might as well have been dead, it was now so old - but lived on here, in the still night. We stared into a fire in which the heat left a desert of ash by morning, and I heard from him of a place out west. It was the site of a hermitage, a century old, outside a town that bordered the beginning of the boundless red sands. Then and there we knew that we had to find it. Later, when we returned from our unannounced disappearance, any chance of getting permission to leave on an overnight trip from the college had trickled up as a result of the escapade. Then it was winter - we waited full until the summer, when the year of study ended, until we found our chance. And in that six month’s time, we embarked. 

As the moving car took us further and further away, words from a poet whom I read in boyhood danced tandem to the rolling landscape. From the lines of Shelley, whose Ozymandias my father explained to an eager and yet unequipped boy almost a decade earlier, I encountered the power of the desert as the Old World knew it. Yet in another poem of his, I find now a strange parallel to the feeling of the desert I then sought:

Ode to the West Wind

by Percey Bysse Shelley

I

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)

With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!

II

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion,

Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,

Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread

On the blue surface of thine aëry surge,

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge

Of the horizon to the zenith's height,

The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,

Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear!

III

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,

Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers

Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou

For whose path the Atlantic's level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear

The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,

And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear!

IV

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;

If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;

A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even

I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,

As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed

Scarce seem'd a vision; I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd

One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

V

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!

And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

The seasons spoken of, it is true, exist hardly at all in this west - less than once every decade a semblance of Spring comes to the desert. And Shelley’s poem moves in reverse to my own experience at the age of eighteen, starting in desolation before passing over the sea. Yet in this, it becomes in my land a depiction of the path of the west wind itself, blowing across the desert to the coastline. Its movement takes it from the red, yellow, and black lands whose desolation is shown in the same colours as the flag of this nation’s indigenous peoples. It is a spirit and a breeze, a ghost and a gust of air. That is the first stanza. Then, Shelley invokes the tempest, which is perhaps as terrifying in the sheer, shelterless sands as it is in seething seas to the east. By the third stanza, we have met the sea - and though the names of the seas Shelley summons are unknown to this nation’s shores, the terror and power that splits the waves is not. It is the same storm wind that can ravage and revivify a desert, even as its lightning strips the scarce barren trees bare. The poem might well have a yet-unthought of meaning in this desert island. It is verse I hope might through me take root in the red dirt of my homeland. Though I may have to read it backwards as I move from the coast inland, its verses already hold a key to an experience I have encountered; then, at the age of eighteen, driving to the ruins of the hermitage amidst the nascent desert. Now, I carry it with me in more than just abstract memory. Shelley himself took the emblems of what was an old world to his own time, right from the lyrics of the ancient Mediterranean peoples, into his poetry. The task we at the Incidental Encyclical have set for ourselves is much the same. For you, dear reader, as well as for ourselves, we hope to take the spirit of things past and find a place for it today.

As this project, The Incidental Encyclical, moves into its third issue for its first year, we take as our theme the insight that desert places are not totally barren. That there is a spirit, one that calls and guides and instructs, to be found in places where nothing else lives or breathes. From the outset of this journey up, we leave the troubled seas behind in order that we may seek:

Wisdom in Desert Places.