Art by Bonnie Eastlake (@bonniemay_art)
(This piece continues in the series of transitions - reflections of past issues, and introductions to new issues - that has been ongoing throughout the year. The preceding instalments, ‘The Sea and the Hills’, and ‘Ode to the West Wind’, are also available on our Substack.)
Am I free? Now, here, at the age past the threshold of adulthood? I am out - of the home, I have found a barren plot and, it being granted to me, have begun to work to turn it to a garden. Perhaps, indeed, I will soon come to a promised land. Perhaps, indeed, it will be of my own making, but, even so, the plot was lent to me - not won, nor conquered, nor even sought. But slowly now: the story must keep pace with the spirit.
My time at college is finished; I have sought, with charged enthusiasm, wisdom from dead and dusty books, and have graduated. The future looms, perhaps dark like storm clouds (yet with the same promise of rain), overhead. I am asked to return to the college and tutor. Along with this, a small place in which to live I am granted: a shed, with a tangled, dead patch of ground beside it. Thus in two ways am I charged with the task of applying myself, and what I have found in desert places. Take what you have learned and apply it, first to yourself (know it, understand it - understand what that means, likewise) - and then help others in their pursuit of that ‘likewise’. Then there is the place besides where I live. I cannot remain static in what wisdom I may have stumbled across, not even here. With the little wasteland to call my own outside my door, I now find a call of my own accord to apply myself to.
If I have found only desolation in suburb, and even in city, it has been too large a desolation to take charge of. If I move out to the hills, stark as they are, or the coast, whittled away by the seas, I see the impact of how my people took this land. They too are become desolate, not perhaps by intention, but because there was no wisdom in how they were stormed and claimed. Australia is a nation paying deep into its soil for the loss of its indigenous peoples and their knowledge. Though I am an adult, I am young, and there is much of this I do not know. But I do my best, and turn as much of this desolation into a hospitable place as I can. It is hard work, truly. The earth of this nation had never known livestock or the kind of land clearing my own ancestors would practise on it, but their own short stay upon it has made it hard. Here I am in the plot I have accepted, by which I live. I break through the soil time and again, and bit by bit claim inches and yards. After some months, I have a yard. I have built a deck to sit on, surrounded by flowers and all other manner of growing thing. I have a place to show hospitality.
But for all that, there is a danger in what I am doing. Perhaps I have not properly taken in the wisdom, both of this soon-to-be desolate land, and of the long-desolate lands I have travelled in study, of temperance. This is a virtue said by some to be the governor of all others. Hospitality is a good thing, but there are deficiencies, indulgences, and indiscretions possible in any virtue. As I further and further expand the garden I have built, it comes into my head to build a wall for it. As I invite further and further persons, beyond friend or acquaintance, into this home, it never comes into my head to draw a line. There may be some who have entertained angels, but I am barely twenty, and Abraham was nearly one hundred. There’s something to be said for the wisdom of patience, which I suspect is the spouse of temperance.
Long brewing, the thunder cracks. So does my foot, which I break in a tempestuous effort to move great slabs of sandstone into a line I have dug. I have to stop. I stop, I break. Now I am static, stuck in the space clouded by my judgement. It is not always literally painful to realise a misstep. In this case, both the misstep and the resulting pain were very much so.
At once, all the little place I had set apart for myself shrunk. Somehow, the all and sundry I had made habit of entertaining all but to a man ceased their visits. Apparently, it was a solitude I had devised, but one which I could not quite understand. There was little else to do but return to the dusty books and study. If I was to find wisdom once more and at least understand that, I found instead a body of work electric. There is a despair that does not give over to simply sinking. The book that had discharged its power straight through me was the collected poems of Walt Whitman, and in those words I - if not understanding, then recognising - became turbulent and alive. But the recognition was the step most critical, perhaps; the light shone inward like lighting rending clouds to point out where the strife had always been: not outside, but within.
In a winter gale, when tin roofs knew the threat of west winds unchecked and trees bent like supplicants before the torrent, I stood amidst the brewing heavenly strife and read aloud from among many of Whitman’s cries of the inmost turbulence:
ONE hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not! (What is this that frees me so in storms? What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?) O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man! O savage and tender achings! (I bequeath them to you my children, I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride.) O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me in defiance of the world! O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine! O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of a determin'd man. O the puzzle, the thrice-tied knot, the deep and dark pool, all untied and illumin'd! O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last! To be absolv'd from previous ties and conventions, I from mine and you from yours! To find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of Nature! To have the gag remov'd from one's mouth! To have the feeling to-day or any day I am sufficient as I am. O something unprov'd! something in a trance! To escape utterly from others' anchors and holds! To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous! To court destruction with taunts, with invitations! To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me! To rise thither with my inebriate soul! To be lost if it must be so! To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom! With one brief hour of madness and joy.
This poem cannot be read in quiet. This poem, following the pattern known only to the intuition that tells the hearer and the crier of the word it is poetry, demands to be orated like a hurricane. This poem reels; temperance be damned. It may not be wisdom, but within it nonetheless something can be recognised. All of the things I felt charged with left me depleted. To have been removed from them is to feel flat; the spark is gone. Yet I was free to choose these things when I accepted them; why do I feel bound now that they are slipping away? What do I have, now there is only the supposedly free self left to myself?
Whitman desires to know: “Am I free?”; even to answer it himself. He demands to fulfil something, a task, and starts with the self. These are the demands of poets from Sappho to Byron, Chaucer to Ginsberg. Whitman’s desires, demands are perhaps among the most candid and simply, beautifully simply, put of all. Of course, this claim will always be something unproved - something in a trance. If out of that trance - if out of the almost necessary moment that comes in every life, of one brief hour to madness and joy - if out of it all can come recognition… perhaps, though this be not wisdom, it can be understood in light of it. Perhaps something can come of the place on which we now stand, in our final quarter of this year in our project. Something with which to continue the story, out from…
…Strife Within.