Rosemary Dobson - The Sailor

Back in the Navy, you knew when disenchantment was beginning to set in on a fellow shipmate – usually the bloke with a few years under his belt.  He would withdraw to his bunk of a night to do a bit of reading.  Nothing unusual about that, except up until now you could bet he’d be laying back with a dog-eared copy of Playboy or Hustler propped open on his chest, constantly adjusting the position of his bunk-light to get the original studio colours.  Then one night, you look across and you see him engrossed in some plain cover magazine on alternate lifestyle called, ‘Grass Roots’.  ‘Grass Roots!’  When a sailor gets disenchanted his mind starts imagining himself as far away from the briny as he can get.  He imagines a plot of land, digging in dirt, growing turnips, breeding alpacas, working donkeys, mud bricks and maintaining a healthy water tank.  There was always this standard response that blokes would give if you asked them what they were going to do when they paid off.  And the response was, “Mate, when I pay off I’m going to put an oar on my shoulder and keep walking inland with me back to the sea until somebody says, ‘what’s that’?”  It was always one of those standard responses you expected, like, “What’s the best cure for sea sickness?”  Reply, “Find a tree and sit under it!”  I always thought the oar thing was a matelot’s made up dit from way back.  But then I come across a poem written in 1960 by our Australian poet, Rosemary Dobson, called, The Sailor.  Rosemary has put the yarn of the disenchanted sailor into a humorous poetic form.  So I’m wondering, was it Rosemary who first created this notion of a disenchanted sailor searching for a sea-change, or did she hear it as a ditty from a matelot?  I reckon it was some sailor who told her the yarn.  I reckon Rosemary would have heard this story and it would have appealed to her.  Read some of Rosemary Dobson’s poetry and you feel she’s got a nice little sense of humour; a careful, controlled, academic, witty sense of humour; framed to politely amuse but not shock the establishment.  On second thought, I don’t reckon it was a matelot who told Rosemary the yarn of the sailor, I reckon it must have been an ‘officer’.  I do love the poem for how it gives to me a rhythmic form of a crusty old dit I’ve heard so many, many times before.

The Sailor

(Rosemary Dobson, 1920 – )

 

The sailor settled the oar at his back

Over the hills he took the track

And the blue sea dipped behind him.

Whenever he saw beneath his palm

The shimmering roofs of a country town

He rubbed his hands and hoisted his oar –

But those who came to gape at the door

Cried out, ‘Well, look at the sailor!’

 

Over the crests of the Great Divide,

Down the slopes of the other side

Across the plains out westward –

And still as he walked through one-horse towns

Or droving-camps or mining claims

The folk came out to watch him pass

And chewing on a stalk of summer grass

Said, ‘What do you know – a sailor!’

 

Way out west where the red sand spins

And the plains lie down under gibber stones

He followed the stock routes inland.

The stockmen shouted, ‘Sailor, hey!’

But he came at last to the end of his way

For he heard a voice from a humpy croak

‘What’s that, mate, tied up on your back?’

And, ‘Here I stay’ cried the sailor.

 

I’ve half a mind to hoist a gun

And follow the way that sailor’s gone …

So the sailor kept walking until he came across people who had never seen an oar, therefore not tainted with any of the crap from life at sea, so he knows he can live there and forget his past.

 

Note how the last two lines create an analogy between oar and gun and what each represents – an oar, a piece of sea-faring equipment, the toil, loneliness, drudgery and peril of life at sea, a sailor’s life.  A gun, a piece of soldiering equipment, the horror of war, battle, massacre, fear, bloodshed, a military life.  In these lines does the poet put herself in a profession that she desires to get away from (soldiering, of which the ‘gun’ is representative), or is she revealing her personal opinion of guns in our society (more topical today than in 1960).  I tend to believe the analogy is between professions that the poet describes becoming tired of, so the desire to drop everything, walk away and find a place where people don’t engage in that sort of thing (don’t recognise the equipment).

Revision - 6^th March 2015.  Since posting this post with Rosemary Dobson’s poem, The Sailor, I was a little astounded to read in a book published by Camden House, A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900; (Nicholas Birns & Rebecca McNeer; 2007), that it was the ‘U-2 incident’ that prompted Rosemary to write The Sailor.  The ‘U-2 incident’ occurred in 1960 when the Russians shot down an American spy plane in their air space and the pilot, Gary Powers, was captured and jailed for a couple of years – embarrassing for the USA.  OK, 1960 is the year Dobson published the poem, but did Rosemary state that the poem was inspired by the U-2 incident?  Even if she did, I can’t see the connection.  Here’s the extract from Companion to Australian Literature, quote;

“In ‘The Sailor’, May 1960, a poem prompted by the U-2 crisis between the United States and the USSR, Dobson writes her own version of the male explorer poem, which registers both a fascination and a repulsion towards the figure of ‘Man Alone’, and still manages, in four compact stanzas to encompass all of the Australian continent.”

Is Birns suggesting the ‘sailor’ with the oar on his back is an early explorer exploring into the heart of Australia – ‘version of the male explorer poem …’?  Oh come on!  Where does ‘fascination’ and ‘repulsion’ of seeing this sailor, this ‘Man Alone’ come from?  By Birns not knowing the old navy dit, I believe he is interpreting the description of reactions of people as they come out to see the sailor as being either ‘fascinated’ or ‘repulsed’.  Not so.  The description of people’s reactions in the poem simply carry along the notion that as the sailor walks further inland he is still being recognised, identified as a ‘sailor’ (until he gets to a place where people don’t know what an oar is, and that’s where he figures he’ll stay!).  If Rosemary really was prompted by the U-2 incident to write The Sailor, then I believe the connection is only in the last two lines (the three main stanzas being from an old navy dit).  Perhaps with the U-2 incident and the media attention at the time, Rosemary felt for the captured pilot, Gary Powers.  In the Cold War with tensions running high here’s a dude right in the spotlight – got himself shot down; his country’s trying to lie about and deny his mission; he’s facing trial, imprisonment or execution – in 1960 everybody in the world knew who ‘Gary Powers’ was.  So I reckon Rosemary couldn’t help think what she reckons Powers would be thinking -

"I’ve half a mind to hoist a gun

And follow the way that sailor’s gone …"
 

 There’s another Rosemary Dobson poem that I like and it has a military theme.  It’s called, ‘The Major-General’. 

The Major-General

(Rosemary Dobson, 1920 – )

 

Grounded in Greek he kept his stoic phrase

Ready like a revolver in his drawer,

Ex-army, major-general, could outstare

Weakness, opinion and, at last, old age.

He beat the mischief from his younger son;

His wife grew tremulous, pity and grief

Aroused her protests, but she did not speak.

 

Sustained by shoe-trees, trouser-press and cane –

A rough-cut blackthorn with a silver knob –

He kept his bearing, earned a wide respect

And envy for his wife.  Each morning strolled

About the well-kept garden, cut two flowers,

One for his tweed lapel, and one for her

Laid on the breakfast-table like a threat.

This is not Rosemary playing with humour.  You know that the poem is an observation made by a civilian, from the term in the third line, ‘Ex-army’.  Civilians usually use the term to describe people they know who were in the military.  Rosemary paints a rather disturbing picture of a man who has carried his military behaviour over into his family and retired life – ‘kept his stoic phrase, Ready like a revolver ….’  One can only imagine a modern equivalent, Greek for, ‘suck it up princess!’  Trouble is, these people exist; the military can breed people like this.  When I read this poem I think of a favourite film of mine, The Great Santini (Robert Duvall).  How the competent hard-arse military man is equipped and can destroy his family from within.  Read The Major-General, and it is completely devoid of love.  It is a description of life with not a speck of love; killed by the ex-army fellow who believes (no, demands) approval, command, obedience and unquestionable loyalty.  We, military people need to be awake to this more than a lot of others.  I dwell on the last line, ‘Laid on the breakfast-table like a threat’.  How is it a threat?  It would surely not be the major’s purpose to place the flower as a threat.  In his mind, surely he would be placing the flower as a gesture of, weak consideration (affection or love not something being familiar to the major).  But even something as clinical as consideration can’t be construed as a threat.  So the gesture in placing the flower is not even from weak consideration!  It is a completely hollow gesture that the major has learnt powerful people do, and it means, ‘play the game, or else!’

 

My link to Rosemary Dobson is via her poem, The Major-General.  I grew up in an era and atmosphere of stoic, tough men; male aggression and dominance.  I take comfort in knowing it is being challenged and corrected (in our society at least).  I know I carry traits of my up-bringing, but who knows, if I hadn’t joined the company of men in the Navy I could be a lot worse!

2006.   Queensland cattle and farming country - where I grew up.  Returning to some of the towns and regional airports I see examples of tough men, aged now, but would have been considered good providers and protectors in their day.  Men who called a ‘spade’ a ‘spade’ without worrying about political correctness.  Men who got where they got by being physically superior.

On Observing a Man’s Man.

 

Like an old bull elephant

but not dignified

or false dignity

false bravado

old posturing

ignorant posturing

ego

old ego posturing

old posturing

from a life time of bullying

over standing

big

threatening

bull frog puffed up

physical posturing

barrel chest

fat gut

but all above the gut

thick arms

ensured ignorance

struck respect

deterred challenge

bull head

bull expression

get fucked exaggerated stance

on old legs

spindle legs

with the condition gone

exaggerated stiffness

John Wayne awkwardness

drawl

bandy legs

step, step, step

around, turn,

on display

used to standing out

played footy

bravado

still wanting to take a stand

ready to have a go

in absurd Kenso cargo pants.

                                                                                                               J. O. White

Bruce Dawe - and Easter poems

Easter is approaching and I’m thinking, who are the Christian or religious poets among my favourites?  I think poetry, by its nature leads one to reflect on life and the spiritual nature of things – nearly every poet I’ve read has dealt with the subject in some way as part of their work, pondering on God and the meaning of life.  But in the Christian calendar, Easter is not a time for questioning.  It is a time for knowing that Jesus died in a brutal, human flesh manner that perhaps only affords acceptance through it being seen as a willing and necessary sacrifice.  That’s why I like this poem on the crucifixion written by Bruce Dawe, ‘and a good friday was had by all’.  To me, Bruce Dawe has a way of writing cleverly for the common man – conversational language that puts you right there with Jesus and the soldiers as they are nailing him to the cross.  Sometimes it’s helpful to reflect on things as we know them from the world of our own experience in order to progress to the unknown, or things we don’t understand.  Dawe’s poem looks at it through the eyes of the common soldier doing his duty – he doesn’t like it, but he’s ‘signed the dotted line’ and has got to trust that the ‘big men’ know what they are doing.

and a good friday was had by all

(Bruce Dawe, 1930 -)

 

You men there, keep those women back

and God Almighty he laid down

on the crossed timber and old Silenus

my offsider looked at me as if to say

nice work for soldiers, your mind’s not your own

once you sign that dotted line Ave Caesar

and all that malarkey Imperator Rex

 

well this Nazarene

didn’t make it any easier

really – not like the ones

who kick up a fuss so you can

do your block and take it out on them

                                                          Silenus

held the spikes steady and I let fly

with the sledge-hammer, not looking

on the downswing trying hard not to hear

over the women’s wailing the bones give way

the iron shocking the dumb wood.

 

Orders is orders, I said after it was over

nothing personal you understand – we had a

drill-sergeant once thought he was God but he wasn’t

a patch on you

 

then we hauled on the ropes

and he rose in the hot air

like a diver just leaving the springboard, arms spread

so it seemed

over the whole damned creation

over the big men who must have had it in for him

and the curious ones who’ll watch anything if it’s free

with only the usual women caring anywhere

and a blind man in tears.

The times I read, and a good friday was had by all, I find myself reflecting on the words the soldier addressed to Jesus, “orders is orders ……… nothing personal you understand – we had a drill-sergeant once thought he was God but he wasn’t a patch on you ………”  They are a soldier’s words spoken honestly and show no hatred or malice, spoken man to man, with a tough admiration.  I can’t help but feel that Jesus would have blessed those words.

In my poem, I also reflect on the act of Jesus’ crucifixion.  I had a whole day to reflect – hiking with my family on a Good Friday.  The content was running through my head as we struggled over alpine hiking trails.  At the end of the day I just wrote what I had thought and felt – very quick poem, capture it like a dream.  One day I may come back to polish it – but maybe it is as it is ………. happy Easter.

2012.  We travel down to Thredbo and stay at the Navy ski lodge for the Easter weekend. None of us attend church service, but I know these mountains and alpine region won’t let you off that easy from celebration and worship.

Good Friday on the Main Range

 

5:30

Under the shower,

this is Good Friday,

our Lord would be

being whipped and scourged,

a long night of no sleep.

I make the first cut

on our leg of ham (sandwiches),

the Jews didn’t eat pork,

forbade it

because it was prone

to be full of disease and parasites,

another social rule

enforced by religion.

good friday,

what will the people say,

when they see us eating ham?

 

6:30

I’m ready, keen

to get around to Charlotte Pass

and our walk on the Main Range,

for some reason, Matthew

drags the chain,

deliberate protest against authority?

Jesus pissed the authorities off,

why would he do that?

Didn’t he expect they’d kill him?

Sitting, waiting,

whatever happened to authority?

Now, collaborative decision making

means everybody’s guilty.

 

9:00

We’re finally started,

carrying jackets and thermals.

They’d be nailing Jesus

to the cross now,

hauling him up

to hang in the air,

physical exertion begins

on our Mount Calvary,

climbing out

of the Snowy River valley,

my heart is beating too fast.

Jesus’s heart,

his physical heart,

the heart of Jesus,

essence of Jesus,

God,

they say it takes hours and hours

for a person to die from crucifixion,

we’ve only just begun.

 

12:00

Up, we seem to be ever

climbing up,

clouds blacken in anger

beyond us.

For a people of signs,

it’s a wonder they never saw

the signs.

Out on the range

there’s no protection from the wind,

it howls and stabs,

deliberate and horizontal

at our bodies,

we’re walking in cloud

being shredded and re-formed

over tough alpine plants,

giving no illusion

that death in these parts

could be very close at hand.

The women, the women

at the foot of the cross,

would be howling

and wailing by now, how long

will they have to wait

and watch?

We know it’s another three hours,

one hour to Kosciosko,

two to Seaman’s hut.

 

3:00

Trudging

as bowed monks

strung out,

along the road

to salvation.

The road’s a brown line

drawing the eye away

to creek crossings

and snow depth markers,

each at 25 metres

set to leaning angles,

like crucifixion poles.

They could crucify hundreds here,

the Romans used to do that,

line the roads and leave them.

These they had to get down

before sunset,

so they broke the legs

of the thieves

and stuck a spear

in Jesus’ side.

 

Surprisingly, devout hikers

armed with light camping gear,

pass us going out.

It’s Good Friday.

We have witnessed,

the devil’s fury

will have no mercy

here tonight.

                             J. O. White

  

Kenneth Slessor - Five Bells

It’s funny how you can arrive at something via many different paths or a path for which you did not plan.  That’s how it was for me with the poem Five Bells by Kenneth Slessor.  I remember saying in an earlier post, quite emphatically, that Five Bells was too full of hidden meaning for me to appreciate.  I know they study the poem at school and it’s considered Slessor’s best work, but for the times I had tried to read and understand it, the thing forever seemed too difficult – “Deep and dissolving verticals of light    Ferry the falls of moonshine down;  Why thieve these profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought anchored in time? …………?”

And that’s how Five Bells might have remained for me.  Except, I’m driving home from work a couple of weeks back listening to Radio National and they’re playing a track from a newly released album – a collaboration between the Australian National Academy of Music and singer song writer, Paul Kelly.  I like Paul Kelly’s work.  The experience gets better – the album is called, Conversations with Ghosts, and it’s a collection of poetry from a number of known poets where Paul Kelly sings their poetry set to modern classical music.  Each poem has a, talking to the dead, reflection, bells or ghost experience about it, so you’ve got poets like W. B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson, and of course, Kenneth Slessor with Five Bells.  Hearing the words from Five Bells being sounded out made a big difference to my interest in the poem.  I could hear that it had something to do with the ringing and sound of a ship’s bell – that also got my interest.  I did some research to find out why the poem was written and who it was about.  Essentially, Slessor is looking out on Sydney harbour at night while reminiscing about a friend and work colleague of his (Joe Lynch) who went missing off the back of a ferry, presumed drowned, because they never found the body – controversy over whether he fell or jumped.  It does help in understanding the poem if you do some background reading on Joe Lynch.  His biography is pretty much followed throughout the poem – the drowning in the first couple of verses; mad drinking sessions; walking out to a friends place at Moorebank; living and working in Melbourne as a cartoonist on Punch magazine; back to Sydney working on Smith’s Weekly; drinking and partying (reports say Joe sunk because he was wearing an overcoat weighed down with bottles of beer he was taking to a party on the North Shore); his father, a fiddle player and stone mason carving graveyard headstones for a living. 

Another aid to understanding Five Bells is to have knowledge of the maritime tradition of ringing a ship’s bell to denote time.  The title Five Bells is a direct reference to the maritime time-keeping system, so here it is.  A ship’s daily routine is broken up into 6, four-hour watches:

 

Midnight to 4am (middle watch);

4am to 8am (morning watch);

8am to 12noon (forenoon watch);

12 pm to 4pm (afternoon watch);

4pm to 8pm (dog watch – usually split into 2, two hour watches); and

8pm to midnight (first watch)

 

During each four hour watch, the ship’s bell is struck sharply on each half hour (8 ‘bells’ in total).  To signal a complete hour, the bell is struck in a quick ‘double’ bell movement (ding-ding!) and the half hour is signalled by an additional ‘single’ bell movement (ding-ding! …….. ding!).  So ‘Five Bells’ indicates it is two and a half hours into a watch (ding-ding!  ding-ding! …….. ding!).  The question is, in which ‘watch’ is Slessor’s Five Bells rang out?  It must be either the first watch (10.30pm) or the middle watch (2.30am) because it is definitely at night – ‘Night and water Pour to one rip of darkness ………. ‘, ‘I look out my window in the dark ………. ‘, ‘ ………. in the moon’s drench ….. ‘.  It is unlikely to be the middle watch because the bell is not normally rung in harbour at night at this time in the morning (disturbs the neighbours).  So we imagine Slessor is sitting up around 10.30pm, pondering upon the settling lights and night sounds of dark harbour …….

Five Bells

(Kenneth Slessor, 1901 - 1971)

 

Time that is moved by little fidget wheels

Is not my Time, the flood that does not flow.

Between the double and the single bell

Of a ship’s hour, between a round of bells

From the dark warship riding there below,

I have lived many lives, and this one life

Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells.

 

Deep and dissolving verticals of light

Ferry the falls of moonshine down.  Five bells

Coldly rung out of a machine’s voice.  Night and water

Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats

In air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.

 

Why do I think of you, dead man, why thieve

These profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought

Anchored in Time?  You have gone from earth,

Gone even from the meaning of a name;

Yet something’s there, yet something forms its lips

And hits and cries against the ports of space,

Beating their sides to make its fury heard.

 

Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face

In agonies of speech on speechless panes?

Cry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name!

 

But I hear nothing, nothing . . . only bells,

Five bells, the bumpkin calculus of Time.

Your echoes die, your voice is dowsed by Life,

There’s not a mouth can fly the pygmy strait –

Nothing except the memory of some bones

Long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud;

And unimportant things you might have done,

Or once I thought you did; but you forgot,

And all have now forgotten – looks and words

And slops of beer; your coat with buttons off,

Your gaunt chin and pricked eye, and raging tales

Of Irish kings and English perfidy,

And dirtier perfidy of publicans

Groaning to God from Darlinghurst.

Five bells.

 

Then I saw the road, I heard the thunder

Tumble, and felt the talons of the rain

The night we came to Moorebank in slab-dark,

So dark you bore no body, had no face,

But a sheer voice that rattled out of air

(As now you’d cry if I could break the glass),

A voice that spoke beside me in the bush,

Loud for a breath or bitten off by wind,

Of Milton, melons and the Rights of Man,

And blowing flutes, and how Tahitian girls

Are brown and angry-tongued, and Sydney girls

Are white and angry-tongued, or so you’d found.

But all I heard was words that didn’t join

So Milton became melons, melons girls,

And fifty mouths it seemed, were out that night,

And in each tree an Ear was bending down,

Or something had just run, gone behind grass,

When, blank and bone-white, like a maniac’s thought,

The naphtha-flash of lightning slit the sky,

Knifing the dark with deathly photographs.

There’s not so many with so poor a purse

Or fierce a need, must fare by night like that,

Five miles in darkness on a country track,

But when you do, that’s what you think

Five bells.

 

In Melbourne, your appetite had gone,

Your angers too; they had leeched away

By the soft archery of summer rains

And the sponge-paws of wetness, the slow damp

That stuck the leaves of living, snailed the mind,

And showed your bones, that had been sharp with rage,

The sodden ecstasies of rectitude.

I thought of what you had written in faint ink,

Your journal with the sawn-off lock, that stayed behind

With other things you left, all without use,

All without meaning now, except a sign

That someone had been living who was now dead:

“At Labassa.  Room 6 x 8

On top of the tower; because of this, very dark

And cold in winter.  Everything has been stowed

Into this room 500 books all shapes

And colours, dealt across the floor

And over the sills and on the laps of chairs;

Guns, photos of many different things

And different curioes that I obtained . . . . “

 

In Sydney by the spent aquarium-flare

Of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper,

We argued about blowing up the world,

But you were living backward, so each night

You crept a moment closer to the breast,

And they were living, all of them, those frames

And shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth,

And most your father, the old man gone blind,

With fingers always round a fiddle’s neck,

That graveyard mason whose fair monuments

And tablets cut with dreams of piety

Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men

Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment

At cargoes they had never thought to bear,

These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.

 

Where have you gone?  The tide is over you,

The turn of midnight water’s over you,

As time is over you, and mystery,

And memory, the flood that does not flow.

You have no suburb, like those easier dead

In private berths of dissolution laid –

The tide goes over, the waves ride over you

And let their shadows down like shining hair,

But they were Water, and the sea-pinks bend

Like lilies in your teeth, but they are Weed,

And you are only part of an Idea.

I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in,

The night you died, I felt your eardrums crack,

And the short agony, the longer dream,

The nothing that was neither long nor short,

But I was bound, and could not go that way,

But I was blind, and could not feel your hand.

If I could find an answer, could only find

Your meaning, or could say why you were here

Who now are gone, what purpose gave you breath

Or seized it back, might I not hear your voice?

 

I look out of my window in the dark

At waves with diamond quills and combs of light

That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand

In the moon’s drench, that straight enormous glaze,

And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-bouys

Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each,

And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard

Was a boat’s whistle, and the scraping squeal

Of seabirds’ voices far away, and bells,

Five bells.  Five bells coldly ringing out.

Five bells.

Slessor wrote Five Bells in 1937, ten years after Joe Lynch drowned.  In an interview published in the Daily Telegraph, 31^st July, 1967 (Bread & Wine, Kenneth Slessor, Angus & Robertson, 1970), Slessor said part of his inspiration for Five Bells came from an old Arabian fairy-tale where a man dips his face in a basin of magic water and between the time he dips his head in and withdraws it (5 seconds, 5 bells), he dreams he has lived another life - sailed many voyages, been shipwrecked and captured by pirates, married a princess, fought in battles and finally executed.  The fairy-tale suggests the life the man experiences as vision is just as real as his actual life except it was lived on another time-scale (who’s to say it wasn’t for ‘real’?).

In reminiscing, Slessor realises he can imagine, replay in memory, the whole span of Joe Lynch’s human life (or a human life) in the interval between the strokes of a ship’s bell (ding-ding!  ding-ding! …….. ding!).  Five Bells is written with the two time-scales interposed upon each other – the mechanical time-scale of five bells being rung out in three to five seconds, and a memory time-scale that compresses the thirty years of Joe Lynch’s life into the same five seconds (note the words, Five Bells repeated three times throughout the poem – 3 seconds of the ship’s bell; 3 decades of Joe Lynch’s life).  The words remind the reader that at that particular point in the poem a lengthy period of time has advanced along the time-scale of Joe Lynch’s life, but it has only occupied a few moments on the mechanical time-scale of the ship’s bell.

The construction of the poem gets us thinking about time and the mystery of time in relation to memory, ‘the flood that does not flow.’  What is memory?  It comes in a chronological order but it does not advance or ‘flow’ in the same pace or manner as real time.  It can be held in a compressed form.  We mechanically measure real time by it’s passage, but time may simply be this moment, nothing more than now.  Anything in front of now does not exist.  Anything behind is compressed in memory, mystery ….

“The turn of midnight water’s over you,

As time is over you, and mystery,

And memory, the flood that does not flow.”

 

I’ve dug up another old poem of mine as a link to this post.  Father Ashley is my midnight reflection on another man’s life.  A man who lives in my memory, who lives in the compressed time-scale of memory, between the double check that the cars are locked and the single throw of the front door latch before I go to bed, at Five Bells ……..

1992.  Living in Sydney, in the Catholic faith, I met an old priest during frequent visits to Melbourne.  At the time it seemed an odd friendship.  Little insights and understandings came much later; Father Ashley insights.  How important is it that other people hold us in their minds?  What happens when there’s nobody to pray for us?  What is life without prayer?

Father Ashley

 

Father Ashley, you must be dead now.

When was it?  ’76 or ’77?

Did you think I was a visionary convert?

Did you think I knew what you knew?

You pursued me.

I felt you took an interest in me that wasn’t encouraged.

And I, like always, to all people,

Dealt with you at arms length.

 

Remember 4/187 West Street?

I cooked us a meal there more than once.

You would visit Sydney,

And stay at the North Sydney Jesuit College.

I would look you up there and drive you to my place.

There was one time when you were in the city,

At that little old church at the western end of George Street,

Almost going into Parramatta Road.

It never dawned on me to remember why you were there.

 

You always knew when I was in Melbourne.

I don’t think I got in touch.

I think others used to do that for me.

You were a priest put out to pasture,

At Campion College, Kew.

Your stationary showed an embossed crest,

Oh, that’s right, there was the occasional letter.

Why didn’t I keep them?

 

Were you lonely?

Is that why you sought out my company?

Did you want to talk?

But what could I possibly say that you would want to hear?

Were you expecting to hear me speak of discovering the Truth, maybe?

When I didn’t even know I was looking for it?

Couldn’t you see me for what I really was?

Were you so easily fooled?

 

Looking back I’m ashamed to admit,

I did think you were a bit of a fool,

A little man.

You always wore your black coat and wide clerical collar,

Manacled about loose skin.

You giggled and fussed and shuffled and shook a little

Because you were old.

I wondered why the hell I was with you at all.

 

Father Ashley, I remember only one thing you ever said,

You asked me seriously if I prayed.

“Do you pray”? you said.

I remember I struggled with the answer,

I didn’t really know if I did but I thought I didn’t but should’ve.

I said yes, hoping that would be the end of it.

You seemed satisfied with the answer, remember,

For you were quite serious again when you asked,

“Will you pray for me”?

 

Couldn’t you see me for what I was?

Couldn’t you see through me?

Were you so easily fooled?

                                               J. O. White