Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 7 Number 1, April 2006

_______________________________________________________________

Like Metaphysical Labour .

Poetry, silence, negative capability: three months in a frozen shack

by 

Dan Disney

University of Melbourne

Absolute and entire solitude…is as great a positive pain as can almost be conceived.

Edmund Burke A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

A poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer with him.

Plato  Ion

One

Three months in a mountain shack, writing, thinking, being? Buddha, Thoreau, Russell, Wittgenstein, et al: they’d all had moments of deep solitude. I’d just received a grant and my thesis was submitted so…why not? I began by making several phone calls to the farming families I'd spent my childhood around; by the time I was ready I’d found a tiny shack in the middle of nowhere, got a larder's worth of tinned food, and received ironclad promises from friends that they’d visit. What new inventions would wander out my psyche’s darker recesses? It all seemed like it might somehow be significant. And at least the trees out there wouldn’t fall unheard.

The shack is hidden in a loamy green valley where snow-topped mountains crowd so steeply that everything is shadowlit by early afternoon. The place has a veranda and a chimney; generations of fishers have visited generations of native mice and spiders who seem to shelter in every available nook. An old man's pinstriped jacket hangs from a nail by the plank door, which opens into a single room and leaves a hefty gap above the uneven wooden floor. Four tiny windowpanes rattle like teeth about to come loose. The shack, midwinter, sometimes seems small as a fallen-over wardrobe.

At a T-intersection deep in the Great Dividing Range there is a dirt trail, a mess of sludge and wheel-ruts thru snow gums. My car can’t make the last two kilometres the first morning out, so I spend the rest of the day to and fro, loading in (generator, fuel, axes, shovel, broom, gas bottles, cooker, boxes [and boxes. And boxes] of food, water barrels, torches, saucepans, clothes, bedding, laptop, a small library, stereo, prayer flags, shotgun, first aid kit) with a wheelbarrow. The entire time I think of a poet friend’s letter, reminding me how Kerouac ‘went a bit crazy’ firewatching on Mount Desolation. Her words seem a loud and distinct clarion call. Day one, and I set my jaw against the cold and push the wheelbarrow.

I remember stories of the woman who lived in these mountains in isolation for 60 years. Farmers and townsfolk (Omeo, on the steppes of the Victorian Alps, lies 50 kilometres away) still gossip about how ‘Mad Lucy’ carried her dead father to a roadside and left him there for the bush nurses. How she used to scare anyone trying to glimpse her by throwing rocks on sheets of iron and wailing like a banshee in the scrub. How she cut entire hillsides into firewood and tried to shoot someone once. No-one can remember anyone ever seeing her. My first days in the shack I think about Lucy constantly. How did she cope? Could she read? Did she share letters with anyone?

On my fourth night in the hut an angry windstorm barrels down from a blizzard on Falls Creek. The ubiquitous snow gums are blasted by it; the top of one topples over the shack’s roof and takes half the chimney with it. My father (retired, olden, more physically fragile now than I can get used to) has towed a caravan out ‘for guests’ (at the moment, him). Three in the morning and he's out in a woolly jumper, gumboots and underpants, hooking up the van to his 4WD to tow it from under a huge and broken tree. When we look the damage to the van isn’t superficial, but at least the man is not hurt. Melbourne at this moment seems windproof, impossibly distant.

I sometimes see my neighbour from over the hill, aloft on his ancient tractor. He has a team of work dogs for company, and paddocks filled with lowing cows mothering their young. Tony has a ginger beard streaked with silver that goes down past his chest. I talk to him a few times but the words always seem to peter out and we end up staring at mountains. As if the silence got into him long ago. He nods and grunts when I tell him I’m writing poems in the shack.

The first days are the hardest. Within two weeks my generator conks it, the fires I keep stoked through the day starve overnight, and snow and ice are everywhere. My thermometer frequently dips below negative ten. One morning I pour the last milk from a longlife container. There's something heavy in the bottom; a drowned mouse pokes through the hole. Days later, hammering a goodluck horseshoe to the veranda’s column I bash a thumb and lose the nail. I break a molar on a frozen muesli bar and one night, half asleep in my chair in front of the fire, a knobbly black spider summits the flannelette of my shoulder's mountain. My gut has begun to develop a semi-permanent knot.

Effort is in everything. In exchange for my time in the shack I’m to take down fences burnt in January’s fires. I do kilometres in the first fortnight. It is filthy, cold, hard work wrapping warped and useless wire into bundles, stacking star pickets, and clipping barbed wire into re-useable lengths. My hands cramp. My beard grows. I get used to the mountainfolk uniform (boots and Hard Yakka). There’s no hot shower at night but a saucepan boiled over the fire gets some of the layered dirt and embers off. My meals are basic: stew, pasta, anything that can be done in a pot. Before long the labour is finished: before, that is, I realise its been a diversion. Waves of horror have begun to rush thru me: the idea of spending ninety days in this shack – in its silent, burnt, frozen country – creates a forceful, sucking undertow. With no fences left to undo, now I must sit and begin another kind of work.

Two

I often wonder why poets exist and where their poems come from. Up until the shack, the act of poetry for me is essential, not easily defined, a psychic cipher. But spending time alone increasingly allows for answers, as if the muffled whispering of poetry utters a little louder now that the city's harmonies and dissonance are gone. My days always begin with exercise, which makes me warm while the fire gets moving in the hearth. Then porridge before a morning of reading: semiotics, philosophy, poetry. These all seem so incongruous to my icy mountain setting. It’s as if the world – relational, held together by the bond of invented meanings – isn’t relevant in this recluse’s shack. What becomes bigger, more relevant (other than my sense of loss. I spend the first weeks grieving over my missing cityscape and the fidelity of deep-running friendships) is a new and foreign thing: an inner space, a vacuum without acuity or depth. It sets me on edge as much as the wild dogs that yowl in the hills around my shack at night.

Then each day after my morning’s reading, poems: which, borne from out my inner silence, can be more menacing than the dogs. These are times that require moment after moment of pure, at times desperate, waiting. What arrives out the silence is often neither what I anticipate or want. So many times I feel myself deep inside what Keats terms negative capability, that is, ‘when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without irritable reaching after fact and reason.’[i] I often wish I could invent an excavator for my unconscious. Without a city to surround me my stimulus is in sharp, silent relief: the days are no longer about writing poems – instead, poetry becomes a yardstick. My happiness depends on it. Some days I am left wondering whether I’m groping toward meaning or enduring a form of torture. And there is nothing to do after dark falls.

Sometimes I feel like leaving. Urgently. But I remind myself of others who have spent lifetimes of waiting for secrets: the aeons of Desert Mothers and Fathers. The Gnostics, with their belief in redemption thru self-knowledge. The epiphanies of the Buddhists (‘agony before ecstasy’ becomes a favourite mantra, usually employed while waiting for poems to meander within reach): there is a rich tradition of people working in reflective solitude. It is as if creative passivity is necessary; as if in order to receive moments of mysterious knowing we must deeply experience quietness. Each poem, when it arrives, seems as if a spark from something wholly outside me, fleetingly seen from inside a cloud of unknowing that is stretched far as my mind’s eye and beyond.

Cabin fever, duly, sets in. A new form of restlessness, it feels like there’s been an apocalypse and I Am The Only One Left. What does Tony from over the hill do when ennui sets in? Build a new haystack? His dogs visit occasionally, sniffing at the fenceline but never close enough for a pat. Work dogs. I force myself to sit and sit and sit in front of my laptop. Sometimes a poem takes days to emerge. I never fail to ask ‘What took you so long?’ and then wonder who I’m addressing. I find myself craving narratives: films, novels, stories, anything but this rudderless psychic exploration. The books I’ve brought offer little respite: philosophy isn’t therapy (thankyou Wittgenstein); semiotics and collections of poems don’t contain the lull and increment of fiction’s narrative. I begin to miss stories dreadfully.

The banjo and rocking-chair on the veranda bring occasional moments of sunlit relief. I build a stupa of piled rocks in front of the shack and cut firewood. Lots of it. My walks in the mountains verge on the epic: across spurs and deeper into the thick Alpine scrub. I collect antlers from the skeletons of deer perished in the fire, and bring them back with me to adorn the shack. I put prayer flags up, as well as some of my favourite posters – including Bruegel’s Tower of Babel, which is tacked into place above where I write. The shack is taking shape; even though I'm more comfortable now, most of the time it still feels like I’m chasing after a lost or unknown language.

The word ‘poetry’ translates from the Latin poēta (Greek poētēs) as ‘to make or compose’; ‘text’ from the Latin texere as ‘to weave’ (the Greek téchnē: art, skill, craft).[ii] My poems feel like small language-based inventions which, in terms of ‘making’ or ‘composing’ (or creating) seems fundamental to poetry, the very essence that establishes it as a genre apart from the weave and weft of fiction. I have a slew of new collections with me. Reading them, peeling each poem layer by layer, it occurs to me that maybe we all as poets strive for a similar thing. Emma Lew, with her whispering sense of the otherly, with her knowing of language as a landmass, and with her stepping off into the psychic territories where words sheer off. Michael Farrell, who brunts meaning blackly while subverting language like an abstract expressionist. Jordie Albiston, who’s poems are pitted with literal, metaphorical, metaphysical dark spaces. Kevin Brophy, who treads the gaps of language to peer like a quantum physicist into its absences.[iii] What is it these poets flounder after? What do I fossick for, in my dark and frozen shack?

It often seems exasperatingly unclear to me. But in the moments when a new metaphor flares suddenly inside a poem I am exclamatory as Archimedes in his bathtub, and the slow moments of anxious waiting are made worthwhile. Meaning is transferred from one thing to an other[iv] and, in this process, something else is illumined: the role of the poet as creator is confirmed, as a newly-minted metaphor brings moments of newness back, via the artifice of language, into a matrix of meaning. Little wonder poetry seems like metaphysical labour. And little wonder poetry is so unread; a 'higher algebra of metaphors',[v] poems contain moments of extremity. Poets, it seems, busy themselves working at the very source of consciousness, the Kantian ens realissimum, expanding the phenomenological universe with conflations of metaphoric newness.

In the shack, without the distractions of my beloved city, the murmuring of poetry becomes stronger and more insistent. Mine is not a pastoral or romantic poetry; I invent pieces about fallibility, machineries, the godhead. And each poem seems to be a moment of individuation, as if every time I write a poem I am learning how to write a poem. I print a favourite quote and paste it to the wall:

The creative path is dark, groping, essentially mysterious. If you are listening to any other voice other than your own, you’re lost, or, what is more likely, are yet to cross the threshold that marks its beginning: the loss of self-consciousness and, in its place, the detached exploration of self.[vi]

Art cannot be gestureless. There is a continuum of tropes, each resonant with a history of newness. In beginning to listen more closely for what Keats termed 'truth and beauty'[vii] I am (perhaps for the first time) venturing beyond the established boundaries of my own poetics and into a psychic scape that is unfamiliar and difficult terrain. Poems I've never dreamed of begin to hit the page.

Three

My father used to joke that the road out to the shack is so senselessly curvy that it must've been built by a team of drunks. On the few times I go back to Omeo - to shower, to restock my vegetables, to call friends, the roadsigns count down the trip like an anxious bodhisattva waiting for satori: OM50. OM34. OM12. Countryfolk I pass on the road flick single digit salutations like cricket umpires from behind steering wheels. One night, back in the shack, I remember I've still got half a packet of cigarettes (for the time being I’ve started again) in the car. The moon is a bright and full lens above. It is so light I cast a shadow. Returning from the car I squint, blink, take a third look. There is a greyscale rainbow above me at midnight. Late night walks are a thing I begin to do more of (I take the gun when the wild dogs are out calling to one another[viii]).

The city becomes more comfortably distant. Time is passing. But the mountains can be strange. Occasionally I walk to my car and drive it for a while. When the dirt trail arrives at the T-intersection, right takes me to Omeo but beforehand, and very occasionally at night, to The Blue Duck: a mysterious, townless pub at a bend in the river. Locals with farms scattered across these Middle Of Nowhere mountains huddle here, swapping fishing and footy stories over beers. One thunder-filled and raucous night Tony and I bump into each other. With no mountains to gaze out to, we do our best to yarn for a ½ hour and it seems alright. At closing time I follow his tail-lights thru 20 kilometres of blankety fog.

Turning left at the T-intersection and away from Omeo and the Blue Duck, I once drive a halfday over a bumpy road through the mountains, and discover a deserted town built on an abandoned mine. I have to walk carefully; there are fissures that seem bottomless everywhere. My heart thumps hard when I find 97 identical stark white concrete crosses just off the road. They form an even grid, latticing a small bare hill. After a moment I spot a sign that tells me roadworkers built the crosses to commemorate those who died in the town 100 years ago. The hackles on my neck soften but, remembering this some nights, the shack gets pure eerie.

Time continues to pass; poems and mice leave their footprints on the page, new questions fall and melt away like snow. I get somewhere towards contentedness. Friends visit occasionally, get drunk, and lick the solar-powered electric fence. My girlfriend comes up and we find ourselves one night in a seedy hotel room in a town where the train line ends. At the bedhead, a picture of Princess Diana in a tiara. We turn her the other way to face the wall for a while. Happiness is beginning to exude sideways out of me. The shack, I decide, can be as simple as adaptation and attitude. But in my visitors’ wake I find myself full of pangs, feeling the city’s tug again. Solitude can be bearable, but its reward – my new poems – sometimes seems like small payment.

As poems continue to arrive, I continue to wonder on the role of poets. Toward the end of my stay I remember a quote from Buddha, who advised from his deathbed that we 'work out (our) own salvation with diligence.’[ix] In the post-god, post-postmodern milieu, I wonder: what can redeem us (and, indeed, what should we seek salvation from, in our rationalist universe)? With increasing clarity it seems metaphors are mental conceptions evolved to re-mask the universe, stretching language beyond its own parameters. This is what I have busied myself with in the shack. In undertaking the act of mystery-gathering, the poet seems responsible for re-creating nothing less than new versions of reality. And maybe it is this – the play of new meaning – that keeps the universe vivid, and gets us through the night.

Four

Then, one day, almost ridiculously, it is Spring. The sun is warmer and it hasn't snowed for weeks. Three months have gone and it is time to leave. I pack my things, and my father brings his 4WD and a trailer. We load the lot in an hour. Within a week I'm back in Carlton doing coffee and films and dinner with friends. I decide to go overseas; I ask my girlfriend to come and she says 'yes'. I’ve brought something strong back with me. Poetics, notionally, centres on aesthetics. In the shack it sometimes feels like I’ve wrestled with something bigger. At home, a small pile of new work sits at the corner of my desk.