The honeymoon Christmas

For once we didn’t go anywhere. This was our seventh Christmas together, but our first Christmas alone together. Our first Christmas in our very own house with our very own tree. Our first Christmas with our very entertaining cats. Our first Christmas married. Our first Christmas in Norway. My very first white Christmas.

On Christmas Eve we tidied up a bit then settled down for presents about 4pm (Michael having ascertained in advance that we would do German presents rather than Australian ones so he wouldn’t have to wait till tomorrow). The kittens were most excited with their toy mice, Michael loved his huge warm grey dressing-gown, I put my early Christmas present of an ipod touch to good use providing some quality Christmas music, and we emptied the Christmas stockings of an over-abundance of Swedish chocolate I had purchased to make up for already having eaten the Australian chocolate Mum had sent me. (We still have some German Christmas goodies left cos Michael’s Mum sent over four boxes of them!) We then called Michael’s folks, had a yummy dinner of roast carrots, parsnips, garlic, red onions, falafels and brussell sprouts, and capped off the evening by watching ‘Let the Right One In’ – brutal and poetic and heart-warming all at once.

The 25th continued in much the same way – our favourite food, a crackling fire, novels on the sofa, a walk in the snow, skype calls to family, and Michael practicing taking photos of lights. Some new friends, a Japanese family, came over for dinner, and their little daughter proved what a good kindergarten teacher I’ve been for the last few months by giving us spirited renditions of ‘Twinkle twinkle little star’.

I thought some more about how much I like that Norwegian advent poem – how joy and hope are there, but longing too. The last verse goes:

We light four candles this evening,
and let them burn down,
for longing, joy, hope and peace,
but most of all
for peace on this small earth
where people live.

 

My Nanna said that Christmas wasn’t the same this year without Irene, my Dad’s twin sister who died earlier this year. And I must admit, looking at several of my friends’ Christmas photos on facebook of their six month old babies, I felt a little twinge for our lost little one whom we will never meet. But then I felt an even bigger twinge from the very present little one kicking and wriggling inside me, and I smiled. We should meet him very soon. But I like that poem very much because those who are absent can be with us too, they are not shut out.

I love Christmas. I love Christmas in Australia with my family and the sunshine, and I love Christmas in Germany with Michael’s family and the perfectly wonderful German Christmas markets. But this year, this quiet, happy, snow-filled Christmas was exactly what we needed, and I wouldn’t change a thing.

 

Christmas lights

Ok so this is just a gratuitous shot of the kittens snoozing in our lounge room. I really want to write about light. Light is very important around here at this darkest time of year. All the houses have little white electric candles in their windows, which shine out calmly to the snow-filled streets.

On December 13th we celebrated Lucia. I think it’s even bigger in Sweden. The children at the kindergarten dressed up in white smocks and carried electric candles and walked in a procession singing songs about saint Lucia. It was strangely moving.

And every Monday at the kindergarten, we lit an advent candle. A day late, but it didn’t matter. Advent candles are pretty new to me, as the church I grew up in wasn’t big on that sort of symbolism. I had of course come across them, but only in passing. So I wasn’t sure if the particular meanings attached to the different candles were universal or peculiar to Norway.

I looked it up, and found this site, which explains it all beautifully. In Norway, the advent candles symbolize, in this order: joy, hope, longing and peace. It feels right to have the longing in there too. This particular configuration of meanings comes from a poem by the Norwegian poet Inger Hagerup. They recite one verse for each of the four Sundays before Christmas. It is a beautiful poem. It’s worth looking at the Norwegian version on the first site I linked to, but an English translation would go something like:

So we light one candle this evening.
We light it for joy.
It stands and shines for itself
And for us who are here now.
So we light one candle this evening,
We light it for joy.

 

Berlin

Was nice, if a little cloudy. Lots of delicious pizzas, waffles, and ice-creams were ingested, not to mention German beer. Here is Michael looking pensive in a pink cafe.

A highlight for me was gate-crashing a conference on Shakespear’s ‘Troilus and Cresseda’  and Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ for half a day, and catching up with not one but two of my favourite Australian medievalists. This was so lovely, and as Stephanie pointed out, it felt a bit like home away from home. The papers I heard were about gesture and emotion, public and private, faces and defacing. I must confess to not having read Chaucher’s ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ since my Honours year, but I have a very clear memory of the brilliant Tom Burton demonstrating the pathos of the poem. (For those not familiar with it, it’s a poem about love and betrayal, with the backdrop of the Trojan war.) Unfortunately the European spring put on a very poor show for all the international guests, but they seemed to enjoy themselves anyway.

We also climbed up to the top of the Berliner Dom, and watched a concert of Schumann and Bruckner there one evening. On Sunday, finally, the sun came out, and I wandered through the Tiergarten while Michael caught up with an old friend.

Whilst I was lounging in the sun, a tall dark handsome stranger from Cairo made a concerted effort to pick me up. He told me he was a masseur and a body-builder (!!!). As I gallantly extricated myself, he told me he was happy to merely ‘look see’. Having escaped Criseyde’s fate, I was immediately rewarded by a sign from the gods.

 

Gifts

My grandmothers gave you presents.

Yellow hand-knitted booties,
The very same pattern my father wore once
And so did I.

A white cloth to wrap you in
Embroidered with a bumble bee.

For days they seemed to herald
Your presence –
Feet that would curl into them
A body damp and warm
And small enough to hold.

Now they cup emptiness.
I fold them away to save for another.

I will not even give you a name.

But I give you all the names.
The silly names we giggled over late at night.
The beautiful names, the old names,
Far too pretentious to actually use.
Now you can have them all:
The strong names, the bright names,
The storybook names, the wicked names,
The simple, lovely names we weighed on our tongues
Like smooth pebbles.
Have them all.

I’ll weave them into a coat of many colours
Fit for a favoured child.
Being spun of words, it may have holes
(How poorly the letters knit together)
But it will be pretty.
The coat will glitter in the dark like a fiery rainbow,
Like a cloud of bees.

And if, where you’re going, you do not need it, well,
Leave it behind.

 

Lakes

I cycled to the lake this evening and the water was very still. The pine trees, gilded by the late sun, mirrored themselves perfectly. Then a fish jumped and flopped and splashed and the ripples circled out, a perfect bulls eye, eventually hitting the bank and folding in on themselves. It reminded me of this poem, by a 19th/early 20th century Australian poet who lived and wrote poems near the country town where I grew up. He was a farm labourer and largely uneducated. This poem is a bit awkward in places but I like it anyway.

The Crane is my neighbour

John Shaw Neilson

The bird is my neighbour, a whimsical fellow and dim;
There is in the lake a nobility falling on him.

The bird is a noble, he turns to the sky for a theme,
And the ripples are thoughts coming out to the edge of a dream.

The bird is both ancient and excellent, sober and wise,
But he never could spend all the love that is sent for his eyes.

He bleats no instruction, he is not an arrogant drummer;
His gown is simplicity – blue as the smoke of the summer.

How patient he is as he puts out his wings for the blue!
His eyes are as old as the twilight, and calm as the dew.

The bird is my neighbour, he leaves not a claim for a sigh,
He moves as the guest of the sunlight – he roams in the sky.

The bird is a noble, he turns to the sky for a theme,
And the ripples are thoughts coming out to the edge of a dream.

Claire Souter made a painting inspired by it.

I also thought of this poem, which I wrote about ten years ago and remember word for word. (Not surprising really as it is a silly little thing.) I wrote it about a lake not far from Penola, with which Neilson had some connection, and I was thinking about him and his lake and his ripples at the time.

I am the lake’s reflection
said the curved moon
leaping like a silver fish
in blue, late afternoon.

For me, there is still something magical and improbable about lakes. Perhaps as I come from such a dry country, where things marked as lakes on maps are often just sand flats or salt flats waiting for rain. ‘Lake’. There is something marvelous about it – the image, the word. The thought of all that still water beneath the stones and the trees.

 

Adelaide

I always find blogging more difficult from here. I guess it’s because many of the people who read the blog are just around the corner. But it’s been good. I’ve been hanging out with my grandparents, and my brother, and my old friends. And it’s good good good. There’s something about old friends which is just great. I also met my one year old second cousin who is cute.

Up until yesterday the days have been shiny and warm and bright. Yesterday it started to rain. After an initial grumpiness (yes I know Adelaide needs rain but not during my holiday) I let myself enjoy it. The white twisty trunk of the gum tree near my parents’ deck is now grey and slippery like wet silk. The air smells clean. The birds croak and chatter and fly about between the newly washed leaves. And the rain, when it comes, is sudden and fresh and noisy on the tin roof, and not like European rain at all.

Another funny thing happened last night. I was drinking a beer with my brother in the verander of a pub, and a very friendly lawyer kept popping out for a smoke. He chatted to my brother, and when he discovered that my brother is an artist, he gave him his card so he can invite him to his next exhibition. Then he asked me what I did, and when I said I had just finished a PhD in literature, he said his sister Kate is into literature too, she’s a poet. ‘Kate who?’ I asked, but I already knew. Kate Deller Evans and I had our first collections of poetry published together in New Poets Seven back in 2002. He said he was seeing her later, and he’d say hello. Living on the other side of the world, I have become unused to all this synchronicity!

 

Why you should still love Les Murray

I felt so tired this morning that I promised myself an early night tonight. Why is it not possible to get more done? I am making progress but I wish it were quicker.

I am working on my Les Murray chapter. I like his work very much. I’m not sure my chapter will do him justice. Actually, ‘like’ is not the right word at all. I adore his poems. He is a genius. His politics are also terribly problematic and unfortunately I have to deal with them in the chapter. But they don’t make me adore his poetry any less. (Not every single poem, but a lot of them.) I came across this beautiful review by Clive James that sums up one of the things so brilliant about him. He says Murray is an example of the way poets are ‘ unfairly interesting, as if they didn’t deserve to get so much said in such a short space’:

‘The severed trunk
slips off its stump and drops along its shadow.’

Not only do you wonder how he thought of that, you imagine him wondering too…

There is another good example in ‘The Power-line Incarnation’, a poem about how it feels to clear fallen power-lines off the roof of your house and find them to be still transmitting their full load of electricity.

‘When I ran to snatch the wires off our roof
hands bloomed teeth shouted I was almost seized held back from this life
O flumes O chariot reins
you cover me with lurids deck me with gaudies…’

The non-Australian reader need not think that there are outback Australians who call wires flumes. ‘Flume’, meaning an artificial channel, is Middle English following Old French, and comes out of the dictionary, not out of colonial usage. But the flumes, lurids, and gaudies seem appropriate here because the shock has sent the narrator back to the roots, of language as of life; the voltage has impelled a Jungian power-dive into the collective unconscious.

Isn’t ‘flume’ a lovely word? It sums up for me the electric shiver I get like get from moments like this in Murray’s poetry. Instead of writing my chapter I would like to write pages and pages about these incredible phrases. His bat poem for example. And oh, there are millions and millions. (If you click over to James’s review he discusses a few more.)

But these magic phrases are not the only thing that is wonderful about Murray’s poetry. He has all these elaborate theories about Australian identity, involving fusions of Aboriginal poetry, and Catholicism, and Gaelic poetry, and the Middle Ages, and the poor farmers, and about how he experiences belonging in the country the same way the Aboriginals do but also in the same way his Scottish ancestors did. Which of course is terribly problematic and you can’t really do that, and in designating certain groups as truly ‘Australian’ he’s alienating a huge proportion of the population.

But – I don’t think his poetry is brilliant simply in spite of his weird politics and his intense spiritual visions. I think they’re bound up together somehow, they come from the same place. So while I can unpick the unsettling way he aligns the Middle Ages with Australia, in some ways I don’t want to, because his vision is compelling and marvelous. It is a myth, yes, and there are real problems with some of the things he implies, but what he gives outweighs by far anything we can objectively say is problematic about his poetry.

And I was going to talk about how reading his ‘The Idyll Wheel’ – a suite of poems based around the Australian seasons – while holed up in my study listening to The Magic Flute in a snowy Norwegian February made me cry. But I have to go to bed now otherwise my new curfew will count for nothing and I will be a slow writer tomorrow morning. But the poem reminded me of how some weird woman on TV in England said she’d hate to have a Christmas in Australia because you’d know winter was just around the corner, and I thought – she knows nothing, winter is the least of their problems right now. Winter is unimaginable right now. As Les knows well:

Weedy drymouth Feb, first cousin of scorched creek stones,
of barbed wire across gaunt gullies, bringer of soldered
death-freckles to the backs of farmer’s hands. . .

. . .

. . . needy Feb, who waits for the raw eel-perfume
of the first real rain’s pheromones, the magic rain-on-dust
sexual scent of Time itself, philtre of all native beings

 

Ezra Pound sings cuckoo

The things you find on Wikipedia. I must confess, I’ve never been able to get into Ezra Pound. I never had the chance to study his work formally, and the few times I opened his collected poems as a conscientious undergraduate in the library on rainy afternoons, I found them impenetrable. But I was looking up the ‘cuckoo song‘, for thesis related reasons, and I came across this. It won’t mean much to you Aussies right now, but it made me laugh out loud.

Winter is icumen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damm you; Sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, ’tis why I am, Goddamm,
So ‘gainst the winter’s balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing goddamm,
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.

 

To quote a poem entirely out of context

I am like the sea trying to straighten myself out
On a beach while ships are sinking elsewhere

Kevin Hart

That’s what the thesis feels like right now, as I straighten a few niggling, messy footnotes. (The poem, by the way, is called ‘To the Spirit’, and isn’t talking about theses at all, but I’ve always loved that image.)

 

Why I’m doing this

Been thinking about Australian poetry. What it means to me. Why it called out to me, and drew me to study it. Why on earth I ended up devoting several years of my life to studying Australian poetry and the Middle Ages, together. It has something to do with being out of the limelight. And something to do with feeling at home. Not sure if that makes sense. I love all kinds of literature – Dostoevsky, Keats, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, but I’d never consider doing a PhD on them. (I wrote an honours thesis in Dostoevsky but that’s different – I didn’t have to learn Russian for that…)

Before I did the Masters in Medieval literature in York (which I did because it sounded amazingly fun, and it was), I came up with the PhD topic that I am now getting close to finishing – to look at representations of the Middle Ages in Australian literature. It helped me get funding for my Masters, which in turn helped me get funding for the PhD. While I was doing the Masters, I wondered if I would come up with a new topic, a ‘proper medieval topic’, and abandon my old one. My Masters dissertation was on the Pearl-poet and fourteenth-century mystics. I loved it. Pearl is still one of my favourite poems. Anyway, I agonized over potential PhD topics for months. But I remember walking along the river one afternoon, and it all suddenly becoming clear. Australian poetry. That was it. It had to be. It lit something up inside me. It made me smile. It was as certain as the grey light on the water, winding out a path.

At various points over the past few years as I’ve studied Australian poetry at an English university, I’ve wondered what’s special about it, to me. When I was tutoring on the introductory ‘Reading Prose’ module, I listened to lectures on Great Expectations and Mrs Dalloway (both novels I adore, especially the latter), and I suddenly realised – London’s down the road for these students. It’s not some mythical city on the other side of the world. ‘English literature’ happens here, it comes from here, here is the centre. And they probably don’t even notice.

Which was probably the reason, as I got into poetry as a teenager and a young adult, that I felt especially connected to the Australian poems. Yes I loved T.S. Eliot and Hopkins and Dylan Thomas and for that matter Zbigniew Herbert, but there was something extraordinary about the fact that John Shaw Neilson wrote about lakes and trees not far from my home, and Les Murray wrote about Emus and possums ‘skidding down the roof on little moonlit claws’, and when Judith Wright described the ‘delicate dry breasts’ of a moon-glazed country seen from a train window, she spoke of a land I knew by heart.

There’s also the weird pride that I come from the same place. I like it that Francis Webb was born in Adelaide, and Randolph Stow taught there. And I love it when I show someone a poem written in Australia and they are seriously impressed. I do feel proud. Like I have some strange national duty to share with the world what good stuff is going on down there.

So that’s the personal baggage I’m bringing to this project (we’ll have to do the ‘why the Middle Ages’ post another day, if anyone’s interested). And it’s what hums in the background as I consider rather tedious arguments about ‘national traditions’ and ‘postcoloniality’ and ‘cultural autonomy’. Because with my thinking-hat on, I don’t buy any of that whole-sale. Belonging is problematic in Australia, and I think ‘cultural autonomy’ is a myth (more on this another day, too). But – something about these poems belong to me – and I to them. And that makes me happy.