Back to this writer’s Contents page

Martin Harrison

Essays

Digitalism
Land and Theory

Digitalism

            “I felt justified in experimenting” — John Tranter, Blackout

Two poem-sequences have appeared recently which reflect aspects of the digital nature of contemporary writing systems and take other pieces of writing as substantial starting points for the new work. M.T.C. Cronin’s “Talking with Neruda’s Questions” and John Tranter’s “Blackout”,[1]  could loosely be described as cut-ups or samples of well-known or at least significant pieces of previous literature. The first takes as its ur-text the great Chilean modernist poet Pablo Neruda’s final and posthumously published sequence, A Book of Questions; the second takes an even more canonised and critically important text, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, using it as a maquette or boiler plate for a cut-up text.

Strikingly, neither of the contemporary poems handles this connection with a “classical” original poem in a traditional literary manner. M.T.C. Cronin’s “Talking with Neruda’s Questions” openly foregrounds the experimental nature of the contemporary poem’s connection with the famous older work. Thus, contrary to the idea that her poem might be a homage to an influential dead poet Neruda’s presence is largely erased. The relationship between the new poem and the older one involves less personal translation than extensive textual interchange. As if to stress the textual arbitrariness of her view of the original poem Cronin makes use of an already published translation, William O’Daly’s 1991 version.[2]  The poet deliberately lets us know that her version takes off from a text which is not, stricto sensu, the original Spanish language poem.

A similar idea that the literary source behind a new poem is provisional is also a feature of “Blackout.” Tranter mixes up samples of an ancient text with samples from two other modern texts. More, neither of these secondary texts is a poem.[3]   What results is accordingly an ongoing and perhaps deliberately incomplete work in which digitally processed interweavings and cancellations between the three pieces of writing lead on to the currently published poem. Cronin’s poem, connections which are properly assumed to operate between a famous literary example and a new poem are deliberately taken apart and broken. Any attempt to argue an explicit reason for the fragmentation of the original in, say, the manner which Pound combined samples in The Cantos in his famous vortices of fragments is rejected in favour of a method of juxtaposition which puts together a single level, linear text where the breaks between different sources for the materials are hard to recognize. Bits and pieces of the original works flicker through Tranter’s poem like bright stones in a mosaic. Some can be identified; others cannot. Their recognisability is, in the main, haphazard, leaving the reader with the impression that the processing of the materials is in large part machine made and aleatoric. The result is a poem which is curiously independent of its famous ancestor; there is almost a suggestion that any famous poem might have done the job.

What then is the criterion of selection where the original materials of these two poems are concerned? An answer will inevitably encompass a shift (a moment which could  be categorised as a moment of indirection) between a digitalised sense of the literary past and a set of other traditionally established ways of acknowledging literary inheritance — such as literary forms like homage. Translation, pastiche, imitation, paraphrase could all be mentioned here too. Broadly speaking, all these forms derive from the practices of Renaissance poets and whether literal translation or literary imitation, they all imply a direct connection between the original source work and the new work. These were, for instance, the forms in which 17th and 18th Century poets reclaimed the main works of classical antiquity; they remain the means by which poets introduce foreign modes and genres into the vernacular literature. homage and translation, in other words, are tried and true methods of an analogue, or copying, way of rendering an earlier work. The new text while not necessarily being a literal facsimile has nonetheless the status of being a version authenticated by the original. At heart, analogue methods assume that the new poem, no matter how transformed or even deliberately distorted, is to be judged as a reproduction of the original. Their relation to the original is similar to that of a photograph: no matter how blurred or recoloured a photograph, it is at base inevitably considered as a reproduction of an original subject. It is this necessary connection with the previous text which both “Blackout” and “Talking with Neruda’s Questions” make precarious. They grow from earlier texts very clearly, but they do not reproduce them or translate them. Any notion of equivalence is left unclear.

In these poems equivalence is not the main game. Factors of chance and factors of change are. The Book of Questions, a sequence of seventy four short poems cast in the form of questions, demonstrates this. Much as if entering a different key stroke instruction, Cronin’s version shifts the syntactic device from a question format to a statement format while retaining much of the language, the imagery and metaphors at the same time as keeping to the same number of seventy four short poems. What matters here is not to make a new version but to intervene in an existing text and make a deep structural change. Where necessary and where Neruda’ s questions do not answer themselves, new phrases are provided. Clearly, however, what is recycled from the original text is not a copy of its structure, nor a rendering of the dramatic voicing of Neruda’s poem.

The act of sampling is, however, not undeliberated. Many of Neruda’s images are used in a way which is off centre and foreign to English language norms. So we get

The name of the month between December
and January is Little-Month-Without-Cares.
By the authority of the three-handed vintner
they numbered the twelve grapes of the cluster...[4]

Neruda’s poem is replaced in front of us no longer as a formal whole but in bits and pieces; while at the same time its voicing and syntax are converted into a hidden template which dictates what new material can be introduced. The result is inevitably a poem which has been dehistoricised and decontextualised. But paradoxically the new poem demonstrates how the partly surrealist influenced images of a modernist can function in the work of a contemporary Australian. Thus Cronin transposes Neruda’s fifty seventh question into:

If we outlawed interplanetary kisses
would we need a prison-cage of moonbeams?
And would a court of love try
the kissers in their beds? The platypus in its spacesuit
could round up the offenders
and the horses in their quiet shoes
could look for evidence on the moon.[5]

Sampling (in the musical sense, for instance) is a useful term here. Cronin’s poem relocates parts of Neruda’s poem. She deals with the Spanish original literally, capturing fragments of Neruda’s poetry in much the same way that one might scan an image or part of an image in the construction of a digital collage. The whole question of what Neruda’s original means to us now, including the historical question of what the poem meant when first composed, is sidelined. Cronin’s poem, for example, makes little overall narrative sense whereas Neruda’s, though full of paradoxical references, structures a series of questions for a resolved formal effect. Neruda’s poem, a set of questions asked by someone at the edge of death, casting an eye back on his life, is a rhetorical schema with a powerful, theatrical and persuasive meaning overall. Every reader intensely senses that the poem could only have been written at that particular point in Neruda’s life at that moment, in that crisis. The formal effect is so strong that the biographical context, the poem’s posthumous publication, extra-literary facts such as the confrontational political environment Neruda was writing in seem necessarily to add to its meaningfulness. These features work so tightly as analogues to the poem’s apparent textual meanings, that biographical and contextual elements though they may be, they cannot easily be extrapolated from Neruda’s intentions in writing the poem. Their convergence is historical and infrangible. They are, so to speak, “in” the writing. Very tellingly, they are largely excised in Cronin’s digital reuse of the poetry.

2Unlike the finality and historicity of The Tempest and of The Book of Questions, malleability at the level of units of information is one of the hallmarks of digital systems. Such malleability derives ultimately from the fact that no digital representation is a copy of the original in the analogue manner just described. Rather, what a digital image presents is a statistical threshold constituted from a multiplicity of numerical samples. A sufficient number of samples, or snapshots, makes up an image but does so only when the samples have been decoded. As is often mentioned in the literature on digital aesthetics, there is no stable surface on which a digital version is captured unlike in analogue systems. There is no tape, no paper, no photographic surface on which a replica is indued. The absence of a copy is, in every sense of the word, literal.

One result of this is that replaceability and the theoretical possibility of manifold arbitrary associations appear to be inbuilt into the logic of digital operations. The lack of a replica opens up too the possibility of selecting only some of the snapshots rather than all of them, or of modifying these snapshots in the process of capturing the information and thus significantly changing the object. This is so not only at levels which are “hidden” in the depths of the system, in its logic and programming languages. It also operates at the most surface levels of the working interface: for example, in networking, in electronic mail, in hypertext. All these  structured aspects of the design system carry features of replaceability  in the ways in which high speed links can be made on word or image, in the non-linear way in which information is accessed on the screen and in the non-linear design of data bases and story boards. The visual layout and design of home pages is an obvious example. Here, what typically comes up on screen is a thoroughly eclectic array of boxes and links and search engines side by side with a higgledy piggledy zoning of adverts and news links plus headers or a side image of some special display.

Neither framed picture space, neither television screen nor newspaper layout seem to explain this style of visual siting.[6]   On the one hand, the average home page is a layout artist’s nightmare composed of irreconcilable typefaces, print sizes, depths of field, frames and colours; but on the other hand, it displays an innovative sense of meaningfulness and composition according to which information is organised on a zoning principle which is less that of sequential reading than of reconnoitring a feature-rich space.

When these ideas are brought back to poems, a number of other features conjoins with this capacity of the digital system to produce potentially arbitrary types of corrugation in the textual surface. Perhaps the most important of these features goes to the core of the relationship between the writing of a poem and its context: the quality which was earlier described as the infrangible connection between the poem’s occasion and its voicing. Digital systems loosen up that connection. Arbitrariness and a multiplicity of directions occur right from the start in any digitalised version and, indeed, reach so deeply into the purely statistical nature of structure that it becomes impossible to determine the point where and when an opening and an ending to an expression occur. Language is, so to speak, switched on rather than being commenced intentionally; and in the same manner, ending is a matter of stopping somewhat as if one is closing down the system or severing a link with the network.

If read back into the structure of poems, this seems to argue there is no necessity to build a point of resolution into the poem’s narrative voice and thereby judge the right moment to terminate (exit from) the work. Similarly, when a work is reframed in digital format, it is difficult to maintain the illusion that an ending is generated from inside the writing or within inner tensions in the structure regardless of how these are carried by the fictional narrative or in the construction of the poet’s voice. There is, for instance, no need to maintain the illusion that this ending coincides with a particularly privileged moment of insight or is produced through complication or Aristotelian peripateia. We might say that the thinking and writing which go on in a digital format no longer produce their own ends, or their own necessary time in which the outcome of a thought must be experienced. At the very least, these changes mark an important change in sensibility, arguably one already apparent in the proliferation of discontinuous forms of fiction writing, in the word-image combinations of hypertext systems and in the way that writing is more and more being treated interactively and not as static text. Analogue systems work quite otherwise: they generate a space for thought, an intensely readerly place for the voiced text, and they necessarily oblige a sense of an ending produced as part of the structure of the experience of reading. As in Neruda’s poem these are features at writing’s heart when practised in its analogue, representational mode. There is a second digital characteristic which if carried over into poetry no less radically upsets the place and manner in which experience is represented. An intrinsic feature of analogue representation is that a proportion holds between original and copy. Usually this feature is a feature of miniaturisation: the image depicted in the photo, for example, is smaller than the person in real life. There are many such instances to do with images, films, paintings, books, memories, poems. Other examples are more complex because they involve intuitive and irrational types of analogue connection. Thus, the information printed on the magnetic tape is conceived as being efficiently packed into a space (the tape) much smaller than the space of the world in which the naturally occurring sound occurs. Or a child setting out toys on the carpet may have imagined the entirety of a city. Here in these examples, the impression of a miniaturisation which occurs when something is copied is clearly not just a literal analogue. For here the capacity of a version to be an analogue is metaphorically tied to a much larger phenomenological framework in which human beings perceive the relative proportions between tapes and sounds, between copies and originals, between toy cars and real ones, between pictures and their subjects. There are many such forms of half-registered identification.

Obviously, a feature such as size is not in itself the issue. In this example size indicates, rather, the way in which metaphoric proportions hold between versions and operate in a field of normal expectations about the differences of size between originals and copies. Normative relations confirm orderly sets of analogues within their phenomenological settings whilst disorderly sets disrupt those norms. This expectation of normative relationships between a thing depicted and the depiction of it can, for example, be decisive — not least in terms of emotional reaction. It is a factor which a variety of media influenced artists have recently been exploiting in work which expands the size of the object depicted either to grotesquely large proportions (Koons’ installation sculptures, for instance) or to sizes which exceed the capacity of the eye to take them in. Christo’s walls and fences, Smithson’s land art pieces, the walking journeys of the British artist Richard Long are well known instances of an art practice which depicts terrain which is beyond the range of seeing. These works explore deliberate reversals of the normal ratio between the size of an original and its representation, a ratio which the viewer expects to operate intrinsically in analogue modalities.

But a digital version is not a replica. The intrinsically  proportional relations between object and copy which an oversize Koons’ artwork exploits and upsets start to weaken once it is recognised that a digital version is only a statistical sample. It is held nowhere in its entirety as a full version. The implications are complex, and should not be overstated. For instance, to draw attention to the lack of an intrinsic connection between original and replica is not to deny that the VDT’s screen image is, when seen by a real viewer on a real screen, smaller or larger than the original. Obviously too a digital image may be reframed or zoomed in on or cut and resampled, thereby changing how we see it. But unlike analogue relationships these new relations between original and digital version now mainly hold according to the various forms of interface access and the variety of reuses (including size, framing, zoom) to which the stored information can be put. They no longer, first off, privilege the cause-effect connection between the original figure and the intimacy (or otherwise) of the portrayal — as in, say, the intimacy of the tiny, hand-held representation in an Elizabethan locket. Or in another example: the deliberate size of the Statue of Liberty.[7]   In digital versions, expectations as to proper proportion are replaced by a willingness to reuse and recycle. You just log in the zoom instruction.

Digital systems scan, copy and reframe at will, a feature which immediately counteracts any tendency to fixate on specific attributes of the representation. Yet this breakdown of a real time affect is not about a lack of different attributes (colour, size, framing, focus etc.) in digital format, but quite the opposite: it is to do with how technical control of these elements analyses, breaks down and multiplies them such that they become variants which can be manipulated in any direction. What results is a new kind of precariousness in the idea that particular facets, particular features and accordingly particular responses inhere in a particular copy or are evoked by it.

This ability to frame and reframe at will is quite likely one of the reasons why John Tranter’s “Blackout” is left unfinished. After the ninth section it breaks off with a printer’s colophon mark indicating that there could be more words one day, or perhaps not. There could be more, there could be less. For where does such a poem start? And what kind of emotional pressures can be said to generate its language and, accordingly, what kind of pressure will bring it to an end?3 In a chapter on the poetic use of language and the connections between imagination, writing and longing, the American poet and critic Susan Stewart writes about how emotions inhere within things and of how similarly “(w)ithout narrative, without the organisation of experience, the event cannot come to be”.[8]   One claim here is that things become significant to us in so far as they deeply intertwine with emotional states like desire and longing. Further, Stewart is arguing that things (like poems, for instance) can achieve that intertwining of longing and meaning because they can narrate events.[9]  Poetry can be exciting and emotionally engaging because it makes, as Stewart puts it, the event of the poem matter. Such a claim assumes of course that poetic language works by analogy and implies that the function of poetry is to organise specific congruencies between lived experience and the language of a poem, defining that space across a series of interlinked stories and symbolic zones. This is what was happening in Neruda’s The Book of Questions, which is both a book of poems and a book of a “life moment”. In this analogue mode, the poem brings an event into being. Largely because this identification between event and moment in speech is made so strongly in The Book of Questions and with such mortal seriousness, the reader is tempted to say that here the end of poetic speech symbolises the end of life, of being alive. This is the experience the poem opens up to the reader.

But “Blackout” is an “event” which is never started, never finished and about which, even more puzzlingly, it cannot even clearly be said that it is unfinished. It does not sufficiently resolve into a coherent narrative or even a coherent thought structure for any such judgements to be certain. Nor is there a clearly established field of representation in the work. No object is nostalgised; no state of mind or place or scene is dreamt of and desired. Similarly, the polyphony of the text is left jagged and juxtapositional, much in the manner of a piece of block music. It is a downloaded text where many voices criss cross in a many timed, interactive way. Given these attributes of the poem (attributes signalled by the poem’s unfinished and indeterminate nature, by its fragmentary voicing and by its lack of apparent subject matter) it is intrinsic to the work that it is hard to define what sort of an “event” “Blackout” is. It is an event entirely on the surface, taking place, so to speak, largely in its own doing.

Paradoxically then, despite all its discontinuities, “Blackout” cannot be described as self reflexive or ironically self undermining poetry. Though the poem plays with how it is artificially derived from other sources it is not a piece “about” writing: it is not about self consciously naming the terms by which the artifice of the poem’s imaginary space is set up. Instead, in a way curiously opposite to a post-modernist view of poetry, “Blackout” is full of things to say, full of gestures which dramatise and commend. Indeed it is fully extroverted writing, turned away from any sense of an internal mechanism and largely ignorant of the sort of psychological “inscape” (including that of being a text about a text) which could underpin more deeply ironic manoeuvres. In a way this is another version of the discontinuous, fragmentary mode for which Tranter’s poetry is often noteworthy. In an admiring, closely argued essay on Tranter, poet and novelist Alan Gould has justly observed the way his poems “are alive, often frenetic, with human exchange, and crowded with people and objects.”[10]   In “Blackout” the crowded, human frenzy is phrasal and syntactic. It is a mode caught in phrases like “The minute is almost done; no more passion!” or “My brain is disturbed with my beating mind.” Expressively the writing is held in a state of ongoing reframing.

Throughout, this sense of doing, a sense of directionality and activity in the voicing of the text, is strongly felt. Short, snappy phrases, commands, apophthegms and questions speed the language on. With no place to stop, phrases flash up and are quickly replaced. The register is dramatic, impersonal, rapid, and “textualising”, inclining to make connections and to literarise. This effect is achieved more or less everywhere in the poem:

Knife, gun, engine: prosper in the dry air,
feed my people. No subjects govern the age.
It is possible to live and die
without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew.
Do you talk to these gentlemen?
They always laugh at nothing.
No-one remembers the past — then go...[11]

Linkages here are being made not only at a networked level of surface association. They seem to be coming from packets of deep memory which, in their turn, have been held in abeyance in the interlinked ur-texts from which Tranter’s poem composes itself. Technically the whole poem suggests a structure closer to that of cognitive processing or of hypertext linking than that of the traditional rhetorical structures of place, evocation and description. This is writing which, not unlike neuronal encoding, is entirely in the business of making and generating, of transferring and networking. After seventeen pages, the text then breaks off.

All this is very well and very interesting. Yet one wants to and ask a question: Is there not a tortuous and possibly deceptive interplay between two contrary directions in “Blackout”? The writing seems to eschew any coherent representation of experience, including the experience of a new, turn of the millennium, Australian rendition of Shakespeare’s playscript. But on the other hand, every reader ultimately stabilises Tranter’s text as an extremely intense and subtle representation of a networking and associational process, including the digital and discontinuous processes just described. In short, the reader invariably makes the text into an image, even if only an image only of itself. The paradox here is that, unlike an engagement with a multimedia site, the poem cannot ever quite achieve the open ended and open edged interactive format it seems to aim towards. If its readers wanted to keep the poem-text’s options open in an authentically interactive way they would have to be actively writing, talking on line, exploring links or downloading as is the case, for instance, with a chatroom or computer game or other sorts of interactive site. Such reading would have to invoke, in practice, the reader as writer, the writer as reader so often celebrated in latterday critical theory.

This is not what happens. Only as an ideal, as a poetic image of reading, can “Blackout” offer a writing and a networking of a series of texts occurring in both real and virtual time. The interactive reading just described cannot take place. Instead what operates in the shift between an earlier text (Shakespeare’s and others’) and a later text is a moment of indirection through which a highly idealised style of reading is proposed and withdrawn. In fact the poem which we read is perhaps most properly described as an exploration of the limits, the unrealisability, of that moment of proposed interactivity — a withdrawal accomplished through the fact that the work inevitably returns to being “a poem” and in so far as it is a poem, to being  a recreative, literary “reading space”. Something similar may be said of “Talking with Neruda’s Questions” where an ambiguous play between a supposedly open ended reading and the fact of a limited literary space is no less strongly felt. This is why Cronin’s shifting of grammatical direction away from Neruda’s dramatic question format into the form of predicate sentences is crucial. It is a manoeuvre which brings about a  concertedly ambivalent effect. Whereas Neruda placed his words in resonant space, inscribing them as sharply as scratchmarks on glass, Cronin’s declarative format allows for her (and Neruda’s) language to be open to recycling, to recomposition and reuse. Oddly, however, at another level her reuse achieves exactly the opposite effect, locking the resonance of Neruda’s language into a firmed up, structured mode like an instant digital photograph, deliberately depriving the poem’s voice of quiver, dramatic pathos, imprecision and blur.

Both poems take as their material, their quarry site, poetry which expresses a deep sense of finality. Shakespeare’s play is his last completed work, a work in which magical illusion is finally and definitively undone and put aside. Neruda’s poem is a poem of questions at the end of a life. Deeply dramatic poems, they suggest a stopping point, a place in which poetic language ends and imagination ceases. It seems unlikely that it is just a happenstance that it is these last words and farewells which two contemporary Australian poets have adapted for their purposes. If Neruda and Shakespeare end in silence, stopping mortally, the finality of these new Australian poems is to do with the absence of analogue. It is a finality which results from all of that running about, all of that doing, all of that activity, generated in the practices of sampling and disassemblage. Their finality results from the fact that they have nothing behind them: they present or represent nothing. They do not move towards the edge, questioning it or preparing for it: they operate ceaselessly on that edge, undermining the very criteria which allow for the proper delimitation of that edge. They question whether there is an authentic threshold operating between something and nothing, illusion and reality.

Sincerity, meaningfulness, pathos, truth telling: such characteristics no longer determine the value of expressiveness in the new poems. Instead, their languages are strategies; their structures are residues of a compositional process. It is not even their abstractness which is of interest, but rather their reiterativeness, their formality, their “keeping on going” in a period when there are so many pressures to detach language from the structuring of a human intentionality. These are pressures which both these poems reflect as well as mask. Both of these pieces would speak from where we are now — which is to say, at  the edge of a time of representation — but they find (inevitably, exploratively) that there is no true voice in which to do so. — from Who Wants to Create Australia? Essays on Poetry and Ideas in Contemporary  Australia (Halstead Press, Sydney, 2004)

Land and Theory

See note [12]

The modern individual is, above all else, a mobile human being.[13]

In writing about two poems, A.D. Hope’s “Australia” and Les Murray’s “At Min-Min Camp,” my concerns are about the how — the manner and the nuance — of seeing and not directly about the thing seen. They could in this regard be termed adverbial, for they are about a qualificatory trace in all action, a trace which is also a gap between the experience of an action and its narrative. This adverbial  trace (this “how”) is what links these poems historically and psychologically while allowing a reading which sidesteps more classical considerations of a purely literary sort: issues such as literary origins, genre, the writer’s visionary claims and the work’s symbolic structure. What interests me is not straightforwardly literary but rather is a set of implicit sensory themes about location and ultimately about an aspect of poetry which (extending the idea of the “how” of seeing to include a variety of regimes of perception) I will short hand as modality. How, in other words, does the poet “go about in the world” in this or that poem? What styles of seeing and feeling occur? Which atmospheres, which climates, which assumptions about the place and texture of experience are let into the poem and which are not?

In both poems, such a reading momentarily fixes on adverbial aspects of place and sight and on the modality or “manner of doing” implicit in the poem. But what is also interesting is how consistent these modal figures are in each poem, almost as if a controlling mode operates deeply in the structuring of poetic experience and distributes tonalities and rhythms of perception across the poem’s language. I want to suggest that there are three such figures: that of “turning around” and secondly an archaeological figure of “above/ below,” of layers and sediments. Typically, too, both poems make prominent a third figure, a figure of movement and journeying in relation to a grounding concept of national territory. It is a figure of mobility which relates many such Australian poems to a continuing tradition within a contemporary, more post-modern kind of vision to do with seeing and reflecting on that seeing.


Australia

“Australia” reads as a consummate achievement of a curiously an-aesthetic type of poetry which might seem to have little to do with modality. It is a poem of voice and opinion. Its sensibility and its performance of style and tone operate between common thought and significant literary form. As an ideological construction, it maps a territory held in common by expatriate visions of the local sense of things, no less than by patriotic and possibly nationalist ones. Sixty years on the story it tells of “here” and “there,” of ironic displacement and of glad return (I am thinking of the famous line “there are some like me turn gladly home”) still links in with the larger, latterday narrative in which a cultivated sense of permanent exile is in conflict with a rhetorical adoption of demotic “Australia” as home. Perhaps not surprisingly, “Australia” is still a major site of a mythology whose contradictions it both promotes and resolves. Strikingly, the names it offers of nation, culture, civilisation and migratory return have recently re-appeared in the guise of post-modern and post-colonial criticism.

Paradoxically, however, the poem also seems quite dated, quite out of touch with modern preoccupations. Besides, it is so famous that to read it is inevitably also to read the history of its reception. In this way, the Australia which the poem depicts is all too firmly ensconced, as textual instance, within the repertoires of “school anthology” and “nation.” It is too much part of the doxa of nationalist rhetoric. For Hope this was a nation “without songs, architecture, history” whose only rescuable reference to post-modern senses of flow and trajectory is a remark about settlement as a river of immense stupidity. “Australia” clearly infringes Whitlamite, Keatingesque, left wing notions of nationalist emergence with its depressing, downgrading version of national life. “Australia” is also devastatingly ignorant of anything other than a whitefella, civilising view of settler-culture. If Hope’s phrase “She is the last of lands” inevitably suggests distance from London, then similarly Hope’s sense of emptiness (“She is the last of lands, the emptiest”) reads now as censoring any trace of accurate settler history and any acknowledgement of Aboriginal presence. The poem’s demography is inert in regard of multilingualism or multicultural forms of migration, including those of the poem’s own decade.

Of course, my procedure in sketching such a reading is, no less than Hope’s poem, ironic. A device to break through its fama: its ring of fire. For it is obvious that “Australia” is a remarkable achievement of political prophecy and stylistic control. Transferred to our doubtful post-modern days it is still current, still negative/ positive and resistant. Hope’s generalising, pure, overseeing manner remains mesmeric.

So to understand it further, it might be necessary to pick out some terms already introduced, in particular, myth and significant form. This  poem which is, for example, as concerned with cultural metaphor and myth as it is transparently neo-classical in its attunement of common thought to precisely executed literary genre. Particularly, however, in its construction of implicit cultural senses of place, it becomes noticeable how a series of terms to do with assumed orders of perception and assumed and relatively unselfconscious ideas about embodiment and perspective play across “Australia”. Indeed this mode of seeing is a form of over-seeing, untroubled and surveying, leaping from point of interest to point of interest and uninterested in filling in the gaps.



Modality and figure intertwine in the poem in a complex and half hidden way. The poet “sees” his geographical territory in a manner which I would term both interstitial and unusually stable. The placeless, out-of-the-air, overseeing mode of “Australia” is, paradoxically, the ground for the final and very famous moment of glad return. Australia is to be read as a map or an overlay, whose points of interest are already loaded with intellectual standpoints. Strategically adopting the position (and indeed the tone: those annoying “monotonous tribes”) of the colonial planner, the viewer recites the famous trans-continental distance as if from an Imperial Almanac, while indicating the coastal cities like a child tracing his finger along the pink-shaded coastal fringe. Or another example: a similar overseeing manner, moving from point to point and flattening out differences on the way, occurs in the curious river image already referred to:

Her rivers of water drown among inland sands,
The river of her immense stupidity

Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth...

A stupefying flood smoothes out all differences and topographical discrepancies in a journey of several thousand kilometres. This flood erases the ferment of writing, art, political opinion, economic hardship, technological change and racial difference which characterised Australia in the 30s. Clearly, there is an implicit modal structuring at work here by which only a particular sort of terrain for an Australia can be brought into being.

At first sight of course, it might appear that the mythemes of “culture” are what carry the poem’s modal structure. And it is true that a series of cultural displacements has to be brought into play here for “Australia’s” thematic content to proceed. Thus, a set of oppositions build up a necessary figure of oscillation, irresolution and hesitancy; in other words, they build up the necessary conditions (much like someone stopping in the street, remembering something and turning back) by which a new order of decisiveness can be produced from the antonyms of here/ there, civilisation/ chatter, savagery/ spirit, jungle/ desert, modern thought/ learned doubt, monotony/ colour and so on. These oppositions, however, do not line up across a consistent cultural divide of back here/ over there, no matter how much at first glance it might appear so. It is tempting for example to read  “Australia” as if it performs a typically Australian moment of anti-modernism. But it does not do so, in the same way that it cannot be reduced to a poem of simple oppositions between Urbanity and Nature. Instead, the name of the country, Australia, becomes a shifter between two appositionally defined myths of culture. According to one part of the myth, modern culture is civilising and desirable. According to another part of the myth the very same modern culture is going decadent and feral and must be avoided at all costs. This double messaging vision of Australia’s place in the wider world culture operates under the sway of what looks curiously like a Kleinian good breast/ bad breast sense of relationship with the other, but this in itself is still not a sufficient explanation for the poet’s celebrated invoking of a moment of glad return:

Yet there are some like me turn gladly home
From the lush jungle of modern thought...

What must be remembered is that the creation of opposites is also the creation of a structure. The poet’s hesitancy, a psychological figure constructed from opposites and from his distant overseeing manner, prepares the ground on which both the lack of place and the acquisition of place can be “sited”. But at the heart of the figure of turning there is a problem which is not just to do with cultural geography and myth. A different order of boundary and movement is introduced into his overviewing of cultural opposites. The discourse of here and over there is  overtaken by another surreptitiously organised set of co-ordinates. This doubling of the theme of place is easy to overlook in “Australia’s” placeless, discursive construction. Certainly, the poem rhetorically builds two quite distinct “places”. Between them there occurs a dramatic shift — I would say a complete fracture — at the heart of the poem’s modal construction.

Put bluntly, do the last eight lines of “Australia” have anything to do with what precedes them? Many readers make the assumption that there is a logical progression here between the  negative/ positive view of Australia and the moment of glad return. But when read carefully it is quite clear that what the poet gladly turns back to is not his negative Australia. Nor is he literally turning away from the implied opposite of that drab nation, some colourful, intelligent Europe, for instance. What he turns from is completely unprepared for in the poem’s smoothing, overseeing, mapping vision of the land. This new feature is dropped in with surprising and carefully calculated inappropriateness. He turns from the “lush jungle  of modern thought.” The surprise is not only that this “jungle” is itself a placeless and largely undefined realm. It also leaps out because the word is chosen more for its metaphoric and symbolic power rather than for any literal reference to northern Queensland, say, or for that matter to Kipling. Some

                        ...like me turn gladly home
From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find
The Arabian desert of the human mind...

Nothing has anticipated this purely intellectual move. When set against the Arabian — not Australian — desert of the mind which the poet now turns towards, the transcendent nature of the turn becomes fully apparent. The underlying antinomy at work in “Australia” is not between here and there, culture and savagery but between thought and mind, between wet and dry, between the lush and the arid. These oppositions are fully modal, entirely to do with contrary sorts of  mind-space. That earlier part of the poem, the moment of cartographic, embodied hesitation, is a prelude to a classical in-the-mind manoeuvre between thought (“modern thought”) and a style of meditation. It is a choice between wet body (jungle) and dry space (Arabia), a choice made in order to get a glimpse of some spirit which can in (in Hope’s words) “escape”.


At Min-Min Camp

Some fifty years later we are camping in the ruins. A.D.Hope’s map is now a temporary stop-over on a journey heading inland towards the real, not the Arabian, desert. In Les Murray’s “At Min-Min Camp” there is an exquisitely evoked sense of place; but it is a place in which the idyllic vision of Australia terminates. This end-point is captured in the baroque image of a verandah which has lost its house: it is all that is left of an old station’s farmhouse where Murray makes camp one night under the onset of a truly cosmological night. The night is the kind of dizzying night you can see almost every night far west on the other side of the Dividing Range. From the poem’s title it is quite likely that we are in the Channel country of south west Queensland, an area famous for its peculiar refractions of light at night, the so called “min min” effect of dancing lights.

In symbolic terms, the poet and his unnamed friends are on the way, on a journey moving through the poor but theatrically well-lit space where ordinary battlers travel “to the modern world”. The moment of “seeing” is literal: irony here gives way to
icon. The moment of seeing is now carried figuratively in the effect of turbid sky and lightning striking the earth along the skyline. This ruined theatre is a shelter after a dusk heat-storm of thunder and lightning:

In the afternoon a blue storm walloped and split
like a loose mainsail behind us. Then another
far out on the plain fumed its corrugated walls.
A heavy dough of cloud kept rising, and reached us.

The speeding turbid sky went out of focus, fracturing
continually, and poured. We made camp on a verandah

that had lost its house. I remembered it: pitsawn pine
lined with newspaper. People lived on treacle and rabbit
by firelight, and slept on grain-bag quilts there.[14]

Reckoning with the inland’s dramatic, beautiful weather-effects, accepting its stark history of poverty and social change, is no longer a monotonous, stupid, second-hand (Hope) kind of thing to think and talk about. They are exactly the sorts of issues which Australians (who have got more familiar with the interior now that it is no longer active hinterland but drought-struck, flood-prone, post-industrial, half-abandoned farmland) address every day. We have no doubt about the capacity of the landscape to realise concretely the spirit of Hope’s savage and scarlet (“Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare”), and perhaps no-one any longer lives timidly but somewhat thankfully on the shore.

On the other hand, we still have problems with chatter (Hope). It is only the rain which in Murray’s evocative phrase dies away to conversation, to talk, to functional interchange and which ultimately leads on to a vision which is at once intimate and mythic, emotional and abstractly planetary:

...when the rain died away to conversation, and parted
on refreshed increasing star-charts, there arose

an unlikely bushfire in the ranges. The moon leaped from it,
slim, trim, in perfect roundness. Spiderwebs palely yellow
by firelight changed sides, and were steel-thread, diamante.

Orange gold itself, everything the moon gave, everywhere
was nickel silver, or that lake-submerged no colour
native to dreams. Sparse human lights on earth

were solar-coloured, though: ingots of homestead,
amoebae that moved and twinned on distant roads...[15]

Clearly, a topographical sense is strongly felt; things and events are carefully oriented in relation to each other. But this time the architecture of the poem is to do with fragments and systems: the fragments of the verandah and the fragmented sense of a journey, the networks of overhead constellations, car lights criss-crossing on a highway, the pinpointing of distant house lights, the flickering of moon glow and striation of bush fire. “At Min-Min Camp” is a poem of darkness and networked, moving lights; it is a poem, too, where the relationship between inner dream-like senses and outer perceptions becomes tentative. The incandescence of the moon, for example, is for Murray like the semi-colour of dreamscapes.

Distinct from Hope’s cartographic eye in “Australia” the mode of seeing is not predicated on the figure of the turn; it is not a seeing conditioned by hesitation and mythic contradictions. Rather (and no doubt related to that sense of greater transitiveness between inner and outer awareness) to “see” is a subliminal form of looking upwards to the approaching electric storm and, then, to the cooler and more immense night sky; while, by the same token, the viewer can also look downwards into the fissures of the earth. The body-figure, the position at the centre of the poem’s modal construction, is a seeing which sees the “overhead” and the “below.” Ultimately perhaps this body-figure is that of the child looking up into the face of the parent. But having looked up, the viewer will inevitably also compare that vision with the looking which fixes on the ground.

To Murray, those who, a couple of generations ago, left the half-destroyed house on the plain (what he calls “the last house”) can be identified with all of humanity:

...You can’t catch up with them now
though it isn’t long ago: when we came up from the Rift Valley
we all lived in a small star on the ground.

From this rift or hollow Murray traces an abstract origin, a broader, more archaeological sense of ancestry. It does not matter that this ancestry is not specifically Australian. Instead the overlay-style map of Hope’s poem lies literally and imagistically in what Murray’s poem positions as a darkness underground: that is to say, a point of origin is not located in a city “over there” but in an abstract, intellectual place in the anthropological and ethnographic record. The map of the five cities is replaced by a map of chthonic emergence and starry pin pricks. The poem’s modal form is to trace the various emanations of the light in relation to this hidden ground. Thus, Aboriginal predecessors at Min-Min are “boys” who have gone off to be “wandering lights” on the plain. Humanity’s ancestors are primitive men creeping towards a fire; they are “shifting faces” called to the “light’s edge”. Similarly the main protagonists in the poem (“we”) are stranded travellers who, after being drenched by thunderbolts and then showered by starlight, huddle around the camp fire’s flickering flames:

We were drinking tea round a sheet-iron fire on the boards
bearing chill on our shoulders, like the boys who’d slept
on that verandah, and gone to be wandering lights

lifelong on the plains...[16]

Yet none of this account does justice to this peculiarly beautiful poem’s modal complexity — in particular the way in which “At Min-Min Camp” foregrounds the elements of temporal phase within the journey. This is a temporary stop-over, a stop-over freighted with time. Dwelling, it is suggested, is a temporary camp site: a moment in which a star-map of the true community is found to be fragmentary, possibly divergent. The poem is sensitive to a non-European feel for country, a feel incipiently found in styles of nomadic interlinkage. Yet no less insistently there is, as in “Australia”, a point of modal fracture in the poem. Driven by the topography’s overriding sublimatory demand, there is movement in the gaze, an interruptive moment in the mind, which has not been prepared for. Despite all the senses of journey, of ancestral dispersal and architectural network, a “new thing” (Murray’s phrase) has to be introduced, which suddenly ties together and centralises the poet’s vision.

This new thing is the sudden arrival of that most European of icons, the face. For Murray to speak of land requires that the vision of it conforms to a Christian face (“holiness, a true face, constant in all lights”) whose Graeco-Byzantine fullness is at odds with the yarn-telling, story-forming lineaments of a ground-painting or an interlinkage of sacred sites, or a 4-wheel drive across the plains. To take non-European notions literally, to take them nomadically is, as the poem says, to re-invent fairy tales: it is to turn the sacred into a fairy-tale:

Then the sacred turned fairy-tale, as always. And the new thing,
holiness, a true face, constant in all lights,
was still very scattered. It saved some. It is still scattered.

Modally, what is still not clear is how this face (of salvation) is to be seen. Is it seen from above, like the shattered fragments of a lake system in dry country? Or do we look up and into it as if into the prismatic shatter of light through rain clouds or tree branches? However displaced, “At Min-Min Camp’s” modal base remains this key signifier of contemplative human presence: the responsive face. It corresponds to a prayer image which gathers together (in an Augustinian way) the congregated city of overt and true appearances. By the end of the poem, the inference is that Australia should become a version of the City of God.

Baroque, full of leakages, thoroughly theatrical, “At Min-Min Camp” turns out to be no less a political vehicle than Hope’s “Australia”. Yet it is much more theological. The relations of body, self and land are those of the autonomous Christian individual and of the thinker in search of the ideal community of faith. Even if you can travel further west, you take the hope of finding this face with you. Even if you can cross the limit of European topography, you take the impulse towards communal belief with you. If the final almost self-mocking moments of the poem portray the poet in a kind of Mad Max scenery heading over ruined squatter country on the back of a stripped down truck, we are nonetheless taking with us the House of the Holy Ghost.


Post-Modern Fragments

Les Murray has never written the poem of the next camp fire further west.

In hindsight, we know that the journey further West has been so far the achievement of the aerial, archaeological viewpoint of white and Aboriginal painters of the post-60s period — especially painters like Rover Thomas, the Papunya artists, and Olsen, Juniper, Fairweather, Wolseley and Tuckson, photographers like Richard Wollendorp. Few poets have signalled similar preoccupations in their work, the key exception being Jennifer Rankin; but her early death prematurely ended the development of a major poetry which could interlink the themes of non-European geography, metaphoric orders of flying, a mix of lying-in-and-on-the-ground images and an inward-facing, psychological sense of movement. Some of David Campbell’s final poems similarly suggest a relativistic, sedimented, mythological account of place — in particular “Menindee,” “The Wimmera,” “Wind in Casuarinas” or “The Niagara Café”. As with the painters, whenever the poets have explored this area of the senses, it has usually been (quite literally) in the inland. Perhaps responding to the flatness of most of inland Australia, the predominant modal figure has been that of sedimentary levels, of above and below. Similarly many of the poems assume a particularly self reflexive sense of experience, a kind of gap between the artifice of the poem and the immensity of the spatial dimensions of topographical experience (both in and out of the mind.) Paradoxical though it may sound, the success of such work is that the poems deeply disguise the provisional and fractured nature of their structures in the way that Hope’s and Murray’s poems also strive to do.

In the main, however, it has not been in poetry where this sedimentary, mythological mode has been most explored. It has been in criticism and critical theory. Immediately when thinking of the new perceptions and new dimensions currently given to the notion of interior or the centre in Australia, the references have to be to essayists and critics like Eric Rolls, Stephen Muecke or Ross Gibson or of the work of literary geographers like George Seddon or art critic-and historian, Martin Thomas.[17]   Criticism in the visual arts, together with writing about cinema and photography, have also been a primary source for a body of work which often combines memoir, history and discontinuous theoretical narratives.

Film making and painting play a part in Stephen Muecke’s No Road (Bitumen All the Way), an often comic compilation of post-modern traveller’s tales. To take one example, visual and theoretical references abound in the way the narrator defines a potentially calamitous aesthetic difference of outlook between himself and his travelling companions, a Fred Williams influenced Moroccan painter and his wife:

I have a Postmodernism which would like to see images of motels sketched against ... other landscapes, layered, no real Nature, only palimpsests and impositions. Thus, the extensions to the Halls Creek Hotel, a short flight to the Bungles, are perfect Dallas — Southfork ranchero style — added to the old colonial pub, and with elements of the glass postmodern arch thrown in. We are camped beside the hotel, red dust getting into everything, the tent, the car, we tramp it into the hotel then into the front bar to play pool. Red suffuses the sky at sunset, and there would be a red wash in this painting I am imagining...[18]

In some cases writing about the modal experience of the inland has been directly the work of artists as is the case of painter and installation artist Kim Mahood’s Craft for a Dry Lake, an account of an artist’s return to her childhood home in the Tanami Desert. Often for her, the identification with land is literal, physical and performative not least in her sense of the connection between personal beauty and environment.
An intense sense of return and reflexiveness is captured in what she calls the “curious experience” of growing up “in mythological country”:

It is possibly like being very beautiful. It is the thing people notice about
you, that makes you different and unique. It becomes the way you identify
yourself. This is where I come from. This is my country. This is me.[19]

Relativism of position — a sense of physical movement and a recursive psychological movement (in this case, between levels seen from above) — is what fascinates in an account given by the art critic, Noel Sheridan, when he writes of going for a walk at the Warburton community in central Western Australia. It is as as if he is already experiencing something of the camp west of Min-Min:

It is wonderful. And one admires Sheridan’s frank, awkwardly intellectual admission earlier on that “it was the anchor of an epistemology of modernist perception which first caught and then engaged me with Aboriginal art”. It was modernist art-theory and the problematics of the flat picture-plane which took him off to Warburton. Looked at closely, however, this is also a writing which constructs a series of micro-turns, both rhetorically and literally. These turns occur not once as in “Australia” but repeatedly, between pebble and horizon, between Warburton and Perth, between the far and the close, between the big and the little, between white and black. The eye is constantly turning back. The construction of “seeing” is that of hidden cinematic reverse shots. And at the same time there is the sense of an account of an experience which leaves it just there, as just that: an intelligent experience whose telling comes perilously close to repeating all the clichés of the explorer with his native guide. And which both fails, and honestly refuses, to escape from that ironic placement.

Could there indeed be any modally free position from which to reflect on that experience? Poetry, of course, almost inevitably foregrounds the embodied lived sense of experience, but theory and reflection too cannot escape from modal conditions similar to those with which the poet works. No less than poems, contemporary forms of post-modern and post-colonial theory, especially the kinds found around the university, carry with them constant traces of their perceptual regimes; often (and in this regard they are less interesting than poetry) they offer little more than the surface of the theorist’s modal artifice. This is perhaps why so many contemporary cultural theories can be so quickly reduced to moralising or vague abstraction: erasing contradiction, unconscious of their metaphors, such theories offer redemptive and apocalyptic visions. Thus the terms country and land can easily lose their connection with Sheridan’s “epistemology” when reduced to being merely an academic strategy within theorised accounts of reading or when invoked for nationalist political ends. Experience, momentariness, the phenomenology of the senses get lost, left behind. What results, when drained of any awareness of the modal limits of thought, is often a bizarre host of purely operational terms such as intermediacy, mimicry, trans-territorialism, spatiality, vectors and pluralisms of various guises. Theories, in other words: ideas littering an ill-defined ground. After all, the 90s were the Star Trek decade in which, year by year, we saw the invention of model after model of purely cerebral vehicles for crossing “the land”.

Not all such models, it is true, deserve to be abandoned. It could be argued that the acquisition of a sense of living at a European edge within our own country rather than on the edge of an external European communication zone marks a paradigm shift at a profound cultural level. Thus, for instance, a historian such as Paul Carter, commenting on the work of Centralian anthropologist and Arrernte translator T.G.H. Strehlow, recommends a style of intermediate poetics for Australian writing, a between-two-worlds modality or a space between two mind-sets. Here too we encounter a metaphoric projection entirely dependent on the turn. Carter is looking forward in order to look back, a turn carried in the rhetorical manoeuvres (turns) of the theorist’s own lively writing as much as it is carried in documentation or evidence:

The agile warrior and the light-footed orator share a capacity to respond creatively, one might say baroquely, to historical contingencies; the well-armed goddess of eloquence is appropriately associated with them both. In the will to invent, in the gift of improvisation perhaps, lies a key to the creation of Strehlow’s new Australian poetry. If so, it will be the gifts of spontaneous free association which will be privileged in the new poetry...But before running ahead like this, and in the process identifying rhetorical ingenuity with poetic inspiration, we need to be aware how much it identifies a Newtonian world-view. What for example, can it mean to talk about wilful inventiveness in a world not governed by notions of equal and opposite forces and a space that is neutral, empty?[20]

In this example, back and forth runs the glancing eye, setting up its own architecture of contrarieties and opposites in order for the theorist/ see-er to be able to turn decisively and spin a new theoretical trope. Elsewhere, Carter literalises this trope, this spin-on-a-point, as a foot impressing the ground as it brings into being an indeterminate zone which Carter calls “vibrating tracks”. Such prints and tracks do not lead on; they can be read backwards and forwards. The foot turns by virtue of the track’s pointing in any direction. Clearly, the real turn here is sublimatory and intuitive, a move made only in the mind more or less as if Carter is trying to account for some impulse carried autonomically through the body’s nervous system. We go where we go, so to speak. Somewhat problematically perhaps, what this authenticating return of savage agility and of direction free wilderness lacks is the modal feature which is crucial to Hope’s poem: its fracture under the pressure of the poet’s recognition (in opposition to a fluently theoretical projection) of human limit and dilemma. Carter’s agility operates in some neurological, unspoken instant. The strength of Hope’s poem is its ironic distancing effect, its wiliness.


The Land, the Land

Modality, that pressure of the adverbial trace, insists on a richer, more variable and more fleshed-out function than any kind of theorised seeing or over-determined notion of mobility can lend itself to. What is this function, then? Can it be named as some sort of “feeling-for-place” or a deeply acquired understanding and sensing of one’s location? Insofar as this function is implicated in indeterminacy or an uncertainty in reading a land-form (as post-colonialists might wish it), then perhaps what occurs semi-spontaneously is more like what the ancients called geomancy : a sense of the magic of a place, a knowledge derived from it (by looking at its light changes, its weathers, its drynesses and thinnesses of soil, the passage of birds and animals across it, the striations and surfaces which form it) and an intuitive attraction or connectedness with its particulars (trees, stones, houses, slopes). Geomancy, it could readily be conceded, suggests a practice too ritualised and orderly for what in fact occurs when one knows a place or longs for it; for what the adverbial trace is pointing to in such seeing is a sensing of the world which is not just already interpretable and culturally meaningful but which is also beyond code. Such an awareness is that memory sense, that sense of familiarity, which has been in abeyance until the moment of return arrives. Years later long after you had forgotten the place and never imagined returning, you drive through the same deep hinterland valley plain. The flash of light on water, the pollarded willows, the riverside train tracks, the flat space before the background of magenta, eroded hills all return in an instant as if they have never been out of mind. Even micro-details like washed out road-edges, or the spacing of fence posts, float back present to the eye as if they have been held in perfect recall for decades.

Counterposed against purely theoretical vision, such experiential senses of place work against the pressure towards a spectacular telling of the nexus of language, body sense and and movement. Theory, on the other hand, inevitably reduces being to a being which is largely theoretical, that is to say, held between geometrical points, totally visibilised. So when the nexus of language, body-sense and movement is represented symbolically in a theoretical way, its human dimension will quite likely be pictured through a mode of mobility whether on the track, in space, in the truck, or pivoting on a step in a voyage as the ship (and the gaze) turns back home. This nexus (as with the turn) seems inextricably caught up with the way the eye distances itself from the thing seen and, more, treats the relationship between body and space as primarily ballistic. Such representations are highly visible, conscious and overt, tending to downplay what is hidden, covert or atmospheric. The familiar sense which returns from abeyance is simply not directed enough or smartly informative enough to satisfy theory’s requirements for a modelling of experience. It does not conform to what a theorised seeing requires: it cannot be reduced to a glance shot out, or a bird or a bullet in mid-flight.

It is important in this context not to forget those other ideas and practices, no less theorised, which relate inside and outside, mind-state and land-state, topographical attributes and meditative powers. In the European tradition these other themes are mainly not to be found in architectural and painterly discourses, but in discourses not normally considered “land-based” in a straightforward sense of the term. For instance, anatomical, medical theories of the body, ancient theories of body heat and humours, no less than modern theories of blood-flow and neurological networking, of transplant and gene code modification. Similarly cultural practices around birth, rituals to do with death, sexual practices and physical culture in general all contribute to our sense of placement and embodiment. When, for example, urban historian Richard Sennett finds that “(European) civilisation from its origins has been challenged by the body in pain”, then this is largely because:

dominant images of the body have cracked apart in the process of being impressed on the city. A master image of the body inherently invites ambivalence among the people it rules, for every human body is physically idiosyncratic, and every human body feels contradictory physical desires.[21]

Sennett stresses that the placement of the body in space is never entirely open to a ballistic, anatomical, geometricised form of analysis, never totally open to the rational light and the clear-minded sky, nor clear about its relation to the connection between earth and sky.

Similarly, the connection between discourses which analyse the body and those which represent the environment will be dialectical and evolving. A more intuitive, a less consciously visualising approach inevitably entails a response to the difficulty in building, projecting and defining a sense of “place”. The Japanese environmental engineer, Tadahiko Higuchi, very usefully refers to this difficulty as a fracturing which occurs between conscious and unconscious desire by which

(we) have ceased to be able unconsciously to develop land in such a way as to conform to nature...Retrospectively, it appears we know all too little about nature, and what we know amounts to theories which enable us to deform it.[22]

Is it perhaps this difficulty in dealing with such indeterminacy, with such unconscious factors, that leads to the resoluteness with which theories and poems strive to complete a “figure” of the other? The pressure is to put something stable, something overt and visible in place. This is often literally captured in, say, the figure standing in the landscape or the unforgettable detail which stands for a moment spent in a place. But equally is it not in these figures that the tell-tale trace and symptom unconsciously appear? This is why what was, first off, termed an adverbial reading reveals its further shadow-narrative: a story, certainly, but one always lurking in the shadows or hidden by the brilliance of the thing in view. It is a story which is never fully tellable, whose recitation (as it was in Les Murray’s poem) is nuance and fragment. For no matter how attentive to the modal construction of place, its hesitancies and its aerial layers, a full self reflexiveness and a transparent rendition of the place-in-time (the here, the now) simply cannot happen. The gap between experience and narrative, the space of the absent adverb, remains apparent. The problem of mode and mood does not go away. In the end it is what tells us that this time, this place, are real.

— from Who Wants to Create Australia? Essays on Poetry and Ideas in Contemporary  Australia (Halstead Press, Sydney, 2004)

The URL address of this page is
http://www.austlit.com/a/harrison-m/prose.html