Note: What follows is my first contribution to a collaborative book of micro-essays I am doing with Russell West-Pavlov.
I have been here before. That was in 1999. I
wrote a sequence of poems on the war in the Balkans. Those poems claimed
Hölderlin was not mad. I am here now. Writing this. This visit is less
temporary than the last, which was for a conference and only lasted a week.
This one is around eleven weeks. Eleven times longer, at least. Duration and
exposure. And this time I am with Tracy, and Tim who is thirteen, and so when I
was here last time not part of the ‘messages home’ I sent every day. That home
then was Cambridge, but Cambridge inflected through the Western Australian wheatbelt.
Two different environments. And by environments I do not mean that which Lefebvre
mocks as an ambiguous and non-defined space. What did he know about space,
caught up in his urban ‘second nature’? Environment in the way I meant it, and
mean it, is agency of the non-human as much as the human. The fens, caught,
managed, made, turned into the vegetable garden of Britain, were and are still
environment. I watched birds; I walked through the fens. I saw reclamation
projects taking place, the growing of Wicken Fen again, beyond tourist curio to
hard-core nature reserve. And what potlatch is still disinterred from the peaty
ground of the fens. And now, as I build a multi-dimensional model of a damaged
place, a place where Nazism is still close to the surface, where the
polymorphous perversity of a Romantic god-poet, and forest reserves where the
great crested newt struggles to breed, and the memorials of loss and butchery
sit alongside the naming of the fuchsia and the spirit of a pastor who spoke
for years against Nazism and was killed by it, where Cemetery X holds the body-parts
of those experimented on, where bats move from attic to cellar to evade wood-preservative
poison, where outdoor theatres can only open after a specific summer date and
then only show silent movies to help protect that very bat, where deer antlers
over doorways are warped cathode and anode to an organic-vegan alternative
movement in which all nature is nature and environment is clear and definable.
And now, writing in ambiguity, I search for the concrete. And that, and this,
is inflected through where we came from by road and ferry and road and ferry and road — West Cork in Ireland via Cambridge. And always the mental space, the spatial configuration and underpinnings of Jam Tree Gully. Where late storms will stir fire memories, the absolute fear of excoriation
and conflagration, the easterly and northerly driven firestorms of the
Australian wheatbelt summer. The place where temporariness is our absence, and
where we’re always expected back, whether we belong or don’t. Here, now,
attempting to collate vocabulary, parse sentences in a language Celan broke
into fragments, which others have reconstituted, I listen to Tim gather it to
him with critical consciousness like rainwater off our Jam Tree Gully roof. It’s
not a romantic image – that rainwater gathers the dust and the bird-droppings
and all else deposited across the corrugated roof-planes, gathers the pristine
and the contaminated from its functional open and occupied space, made
invisible as it collects in the great 90 000-litre tank, is pumped into the
house, issues forth visible again from the taps. As is language. No Bauhaus moment.
And Tracy, shifting from language to language with ease. ‘Flies through the air
with the greatest of ease.’ I cannot use anyone else’s words here to support my
argument. I offer no quote, no external authority. But I know that enough days
have passed for the sound of the Great Tits singing on the bare trees, and the
sight of the Schloss with its collection of antiquities, with its animals
carved from animal, a lost animal, a great animal, are familiar enough to place
a lacuna in temporary. It’s there I will go, and it’s there I will retreat.
John Kinsella
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