Recommended Reading

“Do you have any books the Faculty doesn't particularly recommend?”

This cartoon is from a collection by Flannery O'Connor, about to be published for the first time. Better known for her short stories, O'Connor is one of those writers, like Simone Weil, who is on my to-read list because of the other authors who've recommended her; she was even, ironically, on my reading list in first year uni. I've come across her name and repute in various places, most often in arguments for the possibility of a Christian literature, distinct from the kind of genre fiction (usually romance) peddled by Christian bookshops. Like Simone Weil, and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and now Marilynne Robinson, she's taken seriously by secular readers, and her work, infused with religious sensibility, meets every test of intellect and art. Perhaps as proof of this, I've also come across her in accounts of the American short story, and of Southern literature, and of writers who stand out from their time and place. By all accounts she's worth attention.

She was lonely and sickly, and like Simone Weil, she died horribly, young. A Georgian, and a Catholic, she's known for keen observation, moral acuity, and sharp irony.  Though she lived almost reclusively, she had a gift for seeing and sketching folks in all their flawed glory. She's proof that writers can reach greatness without going too far from their own front door. And she comes highly recommended.

Look down, look down

Threaded through the yarns in Bill Bryson's Down Under is a quite earnest consideration of Aboriginal Australia: its amazing pre-history, troubling history, and present predicament. As an outsider, what he noticed was the invisibility of Aboriginal people, compounded by the tendency of white Australia not to look. Sitting in a cafe in Alice Springs, he felt as though he were watching two different countries overlaid, each unconscious of the other.  Bobbi Sykes,  who died last November, captured this assumed unconsciousness simply: “Moving along Main St. / Whitesville / Digging all them white face / (Staring, or ‘not staring’).” “Not staring” (I've done it) is both cause and symptom.  Looking isn't everything, but it's a start. The meeting of gazes begins to look like equality.

In the 1960s, Oodgeroo's stirring “Song of Hope” began “Look up, my people.” Contemporary poet Elizabeth Hodgson, who won the David Unaipon Award for her 2008 collection Skin Painting, calls for some reciprocity. Her poem cries: “Look down, look down,” urging us to see another country; to see this one the way someone else does and has. 

When you walk this land do you notice
the tracks of my people?

Look down, look down
see the footprints criss-crossing your path.
Look down past the concrete and bitumen
gardens choking with imported flora.

Look down, look down
See where you plant your feet.
Can you fill the footprints of the past?
When you cross a river, a mountain range,
do you know you've walked into another country?

Home of the brave

Independence Day celebrates, among other things, America's repulsion of the alien. Today the land of the free and the home of the brave is often nurse to a great deal of force and fear, and 235 years on from its declaration, the cherished independence is still threatened by the alien.

One such alien was Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who was characteristically amused by the form he had to fill in to gain entry to the US in 1921. He recorded the incident in “What I saw in America.”

One of the questions on the paper was, “Are you an anarchist?” To which a detached philosopher would naturally feel inclined to answer, “What the devil has that to do with you?” ... Then there was the question, “Are you in favor of subverting the government of the United States by force?”Against this I should write, “I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour and not the beginning.”... But among many things that amused me almost to the point of treating the form thus disrespectfully, the most amusing was the thought of the ruthless outlaw who should feel compelled to treat it respectfully. I like to think of the foreign desperado, seeking to slip into America with official papers under official protection, and sitting down to write with a beautiful gravity, “I am an anarchist. I hate you all and wish to destroy you.” Or, “I intend to subvert by force the government of the United States as soon as possible, sticking the long sheath-knife in my left trouser-pocket into your President at the earliest opportunity.” There seems to be a certain simplicity of mind about these answers; and it is reassuring to know that anarchists... are so pure and good that the police have only to ask them questions and they are certain to tell no lies.

I doubt whether this touching naivete obtains in contemporary US customs officials, but the questions come out of an enduring disquiet about America's natural predators. More than 30 years from the end of the Cold War, the communist is still a dreaded bogey. The word “socialism” makes grown men quake. There is much to admire about what America has meant and won in the world, but I'm afraid their tight grip on freedom will finally choke it. FDR told them they had nothing to fear but fear itself; I don't think they heard him.

Old salt

I'm having a love affair with salt. Recent salty interludes include discovering spaghetti with olive oil and rock salt, sprinkling pink salt from the Murray River on my calamari at Circular Quay, savouring Koko Black's new salted caramel truffle, and pledging undying devotion to Lindt's dark chocolate with sea salt - or fleur de sel, as they more gallicly call it. (Seriously, go and buy some right now). I've been eating salt since I started on solids - otherwise I'd be dead by now - but I don't remember ever noticing it before, ever enjoying it as a flavour rather than simply a category of flavour.

Salt has a fascinating world history, which is amply canvassed in Mark Kurlansky's Salt: A world history. Bill Bryson's history of private life At Home also details some of salt's story: together with pepper, no condiments in human history have caused more toil and bloodshed. For the ancients it was so valuable that it was used as currency: hence 'salary,' and the colloquial 'worth his salt.'

It figures in the Hebrew scriptures as a cleanser, purifyer, preserver, and destroyer. The book of Job contains the first known reference to salt in recorded literature. Salt was part of religious rituals and ordained feasts; conquered lands had their fields strewn with salt to make them unfruitful; the Dead Sea is also the salt sea. Salt, famously, was what Lot's wife became when she looked back at the destruction of Sodom. In the New Testament, Jesus memorably calls his followers 'the salt of the earth'. Later, Paul tells the early church to season their conversations with salt, and fill them with grace, as though the two were counterparts.

Salt is elemental, primitive, powerful, ubiquitous; able to kill or to keep. Too much or too little is lethal for us. Spilling it is bad luck; throwing it brings good. Salt is not food, but it is the grace of every repast. It also has a mysterious affinity with the sacred. And you wouldn't eat your chips without it.

Mmm, sacralicious.

To watch you sleeping

For Canada Day, here's Margaret Atwood's “Variation On The Word Sleep.” I don't think it's a great poem qua poem - it's a bit too much like randomly broken up prose - but I do like the imagery, the invocation of classical myths. And I like the way, without saying that's what it's doing, it describes love. 

I would like to watch you sleeping,

which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and as you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.