William-Blake-and-the-Indigenous-Imagination-A-Review

REFLECTIONS ON AN OTHER
William Blake and the Indigenous Imagination
Some personal reflections on Professor Michael Griffith’s recent talk at the Blake
Society: ‘William Blake and Indigenous Australia’
by Roderick Tweedy, a British object
Being and othering: these were the twin poles of Professor Michael Griffith’s fascinating
talk at the Blake Society in London recently, in which he explored the remarkable
connections between Blake and the antipodean imagination. In particular, he focused on
how Blake’s work and vision have been received and incorporated into the imagination
of leading contemporary Australian writers and artists, such as Nobel-winning novelist
Patrick White and David Malouf, and visual artists such as Margaret Preston and Arthur
Boyd.
I don’t want to write a formal, Urizenic review of the talk here but rather to try and enter
into the spirit of it - to engage with the way of being in the world, and the mode of
attending to it, that this talk both evoked and embodied. This means trying to come to
terms with what is usually called in academic discourse the ‘Other’: how we relate to
people, experiences, or states which are seen as unfamiliar, different, threatening, or not
our own – a sense of something or someone being, in short, not like us, or “not one of us”.
It is often this sense of difference that, perhaps paradoxically, allows us to form a sense
of identity (we define ourselves against it). There is also a wider sense of the ‘Other’,
which points to the possible presence of transcendence in our midst - another form of
unfamiliarity in fact, though one which our rationalizing processes and left-brain
materialistic belief system would much rather ignore or not have to deal with. Both
aspects are present in Aboriginal culture, as indeed they are in Blake’s work.
The presence of the Other often stimulates in us an unfortunate and divisive hardening
and restriction of perception and being (the rationalizing Selfhood “closing itself as in
steel”, as Blake puts it in Jerusalem). 1 In psychological terms, this can perhaps best be
understood as an unconscious manifestation of the anxiety that the idea of the ‘unknown’
or unacceptable can sometimes generate. The astonishing and abysmal treatment of the
Aboriginal people of Australia, as of so many indigenous peoples, illustrates the depth
and extent of this anxiety, its uniform toxicity. As Griffith noted, citing a passage in
David Malouf’s remarkable (and Blake-inspired) novel Remembering Babylon, “it was
the mixture of monstrous strangeness and unwelcome likeness that made Gemmy Fairley
[an English boy marooned and brought up by aborigines] so disturbing to them”. 2 A
1 Jerusalem 74:11.
2 Malouf, David (1994), Remembering Babylon. London: Vintage, p. 43.
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mixture of “monstrous strangeness” and “unwelcome likeness”: is it this implicit sense of
comparison that so unnerves us about the Other?
In a continent that has only relatively recently (2008) formally apologized for its herding
up of Aboriginal children and separating them, often forcibly, from their parents (the socalled
‘Stolen Generation’, in which “Aboriginal children were separated from their
families of origin in the interests of turning them into white Australians”), 3 these
questions are both raw and persistent. One illustration of the problematic nature of this
engagement, or lack of engagement, with the Other is Woorabinda. As John Pilger notes,
“Woorabinda came into existence in 1927 as one of five ‘controlled’ reserves that were
part of an Australian gulag where people were dumped, bereft of community and family
ties that matter to them sometimes more than life itself.” 4 The vital importance of these
ties would in fact be elaborated on in the second half of Griffith’s talk, in which he used
the suggestive metaphor of the (bee)hive to invoke the deep interconnectivity and
essential oneness of all life (‘at-one-ment’), that these ‘controlled’ reserves and gated
communities have so resolutely, and systematically, ruptured and cast asunder. Where
there is control there is always fear. If the Australian government has now said sorry for
its policies of removal, disenfranchisement, forced eviction, and murder (by 1920, the
indigenous people of Queensland alone “had been reduced from at least 120,000 to
20,000; this involved at least 10,000 direct killings”), 5 a similar pathological distrust and
hostility towards the ‘Other’ is still apparent today in Australia towards those migrants
and refugees, often referred to as ‘boat people’, trying to enter the country for a chance of
a better life or, in many cases, of simply a life (‘Australia: Why boat people risk it all’,
BBC News-Asia; ‘Australian government uses military to repel “boat people” but is
silent on claims of savage treatment’, The Independent, 15 January 2014). 6 What is going
on here in the undercurrents of the Australian imagination?
Of course, to suggest that this outlook and psyche, this antipathy towards foreigners and
immigrants as embodiments of Otherness, is peculiar to Australia is a non-starter. One
need only look at the daily newspapers in Britain to witness, and experience, this same
toxic tide of fury and agitation aimed willfully at the most vulnerable and disenfranchised
people. There have always been economic, political, social arguments to justify the
insanity of our treatment of others - that is to say, of our treatment of ourselves. In 1896
the ‘Chief Protector of Aborigines’ proudly noted that “Queensland has so far alienated
about 10,000,000 acres of freehold land. For this we have received about six million
3 Torpey, John C. (2006). Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations
Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 4.
4 Pilger, John (2003). The New Rulers of the World, p. 171.
5 Ibid., p. 180.
6 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23933103;
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/australian-government-usesmilitary-
to-repel-boat-people-but-is-silent-on-claims-of-savage-treatment-9062559.html
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pounds in cash. Since 1859, we have not expended £50,000 for the benefit of the
Aboriginals”. 7 Similarly, in 1996, when Australian Prime Minister John Howard came to
office, his first act was to cut $400million from the Aboriginal affairs budget. 8 In 2013
Tony Abbott was elected Prime Minister on a promise to “stop the boats”, again for
largely economic reasons – that is, viewing people in terms of money. But this cash
nexus, when it occurs, seems to be symptomatic of a deeper and more disturbing
connection between a peculiarly brutal form of economic self-interest and a collapse of
vital ways of being, and forms of attention towards the world, within the modern psyche.
Something must already have taken place in the psyche to allow this dehumanization of
oneself. It is to this inner dissolution and disintegration of the psyche that Griffith, and
indeed Blake’s work, points us.
I feel this fragmentation and disintegration in myself. It is, I think, due to the chronic
imbalances and lack of cohesion that exist between what Blake refers to as the ‘Four
Zoas’ within each of us: the four main operating systems, as it were, within each human
being - the bodily, emotional, rational, and imaginative systems that we need to fully be
alive and experience our reality (Tharmas, Luvah, Urizen, and Urthona, respectively, in
Blake’s fourfold psychology). What is it in us that closes down when we are confronted
by the ‘Other’; what hardens us, elevates us, shuts off, constricts, judges, trationalizes,
justifies, identifies? One of Professor Griffith’s most moving illustrations of this process
in Blake’s work was his comparison of the contrasting figure of the ‘Nurse’ in the Songs
of Innocence and the later Songs of Experience. In the former, the nurse is shown as
someone connected to her world, at peace, involved, caring, empathic: her involvement
with those around her generates what today might be called ‘Presence’ - a sort of
mindfulness, accepting of life and at one with it:
When the voices of children are heard on the green
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast
And every thing else is still
(Songs of Innocence, ‘Nurse’s Song’, p. 15)
This is how it can be when the Four Zoas are working harmoniously, in an integrated
movement based upon a deep sense of inner humanity, rooted in our embodied
relationship with the world. When this collapses - when we become alienated, when we
override this sense (allowing our fears of being flooded, or our desires of being elevated,
to dominate and twist this sense of who we actually are) we frequently become anxious,
increasingly obsessed with the need to control, to define, to judge: the laughter of
children becomes simply a reminder of how much we’ve lost, of death, of the stupid
wasting of our lives (“wasted in play” as Blake’s ‘knowing’ Nurse of Experience thinks
of it now).
I asked a question at this point during the talk (Griffith is a wonderfully ‘interactive’
speaker), and instantly felt these forces of conflict and disintegration activate inside me -
7 Pilger, op.cit., p. 179.
8 Ibid., p. 175.
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a moment ago I was happily sitting there, like the Nurse in the Ecchoing Green whose
“heart is at rest”, and now I am asking a question in public - something I always have
difficulty with -, my throat and body tightens (Tharmas restricting), I feel anxious and
vulnerable (Luvah going into overdrive); I feel suddenly aware of myself as separate and
alienated, I become acutely conscious of myself now as a ‘social’ person, a suburban
mask, potentially threatened with ridicule by others. Others. And it is this latter response
- the Urizenic system - that really initiates the struggle I think, and it initiates it with
something very simple but potent: an idea. It is this idea that destabilizes me, makes me
defensive, upsets all the other systems in me (bodily, emotional, imaginative). It is the
idea saying ‘You are different’ (or, more precisely, ‘Don’t Be Different’) - and the whole
complex of ideological and cultural dictates and phobias that this has accumulated and
annexed itself with, over the years: play it safe, keep quiet, don’t say anything stupid,
don’t say anything anyone could say is stupid, fit in, think of yourself, think.
It is this idea, and this complex, that I think also links with Griffith’s remarkable
presentation of the ‘indigenous’, the ‘aboriginal’, the ‘other’. In a sense, we are all
Australia, we are all somebody’s Other, somebody’s Antipodean, and within ourselves
we all have these ‘controlled’ reserves, these gulags of hatred and alienation. We live
behind screens, we fence things off - not in creative delineations, but in Urizenic
superiority, which itself is a screen masquerading a profound and terrible fear: the
dreadful fear that the abstracted Cartesian mind (the basis of our socially constructed and
intellectual identities) has of being overwhelmed by bodily existence, or by the cultural
seas of human energy. 9 Boat-people take the rage of this, just as Muslims or immigrants
feel the hardness and obduracy of the British psyche over ‘here’. The word is Flood. As
the screen goes up, the passport controls to the borders of our inner lives, our
imaginations, shut down. In the wonderfully Orwellian, or perhaps Freudian, phrase
‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ the current Australian government seems to have ossified
its own sense of internal boundary: it is ‘Keep Out” written by those with restricted
mentalisation skills, unable to manage containment issues, possessing little or zero
empathy, and ultimately therefore little humanity. Psychopaths have a deficiency in the
right hemisphere of the brain which makes them unable to empathize with the experience
and inner lives of others: 10 our governments and media are like this: they operate
perfectly lucidly, with a platform of often rational-sounding confabulations designed to
appeal to self-interest (just as the agenda pursued by psychopaths is utterly rational, if
one posits individual self-interest as the basis of action), but the world has suddenly
become colder and darker - like the darkening “green” that the experienced Nurse
presides over. Imagination is absolutely central to humanity - losing it is not like losing a
faculty, like speech or hearing - it is losing what it is to be human. As Blake noted, “the
Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself” (Mil 32: 8-35). Human
9 As Malouf notes in his novel, articulating the underlying anxiety of the European
settlers: "For at any moment - and this was the fact of the matter - they might be
overwhelmed." (Malouf, Remembering Babylon, p. 42).
10 “Psychopaths, who have no sense of guilt, shame or responsibility, have deficits in
their right frontal lobe” (McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, p. 85)
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Existence is fearfully and wonderfully posited on both difference and our common
humanity. This is why, I think, Blake urges us to engage with the Other: not because of
some grand but bland Urizenic generalization such as “we are all the same” (no one is)
but because we are all unique, “Minute Particulars” as Blake observes, and in that biomagical-diversity
lies something absolutely extraordinary and fundamental to existence -
and not just to human existence. 11 Equally, if we lose humanity we become increasingly a
machine, a devitalised set of programs or instructions of how corporations, bankers, and
advertisers want us to live (focus on your mortgage, play safe, think of your jobs, watch
television ...). These feelings of devitalisation are, I would argue, extremely prevalent in
contemporary societies, and creativity, imagination, social bonds, and embodied living,
are essential ways of countering them. Regarding immigrants, asylum-seekers, or the
homeless, as objects of trepidation and threat most certainly aren’t - though the media
and politicians relentlessly try to convince us that they are.
If we are all Australians we are perhaps also, even more profoundly, all aboriginals –
born out of this planet and sharing specific, native, ties with it. Our indigenous heritage is
written into our bones. It is also inscribed within our imaginations, our collective
unconscious: the very word “indigenous” means “born within” or “native”, which is
exactly how Blake regards the imaginative faculty in man. And it was this connection -
with indigenous Australia - that formed the focus of Griffith’s brilliant exposition of the
transformative power of two of Australia’s most creative recent writers: Patrick White
and David Malouf. Each in their own way portray the outcasts, the marginalized, and the
destitute, as sources not of society’s problems but of society’s answers. Not in any
romanticized sense, but simply empirically they are presented as not only living
embodiments of the fractured and pathological mind-set of a riven and uneasy society
that produces them, but also able - occasionally at least - by the very virtue of their
exclusion, their intense suffering and ‘outsider’ status (which Blake also experienced), to
act as symptoms and vehicles (“chariots”) for transformation - the transformation of the
imaginative operating system of humanity itself. Blake was an outsider (“O why was I
born with a different face?/Why was I not born like the rest of my race?”); 12 the
aboriginals are outsiders; and Patrick White’s figure of the frequently drunk, aborigine,
homosexual, artist Alf Dubbo is an almost perfect outsider. Indeed these marginalised,
poor, misunderstood, and condemned figures recall Blake’s reading of another
transformative and outcast figure: Jesus. In Blake’s vision, Jesus is a revolutionary and
redemptive force precisely because of his connection with the oppressed: the Christ of the
whorehouse. Blake intimates that Jesus is divine not because he washes away the sins and
separations of the world, but because he embodies and transfigures them (The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell, Plate 23); it is his radical incarnation of everything that the ‘Gods of
This World’ want us to distance ourselves from and consider weak, impractical, unclean,
or socially useless, that has made him such an enormously potent and truly revolutionary
force. Blake’s Jesus speaks to the oppressed, not to the oppressors, just as he addresses
himself to our imaginations not to our Pilatean rationality: it’s no surprise that those who
preserved his memory most fiercely in the early centuries following his death, who kept
11 As S. Foster Damon notes, "Minute Particulars are the outward expression in this
world of the eternal individualities of all things.” (Damon, pp. 280-281).
12 Blake, Letter to Thomas Butts, Felpham, August 16 1803.
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him alive, were slaves. 13 In both Blake and Malouf there was, and is, something divine
and transformative in the experience and vision that the outsiders and vagrants and
unvanquished artists possess: what is it?
David Malouf’s 1993 novel Remembering Babylon opens with a startling epigraph from
Blake: “Whether this is Jerusalem or Babylon we Know Not” (FZ iv.102). Like much of
Blake, it’s an ambiguous, thought-provoking statement. In the contested histories and
worlds of how we define reality, who is to say what is freedom and what is Matrix-like
captivity? Who is to say that ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ is not rational practice, is not
a protector of freedom and identity? Blake’s next line helps develop these uncertainties:
“All is confusion All is tumult & we alone are escaped”. In Blake’s world, there is not
one Urizenic, correct, ‘objective’ interpretation of experience, as the Cartesian mind
(craving certainty, and thus control, power) would like. But rather than seeing this as a
failing or a limitation, Blake urges us to embrace this multiplicity of vision, this
enrichment of meanings (as the angels and devils embrace on the cover of The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell, in an explosion of colour). In this sense, we are all subjects - not to
an Other, not to Monarchy, not to Ideology, not to Empire - but to ourselves, embodied
perspectives, each with particular (subjective) vision and experience. It is this holiness of
subjectivity that the subjugation of Aboriginals tramples on so disdainfully: a desire to
eradicate the other’s perspective. As Griffith pointed out, it is significant in this respect
that the indigenous people of Australia were not even counted as humans but were
classified by the original English explorers/ invaders/immigrants as part of the “fauna” of
the place, of what they called an “empty land”. 14 Sadly, despite all the centuries of
genocide (chronicled in Bringing Them Home, the influential 1997 report of the Human
Rights Commission), despite all the governmental statements of apology, which resulted
in part from these findings, the Aboriginals remain largely “invisible” in much of
contemporary Australian life. 15
The Blakean epigraph also suggests a way forward: as Griffith noted, the quotation points
to one of the main themes of the other great Australian novel that he discussed in his talk,
Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White. This Nobel-winning book, first published in 1961,
13 It is estimated that in the first century A.D. up to one million slaves were owned by the
richest five per cent of Roman citizens. Indeed, during this period the slave population
constituted approximately one third of the total population, which is perhaps why the
message of Jesus had to be defused so urgently. It was the Emperor Constantine who
finally managed this, turning him into a pro-Empire Mithraic Sun-God in the third-fourth
century (Meager, D., Slavery in Bible Times; Brown, P., The Rise of Christendom). As
Marcus Borg notes, Jesus represented and embodied what he terms the “politics of
compassion”, in stark contradistinction to the “politics of purity” that was associated with
the priestly tradition, and centred on the temple. For Jesus, Borg adds, “compassion had a
radical sociopolitical meaning … The inclusiveness of the Jesus movement continued
into the early Christian movement as we hear it described in the parts of the New
Testament. It was one of the most striking qualities of the movement” (Meeting Jesus
Again for the First Time (1995), p. 13, p. 58. p. 58).
14 Pilger, op. cit., p. 187.
15 Ibid., p. 186, p. 181.
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explores the ambiguous status of those who have somehow “escaped” orthodox readings,
mainstream norms. His central characters are the “riders of the chariot’ who, White
intimates, drive the prophetic wheels that transform society, and once again it is not the
chiefs and bankers and big-wigs who are able to carry out this task but the outcasts, the
marginalized, the disenfranchised, the invisible. In both novels it is those on the margins,
those on the edges, who seem to hold an ambiguous and “transvaluative”, transformative
place, or have a redemptive role - and who again seem curiously to incarnate Jesus’s
equally problematic and challenging identification with the lowly and despised of society
(the messiah of slums, of sweatshops), before Christianity was so diligently re-branded
by the Church of Constantine in the fourth century as another form of social control for
the imperial colonies. Blake and orthodox religion both read from the same Bible but, as
Blake says, “thou read’st black where I read white” (“The Vision of Christ that thou dost
see/Is my Visions Greatest Enemy”). 16 Reading transgressively is exactly what the novels
of Malouf and White urge us to do, and they intimately reinforce Blake’s vision of a
reclaimed sense of ministry and divinity - the ‘Other’ vision of Jesus as itinerant teacher,
theological migrant, Galilean boat person, the friend of outcasts and prostitutes. Even
occasionally of rich people. Indeed, the only people who Jesus really seemed to dislike
were the morally self-righteous, the high priests of contemporary culture, who he
suggests are parasitic hypocrites, made obdurate by their own creeds and inability to
imagine:
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door
of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will
you let those enter who are trying to.
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over
land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them
twice as much a child of hell as you are.
Woe to you, blind guides! You say, ‘If anyone swears by the temple, it means
nothing; but anyone who swears by the gold of the temple is bound by that oath.’
You blind fools! Which is greater: the gold, or the temple that makes the gold
sacred?
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how
often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks
under her wings, and you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate.
For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in
the name of the Lord.’ (Gospel of Matthew 23:13-39).
All of these directives or “woes” might be applied to the colonial history of Australia. In
the coruscating heat of his vision Jesus forcibly denounces the current rulers of the world,
the contemporary “domination system” as Marcus Borg calls it, and draws our attention
to all those who preside over these desolating Operation Sovereign Borders of the soul.
The message of Blake, and of Jesus, and of Malouf, and of White, is here the same: it’s
16 The Everlasting Gospel.
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time to wake up, to access the sleeping wisdom, to stimulate the Aboriginal Dreaming.
At the end of Griffith’s talk Tim Heath, the Chair of the Blake Society, made the salient
point that if Blake had lost his trial for sedition in 1803, it is likely that he would not have
been imprisoned or fined, as one might have supposed, but would instead have been
transported to Australia. Australia is after all the land of outcasts, of convicts, or outlaws.
It’s an irony of history that those who currently criminalize and deport immigrants and
indigenous people were once criminalized and deported themselves. Rather than
perpetuate this dysfunctional pattern of pain and demonization, Australia – with its
unique experience of being on both ‘sides’, the extraordinary product of both the northern
and southern hemispheres, as well as the left and right hemispheres – is surely, radically,
a continent of alternative vision. It would be extraordinary to liberate some of that energy,
that experience, and to reach into ourselves, into the vast outback of our imagination, and
awaken that vision. Instead of herding the Other into gulags of self- righteousness and
fear, to watch it rot and uselessly decay, it might instead be seen as a source of
transformation, awakening, even of transcendence. Because this process will necessarily
involve transcendence - moving beyond the current, limiting paradigm, and its hyperfunctioning
left-brain world predicated on control and manipulation, and compulsively
addicted to its own material self-indulgence: a condition that both Blake and Malouf term
“Babylon”, a psychological state of exile, of alienation with the nation. This is the world
of Us and Them, of Higher and Lower, of Controllers and Controlled. In a brilliantly
imaginative turn, Malouf reclaims an image for how this post-Babylonian society could
operate. In his novel, one of those who first encounters the dark, unkept semi-native
Gemmy Fairley is the young Janet McIvor, the daughter of the family who later takes him
in. In one scene, she has a remarkable and transformative experience in which a great
swarm of bees momentarily encompass her entire body:
Suddenly there was the sound of a wind getting up in the grove, though she did not
feel the touch of it, and before she could complete the breath she had taken, or
expel it in a cry, the swarm was on her, thickening so fast about her that it was as if
night had fallen, just like that, in a single cloud.
She just had time to see her hands covered with plushy, alive fur gloves before her
whole body crusted over and she was blazingly gathered into the single sound they
made, the single mind. Her own mind closed in her. She stood still as still and did
not breathe. She surrendered herself. [Malouf, op. cit., p. 142].
Her conscious, rational “mind” (that incessant mental noise consisting largely of
compulsive alienated thinking built on fear and separation) suddenly collapses, and she
surrenders to this epiphanic envelopment within the interrelated “single mind”,
represented by the cloud of bees, “the life of the hive”. 17 Here, instead of the predictable
17 “If she could escape, she thought, just for a moment, out of her personal mind into their
communally single one, she would know at last what it was like to be an angel” (pp. 140-
141; “It was like peering through into the City of God” - p.191).
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eaction - i.e., fear of being engulfed and swamped by this strangeness, by this potentially
hazardous swarm (you can imagine how the tabloids would report this story: “White
Teenager Engulfed by Swarm of Dark Bees!”) she is liberated by the encounter. What
makes her response so positive, Malouf suggests, is her innate sense of relationship to the
land, to being. Unlike the old Nurse of Experience in Blake’s poem, she refuses to give in
to the voices of alarm, mortality, and enclosure. And unlike many other characters in
Malouf’s novel, she feels completely at home and comfortable in the Australian
environment: as one critic remarks, “the fact that Janet is not phased walking around the
bush indicates that she is acclimatised to the Australian outback, and especially, the
land.” 18 Janet’s positive response to the bees, Malouf suggests, is not the result of naivety
or stupidity but rather of her accessing a deeper rationality and wisdom: “The bees have
their stomachs full, her mind told her, they will not sting. Stand still, stand still. It was her
old mind that told her this.” 19 It is this “old mind” - this ancient land-based form of
knowledge - that potentially saves her: she is able to understand context, to exist in the
present moment; she is not driven along, like scraps of yesterday’s paper, by the winds of
hysteria or prejudice and alarm. Indeed, Malouf suggests that it could be this “old mind”
that can save all of us, and that it is never too late to re-engage with these deep, atavistic
ways of knowing. 20
“The single mind”: through her encounter with the bees, Malouf suggests the integrative
presence of a deeper, more breath-taking interconnectivity and interrelation between all
things, between all of us “others”. Perhaps this is the presence of Presence itself. As
Griffith remarked, the bees and ants that form recurrent symbols in Malouf’s writing live
in communities that are structurally fantastic, in which each member brings something to
the hive, brings something to the party. This is how of course all living systems operate, -
provided of course that disastrous, alienating, imposed economies don’t re-order
everything according to unnatural and narcissistic laws of profit and control. In such
economies members are not viewed as intrinsically productive but as intrinsically
threatening: the ‘Other’ is seen not in terms of what they can bring to the community but
as a potential drain on resources. These are the lenses that capitalism thrusts on us.
Through his writing Malouf suggests, like Blake, that we need to peel these off, and see
things as they really are.
In the discussions at the end of Griffith’s wonderful talk, Tim Heath drew attention to a
wonderful homonym at work in Janet’s epiphany: the subtle correlation between bees and
being. How “to be” is the question facing not only Janet but perhaps all of us. And just as
18 http://devenlit12.wordpress.com/category/remembering-babylon/
19 Malouf, op.cit., p. 142.
20 The bees leave Janet “one by one, then in fistfulls, rolling off her, peeling away like a
crust, till she stood in her own skin again, which was fresh where the air touched it” (ibid.,
pp. 142-143). As Deven suggests, the simile used in this quotation (“peeling away like a
crust”) “gives the impression that she is a new breed of white Australian; she has adjusted
fully to the Australian lifestyle and what it means to be an Australian. She feels at
harmony with nature, as if they share a ‘single mind’. This in itself is a very Aboriginal
concept” (op. cit.).
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the experience of alienation and marginalization can paradoxically invite (in both Malouf
and White) the alternating gyre of reconciliation and inclusion, and just as dis-ease and
sickness can sometimes become the harbingers of ‘ease’ and the vehicles of wholeness,
so Janet’s encounter with the cloud of honey-making beings is what unexpectedly opens
up to her an intense apprehension of oneness and aliveness, of peacefulness. She deeply
connects to “bee-ing”, to the multitudinous, exhilarating, astonishing presence, through
her engaged attunement to the powerful Otherness within life, and the perception of the
ordinary miraculousness of things. Isn’t that also what Blake said the task of both poets
and prophets is - to see the infinite in everything? As he notes in The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell, this vision is common to both the poets and indigenous people: it is “the desire
of raising other men into a perception of the infinite; this the North American tribes
practise”. 21 Be like bees.
Roderick Tweedy is author of The God of the Left Hemisphere: Blake, Bolte Taylor and
the Myth of Creation, editor for Karnac Books, and an enthusiastic supporter of the userled
mental health organization, Mental Fight Club.
21 MHH Pl. 13.
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