very fine time with les
murray friday morning in the carmelite library, as fortune would have it les
was in melbourne to speak to haplax in the evening, so his chauffeuse donna
ward transported les over to middle park at 9.30 for a late breakfast of irish breakfast
tea and passionfruit cakes from the south melbourne market, les plans to talk
at the carmelite centre next year thus this opportunity to get a feel for the
place, the calm room that is the carmelite library of spirituality, yes his
catholicism is well-known to his readers, part of his escape or rejection of
his presbyterian upbringing, still an unexplored part of his work actually, but
his catholicism also an exploration of the history that is everywhere about us
and of the god that forgives while he asks us to learn forgiveness, one of the
hardest challenges for any of us in this life, les said he writes poems now
that try to handle forgiving things in his past, I remarked unheard that that
is the jesus thing, one of the hardest things you can do, les talked this
morning about his scots ancestors and how even today the murrays don’t give
christmas presents, a handkerchief or something, which is given to someone else
at the next birthday, he was being serious I think, coming from an anglican
vicarage world myself where christmas pudding can be an explanation of life
itself this murray parsimony is mighty weird and maybe catholicism was a cure
and a way forward for him, he is incredibly sensory, he seemed quite
comfortable in the serene surrounds of the library, great conversation and he
really does listen to what everyone is saying, I actually relate to his way of
relating, he doesn’t bother with prefaces, it’s straight on with whatever comes
next to his mind, les talked about archbishop mannix, said he wanted to write
something sometime on mannix, seeing as how he was in melbourne at the moment, and how mannix had saved
hundreds of lives maybe by acting against conscription in the great war, I told
les that the carmelite hall itself where we sat over morning tea was dedicated
by mannix and the stone block with goldleaf was in the front of the building
proving he’d dedicated the building in 1918, but les had already noticed the
bluestone block with the goldleaf, and I remarked how the hall predated the
church (our lady of mount carmel) because when mannix came to middle park he
said to the carmelites they had to decide what kind of style of building they
wanted, make up your minds, our lady being several styles in one
roman-byzantine & romanesque & victorian gothic & maybe australian
italianate and it was thus in the twenties they constructed a new church which
is what we see today on the corner of richardson and wright streets, victoria
was discussed, I said that in the last census, les knew it was late last year
and told us promptly, they made an analysis of giving to public charities and
on a ratio the most charitable place was the very same middle park, so it was
good to be sitting in the most charitable place in australia, but I asked what
was the second most charitable place in victoria, and les guessed very very
close he said bairnsdale maybe, and I said hmmm close in fact lakes entrance,
and he agreed lakes entrance was a friendly place to be, said his favourite
victorian town was mildura, it’s also great to hear him talking so openly about
autism, my understanding of autism is that ultimately only one person can say a
person is autistic and that is the person themselves, they have to
self-diagnose, as I understand it, others can find ways of making them see that
there are social problems but only they can get to the point of identifying it,
that’s why les rehearsed a series of characteristics of his that he recognises
as typical of the spectrum, this is very healthy behaviour from les, I believe,
it is self-curative which is why it’s worth listening to him say it, he needs
to say it and we need to hear it, it makes lots of things more understandable
about les and his difficulties and his poetry, and anyway what does it all
mean? autism, he talked about his son alexander who displays what is called
iliasm which apparently is the verbal trait of talking in collective pronouns
about one’s own personal actions, les said with joy that alexander was an
iliast, a word he had just invented, I observed how close it was to iliad, les
got onto all sorts of stuff, he wanted to know all about carmelites of course
and how many were there and there was a new translation of john of the cross in
recent years that he found okay, he also liked the penguin version of a few
years back and I said that in reading john recently I particularly liked roy
campbell’s versions, we agreed that campbell is about the best, that he gets
closer to the spanish lyricism than other translators, the visit was to
introduce him to middle park in anticipation of his two sessions with us at the
carmelite centre early next year, an evening session for ‘poetry for the soul’
and a next morning session where people are invited to come along and read
poems and les and the rest of us talk about the poems, it’s going to be
terrific and I already worry about too many people cramming into the o’connor-pilkington rooms at middle park, we
talked about previous sessions of poetry for the soul including the last one on
james k baxter and the american poet still with us mary oliver, les was
interested in oliver so I reached down the collected poems from the shelf, he
read some quietly over his cup of tea, coming to the early one-word judgement
‘soft’ but that he needed to read more, even ‘soft’ is open to interpretation,
childhood is an amazing time, when I listen to things les says that I find a
bit tricky (he talked about a poem on the cattle history of australia, for
example, which I find needs more questions being asked) I see that he is
reworking some very fundamental truths of his own upbringing that he not only
will not betray but in fact wishes to laud to the skies, he certainly lives an
incredibly close-up world of the mind, everything is ticking over so any word
can be picked up and turned into new or amazing information, inside an hour we
covered the catastrophe of the thirty years war, bach’s church in leipzig where
les himself once attended communion, how cameras have become omnipresent and
even on the farm people come up the drive and take pictures of him, the glory
of libraries for those craving knowledge himself included, any turn in the
conversation touched off thoughts informed by remarkable knowledge, that seemed
as though the main thought in his mind at the time, readymade but of course the
result of years of hard-won thought experience, but soon I had to return to the
library work and les and donna had an appointment uptown at the university, as
one would expect, we breathed the cool air of friday morning coming off port
phillip bay, then donna and les were in the car and off to the next destination
composed freely the following evening by philip harvey
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