Leeward

by Geoffrey Lehmann

  He finds ‘An intellectual hatred is the worst/ So let her think opinions are accursed.’ He prays for custom and ceremony in her future house: ‘How but in custom and in ceremony/ Are innocence and beauty born?’

  The most rotund and optimistic statement of happiness in later life might be Wallace Stevens’s ‘Credences of Summer’. He tell us ‘The rock … is the truth’, it is not a ‘hermit’s truth’, it is ‘visible’ and ‘audible,/ The brilliant mercy of a sure repose…’ We should enjoy the physical world. But its beauty is beyond our control:

  The personae of summer play the characters

  Of an inhuman author, who meditates

  With the gold bugs, in blue meadows, late at night.

  Ithaca is not tragic or comic. Shakespeare had reached his Ithaca when he wrote The Tempest. His Miranda says:

  How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

  That has such people in’t!

  Shakespeare says through Caliban:

  Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,

  Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.

  Ithaca is full of surprises. The second law of thermodynamics says systems irreversibly trend towards entropy. Astronomers observe a universe speeding up as it is flying apart into heat death. But there is something odd here. We cannot imagine a beginning to time, and if there is no beginning, entropy would have happened already.

  The physicist Freeman Dyson is reassured by gravity. Our solar system was once a mass of stellar gas and became an ordered system, and eventually produced intelligent beings. Dyson points out in A Many-Colored Glass (at age seventy-six): ‘What we see in the real universe is the opposite of a heat death. We see the universe growing more ordered and more lively as it grows older.’

  The psychologist Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature shows, through historical and statistical evidence, how human violence has declined over time, century by century. The glamour of the past is an illusion. The past is something we are escaping from.

  Roger Penrose in Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe sees entropy as an end that becomes a new beginning and a new Big Bang. He calls this Conformal Cyclic Cosmology and jokes it is Conformal Crazy Cosmology.

  He suggests the mysterious magnetic fields in great voids are the ghosts of galaxies that were there in a previous universe.

  ‘People’ – beings like us – inhabit these cyclic universes. Intel-ligent life needs cooperative minds. ‘We’ – but not the personal pronoun I – have been here before and shall be here again.

  As well as thinking intellectual hatreds are the worst, in Ithaca we love the scientific method, numbers and history. They help us understand a little of the universal complexity, but we know there are things we cannot know. Our happiness is illogical. We do not know where it comes from.

  One of the most sublimely happy pieces of music in the classical repertoire is Gertrude Stein’s and Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts, which Christopher Carroll has described as having ‘mesmeric, nonsense language’ and ‘simple, repetitive, diatonic music’. I got to know it when I was young because it was loved by Richard Meale, a composer, most of whose music sounds unhappy.

  Some critics regard this opera as ridiculous words sung to cheerfully vapid tinklings. They seem not to have understood what the younger gay composer and older lesbian poet were about. Thomson said he and Stein ‘got along like a couple of Harvard boys’.

  There are not three acts, but four; and there are not four saints, but about twenty of these holy men and women with names like Saint Settlement, Saint Plan and Saint Martyr as well as more familiar saints, such as Saint Teresa. Except there is Saint Teresa I and Saint Teresa II, so she can sing duets with herself.

  This opera is full of numbers that are sung out, but do not add up. Contradictory stage directions are sung: CHORUS I

  Saint Teresa seated and not surrounded. There are a great many places and persons near together. Saint Teresa not seated.

  The libretto is replete with illogical wordplay. I am sure there is logic in this illogic. After an hour and a bit the opera ends as triumphantly and abruptly as it began:

  COMPÈRE: Saint Ignatius and left and right laterally be lined.

  ALL: All Saints.

  COMPÈRE: To Saints.

  ALL: Four Saints.

  COMPÈRE: And Saints.

  ALL: Five Saints.

  COMPÈRE: To Saints.

  COMPÈRE: Last Act.

  ALL: Which is a fact.

  Happiness is a fact, and there is no logic to it, except that when self-replicating beings are given the evolutionary advantage of consciousness, they will not want to survive unless they are happy.

  The opera’s premiere was in Wallace Stevens’s home town Hartford, in 1934. The sets were made of shimmering Saran wrap and the cast were all black. Stevens, a difficult modern poet who did not like difficult modern music, was in the audience and found it ‘most agreeable musically’. But he wrote to a friend, that there were ‘numerous asses of the first water in the audience … people who walked around with cigarette holders a foot long, and so on’.

  Currarong, an old fishing village south of Sydney, is at the heart of my Ithaca. In 1990 Gail and I were staying with Ian and Marilyn Fincham at their beach house in Currarong. We had just finished dinner and at 9 pm there was a knock on the door. Doreen, an estate agent who lived across the road, was standing there in a white nightdress. ‘There’s a house up the road on the beach front’, she told us. ‘It’s just come on the market.’

  We walked up and stood on the road, looking at the house. Before anyone could say anything, I said, ‘I’ll buy it’. I turned to Ian with embarrassment and said, ‘Ian, only if you don’t want it’.

  The house is on a sand dune and we grow sand-loving Australian plants that do not grow at Lindfield: flannel flowers, and red and yellow kangaroo paws. Currarong is at the end of a long road through uninhabited bush, a naval firing range on one side, and on the other side, beyond some trees and scrub, a long surf beach going for miles, deserted for most of the year.

  ‘Currarong’ in the local Aboriginal language is ‘place of many winds’. The beach is different every day. Stinging blue bottles sometimes wash up in hundreds. For a week the beach might stink with mounds of kelp. The water is grey one day, and sparkling green-and-blue next morning. Once every few years tens of thousands of dead mutton birds litter miles of beach.

  Deborah Hope and John Edwards have a house in the next street. Gail and Deborah often go for long walks along the beach and John and I play golf nearby at Callala Bay. Late in the afternoon there are no other players on the course as we finish our game, watched only by kangaroos.

  One afternoon Gail was swimming and a dolphin surfaced and startled her, it was so close. She quickly left the water and believes the dolphin was warning her about sharks nearby.

  Sea eagles hunt over a wide area and we hear two or three of them calling to each other at dusk, as they fly home. At night we sit on the brick patio gazing out at the garden lit up by lights from the house. We cannot see the ocean, only hear its roaring, when the wind is high, beyond a windbreak of low eucalypts and banksias on the sand dune. Other nights there is a rhythmic murmur of small waves breaking on the beach. When it is free of clouds, the night sky has a hard clarity and brilliance.

  The water comes right up to the foot of the dune at high tide. Sometimes after an evening meal on the patio we walk down onto the beach. From our front gate it’s a hundred paces along a sandy path through low trees and scrub. Standing on the water’s edge we watch the lights of a tanker move almost imperceptibly on the horizon.

 

 

 
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