There will come a day when the home that we’ve lived in for many years can no longer do the job. The body wears out and becomes a hindrance rather than a vehicle. ‘Death must be pretty ordinary,’ a man said to me years ago. ‘Everyone does it.’ But you’d never know that from listening to daily, ordinary human conversations. The fact of death is so big, and yet it’s rarely talked about. And even more rarely with children. I think it’s wicked that we don’t teach children about death right from the start, that we don’t speak frankly and openly about it. A huge conspiracy of adults against children is the order of the day. Many parents think it’s a good idea for kids to learn about death by having pets. ‘It’s good for them to have pets because it teaches responsibility and they learn about death when the pet dies.’ But there is quite a bit of difference between the death of the cat and the death of their grandfather, sibling, or parent. We are not hamsters. ‘They lived happily ever after’ ends the fairy tale, but our lives have a very different ending and it would be great, I believe, if there were spirited discussions in homes and schools about the huge fact that no one gets out of here alive!
With this fact in mind, how are we to live? What should our priorities be? Are we going to take the road of eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die, refusing to even think about it? Knowing in a real way that there is limited time available and that we know not the day nor the hour, can give life a real energy, a depth and a zest. It might even make us kinder to each other because we’re all in the same doomed lifeboat. Also the fact that we simply don’t know what happens after death—or in fact whether anything happens at all—is an alarming proposition for human beings, who become extremely anxious when they don’t know what’s going to happen.5 All these facts affect each one of us. Death and taxes, we joke, and while we study and become familiar with taxation and have meetings with accountants and tax agents, there’s not the same time given to the other part of the joke. Discussions about death could open the way to really interesting conversations about the nature of life, of consciousness, of what it means to be a person; of how we grow and create our images of ourselves, of how we might better use our limited time. Young people would find this at least as interesting as Britney Spears, and maybe even more so.
Home, perfect home
The lines in the old hymn about Jerusalem, ‘The Holy City’ (composed by Michael Maybrick, 1844–1913), that make my voice wobble when I sing it come in the last verse. This nineteenth-century composition presents a very compressed history of Jerusalem from the Second Temple period, speedily moves to the time of Jesus’s death and the later destruction of the temple as he’d prophesied, into a glowing vision of the future Holy City: ‘And once again the scene was changed. / New earth there seemed to be; / I saw the Holy City beside the tideless sea; / The light of God was on its streets / the gates were open wide, / and all who would might enter, and no one was denied.’
That’s the line that hits my heart hard. No one was denied. As a child sent away from home, whose childhood hero was Peter Pan, whose mother—it should be remembered—had nailed the window shut one night when he went flying so that he could never come home again: the idea that the gates stood open wide and that everyone—even me—was welcome, is an exhilarating example of generosity, acceptance and redemption. For me, home is anchored in a sense of unquestioned belonging—of acceptance. A deep sense of everything being understood, accepted and forgiven. Within and without.
Is there such a place? Deep down in each one of us is the potential for stillness and quiet: a place where all concepts and notions about the self, about everything and everyone around, even about ‘home’, can dissolve away. Do we experience this as very young children, in those days when ‘I’ was simply a presence, observing and aware, without a long story about ‘me and my life’ clogging up the ‘channels’? Rarely achieved in this busy, noisy, wordy world, this inner space can be accessed and it can bring comfort and peace. It is a place where the gates are always open and no one is denied. Maybe this sense of deep-down self is home. Maybe this deep-down inner space is the still centre of the turning wheel that spins our lives, our homes, our nations, our planet, the solar system, the galaxy, outer space…‘No need of moon or stars by night, or sun to shine by day. It was the new Jerusalem that would not pass away.’
* * *
1In the Indo-European stem from which the word derives are surprising etymological relations sourced from the same root, including ‘cemetery’—that last ‘home’.
2Part of the reason for the huge interest surrounding the Diana story or the Obama story is the size of the narrative arc—the distance between the beginning and the end—from bucolic obscurity and modesty, to power, wealth, beauty, status and celebrity. Then, with Diana, came the great ‘fall’ and her eventual enshirinement in her island tomb, a proper fairy princess, surrounded if not by a ring of fire, at least by the moat of a lake, back at the ancestral home of the Spencers. It will be interesting to watch Obama’s story arc unfold—the twice-fathered yet under-fathered black kid of a single mother who has risen to the position of the most powerful prince in the world.
3Interestingly, one of bioenergetic therapy’s greatest proponents, Dr Alexander Lowen, has described women clients, after bioenergetic work, reporting becoming orgasmic with their partners after years of sexual numbness and describing it, weeping, as feeling that they’d finally ‘come home’.
4For instance, why do I think ‘Ah get a dog up ya!’ is about the best, funniest and most appropriate insult for anyone talking nonsense? It’s hardly elegant, it’s not even subtle. It’s coarse. But said with an irriated, deadpan Australian drawl, I—and others—find it irresistibly perfect.
5Women, who go through menstruation whether they like it or not, who have babies pushing out of them whether they like it or not, must have an advantage when it comes to dying. They’ve already experienced what it’s like to be helpless in the face of natural life forces.
The Brilliant City Inside the Soul Cassandra Pybus
The soul finds its own home, if it ever has a home at all.
Marilynne Robinson
I am walking down a narrow dirt road that winds along the edge of the bay. On one side is a pitted sandstone cliff, while on the other side the road falls away into the shimmering water, where black swans glide soundlessly toward a wooden jetty. Four small rowboats are winched up under a green painted roof and on the side in red lettering is the name of my father’s brother, Ken Pybus.
This is my most frequently recurring dream. As far back as I can remember I have been walking along this road, although for many years I never understood where I was or where the road was leading me. Now I recognise it as the original carriage road to the convict station at Oyster Cove, in the far south-eastern corner of Tasmania. This road ran past my uncle’s house at Lower Snug, where I spent magical summers as a young child. In 1985, when I was in my mid thirties and had lived away from Tasmania for most of my life, I came to believe the dream was leading me home. At least that is what I told myself when my very first boyfriend miraculously reappeared at the door of my inner city hovel holding my broken gate before him like a talisman. ‘Your father tells me you have never got married,’ were his first words to me.
I later remonstrated with my father for giving out my address to a virtual stranger, a man I hadn’t seen for twenty years. ‘Come on, pussycat,’ my father responded with hearty candour. ‘You know you’re pretty desperate.’ Indeed, I was desperate; in despair at living in bleak Melbourne with a job I hated as a policy advisor on Affirmative Action. Feminism had led me down the wrong path, I believed, and now I was trapped in a desolate culde-sac, alone and frantic. I felt like the woman in Helen Garner’s story ‘The Life of Art’, who counselled her friend not to expect to find a man who will look after her and love her. ‘Men won’t do those things for women like us,’ the narrator says, wistfully. ‘We’ve done something to ourselves so men won’t do it.’ Such was my terror of loneliness and al
ienation that within a fortnight I agreed to marry this virtual stranger. I wasn’t in love with him; he was safe and deceptively familiar and an escape from the self-pitying abyss I had descended into. I was wilfully blind to the inherent dangers of marrying a man who had run through three marriages by the age of thirty-seven.
I did not dance at my wedding because my new husband refused to set foot on a dance floor, but I did sing, having adapted a Jerome Kern classic, ‘Bill’, for the occasion. Then I purchased my uncle’s house and we went to live at the very end of the world in Lower Snug.
Among the many things I did not know about my husband was that he was a Vietnam veteran freighted with terrors far more intense than anything I could conjure. Beneath his affable, affectionate exterior he was a rigidly inflexible control freak with a lack of interest in intimacy that verged on distaste. Determined not to be his fourth abandoned wife, I clung on to the mediocre security the marriage offered by striving to meet his exacting standards of order and closing down my sexual self. I grew a self-sufficient garden of fruit and vegetables, burrowed deep into the landscape and history of Tasmania and wrote books brimming with lyrical praise of home. For most of the twenty-one years I was married I carried a subterranean sadness that I never permitted myself to acknowledge. By willing myself home in the landscape of my dreaming, and in a marriage that was stultifying and soul-denying, I had put one foot in the grave.
One dazzling day in late April 2000, when the bay looked as if it had been dusted with glitter, I took a kayak for a paddle. There was not a breath of wind and the water was so perfectly translucent that patterns of sunlight danced on the sandy bottom. Farther out was a seething dark patch in the otherwise placid water. Manoeuvring the kayak toward it, I found myself amongst thousands of sooty birds feasting on a school of tiny fish.
This was the annual migration of short-tailed shearwaters, commonly known as mutton birds, which nest along the coast of Tasmania. Their frenzied feeding was to fatten up for an astounding, unbroken flight all the way to the Bering Strait to spend the winter. In the following spring, they would make the epic return trip to nest in the exact same place they had left. A century ago a traveller observed a continuous stream of mutton birds pass across the sun, darkening the sea for hours as they unerringly returned to their burrows. As I rested on my paddle to watch the birds lift out of the water and take flight, tears stung my eyes. Contemplating these plucky birds instinctively winging it all the way to Siberia and back, I experienced a huge up-welling of loss. At that moment I sensed that in this rhythm of exile and homecoming was the same circuitry that hummed through me. So why should I not make the very same journey?
I had become fascinated with the story of a woman named Lillian Alling, who had walked from New York to Siberia in the 1920s. She was following the route of the Collins Overland Telegraph, which was cut through the vast subarctic expanse of the Yukon and Alaska in a quixotic attempt to link New York to London by way of Siberia. It was said that Lillian was trying to get home to Russia, but my research told me this explanation did not hold. I really wanted to solve the mystery of what this enigmatic pedestrian was searching for. Energised by the example of the mutton birds, I sent e-mails to experts on the Russian Far East and wrote away to the Russian Intourist organisation. I got survey maps of the Yukon and the Alaskan subarctic that showed there were four-wheel-drive tracks that roughly replicated the route of the old telegraph. To follow in Lillian’s footsteps would involve a trip of around 12,000 km and, even driving, would take eight to ten weeks, but it could be done.
My husband was of the view that a trip of that nature was quite beyond a woman over fifty. ‘No way, José’ was his firm position regarding my ambition. I suggested he should come with me. ‘What would I want to do that for?’ He had a granite seam of stubbornness that meant no amount of guile could persuade him to do something he did not choose.
Still I persisted. ‘We could have a whole new experience and learn to see the world differently.’
‘I refuse to drive on the wrong side of the road,’ he said emphatically, intending that to be the end of the matter.
‘And I refuse to stay put,’ I blurted out, clasping my survey maps to my chest as a kind of armour against what I knew would be the long, slow, silent burn of his disapproval.
To leave the protective space I called home to venture into an unknown world was deeply destabilising. Even so, I found that teetering on the shaky edge of my being was more exhilarating than anything I had experienced before. For much of the journey I was travelling along the eastern edge of Beringia, a vast area of non-glaciated tundra stretching from Siberia across most of Alaska. Some 12,000 years ago small groups of intrepid Siberian hunters walked across this vast steppe, progressively migrating to the east and south till they had populated North, Central and South America. Today twenty-nine Native American populations share unique genetic markers with people from Siberia.
The tundra over which these proto-Americans walked is savagely inhospitable in the long dark winter, but in late summer it was magnificent. Driving along the empty Top of the World Highway was like being adrift on a terrestrial ocean, with rippling waves of salmon and rust, light and shadow, stretching to the faint indigo streak of the far horizon. There were times I was overwhelmed with a surge of unadulterated joy at the awesome glory, and just as many times that I wailed like a banshee at the sheer terror of being so completely alone.
Being pushed back on my own emotional and psychological resources proved very confronting and my need for external validation grew so insistent that after six weeks I was crippled with homesickness. Desperate for my husband to wrap his arms around me and tell me that he would look after me, I aborted the final leg of my journey to Siberia and flew back to Tasmania. At Hobart airport I flung myself into his broad arms. ‘Nothing else matters but you,’ I bleated, face pressed into his chest. ‘I promise I won’t ever go away again.’
‘Too right,’ he said reaching around me to lift the pack off my back. ‘You and me, happily ever after. That is how all the best stories end.’ Of course, that was not how this story ended.
I was barely back a month before I started planning more journeys. With each passing year the period of my exile was extended, although I always returned eagerly to Lower Snug, chastened by homesickness. My husband was not happy. Married people did not live this way, he admonished, while friends gave me veiled warnings about what was being put at risk. It was not that I mistook the message; my wanderlust was just too strong to give it much heed. I worked on the principle that what I didn’t know couldn’t hurt me.
Then, at midnight on 31 December 2006, as my husband sat at his computer reading his work e-mail, I leaned over his shoulder to wish him Happy New Year. Flickering before me was a message from his female colleague which began: ‘Hello my darling.’ Neither shocked nor surprised, I averted my eyes, kissed his cheek and went to my separate bed, unknowing, unhurt. Then I got up again.
I have had many occasions since to probe my decision to get out of my safe single bed and demand an explanation for that e-mail. I must have known what the upshot of such a confrontation would be. Yet when my husband walked out the very next morning, without a backward glance, I was completely devastated. The first words I blurted out to my friends were: ‘How am I going to live without him?’
The first thing I did was to go as far away as I could envisage, hurriedly negotiating a series of research fellowships in the United States. The first place I fetched up was the John D Rockefeller Library in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. I knew not a soul in the place, which was all for the good since I was in a zombie-like state of traumatic shock. I had come to just the right place as it transpired: almost everyone I encountered was also the walking dead.
Colonial Williamsburg is an entire town meticulously restored and frozen in the time when Virginia was a British colony, before the declaration of independence. It is staffed with extremely knowledgeable guides, dressed in costume, who represented me
mbers of the full range of social strata from elite colonial gentlemen to slave stable-hands, though there are not quite enough black faces for a colonial town where well over half the populace was enslaved. On duty, these people refuse to step outside the eighteenth century or admit there is any other reality than the parochial concerns of a small town in colonial Virginia on the eve of the American Revolution. It’s their job to engage the public in conversation, which made for bizarre exchanges on my first day when I walked through the town to the library. Nor did these disconcerting apparitions cease once I got inside the library. While I was searching the online database at a computer I looked up to see Thomas Jefferson at the next terminal downloading online articles on Palladian architecture. It was many days before I went back again.
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