by Ailsa Piper
Telling friends and family was tricky. I was frightened they would laugh their heads off. Going to a seminary did not quite fit my knockabout image. My father was mystified. He didn’t know what to say. My mother smiled knowingly, and quietly admitted to her friends—‘Just another enthusiasm. He’ll be back home soon. I’ll give him two months.’ My boss, at a total loss, never having faced this situation before, said, ‘I don’t suppose offering you more money will change your mind?’ Talk about not getting it!
Trying to throw light on the reasons behind the radical choices in our life has an endless fascination for me. Why do we do what we do? It’s the critical question at the heart of the science of psychology. Spirituality and psychology are closely related within the interior life of each of us. The story I have just told you touches on a few of the reasons I became a priest. I have no doubt there are countless others, many of them arising from we know not where.
Interestingly, a similar question comes up with me when I think of you exploring a 300-year-old play to find the complex moral issues that emerge in the text, or even the more basic question of what drives you with such passion in your own writing. Sometimes the honesty and integrity with which you invest yourself in the issues you write about leaves me breathless.
So here’s a challenge for you. In return for me struggling to describe to you why I have chosen such an unfashionable life’s work, can you tell me why you are so passionate about the vocation of a writer? Might find, I suspect, some interesting overlap.
Not too much lolling around in the sun, drinking long, cool juices in Bali. Work please. Why do you do what you do???
Happy days.
Tony
Hello dear Tony,
Thanks for your reflection on why you entered the priesthood—and for the promise to enlarge on it. I note you hesitate to use words like vocation or calling. I guess they are what many of us might want to hear, when we pose the question to you. But life is rarely that simple, is it? ‘Substantial’ and ‘worthwhile’. I understand those yearnings, though. We too had a visit from a missionary, when I was at school, and it moved me deeply—her selflessness. An exceptional woman. But storytelling claimed me, ultimately. It was in my bones, my inheritance, having grown up in a remote place among great mythologisers. And I note what I wrote—it claimed me, rather than me claiming it. I didn’t necessarily have a ‘burning bush’ moment, so why should I ask for that from you? Still, I’d like to know more . . .
Now, you must be careful of these dinner party conversations. In my experience, people will start to think you are a crank! When I first mooted carrying sins for others, people looked at me as though I was barking. I hope that being a step removed—being able to say ‘This loopy pilgrim did it’—will preserve your reputation as a man of some gravitas.
The novel, or whatever it is . . .
Well, it is sitting waiting for me, but I’ve had so little time to get back to it these past few months. I’m hoping that after our anniversary celebrations, I will get a slab of time to see what I’ve got.
Thanks for your encouraging words about my writing. I don’t know about passion or integrity—sometimes it’s just slog. Feeling a bit fragile about it this week, actually. I have to finish a piece to deliver at a fundraiser for a beleaguered Victorian TAFE college. In another cycle of government wisdom and cost-cutting, many such institutions are under threat again. Infuriating. Anyway, the event is curated by a man called Bruno, who is a whirlwind of faith in the word. He calls himself a teacher, but he’s an evangelist for the power of stories to renew our lives. He has set seven writers the title My Enduring Love Affair With Writing. I’m finding it difficult, because I can’t honestly claim that the love affair has been enduring on my part.
Well no. That isn’t accurate. It has endured. It has never waned. But I have been an inconstant lover, by which I mean that as a writer, I have come and gone from writing, toyed with it and abandoned it. I have taken from it constantly as a greedy reader, and in my working life as an actor and director I’ve inhaled words and stories like oxygen. But I have not put back equal time and energy at the desk.
If I do think about writing as a lover, I’m reminded of that rather ghastly phrase from some Hollywood movie—‘You complete me.’ Well, I don’t want writing to complete me. Hate the idea of that. But I’d like very much to think that I am now, finally, almost big enough to meet it. Completion I won’t claim, but perhaps I needed to live five busy decades before I had grown enough to commit to writing full-time. I envy those who knew from the beginning where they lived creatively. I have been a flibbertigibbet of the first order, acting and directing and playing behind microphones and in front of cameras. Now I want to stop and do the hard, quiet, solitary yards, with ‘writing’ sitting quietly in the corner, perhaps growling occasionally, but mostly just waiting for me to deliver up something worthy in gratitude for all that it has given me.
Probably that makes no sense, but it is where I plan to start with the piece. I want to listen to what ‘writing’ wants to say. I want to write stories that are, like all of us, complicated, tender, tough, small, true, big and yes, enduring. Writing has sustained me, and so I owe it constancy and attention. The unflinching gaze. That’s what I feel writing is asking of me in this phase of our relationship, so I am going to commit to it. I am going to endure with it.
I’m not sure if that can make any sense to you—or if there will be any overlap with life as a priest—but that is where the thoughts tend.
Hope you were not blown away by the winds. It is positively Arctic down here.
Only a few more sleeps until the tropics. Hooray.
Ailsa
Tony!
Greetings from Ubud! I break my silence with good news—my book is going into reprint. There is life in the sin-carrier yet! It is heaven here. Balinese bliss with a soundtrack of geck-oh! And I’m slowing . . .
Ailsa x
Ailsa,
A reprint—what a smash. In this depressed book market, that’s great news. Congratulations.
Excuse me breaking into your lotus-eating time, but I have been in touch with an old mate of mine, a publisher, with whom I’ve been co-operating for 40 years. He is quite keen to host a discussion between us in Melbourne town about your book in late October or November, if we can find a mutual date. Could be good fun if you are game.
Wonderful to get a sense of the beginnings of your piece on the enduring love of writing.
You know, for as long as I can remember, I’ve been caught up with the urgency to find better words to touch people’s hunger for spirituality. There is a lot of traditional religious language which is tired—a currency that has lost its original value. I love that fire in the belly that the best writers have to search for the killer sentence. I don’t think it’s crazy to say that we share the same drive to explore the power of language.
Now back to the lotus.
Happy days.
Tony
Hi from Lotus-land, Tony!
It’s early. Pre-dawn. My favourite time. Just as the frog croaks are getting lost under the chiming of early birds, and before the whirring of motorbikes takes over, the Balinese women come into our garden. Preceded by the smoke of incense, they glide onto the verandah, placing offerings—small trays like birds’ nests, made of bamboo fronds and filled with flowers, rice, fruit and little biscuits—at the door, at the family temple opposite, and at the gateway. They set them on the stone path and near the daybed. This morning, Wayan told me she makes 80 ‘nests’ a day. The air fills with perfumed smoke as the neighbourhood is dotted with these gifts at every statue, shop entrance and tree. They are infinite in variety and contents, and they make me wonder about the offerings I make to the world—the moments when I pause in the day, as they do often, to stop and acknowledge ancestors or history or family, or perhaps just to give thanks.
I am keenly aware, up here, of how much I have to be thankful for in my days. Not least, a new friend. Thanks for your con
grats re the reprint.
I’d LOVE to have a sin-talk in Melbourne with you. I feel sure we will find something to say.
Now. A juice, I think. It took forever to one-finger tap that missive!
Selamat pagi.
Ailsa
Ailsa,
You’re back in the land of the Vegemite sandwich!
I just caught up with your blog. Every time I dip into it I get the itches: You can do that, the itch says. Then the demons of caution and procrastination scream at me: You fool! Don’t take on anything more in this out-of-control life of yours. And so the chorus goes round and round.
Meeting you reminds me of a throwaway line of your favourite poet, Mary Oliver. She talks about words—chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. But the one she chooses is ‘grace’. Mary admits that she doesn’t know what it is exactly, but she’ll take it.
I don’t quite know what it means either, Mary—but having Sandy send me your book was a graced moment.
Happy days.
Tony
Dear Tony,
At last there is time to respond properly.
Firstly, I could not be more delighted at the prospect of our conversation in Melbourne. I’ve written back and said I can do all the dates they propose. Yippeee!
Thank you for the reminder about Mary, and in particular for those lines and their sentiments. They are from another favourite of her poems. How lovely that you should remind me of it. I have been feeling very graced this week. A glowing newspaper review, an exquisitely designed printing of my blog post about Byron Bay Writers Festival in their magazine, thoughtful hand-written letters from readers, and a sense that the book is finding its way toward the people who will make it welcome. Truly blessings. Truly grace.
I agree with you about Sandy’s role in introducing us. I think she might scoff at being thought of as an instrument of grace, or any other such highfalutin’ term we could dream for her, but she most certainly is that.
This is a huge week. I’m finishing a ten-minute piece for an event called Women of Letters—a celebration of . . . well, women and letter-writing! Right up my camino, you would think. But among the other women writers who will be on the stage is Helen Garner—a fact that paralyses me. When I read Monkey Grip—way back in my late teens—I had such a shock of . . . what? Recognition? Well, yes, but no. She was living a totally different life to mine, and yet—the gift of a truly great writer—she observed particularities of her world in a way that allowed me to see, and examine, my own afresh. So much so that when I moved to Melbourne, the first thing I wanted to see was ‘her’ Aqua Profonda sign at the Fitzroy Pool. I was coming from Sydney, your city of shimmering surfaces, and moving south seemed like a pilgrimage to Helen and her deeper water.
To share the stage with her makes me long to do her justice, but the words are not flowing. It has been several weeks since I was invited to take part, and I’ve tried various approaches to the topic—A Letter to my Unfinished Business. I’m writing about my childhood home, that sheep station up in WA’s Gascoyne. It makes me yearn to go back there—do you know I’ve not returned in over forty years? Perhaps I must finally bite the bullet. There is no question that I have unfinished business out there in that red earth. So much was lost for my parents when they left it. So much is left for me to understand. Other than that, the spirits are high, spring is in the air—and there is the prospect of excellent company in November. What more?
Ailsa
Ailsa,
So you will head north to Gascoyne country. The land where they roll their ciggies with one hand, the other casually on the saddle horn. Wonderful idea. Going back to the roots and seeing them (perhaps) for the first time. Touching my family’s history in Ireland, telling the stories and singing the songs, has been one of the defining moments in my recent life. Do it. Go and see. And you, after all, are the woman who writes in her credo—‘I believe that stories shape our lives.’ Do send the piece you are writing if it feels right. Would love to read your impressions. And break a leg or whatever limb is appropriate for such events—but don’t fall off the horse.
Tony
Hello my perspicacious friend!
You were right of course. Spending weeks wrangling at the desk, thinking and writing about my first home—the homeland of three previous generations of my family—created an itch I must scratch. So I’ve booked flights and will head off with Peter in a couple of weeks to search for the little blonde girl who went wandering across the dry earth, picking wildflowers. Hope she is still out there, walking.
I’ll return just in time to prep for a gruelling public conversation with a Monsignor from the north. Hopefully we can plan for you to come for a meal while you’re in town. I’d love you to meet Peter, and I have a couple of other close friends whose company you might enjoy. Showfolk. Your people!
Must away. It will be hot over in the north-west, and I need to pack a fly-net.
Ailsa
PS Thanks for the encouragement—or should I say, the prodding? It feels great to be on my way.
Ailsa,
Buen camino for your desert search, pilgrim. Until my early forties I had no interest in my Celtic background, despite an Irish name from a grandfather and an Irish maternal grandmother who lived with us. Then I spent a month travelling through Ireland.
Hard to find words to describe the effect on me. The familiarity of the place penetrated depths in my psyche I never knew existed. I felt split open to a new understanding of myself. Their ironic sense of humour, their preparation of food, their music, their sensitivity to acts of injustice, their love of conversation—the Irish culture gave me an eerie sense of homecoming. It was like I saw myself anew. I was re-reading my life through a Celtic lens.
I hope your search yields similar riches.
Tony
Hola Tony!
I’m back, and of course your predictions were accurate. Huge amounts of information, memories and emotions to process. Not much I can say with any clarity just now, except that I’m grateful beyond words for the trip, and glad to be home, and well . . .
Flummoxed!
There’s a word.
I have more questions than I left with, but I think maybe that is good. Now I must wash the red dirt from my clothes.
How you, compañero?
Ailsa
Ailsa,
Welcome back! I’m waiting for the stories and the songs. Saw the photo on the blog and was awestruck by the land. The stuff of Aussie myth. Glad you stayed in the saddle.
Probably silly to mention it, but did you see the reference to your admiration of Peter Steele, quoted by Raimond Gaita in The Monthly last issue? He wrote a warm reflection on Peter’s life and I thought with some pride—‘I know that smart, powerful and life-giving woman and damn it she walks miles and miles as well.’
Interesting. Looks like we’ve both been influenced by Jesuit thought. That surprised me.
If you can’t find the reference I would be happy to send it.
We are all on track for our conversation. November 13/14 will be great fun.
Happy days.
Tony
Hooray!
That’s wonderful news, Tony. It’s in the diary.
Yes, Rai told me he was going to write about me as a student of Peter Steele’s. I felt nervous at the thought of being mentioned; unworthy after not having gone to his funeral. I hadn’t stayed in touch—he was very much my prof, not an intimate—and so I didn’t go along to pay tribute to him. I wish I had. He impacted on me profoundly, not least because he was a real live poet. I think he would be gently amused that I’d written a travel/memoir/spirituality book, given that one of the texts I studied with him was Lawrence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey. He was a wise and gifted teacher, and I was fortunate to have had time with him.
You know, I never really considered him as ‘Jesuit’, but in hindsight perhaps it helps to explain why I was so drawn to him and his poetry—the ongoing fascination I have for anyone who
can open up mysteries for me. His writing certainly did that, as did the personal conversations I managed to snatch after tutorials. A generous man.
So looking forward to seeing you again. Soon!
Ailsa
Ailsa,
Never realised how attractive as a means of communication a blog can be until I read yours. I feel selfish somehow relishing your delicious perspectives, plugging into where you are up to whenever I choose, and yet not joining the conversation. Paul Keating used to say that one is either a voyeur or a player. Hate to admit it but where you are concerned I am simply a capital V.
Enough about all that.
November is upon us.
Prepare yourself for some ‘mother’ stories—not sweet little Owl and the Pussycat stories like the ones in your book (loved them), but at the age of 94, my mother was roaring around the racecourse backing Tommy Smith’s outsiders.
By the way, is the Gascoyne trip making any more sense? How did the land affect you? Do you see yourself any differently?
Happy days.
Tony
Hi Tony,
I’m amused at the idea of you as a voyeur—my blog must be the only area of your life where you can call yourself that. I know your dark secret is that you are a player who can’t help but get involved. I am glad its words are resonating though.
The Gascoyne . . .
I’m not sure if sense is what will be made of that visit, but do you know, I think that it will be a writing work of some kind. Article, book, play . . . not sure which. It won’t be a song, of that much you can be sure. No one needs to hear me sing!
Anyway, I had three other perspectives on the land, as well as all my own frantically scrawled notes, because I travelled with Peter, my sister Alanna, and her father.