by Ruth Park
This acerbic assessment of the Holy Father seemed a sad comedown when presented to men with martyrs and exiles on the family tree, but they nodded resignedly.
‘Of course, you know what this means – the end of the Faith as we know it.’
As this more or less has come to pass, the moment was a historic one.
My agent had gathered up assignments for me, doing breakdowns of film properties for two or three London-based companies. In some cases, after I had broken down the novels to their bone structure, I also did the treatment. Many of the novels had little or eccentric bone structure, ribs where they shouldn’t be, or backbones with kinks. In this circumstance I sometimes ventured to suggest orthopaedic adjustments.
This work is an invaluable exercise for any writer. It led me to the habit of graphing anything lengthy or significant that I wrote thereafter.
Some novels, of course, often charming, estimable ones, had no bone structure at all, but relied for their reader impact on character, atmosphere, and elegant text. Such are impossible to carry to the screen without drastic changes. They simply are not cinematic. Yet producers do, and frequently turn out bastardised versions of such novels, causing consternation in the writers and anguished protest from readers who loved the original novel.
This work, erratic as it was, was well paid and after I returned to Australia, provided a basic income.
However, I truly hit bottom in London. That city has had so many griefs of its own that mine seemed sharper, more isolated than before. The surpassing sorrow was not something I could discuss with the children; perhaps they experienced the same and could not discuss it with me.
I spent much leisure time wandering in old churches, over dimpled paving stones engraved with names of those who died three and four centuries ago. One bore the words ‘The Past Seems to Mee Like a Dreeme’, and all I could say was ‘Oh, yes, yes!’
But those sad wanderings brought to me the realisation that death must be insignificant. The realisation, yes, but not the comprehension.
Bad, bad. Yet, what is the good way? Not, I think, with the attention of ‘trauma counsellers’, so often in their twenties, with no or little personal trauma in their life histories. My belief is that bereavement is the time to open your heart to people at large, not necessarily to only one person. John Quattroville knew what he was doing.
In this way I am opening my heart to readers who are, or have been, in that dark, roadless country.
Yet some people, simple people, too, know the good way to handle grief, as distinct from the murderous wonderful way.
Seven years after my husband’s death, when I lived on Norfolk Island, I attended an Islander funeral. The Islanders are the descendants of the Pitcairn people who were ‘given’ Norfolk Island when their own little rock in the Pacific became too small for them. On Norfolk, where there is perhaps still no mortuary, people were buried very soon after death. Sometimes the family said goodbye to a loved child or mother in the morning and by sunset they were hidden from sight. Almost all the Pitcairn people are related; they have their feuds, scandals and battles, but so do all families. And so anyone who dies has many people come to say Godspeed.
How memorable was that burial! Until the last moment the grave remained open; the family was not anxious to say goodbye. Like their distant ancestors, the Tahitians, they carried green sprays of leaves. Some wore garlands of willow or hibiscus. They sang the very old Pitcairn hymns, taught to them, it is said, by pious whalers from Cape Cod and Boston. They wept in each other’s arms, laughed often, for they were repeating one to another little anecdotes of the person who had left them. Now and then one or two wandered to the graveside to say something affectionate (or so it seemed from their expressions). And it seemed to me that this was not a parting ceremony at all, but a loving gathering.
There was a natural wisdom in these people. I knew from other residents, mainlanders as we were called, that this generous expression of grief, this comfort shared in the homeliest way, would go on for weeks until the bereaved were ready for normal life once more.
In significant ways this funeral was like the Maori tangis I had attended as a child, although there was a grand element to those if the deceased person were chiefly. My conviction is that this is the right way, the way dictated by our hearts. We know that even in paleolithic times the dead were laid tenderly to rest, food and drink accompanying them to speed them on their way; a cherished necklace, a favourite dagger laid upon the sleeping breast. Thus the dead are not depersonalised, as they come to be in modern civilisation. They are left space, and if they wish to, they will occupy that space.
My intention when I returned to Australia was to sell our house at Balgowlah Heights and buy a small one for my two older children to live in, if they wished. I was to go back to London as soon as possible. But by November of that year I was invited by the powerful Reader’s Digest to consider a year’s contract to do the text of one of the Digest’s special books. The Digest has always paid its contributors well; the sum offered me was far more than I could have earned by freelancing for two years. Though I was still doing children’s scripts for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, I was nervous about the future of kids’ radio programmes in face of the flood of television for children, so exciting, innovative, and although physically still black and white, psychologically brightly coloured.
It took many long discussions with all my children before I decided I could leave the three young ones alone in London for a year. This was probably a mistake. However, none of them has ever told me the history of those years (for the year stretched considerably) and I shall not ask questions. They survived well, and are three charming, affectionate, and productive people. So, whatever happened, and in my anxious imagination at the time everything happened, it did them no harm.
We sold our family house, and Anne, Rory, myself, the three dogs and a shifting number of cats moved to a small house further up the coast. There I wrote for the Digest, text as ritually ordered as a religious ceremonial, not my kind of thing at all. But the Digest has lasted for many decades; undoubtedly its management knows what it needs. So vanished 1968, with the spectacular splashdown of Apollo 8, after orbiting the moon ten times, the first flight of its kind.
Politically it had been the most explosive, frightening year imaginable … the great Tet offensive in Vietnam; assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy; Czechoslovakia occupied by Soviet and other Warsaw Pact troops; strikes, student riots, conscription riots; massive police-student battles in Mexico City; Nixon elected President of the United States; the noise was deafening.
Nevertheless, I persevered with the Reader’s Digest assignment, writing about mountain devils in springtime as ‘small enamelled lovers’, and having the Digest change the words to ‘minor members of the iguana family’. My health was unreliable, my spirits deeply depressed. I missed my husband and younger children night and day.
Even when I felt better than that, it seemed I was at the bottom of the sea, mile-high water on top of me. Certainly I wrote a great deal, but it was all done from my head. Wherever I lived, in my heart or spirit, there was numbness and inertia.
None of my experiences of widowhood is peculiar to me; I suggest no uniqueness. It is because my experience is universal that I write as I do. Certainly, some people are more resilient; with others no profound affection has been present. People must be people, after all, as varied as blades of grass, alike only to the careless eye.
In hindsight I see that I might well have continued going on as I was, overworked, anxious, sleepless, lonely, on the verge of clinical depression, except for an unpredictable happening.
Having delivered my fortnightly quota of work to the Digest office, I returned to the city to spend an hour or so. For me, these stray hours always concerned bookshops.
I remember walking through the shop in absolute darkness of soul. Any reality of life was non-existent. Picking up a book I looked at the picture of the author on the
back of the jacket. An old man, I thought, maybe a sick man, with one sad eye and one merry one.
I thought, ‘I’m in the pits, and I could be there forever because I don’t know the way out. I wonder what this man would say to me?’
Behind me a voice answered, ‘He would say “Detach! Detach!” ’
The person who spoke was a young man. I think he had a shaven head but I’m not sure now. He was a Pole, a student or novice at Diamond Zendo in Hawaii, a disciple of the well-known Buddhist teacher, Robert Aitken. All these names were strange to me then.
One might say with reason that this meeting was fortuitous. Nevertheless human life and behaviour are far too immense and full of enigmatic contradictions for anyone to say, this is sequential, that is not. My observation is that if grief, rage, terror – any of the primitive emotions – are experienced with enough furious intensity some unanalysable critical point is likely to be reached.
Then something occurs, it does not matter if it be fortuitous or not. It can be a glance, a word, a blow, an incident. The mind flips over, changes its ‘set’, and without the intervention of the will, perceives the possibility of a new direction.
This did not happen to me when I met the young man in the bookshop. Not then.
‘I’ve been watching your face,’ he explained. ‘I could see you’re in a heavy space. And that’s what Suzuki-roshi always advised his students … detach, detach!’
He told me that he was the son of Polish migrants to Australia. In business in suburban Sydney, they had had some financial trouble, and his zendo had released him to travel home to help them. In his time he had studied Soto Zen with Suzuki, who had written the book I held, but found Soto too soft for his intractable nature.
‘I need something fiercer,’ he said. ‘I find it in Rinzai.’
‘But what is Zen?’
‘It’s about consciousness. A system for human life. A way. The less explanation the better.’
‘But, this book?’
‘You won’t find Suzuki-roshi explaining anything. Zen isn’t for learning, it’s for living. Either you cotton on to it, or you don’t.’
‘Tell me about Suzuki.’
‘Oh, he’s dead. In a way.’
And with that the young man smiled and walked out of my life. In a way.
All the way home I gobbled up Suzuki’s book, which was called Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Quickly I realised that Zen was some version of Buddhism, that Soto and Rinzai probably were the names of divergent sects, and roshi meant master. But Suzuki-roshi’s lectures had originally been given to students who already had a working knowledge of Buddhism; they were not for gobbling by ignorant people like me. Still, there were powerful sentences – the world is its own magic; to give is non-attachment; we actually are the true activity of the big existence, reality itself; our practice is not to gather something in your basket but to find something in your sleeve. Something within me echoed all these statements, and I could see how Suzuki-roshi was dead only in a way. His voice was clear, his words simple, except that I could understand them only here and there.
Something stood between him and me; it was that which inhibits most Westerners, and particularly Christians when they are confronted with Buddhism, most of all any of the branches of Zen. We are absolutely stuck with the idea that we do something, and are in due course rewarded with something. This pernicious fixation seems to be a human frailty. One must teach it, after all, to animals. In its severest form it rules authoritarian religions and political ideologies. A Zen master would say, ‘Detach! Detach from this idea without roots.’ He might even add, in the maddening Zen manner, ‘Who is the person acting? Who the one rewarding?’
Certainly Suzuki-roshi informed his students that if they practised certain things, it was likely that there would be a satisfactory consequence. As a physio instructor might tell you that if you assiduously do specific exercises, the pain in your arm will probably cease.
The most liberating thing of all, though I did not recognise it until I actually studied in Zen centres, is that Suzuki-roshi and other Zen masters would not care a spit if you never did any of the mental exercises they recommended. Why should they be ambitious for you? You do your own work, or you do not. They’re not there to hold you up.
Many months passed before my mind pulled away from the reward-punishment syndrome. I saw that cause and effect rule the universe, and that my never-lifting grief was an effect.
‘Well, I know the cause,’ I said to myself. ‘D’Arcy’s death. I don’t have to think about that.’
But even after a few months I was in the habit of querying everything. This process is so painful that one not only flinches but squirms. The illusion that our own value-patterns, whether familial or cultural, alone represent the truth is as strong as death. Indeed people do die for it. This is right and that is wrong, we say, for human beings have an irresistible urge towards polarity. Yet all spiritual wayfarers have observed that it is a dangerous thing to allow oneself to become rigidly aligned.
Buddha said, ‘To see the truth, neither be for or against.’
I realised very clearly that I must examine the cause of my grievous depression, and not take it for granted that I already knew. But it was a threatening exercise. For months I asked myself how I could detach from my husband’s character, life, death? Such seemed the vilest disloyalty. Wasn’t the very fact that I mourned him so profoundly proof of my devotion?
What a shock to see ego in that last sentence, not newly sprung, but well-rooted, blooming! And, digging deeper into my motivation, I saw at last that in letting go of my husband I subconsciously believed I would be relinquishing twenty-five years of my own life.
There was a block in my head. I could not understand detachment. I believed it means indifference.
But detachment does not mean indifference to anything or anyone. It means only that there is no desire to possess these things or that person. In possessiveness lies all the pain – loss, anger, unbearable yearning. All the flies that bite.
How long it took me to allow my husband to go! I said many times, ‘Go your way. Thank you for everything. Go, and be happy!’ but had no feeling that somewhere his spirit flew off joyfully, nothing to hold it to earth.
I had not reached that point of which the Zen masters say: ‘Have you climbed to the top of the ladder, to the last rung? Then step off.’
But years afterwards, on a sunny height in Norfolk Island, where he had never been, the lofty pines standing silent in the way they do, and the fairy terns flipping in and out the boughs like snowflakes or falling flowers, I felt him close, and then gone forever.
‘Goodbye, darlen,’ I said. ‘See you molla!’
Which is the way Norfolk Islanders say goodbye, for they believe in tomorrow.
• 2 •
In 1972 the ABC Children’s Session died, accompanied by cries of deprivation from country children, parents, and correspondence-school teachers. The session, in its declining years, had outlived its value to city kids, who now had films, television, and a rapidly increasing flow of visual and audio teaching aids. But those of us aware of the almost inconceivable isolation of inland children were sad.
There is no way to comprehend the boundless loneliness of the Australian outback until you fly over it and look down upon a cinnabar red emptiness that appears not to belong to familiar Earth. But there, amidst the fantastic tangle of dry rivers, aberrant rivers that run from the coast to the old salt sea that is not there any more, the eye catches the occasional dazzle from an iron roof, the small green blur of a few trees, the wink of a dying dam.
In places like these, with the nearest neighbour five hundred kilometres down the track, I first saw Australian children, ruddy, shy, with homecut hair, rush in from their chores to listen to the ABC Children’s Session, hoping to hear their own romantic Argonaut names.
So passed something both precious and historic. Also down a hole in the ground went our family’s basic source of income for
twenty-five years, and I was panic stricken. Such a basic income, even if it be minimal, is the writer’s safety belt. By the same token it can be the writer’s curse, for he tends to cling to it, often at the expense of more valuable work.
It was queer to find myself scraping carrots or washing my hair without thinking about a Wombat script at the same time. I had written scripts in trains and buses; sitting beside the beds of children with mumps; in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep. Wombat, affectionate, bumbling, in a word muddleheaded, belonged in the family. He had originated there, too, when one of my daughters said in the tragic tones of a four-year-old confronted with the hopeless, ‘I don’t think there’s anyone in the world I’m smarter than!’
It occurred to me then that many tiny children may feel like that. They are, after all, forever being corrected, taught, led this way and that, as though they are not, by any standard, all right just as they are. So I thought, I’ll work out a character that any child is ‘smarter than’. He turned out to be the muddleheaded wombat.
As it happened, I said goodbye to Wombat as a radio character, but not otherwise, as he has appeared in many books, picture books, as a puppet and in the theatre. He has been translated into ten other languages as Vombat, Battino, Woo, El Wombo, Wombi, and Lille Ville Vimse.
During our long association Wombat and I have been through many trials together. I have answered thousands of brief, large-written letters addressed to Wombat’s Mum, and perhaps a hundred long serious letters discussing the curious psychology revealed by the scripts. The writers did not think I knew, so they told me. I have fought off translators who desired to convert Wombat into a bear (for the Malays) and a resolute Indian who thought this burrowing animal would do better behaving as a monkey. I once managed to pacify an English editor who required him to live in a tree, and was happy to confirm to a Japanese publisher that Wombattu-san was indeed a cousin of the esteemed Koara-san.
Wombat and I, there is no denying, are close. We even share the same favourite Hans Andersen fairytale, the one about the ugly dumpling that grew up to be a beautiful scone.