Fishing in the Styx
Page 27
But I wanted a 360 degree view, the two little mountains and their rainforest to the west and north, and the ocean and hills and dales to the east. Madness. Who wants to build on a hill on an island? You want to live in a crow’s nest on a mast, or maybe on the weathervane above the steeple? For all islands are in the roadway of the winds, and Norfolk Island perhaps more than most. Though my house was a lovely house, tightly built by a good Dutchman, the winds found every crack. Wide as a hair? No matter. All the better to go shree-shee through, day and night. The winds sang around windows, under doors, and through the footings. There were high airs and low airs, some spiral, some as undulating as the sea, and they all found me. For a while I had shelter. There was a huge pine to the east. We had built carefully so as not to disturb the roots of that tree, for it had been there first. It fenced off the wind outside my bedroom. Norfolk pines do not sough; they are noiseless creatures even in storms. But within three years that pine began to talk, tick-click, tick-click. It was not the tree itself; the tree, had it been able to talk, would have shrieked, for it was now infested with pine beetle, chewing out its heart. On the island they knew no cure; they advised that the pine be felled, lest it fall on the house and kill that too. So down it went, thirty metres tall, and the wind leaped in and began whispering and fluttering through invisible cracks, getting into the hall and shaking the lampshade into a cascade of tinkles.
Many things were written in that house, dozens of articles of one sort or another, some for the Sydney Morning Herald women’s page where I seemed to have inherited in a modest way the mantles of the much-loved writers, Charmian Clift and Helen Frizell. There were also several Wombat books, and three books for teenagers, including Come Danger, Come Darkness and Playing Beatie Bow, which won prizes and became a film.
The novel about the dwarf, Swords and Crowns and Rings, was written, and won the Miles Franklin Award. Maybe Miles, who had so disliked my younger self, would have been furious; on the other hand she might have mellowed since departing this life in the early 1950s. The award varies in value according to the investment market, and in my year it was exceptionally small, just enough to cover airfares from the island and brief accommodation. Still, I was most pleased to have won it, feeling the event a kind of reconciliation with that salty little woman.
Though I regained my health within a year or two, feeling once again the buoyancy of physical life, I still could not sleep, and so developed the adventurous habit of night-wandering in my minute ex-hire car which bore all the wounds of its previous occupation - doors that either jammed or would not shut, permanently open windows, lights temperamental, bits forever dropping off. Still, it served. Not since my family lived at Tanekaha Valley in New Zealand had I had the opportunity to observe the true country darkness, so lacking in any form of refracted light that it is absolute, a positive presence rather than an absence.
In darkness, like all things, the island changed shape, becoming immense, gullies deeper, hillsides rearing up like the walls of skyscrapers. The tall red guava hedges leaned inwards; sometimes there was a sudden whispered alarm from green linnets or other small birds cosied amidst the foliage. Who’s that at such an hour? A cat or a cow? No, one of Them.
How I hate being the enemy.
The cows were asleep, too, often in the middle of the road. But residents of the island did not have accidents; we all knew the obscured bend where one crept through on the wrong side of the road; the ruts that might swallow a wheel; the steep crumbling bank that was called Place Where Russian Sailors Went Over, referring in the common island way to an exciting incident of years before.
When I had visitors staying, and I often did, they sometimes accompanied me on these prowls, not liking it at all, astonished by the blind darkness, exclaiming with relief should they see the dim spark of an eremite farmhouse in a remote ‘walley’. I often playfully drove them to a place on the western road, close to the cliff and called Ghost Corner, I think. There one might wait under the trees and hear eerie mumblings, whispers and shuffles, most uncanny in the stillness. But the ghost sounds came from muttonbirds, murmuring to their chicks in the burrows that ran from the cliff face under the road.
Still, there are real ghosts on the island, infrequently seen.
Though my house lay in the path of the winds, there were often mornings of entranced stillness. Then the island seems enclosed in a bubble or glassy dome. Time and space vanish; did they ever exist? It is as though stillness were a new dimension. Once, I remember, I stood outside, amazed that I could hear the tinkle of teacups in my neighbour’s kitchen, across two paddocks. And while I stood there, I observed an event I fancy must be rare. I never met another resident who had seen such a thing, except the one I called that day.
Just beyond my boundary fence grew a prodigiously tall pine. The islanders round about called him Big Bob, and the name was warranted, for he could be seen from almost all over the island. Big Bob’s boughs, as big as trees themselves, were welcomed over my fences, and his roots went under the house, immense and muscular. I had refused to have them cut.
Suddenly, from the corner of my eye, I saw the tree explode. There is no other word for it. Big Bob swelled to half his size again, a colossal arrowhead of gold. Again and again these explosions occurred, each time to a lesser degree, and all the time the astonishing cloud of fine yellow pollen drifted down the tree to the ground.
That morning many things had come together, the degree of warmth in the air, the windlessness, the fertility of the tree’s two classes of cone - the small male and the large round female – and I had witnessed an apocalypse.
At the time, for the event lasted but four or five minutes, I had opportunity only to shout to the nurseryman, working in his garden down the road, but he too observed the last half minute of Big Bob’s transcendence.
The islanders whose farmhouses were built along my road, each with a decent interval of eight or ten paddocks in between, told me that Big Bob had been there forever. Their great-grandfathers had recalled him as a mature tree. So he might well have been the 250 years of age that, it is said, Norfolk Island pines can live. They also told me that the trees set cones only two or three times in twenty years, and these were not always fertile.
As anyone who has read my previous book of autobiography, A Fence Around the Cuckoo, will be aware, I began life as a seedling tree myself, or near enough, so both the rain forest and the ever-present pines on the island were esteemed and loved by me. My workroom window looked out on Big Bob, and for several years I had watched his vast boughs gather in the dawn light, then the ruddy sunrise, until he looked as though he had secret fire in his heart, turning his whole being not red but bronze and amber.
We had been through a cyclone together, a time of tremendous noise, when the guava wastelands and the forest disappeared in the rain, blown into visibility by this gust and out by that, an illusory leafy city. The rain forest gave out immense vowel sounds, urrrrr, ahhhhhhhh! and the white oaks, natives related to the hibiscus, creaked and squealed, swirling and lashing, shedding seed capsules by the ton. But the pines, and most royally Big Bob, made small sedate arcs with their crests, and a slow swimming movement with the long boughs, like a host of sea anemones.
These magnificent trees, Aracauria heterophylla, are not pines as we commonly use that word, but belong to a genus which also includes the splendid bunya-bunya, the hoop pine and the New Zealand kauri. They are endemic to this tiny island. But once when the land masses were differently disposed on the globe, they grew in many places. The coal seams of Antarctica are made of what was once Norfolk Island pine.
• 3 •
Thus my island years went past, some swiftly, some slowly, as years do. My older family in New Zealand seemed to need visits far more than my young people in Australia did, and so my children were able to make their way through their early mature years without my fussing around, a description usually given to maternal interest and solicitude. All the aunts, like my mother, had been wido
wed in middle age, and sadly I watched these erstwhile radiant creatures dim, become old, and draw even closer together for company and protection. Like birds in a cage they had their squabbles and fierce chirpings, coming together at nightfall with unsubdued murmurs of ‘And don’t you do that again!’
Both Wendela and Rosina were predeceased by their children, Stuart during the war, and Wendela’s Helga with cancer in her middle years. As a girl Helga had been beautiful in her bright Norwegian way, a kind girl with whom all animals seemed to be in love. She had married late in life; her animal lovers dwindled down to one old cat. When she died her husband left the hospital, returned home and took the cat straight to the vet to be put down. He had been jealous, I suppose. Anyone in the family would have taken the cat, including my sister, who, in her habitual way, had been most practically supportive of her cousin Helga in the latter’s painful illness, and cared for her mother for the rest of her life.
My sister in truth devoted much of her life to a selfless caring for old people growing older. Each one of them was welcome to come and live with me, but that drawing-in of the spirit had taken place as it does in most of the old, and they could not bring themselves to interrupt their protective routines.
‘Live on an island? Oh, no, dear, I positively couldn’t! ’
‘I couldn’t leave my house. Someone might break in.’
‘Wild horses wouldn’t get me on to a plane, and that’s all there is to it.’
‘Joc doesn’t mind giving us a hand now and then.’
So they leaned more and more heavily, creating an all too common situation, where a willing and loving young woman’s life is chewed up in support of others with no future. But what is the answer to the problem of the old and frail?
All this time I assiduously practised Zen. It is best if the student has a teacher, or rather guide, but still possible to make some progress in understanding this interesting discipline if she has written guidance. Our elder son, a physicist, was doing postgraduate work at Berkeley in California, and often sent me books unobtainable in Australia. And few planes arrived on the island without bringing me a parcel of carefully chosen books from Anne, our librarian daughter.
‘Don’t want you reduced to reading the print on Weetbix packets,’ she said. One might well have done. The local library was, at that time, a few hundred old and commonplace books housed in what appeared to be a disused fowlhouse in the middle of a paddock. Later several other book-starved residents and I got together and put enough pressure on the Administrator of the time - ‘Of course, Your Honour, a cultured and aware man like yourself will realise’ – to attain better things. I believe that first reasonably housed and stocked library was the nucleus of what is now an admirable one for a small South Pacific island.
Although I studied Zen teachings in all earnestness, I was stuck in many areas. The roshis make no bones about the fact that you can learn till the cows come home, but that does not equate with experience. There was I, with Big Bob in front of my nose, completely understanding that it was because he was not resistant to the cyclonic winds, but allowed their furious energy to flow through his being, that he had been able to stand for centuries.
And yet I was not able to do likewise.
Having a damaged backbone, one of the many things I resisted was pain. I resented it because it prevented me from doing things, hated it because I felt it unfair. (What have I done to deserve this, and so on.) Every time I had a bout of back trouble I counter-attacked, stiffened up, raged at my inability to drive this devil out of my spine. But it was much stronger than I; I might have spent my life fighting it and I would not have won. The thing to do was stop being rigid and resistant, not to welcome the pain, but to allow it to flow through.
My predicament was a small one compared with many of the sad or deplorable hells into which people will themselves. Still, I created it myself by habitual reaction. We always do, at least until we awaken. This is all that enlightenment or awareness is. Waking up. Nothing special.
Here is a Zen story illustrating how heaven and hell, good and bad, and other bothersome human conditions are constructs of our own minds.
There was a roshi sitting calmly, minding his own business, which was to be calm. Along came a ferocious-looking samurai and barked, ‘Tell me the nature of heaven and hell!’
The roshi looked up at this terrifying warrior and said, ‘Why should I tell a disgusting great lump of nothing like you?’
The samurai nearly burst with rage, but the roshi continued, ‘An ugly frog like you, a slug, a worm, why should I tell you anything?’
The samurai whisked out his sword and was just about to cut the roshi in half when the roshi murmured, ‘That’s hell.’
The samurai wasn’t stupid; he was just used to behaving stupidly. He understood that his feelings of insult, anger and wounded ego had put him into such hell he was ready to slice this man in two.
Tears filled his eyes. He put his hands together in sorrow. The roshi said, ‘That’s heaven.’
When Beres, my brother-in-law and old playmate died of a heart attack in 1976, sadness remained with me for so long, that at last I realised loneliness and nostalgia for our shared youth had a great deal to do with it.
‘Detach! Detach!’ I told myself, but although I had at last been able to let my husband go, freely and with love, somehow I had a great struggle over Beres. He had been such a funny boy, so joyful, wanting to please.
Yet I knew more clearly than ever that it was time to detach from him and all he represented – not that these things should be forgotten or made lesser or greater, simply not possessed any more.
For a long time I had been in touch with the Zen Center in San Francisco, one of a complex of seven Soto Zen study venues effectively founded by Suzuki-roshi. I wrote to inquire if I could stay at the Center for a few weeks.
‘Sure you can, Mrs South Pole,’ they wrote back.
Mrs South Pole! I came from so far away they could not believe it. None of the sixty resident students at the Zen Center had heard of Norfolk Island or knew anything of my kingdom, the Pacific Ocean, except one, an older man, a lone sailor, who had seen Rapa-iti and even passed within hail of solitary Pitcairn. During recreation we talked of sperm whales, thundering through the water like great black wheels, dead on course for Antarctica. Once I had watched three off the north coast of Norfolk, though they were very rare at that time.
But the lone sailor had seen eight or nine in a pod, and although his little vessel had been a considerable distance away from the travellers, it had tossed about like a floating leaf in the turbulence of their passage.
‘You can see divinity in the great whales,’ he said.
I did not tell him that twice in its history Norfolk Island had been a whaling station.
I was much older than others there, but no distinction was made in any way, any more than it was made for gender or race. One was not commended for work well done, nor reproved when it was poor. It was taken for granted that we were there because of choice, and because we wanted to find what ‘was in our sleeves’. Consequently everyone worked and meditated hard, for each one knew that life, in its innermost sense, was at stake.
The Center was in Page Street, running down to historic Market Street. Page Street was lined with Edwardian houses, seedy and tottering, but the Center itself was a calm, solid old building, originally built by wealthy merchants as a refuge for Jewish immigrant girls. So the Star of David was everywhere.
‘So what? All the same difference.’
This was our timetable:
4.40 a.m.
Wake up bell
5.00
Zazen (formal meditation)
5.40
Kinhin (walking meditation)
5.50
Zazen
6.30
Service
7.05
Work
7.20
Breakfast
8.30
Work
12.00
The timetable operated similarly all day until the final meditation period at 8.30 p.m.
We slept on futons, but because of my back I was used to a mattress as hard as a brick. My roomie was a Canadian woman, Jeanne, both warm and reserved as are so many from that likeable nation. Like me, she was an ex-mother, a seeker, needing the full richness of spiritual life, but not quite sure where it was.
‘Time and time again I’ve pointed, saying “There it is!” but I’ve been wrong. My kids think I’m crazy. They think my fulfilment should rest with them. But there’s more, I know there is.’
I told her then of the island women and their huge enfoldment of life. And of one in particular, whom I didn’t know very well, but who, on meeting me in the road, suddenly grabbed me in a hug that lifted me off my feet.
When I, laughing, said, ‘Why did you do that?’ she answered, ‘Cos.’
Jeanne laughed. ‘Isn’t that pure Zen? No cogitation, no analysis, just being.’
She had been at the Center when Suzuki-roshi died there. He wanted to die where his students could be with him daily and hourly, so they could understand completely that death is nothing special. She told me that a few hours before he lapsed into unconsciousness someone asked, ‘When shall we all meet again?’ and a small wasted hand came out from under the blanket and described a circle in the air.
‘Everything is one?’
‘Yes.’
Still disorientated by jetlag, that first morning I shot off my futon wild-eyed. Yet the wake-up bell was a dulcet fairy tinkle that scooted through the many corridors at an inhuman speed. I imagined a tiny monk, a Tinkerbell monk twenty centimetres high, and was considering this mystery when Jeanne groaned, ‘One of these mornings I’m going right out there to clap a flowerpot over him!’
Laggards were called to the zendo, the meditation hall, by a rapidly accelerating tattoo on the han, a thick wooden board, often made in the shape of a fish, hollowed in the middle, and giving forth a resonant, curiously exciting sound. As the beat increased, it was impossible to keep from breaking into a run.