Baby

Some say the unborn
are yet to be people,

but they lie.

Every abortionist worth
their salt knows:

the unborn emerge smiling.

The unborn smiles
not knowing
the threads of desire
that we dangle upon.

With two little fists
the unborn cheats
death.

It has nothing to offer.
Pupils are not apparent
and
out of the button-hole
mouth
silence
grows
like a noxious weed.

Later it burns with
the cancerous flesh,
needles
and tainted scalpel
blades.

The unborn
still smiling
approaches death
with empty hands.
"Death" it says
"stand aside and
let me in...

I give you nothing."

Milieu

Along the mantle is a framed photograph:
'My milieu and I'

It is crowded beneath the glass:
Thousands of paperbacks,
The Internet,
Tears absorbed by a rag
removed from the mouth
of a dissident.
The attack dog's hot, meaty breath.
Confusion over which direction to pray.
Hands cannot be clasped together as
they have broken every bone that
supports the skin.

Huddling, cold and its lonely
upon the periphery.

CONVERSATION: Breaking Up Received Wisdom with John Ralston Saul.

I organised to meet John Ralston Saul in the lobby of his hotel in Circular Quay, Downtown Sydney, thinking I could recognise him from the front cover of his book The Unconscious Civilisation. But, of course, there are two Sauls gracing that cover. One looks serious, yet somber. The other is winking, his shoulders are back and seems ready to pounce into some fabulist game. Hamlet or Puck, which one will appear? Well, both came to town and both sides appeared in this fascinating conversation. I started the conversation with:

J-E: I would like to get three definitions from you. In the spirit of your last book you opened up with a couple of definitions and you then went on to talk on how important it is that language isn’t detached from its meaning. So I will ask you to define three terms. The first is Human the second is Rights and the third is Human Rights.

J-R-S: Gosh (Laughs). Well probably the only thing that makes us different from rats is our consciousness. Most of us are not all that conscious. Most of what we do isn’t about consciousness, so were pretty similar to other animals. But to the extent that were conscious then we become interesting then we become this thing that is different from the other animals. Two things, one is a practical application and the other in an interesting illustration. The practical application is the classical philosophical question. The most important thing is your ability to imagine the other. It’s a form on consciousness. Because it means you can reach outside of yourself in order to imagine the other. It is not simply a lion looking after its lion cubs. It actually is that capacity to see something differently from before and through empathy to have some sort of relationship. That’s particular to human beings I think that success and failure of human civilisation is measured by the ability to imagine the other.

J-E: By the other you mean another human?

J-R-S: It usually is human, and this would take me off the definition. What we have lost in term of human in the West, of which your sort of half part of in Australia, a Western country in the East, the rational movement for half a millennium has cut us off from the really serious roots that we have into where we live, how we live and how it all works. From a kind of religious philosophical sort of view I call it animism. In effect we have lost out ability to understand the animistic. It has been ridiculed from the 1890’s on. We have sufficient proof of global warming. Enough to do something about, but we can’t do anything. That is not about greed and it isn’t about lack of education and its not about stupidity, its about an incapacity to imagine to other, but really worse still, having been locked up to a false rational logic where we are incapable, through the Animist, to imagine is a real way how it all works. If we could imagine how it all works we could do something about it. We’re in denial in that sense of reality. The last part of the definition, and it relates to the rights question. We have spent a lot of time in the last thirty years working on the rights on people in a disadvantaged position, for e.g. handicaps, physical, mental. And that has been a development of those human rights. But what we have done almost nothing is really talking about how those people have an enormous amount to contribute, because they are usually former conscious than the people who don’t think that they have handicaps. They have to be more conscious because everything they do is more difficult, so that high level of consciousness means they have something extremely valuable to contribute not through rights but through obligations so your second question how do you define rights? Well, rights are one half of the equilibrium of rights/obligations. I noticed recently somebody said here (in Australia) “citizenship is a privilege” and things like that those are the wrong words. The right word is what that makes a civilisation like this interesting is the nature of obligation, which comes through citizenship. As opposed to rights which are something that we have to have and you have to re-conquer them everyday. You can put them is a charter of rights?

J-E: We have no bill of rights

J-R-S: Yeah, well we call ours a charter of rights.

J-E: Out attorney general attempted to introduce an Australian Human Rights Bill in the mid 1980s, but it came to nothing.

J-R-S: I was against the Canadian one because I thought it would undermine to power of parliament and I believe in the power of electorate. I have to admit that I have changed my mind. Because the judges from the beginning were very careful about how they applied it they didn’t allow themselves to fill the political space. The more they are written the more you have earlier ones to base yourself on you know what works and what doesn’t work and how to apply it. There’s no question that it has become a kind of mirror against which you can look at right, but the fact is you wake up every morning and those rights can slide away from your very eyes. They are there which is great or they are not there which means that you have to make an even more conscious effort. But you re-conqueror rights on a daily basis. You get up in the morning and you re-conquer them. I’m starting up an institute called Institute for Canadian citizenship with my wife and we had a meeting for people living in isolation.

J-E: Prisoners?

J-R-S: Well handicaps, immigrants who find themselves ghettoised, a whole range of people and so we had a meeting in our new office in an old rag trade building in an immigrant area in Toronto. So all these heads of foundations arrived and I was suddenly called downstairs and there were two of our guests outside in wheelchairs and of course I had never of thought about it but it was an old building and there was no wheel chair access and it was a terribly humiliating moment for me, not for them but for me. They knew perfectly well, they were old friends. They had the consciousness and I didn’t. I was obliged to go upstairs and say “I’m a complete idiot” because I’ve missed something essential here and I’m going to fix it within forty eight hours but I’ve learned a lesson so rights are very fragile. There is the Arar case. A Canadian of Syrian origin the police force decided might be a terrorist and they were certain he was, they had no proof and they provided completely inaccurate information to American security forces and when he was going through New York the Americans arrested and deported him to Syria where he was tortured for several months. A formal inquiry has just finished where the judge had stated that our police force was entirely to blame for what happened to Mr. Arar. People are obliged to say to themselves I thought we had a charter etc, we blinked and one of our citizens is sent off because of our own police force, through the United States to be tortured on our behalf, an astonishing event. So literally rights have to be re-conquered on a daily basis. That’s where the obligation comes in. The rights don’t exist without the obligations. The obligation of the citizen to go out and re-conquer them every day.

J-E: I think Simone Weil talks about obligations come before rights.

J-R-S: They do really come before, they only stand if you exercise your obligations. Sometimes people who believe that citizens are lazy and not serious and they should work harder deform that argument. What we are trying to do here with a democratic system. A democratic system is very complicated to hold in place. It easy to do dictatorship, its easy to do authoritarian, heroic etc. they are very simple and efficient. Democracy is really inefficient its complicated, long and fragile, that kind of engagement of the citizen, the fulfillment of the obligation is what makes it work, then you have the right which are more a marking system. You can mark yourself against the defined rights. Then human rights you define them through your laws, through your charter, experiences, through literature, philosophy. Human rights are pretty clear. Stuff that’s 2000 years old is pretty relevant to day, we feel pretty good because we’ve banned the death penalty in most Western democracies even though it’s crept back in with a vengeance. It might creep back in other places if we don’t exercise our obligation, if we panic and become afraid then the next thing you know, death penalty back, to make people feel less frightened. But the thing is I can still pull out Socrates and use his teachings as the philosophical base for the human rights that PEN stands for. There is no great mystery. It’s not very complicated and we have been at it for two to three thousand years.

J-E: Can you speak more about animism.

J-R-S: Well animism is the understanding that everything is one. That you are not divided from your place. It isn’t that rocks talk (laughs), its not some silly romantic thing. It’s a very interestingly inclusive thing. Vertical, lateral, everything is integrated. Forget about how it happened and why it happened and what it came out of, the fact is that it is a very powerful tool, as a social/religious idea of life.

J-E: Were humans a lot more imaginative in an pre-enlightenment age and in the way they imagined the other or was there something different going on?

J-R-S: Well that’s a really interesting question. I will give you a practical example. The rational process, which gradually builds from the 12th century on to a point where you have a development of false rationality of the 20th century. Look at art. You see in the European tradition as they get more and more caught up in the rational process and rational methodology they solve a whole bunch of artistic problems but in a way in each problem they solve they close a door on their imagination. So you get in the late 19^th and early 20^th century and the Europeans feel themselves castrated as a civilisation in terms of their art. You end of with Brueghel, with bad romantic representation. Suddenly you start seeing these explosion, people say “I’m going to go sit in the forest and paint” so they are desperately trying to find their way back into the animist. Put aside what people are paying for impressionists painters. Actually the more interesting is not the French Impressionists but stuff happening is Sweden and Norway so on. People say we got to get out of here we got to break down these walls and find a way back into the world that produced Greek tragedy. The world where there are not these walls and where every solution is actually a closing down. The really interesting moment is where people like Picasso, invent what we call modern art, but what they have done is turn their back on the Western modern tradition and gone, either physically or through objects to places where animism dominate. Africa, the West Coast of Canada, the Islands of the Pacific. Art historians go crazy when you say this, but in essence they escaped the prison of Western Civilisation by going into the animist world. And stole from it, bit by stealing from it they re-opened up Western imagination for the image. So that’s a pretty convincing example. Look at the largely oral poetry of West Coast Canadian Aboriginal and you will find that the imagination has a humor, a surrealism, a modernism, I’m not saying that everything lies that way, but I am saying that countries like Australia and Canada we spend a lot of time talking about the problems of the Indigenous people. And feeling superior about our guilt for not having done enough but what we really miss is that we have this incredible good fortune to have inside our civilisation an unbroken link, a working modern reality through history, to the animist and that’s an incredible advantage of these two countries, if we want to think of it that way. And that’s not politically correct, it’s the opposite of politically correct.

J-E: It’s a good example of power now being found in the periphery and flowing back to the center.

J-R-S: That would be the positive out come if people could accept that. I’m always saying in Canada that the greatest failure so far, and I think I can say this about Australia of our society is that we have not really come to terms with where we are and what it means.

J-E: Geographically?

J-R-S: Yeah. Because so much happens with machinery and a kind of urban abstract world cut off from reality. We demoted the idea of the physical presence, how can you write literature without that? I don’t know. There’s a little bit of “hey, this is what it is to be Canadian, hey, this is what it is to be Australian” but really the role of the physical place has been demoted greatly. Look at the way geography has been demoted in schools and universities and politicised. David Malouf has written it brilliantly and he calls it “sea dreaming”, already the Australians live around the outside and when they want to go on holiday they move from the outside to the very edge of the outside, the beach or into the water. I love swimming so I sympathise. But if you take the negative view, when given a change an Australian will turn their back on their own country and move away from ninety five percent of it to the very edge of it, so the imagination is not focused on the heart of the country, which is the interior, Canadians are almost as bad, not as bad because when a Canadian goes on holiday they move two hundred kilometers north. At least they are going in the direction of the country they just don’t go too as far.

J-E: There is another issue at play, certainly in Australia, up until quite recently, Australia wasn’t really thought of as home, the old country was England and Australia was England’s backyard. So home in a way is a place that people don’t even get to visit until they’ve turned eighteen and traveled.

J-R-S: That’s another part of sea dreaming because staring at the ocean is looking at the water that you cross in a boat to get to the real place. Although that’s theoretically gone, I think it’s gone in the old sense, but reappeared in the new sense, through the theories of economic globalism which are yet another reason to be in Britain and the U.S. to think that they are the center of reality. You have to believe that where you are is the center of something, not for Nationalistic reasons, but if you can’t do that then you are not centered. Then you are not somewhere, you have to have a sense of the place and the people of the place and the relationship of the people to the place. Once you have that you can imagine the other elsewhere. If you don’t have that then you are a sort of colonial figure or an insecure figure or someone with an inferiority complex who is floating around the world with a false idea of internationalism. Real internationalism is you know where you come from. And so you know the relationship between you, your place and the place that you’ve gone to. False internationalism is that you don’t really believe that the place that you’ve come from is real. And not the center of something and you go abroad with out that anchor of being centered somewhere and that makes it very difficult to develop policy, to imagine the other, to understand why you do certain things abroad, for the right reasons or the wrong reasons.

J-E: I would like to ask you a question about your work. Throughout all your books there is a strong sense of doubt. Doubt like Montaigne had doubt.

J-R-S: Yes

J-E: It seems to me that you are using doubt as an intellectual tool (or a built-in bullshit detector as Ernest Hemingway once said)- J-R-S laughs -and you are applying it to various institutions or concepts to see what they are really composed of and what role they play in society. Yet accompanying this fierce doubt is a playful sense of humour. Why do you employ humour to grasp what are actually very serious topics?

J-R-S: Humour has always been the most serious thing around. It has always been a very powerful tool. Again the Greek plays, poetry, interesting politics, irony, and every form of humour has played a great role. Hemingway always summarises things perfectly with “bullshit detector”, but it also the way of how do you destroy the perceived wisdom of the day. How do you cut through...not just the bullshit…usually when a power structure has been in place for some time it has developed a complete language. I’m here to talk about public education. So there is a whole paragraph in Australia that is about “Don’t parents have a choice about where their kids are going to be educated?” now how the hell do you get through that sentence? How do you break that up? Are you going to be against parents doing the right thing for their children? That’s not a question, that’s an answer. You didn’t ask me a question. You told me an ideological position. Because the question has nothing to do with choice at all. It has to do with those parents deciding to abstract them out of the public good and refuse to contribute to the public good. To making sure that public schools are good because they don’t have to put their kids in them. They don’t have to work on making them good. One of the great jobs of a writer is to always be looking at the received wisdom of the day and the language that goes with it. The obligation of a serious writer is to break up the received wisdom of the day. To crush it, to ridicules it. What writers do is give people language. We give people the language that will allow them to think for themselves. You’re not thinking for them. You are giving them a mechanism: an emotional, intellectual, even stylistic mechanism. So humour is a great way to break it up. And the more serious it is the more important it is to be funny. It’s particularly important when you look at the official world of the intellectual life in the universities, which have become more and more serious over the last couple of decades. Humour in universities is so looked down upon. When you actually get down to real subjects. To be funny about economics. It’s devastating, it’s so easy to do, and they can’t stand it. Political science, sociology. Humour is detested. “Are you not a serious person?” well the answer is yes that’s why I am being funny. And they are clearly not being serious because they can’t afford to make a joke.

J-E: You write novels and you write non-fiction. The traditional understanding of non-fiction is that is represents and comments upon the world, while novels create a world of their own. Do you agree with that dichotomy?

J-R-S: I’m not sure that I do. First of all I have always been against the term non-fiction. The terms fiction and non-fiction are used in an academic way. Terms give power to the people who write about these things as opposed to the people who write them. So in a sense the suggestion is that non-fiction is about reality and facts and fiction is pretend or made up. Which seems to be non-sense in both cases. I can’t think of anything any more real than a great novel and it’s usually the most accurate statement about any society. And facts, we have discovered, are extremely fragile things. They don’t have a very long life. Ideas have long lives. Facts melt away in months usually. There are very few, what you would call a social science facts presented in the 1960 that still stand. Why is that? Because they are not really facts, it’s an illusion of false rationality. If you look at what you or anybody else think about Russia, seriously, you will probably discover that the virtual totality of what we think about Russia came out of fiction. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Lermontov, Chekhov and so on. Almost zero of it came out of non-fiction. This is fascinating. Certainly Russia up to 1919 our understanding is entirely out of what is supposed to be made up stuff. And what could be more accurate about 19th century and early 20th century Russia than the novels of the place. Is there a single work of quote-un-quote-non-fiction from that era that we read or that we read seriously? I can’t think of one. And I think that you can take that example and apply it to almost any place. The second issue is that the Western novel begins to take off in the 18th century. Most of the people writing novels are also interested in writing philosophy or ideas and although they use a different method I don’t think that they saw themselves as doing two very different things. They saw it as part of a whole and I still see it as part of a whole. In that sense I guess my approach is very 18th century because I don’t think there is that much difference between novels and essays. One of the things that set my essays apart is that they are essentially written like novels. There is a story and the ideas are characters and there are major characters, minor characters, comic characters in the ideas and as in every good novel there are stories and characters who lead no where, who peter out. There are people who you think are one thing and then you discover are actually another thing. Writing four novels before writing Voltaire’s Bastards was the best thing that I could possibly have done, because it prevented me from writing boring essays.

Note: This interview was commissioned by Sydney PEN. A shorter version appeared in Sydney PEN magazine and can be found at http://www.pen.org.au/docs/Nov06.pdf

POEM: QUESTIONS LINGERING ON THE BICENTENNIAL OF THE BIRTH OF POE

Dear Edgar Allan Poe,

Some questions about your imagination, and your death:

Why did Charles Baudelaire call your imagination the greatest of your century?
Why did Paul Valery think you incapable of making a mistake?
Why your obsession with crowds and cities (civilisation means "living in cities")?

Why were you obsessed with burying your lovers alive?
How did you die?
Were you beaten?
Was it staged, like the death of Kit Marlow?
Were you syphilitic?
Or was it just one final bender?

When they found your collapsed body,
why were you wearing another man's clothes?

Dear Poe, did you know that Thomas Jefferson was inviting
all of your class to dinner, alphabetically and in pairs,
but you dropped out of U Virginia
before he made it to the letter P?

What is your take on Humbolt's conception of the Cosmos?

Why does Dupin's love of reason lead to madness?
Why can a simple gold bug find the treasure?

Why did Vladimir Pyast, your Russian translator,
go mad while reciting "Ulalume,"
in a St. Petersburg theatre?

As the writer of split houses, family members buried alive, grief, the madness of crowds, mania, the petrification of a culture, the destructive turn to reason, broken harps, crimes without an logical motive, houses barricaded from the plague burning outside, the coming generations ignorant of the centuries of beauty and knowledge that precedes them: why, Edgar, did the Russians worship you so?

After you died the Baltimore Clipper announced your death as "congestion of the brain."
Were they actually talking about soaking our imaginations in yours?

POEM: PUSAN

1.
Summer blows in beneath clouds of yellow dust.
He emerges from the subway to view the cat
and snaps open his knife...

2.
Earlier, he ate dog with raw garlic.
Before slaughtering the beast,
they beat it
again and again.
It turned manic...

3.
He swallows adrenalin infused meat.
Heart pulpitating.
He feels alive...

4.
This coastal Asian city.
His eyes paranoid and sharpened.
An expired visa and nationless.
An emptiness to the streets.
He notices the cat's tail
thick and stumpy.

He holds it and slices away...

5.
When it vanishes he follows
the trail of blood.
It leads through a fish market
down dusty trails,
across car hoods...

6.
He believes in a personal theology.
He believes in his knife.
He believes in talking to the dead.
He believes in counter-language:
engagement
and the glory found in reverly...

7.
By sunrise-he is almost starving-
he sees a new cat.
He removes its tail,
punctures its throat.
Drinks and feasts.
He removes entrails and crawls inside
and staples the stomach closed
and sleeps to muffled traffic.

He dreams: of armies moving down our peninsula
of Buddha's birthday
of people sheltering in the subway
of gnarles hands,
grinding teeth
of shamans dancing in the hills surrounding Pusan.

8.
It's time to rise to the dance,
he says while sheltering
beneath the cat's fur.

POEM: UNTITLED

There are still songs
and music to be found
as tectonic plates
press below Tibet
and the monks...
"Om."

There are still songs
demanding to be sung.

I hear them roll over
the fields of barley.
Where the death camps
burned our flesh.

They can be heard
in the metropolis:
In the subway
In the broken shells
found along the beach.
In revivalist's tents.
In the still traffic.

In the sun barely
getting through the
thick haze above.

China's desert
ruptures, grows and
like an angel of death
it blankets our city.