ambling through silence downhill on a drooping nighthorse

David Campbell's Evening Under Lamplight, 1976, begins with lyrical language and no dialogue: "When horses gallop at night, the sound is mysterious. There was Billy, frowzy with sleep, ambling through silence downhill on a drooping nighthorse. The frost, after a week of rain, had sharpened the hoof-falls. The horse's paunch creaked, and Billy was aware of the silence. He was aware of the cemetery on the dark ridge where the owls moped."

After a page and a half this lyricism vanishes and people speak ordinarily:

"It was easy, he said. "When Len's sick, I'll get the horses in every morning. You're only a girl."
"I'm older than you are."
"That doesn't count."
But Janet only smiled.

So on until the end of the book, though it comes back again a little in the last story while a settler in the bush is contemplating a fox: "The fox lived its own life and he lived his. And the gold trees grew from stone."* Most of the stories follow Billy the child, who is said by the introduction and the blurb to be a fictionalised version of Campbell himself (did Campbell ever say so or did he only let them believe it?), and the later ones tell you about men flying planes in World War II, where he himself flew planes.

Why is the entrance of Janet at breakfast like an ice age that cuts off an earlier way of life in the book?

David Malouf, who wrote the introduction to the 1987 edition, never lets dialogue get in the way of the contemplative-lyrical tone in his own books; he ploughs on through, and you remember the castaway in Remembering Babylon, 1993, meeting his compatriots in Australia after a long time with the indigenous people and getting his words confused so that he says, "I am a British object," instead of subject. And that has a penetrative meaning.

But the dialogue words in David Campbell do not try to have any kind of penetrative meaning. I don't think it occurred to him that they should have one, even though Malouf tells you that prose and poetry are one in the mind of a writer: they do not separate them: "it is the same world he is moving in … however different the demands of the medium he is the same man, bringing with him the same sensory equipment." And this is true because the dialogue in Campbell's poems is as plain as it is in the book – see Outback (No. 1) for example.

I wonder if this is part of his New Bulletin past, this Henry Lawson idea that the lyrical meaning in dialogue should be conferred through narrative events around the spoken language and not through the language itself, as at the end of The Drover's Wife, 1892, when the son says, "Mother, I won't never go drovin'; blarst me if I do," which makes a strong impact in light of everything that has happened. So that if people are lyrical it is not because you have rudely gone inside them and pretended to express their thoughts, but only because you have pointed to plain things around them which could be verified by other observers, though there are no other observers for you are the author, the only one who observes; and yet you are behaving as if there are observers who might accuse you of rudeness or lies, and so you are protecting yourself from the accusations of these non-existent people, the ones who know that Janet would not speak like the woman in the book I'm reading at the moment, who describes river water "spilling over the oar with a pure metallic lustre, like blood" (Narcyza Żmichowska, The Heathen, 1846, tr. Ursula Phillips). But if you can say that Billy on the nighthorse can feel inside him that "to his heartbeats the horses were suddenly galloping," then you can have him wholly and lyrically.



*When I say lyricism I am thinking of that kind of gold-and-stone language in which things are made of beautiful, solid substances and the characters' attention to small, distinct things like creaks is noted; everything is sensation and fluid but there is also a suggestion of eternity as well as attention to the way that a word like "ridge" sits against "moped."

utterly vanished -- how strange it was

Moments being weighted and weighed is what I see then, when I look, and why do I see them, and what am I looking for: well. The load lost: “it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished -- how strange it was! -- a few sayings like this about cabbages” (Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway).

And then the madness of swagmen in Don Watson's book, The Bush: Travels in the Heart of Australia, the author proposing that the “jolly swagman” in Paterson's poem might have been jolly because he was not all there, mentally speaking, this schizophrenic fleeing persecution (the one down the road who screamed at me, “Police! Police!”), and yet sanity would do the same job, the security officers at one of the casinos having a man flee on them the other night when all they were going to do was trespass him, but he fled, they fled after him (and that moment's weight was felt electrically by the officer, he reported afterwards: he could feel a voice inside him telling him not to run, but instinct took over and he ran as a dog runs when you run away from it. Walk away next time! they told the man when they caught him. Walk calmly and we wouldn't have worried about you, but you ran), they felt suspicious now, they did a background check, and behold the man had warrants out for his arrest -- now in gaol. “For thy Self is the master of thyself, and thy Self is thy refuge. Train therefore thyself well, even as a merchant trains a fine horse”  (The Dhammapada, tr Juan Mascaró).

But my point was that we tend to forget the likely insanity of swagmen in spite of it being stated throughout the literature of the time, on and off, and Henry Lawson finishing his story with those words about the bush, “the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds.”

It is so unacknowledged that there is not even any denial of it.

The man in the casino was sane, and so I'm guessing was the one on Friday night who acted against a taunt by knocking one victim unconscious and beating the other one's face against the edge of a concrete box until the skin was off his forehead. I never expected to see another man's skull, remarked the security sergeant. The forehead-man was drunk when he came up with the taunt, and potentially delirious with the lightness of moments; say he felt instinctively that his moments had no consequences. “'Here shall I dwell in the season of rains, and here in winter and summer;' thus thinks the fool, but he does not think of death.”

shared culture offers camouflage

Speaking of travel writers, their individualities and primal connectednesses, reminds me of Ernestine Hill, the Australian journalist who recorded the stories about the band in Darwin and the desperate cobbler down the gulley with "a ragged little hen, crazed with heat" turning "over and over in vertigo. 'It won't die,' he assured me. 'I wish to God it would'" -- she wrote -- characterising her book with an interest in the grotesque that Stark possesses gently and Matthiessen not at all, since he is in the market for a human race that is primally connected through its rituals, and not one in which an Australian can distinguish himself with non sequiturs and a chicken, this man separating himself from Hill twice, once with his chicken and once with his non sequiturs, which are not part of any ritual, or not a ritual that anyone would want to share with him, for the chicken-man is miserable, and the ritual is only the ritual of an Australian lonely madness, a state of mind that has been described by Henry Lawson in several venues, for example, The Bush Undertaker, and it is only a marker of unity in that people who are Australian and not mad do recognise it, and acknowledge it as a potential past-time in that national resource, the bush, "the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of the weird," writes Lawson, who lived for most of his life in Sydney but obtained insights by travelling between the towns of Hungerford and Bourke in 1892 during a drought.

This chicken-man, if he had appeared in Matthiessen, would surely have been useful in a different way, and the author would have placed his remark against a cosmic thoughtfulness; it would have had some correlation with Zen, or Buddhism; his despair might have been described as a possible prelude to enlightenment, it would have been one item in a large design that might have saved him if he had acknowledged it, and as we left the man we might have been allowed to imagine that he would submit to that realisation in future, or the author might decide that the existence of this vertiginous chicken was a message to himself, or at least he would have tried to set the man's behaviour in a smoother and more detailed context (he would have done this as smoothly and sympathetically as he explains the behaviour of two women at a Himalayan temple who are wary of himself and the other hikers) or at least the presentation would have seemed less stark -- but the journalist Hill is as thrilled as a newspaper; the man is not intimate with her, nor is his chicken, and she is not visited by any Zen enlightenment; she is visited by a sense of theatre, and presents the man like a performance.

Her grotesque scenes would not seem grotesque if Matthiessen had written them. Nothing in The Snow Leopard is grotesque when he describes it, not even the wise porter pretending to be a yeti and shouting, "Kak-kak-kak! KAI-ee!" around the campfire. These people would not seem so irreparably separated from the writer, the chicken man would not have been prized as though he were a star or remote comet, as Hill prizes him, or a natural phenomenon, like an intractable cactus.

If we are all primally connected by our rituals, as in the Matthiessen book, then a thing would have to be outside that historical context to seem grotesque, it would have to seem to have come alienly from elsewhere, but you could make it seem this by perceiving it to be so, you could announce that there is no connection between this alien thing and the rituals of the Nepalese: it is an anomaly, you could say, it is not part of proper humanity I do not see the join there, between ourselves and this thing, the points of reference I expect to identify in these cases are absent, and the join is perverse or wrong; it is a polluted join, says the writer, and this separation between ourselves is unnatural, as it was in a poem by William Matthews I was reading the other day

We speak Demotic
because we're disguised as ordinary
folks. A shared culture offers camouflage
behind which we can tend the covert fires
we feed our shames to ...

(part of The Place on the Corner, a poem from After All (1998))