Going Nowhere—& how to get there
Where all things rest and are renewed
And separateness falls away
(‘The Land and the People (I)’, 1939)
I am a citizen of the English language,
Home that I carry with me all homeless days.
(‘Man of Words’, 1984)
Charles Brasch lived in search of an imaginal sublime. The destination he sought was not so much a physical or even a psychological place but rather a condition to be absorbed into. A onefold of a different domain. This essay will trace the path followed through poems Brasch produced over a lifetime. It will be argued that his weaving of poetic insubstantiality ranks among the finer achievements in this country’s poetry.
Judging from the account given in his memoir Indirections, from childhood onward there was no untroubled, caring situation for Brasch to feel himself entirely settled or at home, either biographically or imaginatively.[1] Yet poetry comes to embody the home to which he dedicates his life. Aptly, it was Alan Roddick, friend and literary executor, editor of Selected Poems (2015),[2] who also made the selection and named the posthumous publication Home Ground (1974). Appearing at regular intervals, previous titles mark off regular stepping stones along a journey towards ultimate release: The Land and the People (1939), Disputed Ground (1948), The Estate (1957), Ambulando (1966) and Not Far Off (1969).
Naming land & country
This country’s first reputable generation of pakeha poets behaved as though they were a new hybrid. Interlopers, feeling historically and culturally estranged, they sought in poetic language a refabricated familiarity, belonging, purpose and power. As imaginative writers, with assured rootstock set in a wider, deeper, more nourishing English tradition, they proceed to graft onto that a scion of local possibility (Brasch speaks of established centres engendering localised centres). Unlike their settler forbears, these young poets (the men at least!) relish images of estrangement, rupture, violent reorientation. A simple catalogue of Curnow’s early titles—Not in Narrow Seas (1939), Island and Time (1941), Sailing and Drowning (1943)—indicates the renovation narrative underway.
Sharing Curnow’s revisionist ‘The Unhistoric Story’ (‘It was something different, something / Nobody counted on’), Brasch in The Land and the People renders the predicament in predominantly existential terms, whereby belonging is inseparable from deprivation and homesickness equates to an imaginative residing:
But there imagination wakes
Vivid with an alternative creation
But near-related, complementary,
Later attainable; and flashing
Unknown visions of the known,
Rivals that time’s tenderness shall reconcile.
(‘Waianakarau’)
Poetry is an ‘alternative creation’, transforming a ‘known’ (everyday occurrence) into an ‘unknown’ (poetic vision) that over time subsumes it—though Brasch would also have us believe that imaginative ‘visions’ are assimilable back into the mundane as its higher form. Poetry releases us from the confinement of contemporaneity. For this poet, therefore, present lamentation and the unforeseen concur, revoking time. So, for example, in ‘The Land and the People (III)’, the ‘wash of time’ provides a motif in which arrival and departure merge and contraries (unlike Blake’s emphatic ‘progression’) simply surrender intrinsic differentiation. Bemoaning the unhistorical fact that ‘There are no dead in this land’, the poet endeavours to construct a past on behalf of the exogenic settler community, ‘becoming / Richer as our loss falls home / Into her safer present keeping… / The living and the dead inseparable’. In this instance, hosting Māori must vacate their heritage. What is particularly striking is the calm starkness of a quintessentially elegiac voice that already inhabits futurity.
The sentiment is maintained in Disputed Ground, appearing nine years later, after Brasch’s return to Aotearoa-New Zealand following 15 years residency in England to edit the newly established Landfall (1947-66). Frequently anthologised, anthem-like ‘The Islands (2)’, speaks of the need to reconcile never-ending ‘meeting and parting’ in a land where ‘none knows where he will lie down at night’. Despite an acknowledgement in ‘Forerunners’ of centuries-long occupancy by Māori, with their easy (naïve?) ‘no need to impress themselves / Like conquerors’ or to erect ‘vain memorials’, the poem’s closing line swings the pendulum back towards the self-interest of an encroaching, discombobulated ‘us’, again subordinating the indigene to a role of ‘Offering soil for our rootless behaviour’. In ‘A View of Rangitoto’, the speaker longs for a resurgence of ‘A [volcanic] world of fire before the rocks and waters’, promising ‘fiercer life’. In ‘Otago Landscapes’, Brasch is similarly drawn to the primordial ‘formless / Light-engulfing / Pit of the desolate sea’. And ‘Great Sea’ exhorts ‘The memoried to forget’. These poems, many striking, pit local against all-encompassing, forming a knot that begs undoing.
Naming inner place
The Estate, his third volume, marks a turn inward, farewelling more public avowals of identity-formation in favour of a tenderer sense of occasion. The estate referred to is less actual location than a metonym, encapsulating unboundaried occupation. In a quasi-reversal of earlier sentiment, The Estate signals a marriage of ‘known’ and ‘unknown’, via the imagination. Individual personalities assume larger-than-life importance. One such is Willi Fels, anthropologist, art collector and Brasch’s maternal grandfather and spiritual mentor. Fels epitomises ‘order sought by the imagination’—
The final expressive form
In which [the best and truest] is most itself, and speaks most clearly
To those who would hear, as he, the quick and eager,
sought and heard.
(‘In Memory of Willi Fels (1858-1946)’)
In this world ‘all life breathes as one’. ‘What is to come is already here’, is how ‘The Ruins’ puts it. ‘Memory’, ‘Ruins’—it is the liminal, non-sensorial aspect of life that Brasch deems life. Form, arrived at—form formed—returns in perpetual possibility.
While strictly adhering to conventions of language, syntax and representation of persons places and events, Brasch simultaneously evacuates the ordinary through use of self-cancelling images and a negating movement of voice. Instead of using details to denote significance, his attention is drawn to a deeper essence that imbues each and every detail. Wili Fels is an abstraction, albeit a real one. Similarly, the beloved ancestral home at Thurlby Domain is suspended ‘in the dance that sifts unreal from real’:
Dead house and living trees and we that live
To make our peace on earth and become native
In place and time, in life and death: how should
We entertain any other goal or good
Than this, than here?
(‘Letter from Thurlby Domain’)
The key to the uncanny in Brasch’s poetic method is the collapsing of boundaries between contraries. A string of competing abstract nouns—‘Dead, living, live, peace, native, place, time, life, death, goal, good, this, here’—are stirred into a single antinomian concoction—earlier referred to as ‘The final expressive form’. Something identical happens in the sister-poem:
As years ring a tree; only in loss,
All knowledge stripped away,
We stumble towards our naked identity.
(‘Autumn, Thurlby Domain’)
Memory supersedes signification. The accurate description of tree-rings serves as a simile that also acts holistically: the annual rings denote strict gain over time rather than ‘loss’ and it is not clear how such maturationn should signify ‘knowledge stripped away’ or be associated with human stumbling and nakedness? A better explanation might be that the evocation of aging in the (generic) tree is linked to entropy, a progressive breaking down until nothing remains. The final identity is this nothing, abeyance as identity. ‘Self to Self’, another artful if personally wrenching poem, states the goal explicitly: ‘The formless and the thoughtless then your theme’, where ‘disorders own’ lingers ‘at home in your own darkness’.
The title poem, ‘The Estate’, written around the half-turn of the century and Brasch’s longest sequence, numbering xxxiv sections, evokes a territory of shared (be)longing. I say evokes because, while various household items, including plants, chairs and curtains are briefly mentioned, it is hard to visualise an actual dwelling place, let alone an ‘estate’. Once more the title word functions metonymically, Plato’s symposium, a gathering of an elect. There is genuine tenderness and a yearning for intimacy, especially with male companions (less so with women, as evident in ‘In Memory of Robin Hyde 1906-39’, whose background is explained in Indirections.[3]
To the earlier-named Fels, here is added a list of prominent contemporary art-makers, all featuring in Landfall, who populate the community of the imaginative: T.H. Scott (dedicatee, essayist), Bertram (friend, academic), McCahon (painter), Noel Ginn (pacifist), G.R. Gilbert (writer), Lilburn (composer), Bethell (poet). This living community will, in time’s fullness, comprise those who have ‘gone before and marked boldly / A possible way’. ‘Stillness’ and ‘dissolution’ reverberate in ‘All to nothing, all to all’ (‘xiii’). Section xii, illuminating the visionary prospect, is an apogee:
Admitting me or excluding, intent watcher
Lost to myself…
And drawing all my life into their [‘Torcello’s / Millennial stones and waters’] stillness.
So for a moment under the wheeling tower
I dreamed, or woke; and bear that waking with me
Across the years, as then I bore these islands
Sleeping, and you [Scott] unthought of, and all the future,
And those I shall meet for the first time tomorrow.
As we have seen, contraries proliferate: ‘admitting/excluding, watcher/Lost, life/stillness, dreamed/waking/Sleeping, you/unthought of, all the future/tomorrow’. Harry Scott, feted companion, love-object, housemate, mountaineer, professor of psychology, contributor of eco-aesthetic articles to Landfall, paradigm, addressed again in ‘xxiv’, has an answer spoken on his behalf in this quite moving paeon of adulation:
What is life, you answer,
But to extend life, press its limits farther
Into the uncolonized nothing we must prey on
For every hard-won thought, all new creation
Of stone bronze music words; only at life’s limit
Can man reach through necessity and custom
And move self by self into the province
Of that unrealized nature that awaits him,
His own to enter.
We recognise the ‘alternative creation / … But near-related’ from the earlier ‘Waianakarau’. Fair to say, the wide-eyed infatuation might be disparaged, as it was by Kendrick Smithyman, in his review of The Estate, complaining ‘good feeling gets the better of his poetic discretion much too often, and the relationship as set forth is a wordy adolescent crush’.[4] Notwithstanding the headiness, what strikes me as firmly counterbalancing are images and diction of righting, restitution: ‘press, limits, uncolonized, hard-won, limit, necessity, custom, unrealized’. Destitution and infatuation lock hands:
…in close attendance
Are pain and madness and annihilation.
Here where all communication is
By silence, or by look or sign, or is given
As out of the motionless forest…
…singly, divided
Without isolation; at one in drawing breath
With all that breathes. (‘xxxiv’)
Walking stillness
Given that Demesne was a title considered for what eventually became The Estate, it is fitting that the following volume is named Ambulando, a putative solved-by-walking. It also intimates a curious disembodiment, as we have discussed, a tendency to move away from the resistance of things towards stateless existence. It is an unearthliness that one surveys, succinctly expressed in the title poem:
I do not know the shape of the world.
I cannot set boundaries to experience…
At the frontiers of light,
Fleeing the centre without destination.
The less-than-explicit address in matters of intimacy continues, as does a shielding through use of amorphous language that avoids anything definitive. ‘In your Presence, a song cycle’, confuses sexual (even human) intimacy with intimation. The ‘you’ addressed (‘What was I made for / Except to write your signature’), and the ‘We’ who have ‘love’s work to do’ lack libidinous urgency and any real prospect of reciprocation, and either person might be either male or female, or not. Brasch’s verse is overall averse to sexuality. He aims high above that target—and the one hit most often, nearest the bullseye, is the one where ‘each draws for life-blood the whole / Breath of the other’s soul’. It is an idealised, quasi-spiritual, asymptotic quest.
I rove, you stay,
Each constant in their own way.
Such obduracy does not mean it is imposed on others. ‘Cry Mercy’ lays down ‘no law / For myself or my neighbour’. The poem concludes with an equivocation (strangely compatible with obduracy) which is Brasch’s true voice and points to a culmination of the journey linking dissolution to absolution:
Liking and disliking,
Unloving and wanting love,
Nearer to, farther from
My cross-grained fellow mortals,
On my level days I cry mercy
And on my lofty days give thanks
For the bewildering rough party.
Up’s down, here’s there, everything’s nothing—‘Liking/disliking, Unloving/wanting love, Nearer/farther, cry mercy/give thanks, level/lofty’. In the end, language itself is thrown from the binary seesaw.
The very unlikelihood of achieving what he sets out to achieve (consciously or not) is an unlikely but rather impressive poetic achievement. No wonder the poem ends with an uncharacteristic whoopee at attending the oxymoronic ‘bewildering rough party’. The language and sound features highlighted earlier are anything but boisterous: the first pair of lines is weighed with soft, woozy l-i-k-v-ing sounds; the next pair settles with n-m-f-o-er; and the final three offer an extended riff on m-a-l-on-f-d-y. The ‘rough party’ pierces the needle with intermittencies of sound that immediately disperse again into airy thinness.
Nearly nowhere
Not Far Off refers both to the poet’s nearing his destination and a receding horizon. In a tribute to the East German poet, Johannes Bobrowski, that horizon comprises all humanity (‘you’, ‘they’, thrice repeated ‘all’)—eventually ‘Coiling into dust’. Logic isn’t adequate:
You wake in the ears of men
When they cannot speak
To tell their truth out…
Coiling into dust—
All, all are your kind,
All speak your tongue.
(‘Ode in Grey’)
The ‘Heart-voice of human kind’ that Brasch applauds in ‘Ode in Grey’ is echoed in ‘Man Missing’, the common thread being futility in expecting much from life beyond the dignity of submission—negation prevails:
… looking everywhere,
No real self, only a sort
Of unthought self-conscious thought;
A house with no one at home,
Where any visitor is welcome
To name, try, spare or pan
A genuinely missing no-man.
Self-vacating cannot have been an easy choice, and one senses the heart-wrenching cost to Brasch as an individual (a socially retiring gay man of independent means and without a life partner or family of his own). Tellingly, the next poem, ‘Open the Heart’, speaks the fact of escape, running away, a man exposed with fright in the mirror and obliged to wear a mask in public—‘No more than a puff of wind’. Self-revelation reveals only missingness, the poet’s solitary abode. We may conclude, as does Brasch, that the only recourse is poems-unto-death: ‘At pistol point. They ask your life’. And ‘ask’ here equates to ‘are’.
Naming nameless
Aftermath applies. Home Ground and, even more strikingly, Last Poems, chosen by Roddick and included in Selected Poems, appear posthumously and are a major achievement in the oeuvre. It is fitting that, for Brasch, his life (as poet) is surpassed in death.
In yet another title sequence, ‘Home Ground’, concerning death’s imminence, the imagery, formerly elemental earth-water-wind-fire adopts an uplifting celestial grandeur:
In the assemblies of constellations,
The night host of the galaxies. (i)
The poem’s closing couplet is without a finite verb. The next section opens with a verbless sentence: ‘City of nothing’. Brasch uses language to imagine veritable absence.
The final pivot is recorded in the surpassingly beautiful ‘Night Cries, Wakari Hospital’, in Last Poems. The terrestrial condition is unfastened. The interlocutor comes as witness to his own death—absolute divestment, kenosis:
Only the flawlessly beautiful
May be admitted to your presence…
Over and over without end
Fumbling with your secret name.
and
Now I enter another rule
Laboriously piecing together
The hard grammar of dependence.
(‘Tempora Mutantur’)
The yearned for ‘another rule’ in ‘your presence’ is ushered in via their ‘secret name’ (for the Jewish Brasch surely a reference to Yahweh/YHWH). ‘Laboriously piecing together’ what remains of existence, gratitude is expressed for the nursing care and ‘loving kindness of hands’, mentioned in the moving’Fabled City of Agape’. Brasch insists that deeper realisation resides here—in ‘unwearying service’—‘Not in [the city’s] walls, not in its rational laws, / But in that intangible inimitable air’. All these airy vowels—the lightly dancing i’s(11)-o’s(3)-a’s(8)—exalting heavenward. There is regret over ‘Years, custom, the habit of reserve’ (‘A Word to Peter Olds’). And there is this profound eerie short poem of ever-taken farewell:
The ruby and amethyst eyes of anemones
Glow through me, fiercer than stars.
Flambeaux of earth, their dyes
From age-lost generations burn
Black soil, branches and mosses into light
That does not fail, through winter grip the rocks
To adamant. See, they come now
To lamp me through inscrutable dusk
And down the catacombs of death.
(‘Winter Anemones’)
You notice the ‘inscrutable’ approach into perimeterless existence, the way shown by an unworldly ‘light that does not fail’ provided by the anemones, leading beyond reconstitution. The space entered is an utter ineffable beyond either redemption or non-redemption.
Coda
Poetry for Brasch is an act of investiture. Poetic form employs language and the commonplace in a way that unbinds them, at least the normativity associated with them. In Walter Benjamin’s terms, poetic language comes to absorb and surpass the veracity of its worldly sources. It progressively displaces origin-in-the-world with its own existence, which is deeper than the poems produced in its name. Poetry is empty, pours as from a vessel, and is empty again. Words are embraced in their innate capacity to form rather than as a mechanism of specificity in meaning or communication, which has at most a derived and transient purpose.
notes
[1] Indirections: A Memoir 1909-1947 (OUP: Wellington, 1980). Having lost his mother early on, experiencing lifelong disagreement with his father’s worldly expectations, and not particularly close with his younger sister, Brasch grew up feeling estranged and isolated. Although—perhaps because— he was a more distant figure, grandfather Will Fels was celebrated in memoir and poems as an ideal mentor for the other-worldly qualities that attracted Brasch. [2] Selected Poems (OUP: Dunedin, 2015). All poem references are to this text. [3] Indirections 345. [4] Here & Now 60 (Sep 1957), 31.