In 1969 Colin McCahon painted onto the front of writer Maurice Shadbolt’s studio bar—As there is a constant flow of light we are born into a pure land. This may not have been McCahon’s most seminal work, or even in the pantheon of great McCahon paintings, but its utilitarian value and sheer chutzpah (painted spontaneously onto a studio bar) is quite remarkable.
In 2017 I decided to write a poem where I used this text (and context) as an echo chamber, a connecting thread between McCahon and this ‘constant flow of light’, particularly the local landscape I grew up in, and the kauri as a motif that McCahon had developed at his home in French Bay in the 1950s.
On a personal level, in 1965 my father bought a section not far from Maurice Shadbolt’s house and the little muddy inlet in the Waitakere Ranges. I was born in 1969, the same year this work was painted, and grew up, and now live in my childhood house not far from the Shadbolt house. Now fifty-three years later walking past Shadbolt’s house, I often think of Colin McCahon painting this bar in the house on Arapito Road. It was the year of Apollo 11 and the moon landing, the Vietnam War, the Woodstock music festival, the Beatles’ ‘Abbey Road’ album and what seems a never-ending list of culturally defining events.
Just as he used a range of materials, McCahon often used quotes from various sources, including the Bible, in his paintings. McCahon had long been interested in light as a metaphor both for faith and enlightenment and had begun a related series of dramatic semi-abstract waterfall paintings in 1964, in which a curve of white light cleaved through darkness. Shadbolt’s studio bar is a continuation of this theme, and includes a passage adapted from Shinran's songs to Amida Honen, a Japanese Buddhist text from the 1100s. McCahon used this text in several paintings between the mid-1960s and early 1970s, as he did with the other song here, his version of the Beatles' 'Strawberry Fields Forever'.
C.K. Stead responded to this poem not long after I sent it to him. In his poem, ‘The year was 69’ (included in his latest volume: That Derrida Whom I Derided Died) he catalogued and gave a context to the time and place (1969), ‘and the words had to curve with the bend of the bar / and the flounder net down there among mangroves / pulled round by the tide …and the inner Manukau stillness / sliced by cicadas.’ He also qualified his poetic response, by insisting that in my poem I was talking to myself, and as he’s done to a number of my poems after I’ve sent him down memory lane, set out to go ‘back there (but briefly)’—a consequence he calls it, and in this case, happy if it has caught something of my ambience and location.
Looking back at his response, I see something of what German writer W.G. Sebald ruminated: ‘the older you get,… the more you forget [as] vast tracts of your life sort of vanish into oblivion’, and ‘that which survives in your mind acquires a very considerable degree of density, a very high degree of specific weight’.
In the case of each poetic response, and as poets (C.K. believes) we are in fact almost opposites, me all obliquity and indirection, himself, ‘an excess of clarity’. And yet, he says, that each admires the other’s work. The names in C.K.’s poem are something which he alone can write about with a certain facticity. For me, the music and marked evolution towards abstract representations of place and events is my ‘unfolding dream’, where close-ups and distant scenes coalesce.
My poem finishes: ‘of a hypothesis and destination / together a gradation…’
gradation /greɪˈdeɪʃən/ noun plural gradations Britannica Dictionary definition of GRADATION [count] : a small difference between two points or parts that can be seen in something that changes gradually—often + of
• subtle gradations of color/meaning
• (of a constant flow of light)
sam sampson