If you want to make God laugh, goes the old Jewish proverb, tell Him your plans.
I write this now at a friend’s house amid a stand of tall spotted gums on the New South Wales coast, overlooking blue, empty water and national park – that astonishing luxury of the First World, land and water that can be set aside for sanctuary and circumscribed enjoyment, whose value is recognised as intrinsic and not based on the grimmer equations of poorer places.
When we are dismantled and put back together again, like the man called Head of a Cow, we can’t expect to come away from it without sustaining stress fractures and damage, any more than we can look at the people we used to be and not see what has been left behind in us. There is a price to be paid for such a journey, a bill presented to you only on your return. You will come across your compatriots and risk that they may not recognise you. Your new tender spots, like blistered heels, will pinch you painfully every step you take, on a road that seems mostly thorns. On that journey into the interior, you will walk grieving for your own lost ignorance, which would have allowed you, at least, the comfort of complacency. You will contain, forever, some extra chamber of your heart somewhere, uselessly beating with hidden, exiled love.
I moved from my country town and the sheltering sanctuary of the community which had sustained me with such yearning homesickness while I was away. Time – even millennial time – walks on with its usual oblivious disregard for us, and we store our journals and almanacs away when we can, and carry them like invisible burdens on our backs when we can’t.
I live elsewhere, with somebody else, and in another life. I look at photos, I dream occasionally in Spanish, I spread beans out on the tabletop to pick out gravel before I soak them – hoping for gravel, I think, but never finding any – I take a hammock or a piece of Mexican clothing or a tablecloth sometimes from the trunk and when I hold it to my face and inhale I feel like my heart will break with the strain of holding in the world I left.
Along with everything else I was given when I was there, somebody saw me admiring a huge pile of thousands of multicoloured corncobs in their yard one day, and gave me a couple. The kernels were white, black, purple and pink, and when the time came to leave and so much of what I had accumulated seemed like loot which I was only too happy to give away, I couldn’t bring myself to part with those corncobs. I confess: I smuggled them home, like artefacts, to show people who would not believe the wonder of the New World, evidence of the miraculous, things I retained like holy relics – hey, I saw a mountain of these! –as my memories seem to become coated with the emulsion of old photos, and sensory details sink away under the varnish.
When I showed them to people, I realised I wasn’t the first pilgrim to carry them away –that there was, in fact, a kind of Australian underground of ‘Indian corn’. All sorts of acquaintances gave me more, dried decorative cobs they’d had hanging in their kitchens for years, cobs they’d grown from other imported seeds, multicoloured or red corn their dad had grown once upon a time. The cobs were long and black, thin and orange, speckled, purple, piebald.
They sat for a while in a box, like everything else in my life waiting to be addressed.
‘Life transcends all structures,’ says Pablo Neruda in his memoirs, completed just before he died, ‘and there are new rules of conduct for the soul. The seeds sprout anywhere; all ideas are exotic; we wait for enormous changes every day; we live through the mutation of human order avidly: spring is rebellious.’
Spring is rebellious, and winter ends. Last year I made a new garden, and hunted out that box. I planted a handful of different kernels, alongside some normal sweetcorn seedlings, and watered them in. They took their chance and ran with it, even the ones that had been dusty and dormant on a kitchen shelf for years. They shot up like rampant bamboo.
Soon they towered three and four metres over the vegie garden, my tiny patch of the sierra, bending and falling with their own weight, and when their silks burst forth they were white, red, black and purple, richly powdered with pollen.
The year is cooling. I want to get home and see how it’s doing, my brash and upstart transplanted parcela, growing there thanks to God.
I think of that invisible pollen, airborne and irretrievable, swirling into air currents, carrying that ancient DNA like a tiny defiant battleflag of biodiversity against cloned, genetically engineered sameness. I imagine it scattered loose now, borne elsewhere, random and deviant, unquarantined, hungry to survive against the odds, feral, adaptive, avid.
I’ll pull a few weeds, clear beneath the bean and zucchini tendrils growing around the corn, smell that good earth underneath.
I want to find out the new rules of conduct for the soul. If a poet tells me it’s so, I’m ready to believe in enormous changes.
So I’ll grasp those stalks, plant my feet squarely on the soil, and summon the bees and the wind to do their work on those millions of pollen grains that miraculously powder those filaments.
I want to shake them free. I want to shake us all free.