Caesura

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 6: Our Global Face
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Brian Castro

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In place of a homeland / we hold the transformations of the world.

– lly Sachs

 

Sometimes I think the idea of home is just a failure of nerve. I must have been about 14 years old. Alone in Australia, I was farmed out to different families for the school holidays. I learned to surf on a long board, trying to fit in with the culture. Growing increasingly myopic, I tied my glasses on with rubber bands.

One morning, a wave washed away my spectacles and I landed on a glis­tening shore. My pile of belongings was gone; my friends had disappeared; the stretch of sand was completely deserted. Realising I had washed up on the wrong beach, I tried to make my way back by land, but was obstructed by a rocky point and a high cliff. I was in the wrong place. Where was home? There was a growing sense of panic; blindness without insight.

To question one's attachment to place, one has to peel words, look relent­lessly for false feelings. Place can be a cloying illness – nostalgia, a pathology. The Germans have many home/belonging words: Heim, Heimat, heimisch, heim­lich. The French have few. La maison is cold, emotionally neutral. There is no equivalent for the word cosy. Confortable is as close as the French come – though I keep my distance from home when I detect the odour of durian. That's a smell from my childhood, which is now uncannily unprepossessing.

Longing; belonging. To belong is to think only what one already knows, not knowing what else to think when a cold wind blows out the fire in one's comfort zone. Clothed in rank opinion, groups caress the dead fur of beasts against their flesh. Bilangên. The clangour of an iron age.

Poet Siegfried Sassoon, having smelt the carnage in the trenches of the Somme, could not bring himself to re-embrace the rose gardens of Sussex. No one had a right to be born. Life, like death, was an arbitrary process. The war for Sassoon was a traumatic delivery – a caesarean. Home would never be the same again.

Penser, c'est dire non. To think is to say no – so said the French philosopher Émile-Auguste Chartier. He was from a provincial background, a humble teacher who was mocked by his students. He loved cows. One of the most brilliant of French essayists, he never publicised himself, concealing himself behind the pseudonym ‘Alain'. A pacifist, he nevertheless volunteered at the age of 46 for active service during the First World War. He declined promo­tion from the ranks and throughout his life said "no" to medals and honours.

Poet and politician Dante Alighieri knew how deceptive were the favours of the people. As the leader of a party, he faced repression and revolt. He went into exile without his wife. He could do without further scrutiny. He never returned home.

Philosopher and mayor Michel de Montaigne retired to a tower, caution­ing against mythologising mateship: O my friends, there is no friend.

Real thought is always in between, inseparable from a complexity of feeling. It always suffers from contradiction, since contradiction is the exper­ience of truth. In order to allow such vagabond ideas full dialogue and debate – for this is the agony and achievement of any civilisation – we have to sever the umbilical; head out for the territory beyond.

 

Freu(n)d.

More and more, Freud has become for me a kind of imaginary uncle, I don't know why. Perhaps because he wrote exceptionally clearly about feeling. He pointed out that instincts and drives were ultimately inexplicable. At the very moment when you think Freud has concluded something, he astounds you by reaching further into doubt. His daring springs from the elasticity of his humanity. Nothing surprises him. But in his muscular prose you see that it is always an individualistic humanity. Crowds and power breed crimes. Groups and nations have always defined themselves through violence.

In 1938 he completed Moses and Monotheism and wrote a preface to it:

We are living here in a Catholic country under the protection of that Church, uncertain how long that protection will hold out.

In a matter of weeks he will have to leave the comfort of his rooms at 19 Berggasse in Vienna and flee to London. Meanwhile, the Nazis have pasted swastikas on the walls of his building. Yet Freud will always call Vienna home.

His is a considerable undertaking in those dark times, to be thinking and writing a thesis that religion is the neurosis of humanity. He will call down upon himself both Semitic and anti-Semitic vengeance. He is already aware of this, and writes that he will not give this work to the public. Concealment is his strategy. But what friendship he offers, when he concludes his essay by addressing the sympathetic reader of the future:

... there was someone in darker times who thought the same as you!

I visited his house in London. Hampstead was severely bombed by the Germans but Freud had already ceased to exist, well before the Blitz. Dying of cancer of the jaw, he went up and down the marble steps inside the house sneaking puffs on the odd cigar. The maid complained that he spat over the balustrade. She scolded and protested.

That would have been my most memorable image: a photo, which may not exist, of Freud sneaking another spit while the maid wasn't watching.