The Green Bell

by Paula Keogh

  ‘What are you doing here in M Ward?’ I ask, aware of some tension in the air.

  ‘I’m supposed to come every day. It’s a joke. They’re trying to get me to hate booze. Aversion therapy.’

  ‘That’s heavy, man,’ says Michael. ‘Are you into that?’

  ‘It’s complicated. Had a run-in with the law.’ Ross’s eyes drift off to the side again. I see no trace of the vintage car enthusiast whose heroes were James Dean and John Lennon.

  ‘Oh, right,’ says Michael. ‘But the aversion therapy, is it working?’

  ‘For them or for me?’ Ross says grimly, pulling on his shirtsleeves.

  We talk about M Ward then, the staff and the food. We don’t talk about the war, and we don’t ask Ross about his experiences as a veteran. It doesn’t feel right.

  When I met him, Ross was opposed to the war, and I’m confused and disturbed to think of him in Vietnam. I imagine him walking with his pack and his rifle along a jungle track while bombs explode around him and villagers run ahead of the fire. I hear helicopters shattering the sky and see thick smoke rising into the air. It comes to me that Ross may have killed people, and I feel sick, as though I’ve broken some taboo in having that thought. I wonder how Ross feels about it all.

  After he leaves M Ward that day, I’m still having visions of his war experiences. It’s one thing to imagine what war must be like; it’s quite another to think of someone you know in the thick of it. I bring up war with Michael, talking about Ross while also trying to understand the hallucinations of battlefields, broken bodies and death that I had when I first came to the ward.

  Growing up, I heard only a few anecdotes of my maternal grandfather’s experiences in World War I, but I imagined many more. Pop lost his leg in Delville Wood near Pozières on the Somme in 1916, and as a small child I was fascinated by his stump and the fate of his missing limb. When my parents took us on visits to the Australian War Memorial, the constructed battle scenes inspired my visions of Pop fighting ‘Ole Fritz’.

  Forty-six thousand Australians lost their lives on the muddy battlefields of the Western Front. Pop’s leg may have been the price he paid for his survival. His wound had been small to begin with, but as time passed with no medical help, gangrene set in. His leg was amputated at Rouen; in his diary, he wrote that he was living on a diet of champagne for a few days after the operation – presumably due to the lack of anaesthetics.

  My paternal grandfather also fought in France, but I know even less about his involvement, and he died when I was two. A large sepia photo of him in his army uniform hung above the dining-room table at my grandmother’s house, and I remember his dreamy expression, a soldier in a slouch hat watching over us like a guardian angel as we sat around the table drawing and playing with plasticine.

  During my first days in M Ward, I found myself living through Pop’s experiences, stuck in the trenches up to my thighs in freezing mud, watching gangrene fester in my dirty leg wound. Sometimes, I still feel that it’s me in the trenches – that I’m him or he’s me, I can’t tell which. I feel the rot and the damp and the pain. The noise of gunfire and explosions, the lonely cries of men dying in the fields. I smell death and decay and blood. His trauma is my inheritance.

  My fantasies of my grandfather’s war merge with those of Vietnam and affect all of my responses to violence. I can’t understand how, given poetry, music, art and the power of love, we still kill one another in the most horrific ways. It’s yet another problem my mind obsesses over as if it could be solved, if only I could think of the solution.

  When I talk this through with Michael, he tells me that there would be no war if we saw it through our imaginations. The earth wouldn’t be destroyed by pollution and greed; no one would adhere to the perverted values of capitalist society. If we could see through the lens of poetry and love – if we saw truly with the imagination – we wouldn’t destroy one another and the world we’ve been given.

  As I mull over these ideas, the concept of truth changes for me. Although I’ve always loved music and poetry, before this breakdown I took an intellectual approach to life. I thought that truth was an abstract and objective quality. Now I think that it’s multifaceted, multidimensional. It’s bound up with facts but it goes beyond them. Truth is to be found in the exploration of the factual – in the relationship between facts, and between us and them. The truth of my grandfather’s experience of war is to be discovered and revealed through an imaginative engagement with the physical details of the suffering he endured. Truth appears when matter and spirit merge. It’s the human, subjective dimension of the factual. It’s this I want to see through to and speak of, as best I can. If I can.

  *

  Early one evening, Father Gannon appears in the hospital cafeteria, looking for Michael and me. He places a plate of cupcakes covered in pink icing on the table and sits down.

  ‘From a parishioner,’ he says, offering me one. ‘How’ve you been?’

  ‘I’m good, thanks,’ I say, smiling. I’m starting to like this man.

  He turns to Michael. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Been better,’ he says. ‘Feel a bit hollowed out today. Got any jokes?’

  ‘One I think you’ll like,’ Father Gannon says, winking at me. He pauses and sits back in his chair for effect. ‘Why did the hippies go to Mass on the first day of Lent?’

  Michael groans. ‘This doesn’t have anything to do with penance, does it?’

  ‘No, not even close. Give up?’ He takes our silence as our assent. ‘Because they thought it was Hash Wednesday!’

  Michael laughs and gently punches Father Gannon on the arm. ‘You’ve got my number,’ he says.

  ‘I saved that one for you.’

  I leave the table and line up to get another coffee for us, leaving Michael and Father Gannon talking. When I come back and give them their drinks, they’re deep in conversation.

  ‘I don’t read much poetry, but your poems … they’re very good. There’s a lot of love in them,’ says Father Gannon.

  ‘Yeah, poetry is love,’ says Michael. ‘It’s the closest I come to praying. It’s what I live for. That’s what the two of us have in common – we live for our religions.’

  ‘And from reading your poems, I’d say there are things our religions have in common too.’

  ‘Well, yeah, you’re right. Priest and poet, both of us voices crying in the wilderness.’

  Although I’m curious, I leave them to their conversation. I feel that this is their private discussion. I give them two of the cupcakes and bring the rest of the plate back to the ward to share around.

  *

  I’ve mostly come through the extremity of the psychosis that brought me into M Ward, but I exist in a permeable space, vulnerable to mad thoughts and wanderings. I’ve been trying to imagine that I’m not mad, that my mind isn’t loud with noise, that my heart isn’t pulled this way and that by joy, by pain; that it isn’t pounded by memories and self-doubt. But I can’t put together what sanity might feel like.

  I’m often unreal to myself. Ordinary interactions can seem like hallucinations. I sometimes look at a commonplace object and can’t work out what it is or what it’s used for. The shapes and patterns in pictures can be unrecognisable and threatening. Everyday words like ‘frog’ or ‘underneath’ can take on sinister meanings.

  Such states of mind are eased by Michael’s presence. His voice is always associated with a feeling of clarity at the core of myself. ‘What’s happening?’ he asks, seeing that I’m disoriented. I find it helpful to put my confusion into words, and Michael accepts the reality of the unreal, normalising it. He is Eros, leaning down to me, his arm around my shoulders, his lips on my cheek, on my ear. The golden-winged god, hovering, close. I’m brought back from the underworld into his presence and into the green bell.

  Since I’ve met him, my experience of time has changed. I sense it unfurling as slowly as the frond of a tree fern. Moments expand into what the two of us call ‘round time�
� – the boundless space inside the green bell. A feeling of infinity. Linear time is the clock ticking, counting the hours on the ward in regular beats, but there’s no measurement for round time. It’s a bird, free of its cage, flying into open sky. Our love has the quality of a lucid dream in which everything is connected. We discover the stillness in the dance and are absolved of doubt.

  Saints tell us that love is at the heart of mysticism. With Michael, I discover mysticism at the heart of love.

  For a long time after I lost my faith, I was nostalgic for a mythic world of mysteries and visions, in spite of the inner torment I suffered from the dark side of 1950s Catholicism. Nothing remained of the religion that had once sustained me. Now, with Michael, I’m rediscovering the stories of Jesus, the saints and angels, and connecting again with the breakaway life of the spirit.

  In his poem ‘Esaias’, Michael describes the voice of a prophet, one voice in a vast multitude: ‘and all his words are poems and his truths philosophies’. When we speak of Jesus, Michael refers to him as ‘the Lord’. I see Jesus now as a man, not as a god. He was a charismatic revolutionary, a spiritual genius, storming into the temple and knocking over the tables of the moneylenders, furious that they were using a holy place to do business. He defied convention to befriend Mary Magdalene, and perhaps he did bring Lazarus back from a kind of death.

  With Michael, I exist within a reality that my former rational, everyday self would have rejected as fantasy. I’m in touch with a state of being that transcends the world of appearances and opens me to love, to visits by gods and angels, and to miracles, poetry, music.

  I’m no longer the rationalist, the atheist, the sceptic. Michael – and madness – have opened my eyes to invisible realities. I believe in the inner world of spirit and imagination. I feel that I belong here, with him – and that one day, the noise and the pain will pass, and there will just be the love.

  *

  Slowly focusing and refocusing my eyes, resting them between lines, I read through Michael’s first two books, and poem after poem comes to life. Images emerge in rhythms and patterns, sometimes harmonious, sometimes dissonant, but always creating fully imagined worlds that invite me in.

  I have little sense of personal boundaries; the distinction between myself and others is blurred. I don’t always know whether my thoughts and feelings are my own, or if I’m accessing the inner worlds of other people. As I read, the experiences that Michael speaks of in his poems, the people and the landscapes that he describes, become more real to me than the life I’ve been living. I have an affinity with the visions of his poems. I belong with them, while the streets of Canberra and rooms of M Ward seem brittle and empty.

  The qualities of Michael, the person I know, merge with the personae of his poems. The Michael I have fallen in love with is ‘the inspector of tides’ going for a walk ‘dressed in clouds & with the wind & with some friends’. He is the minstrel who sang for his supper and slept in ‘haysheds and corners out of the wind, wrapped in a wagga rug’. He is the Duke of Courland’s son, living in a loft over the coach-house at the old Courland Penders family estate, feeling old, writing poems that are ‘archaic’. In my mind, I’m there too, living with him, watching the flames of the fire ‘rise and fall like waves’, regretting nothing.

  The Michael who says he loves me and wants to share his life with me is also ‘the hermit of green light’, living a solitary life in the woods tending broken birds, listening to the sound of the river and the ‘imperfect silence’, and finding, often, that ‘it is enough’.

  I have fallen in love with Michael, but also with his imagined selves, his imagined worlds. I enter his dreams and find they are mine: ‘dreams of a perfect poem, something / which in the end requires no work. a swan, for example, / or a red, mossy stone’.

  Michael creates experimental selves and merges with them for the sake of a fuller exploration of what it is to be alive. It’s as if he flows into other identities through an osmotic pressure that carries him across the borders that separate and define. In one of his poems, Michael writes: ‘I am Proust, de Vigny, Owen Aherne, myself – the identities are interchangeable.’ In response to his sense of himself as other, Michael claims the other as self.

  Michael is both the singer and the song, creating places in the mind where I’m released from the confines of M Ward and free to imagine other ways of being, other places to be. His poems bring me into a present moment of his life – standing on a platform at Central Station or waking up on a rainy day – and show me a new way of seeing the life that’s happening around me.

  As I read, I find myself participating in a conversation that’s bringing me into a more caring, more passionate and imaginative world than the one I fell out of when Julianne died. Michael’s poems become part of my weaponry against the noise in my head. Trying to sleep, I drown out the mind’s monologue by reciting my favourite lines.

  While Michael identifies with imagined selves in his poetry, and with other fictional or historical figures, I begin to identify with him, to internalise his personae and merge with his psyche. I feel that I know the ebbs and flows of his imagined life as intimately as I know the currents of my own soul. Michael’s poetry creates a world for us that’s more in line with our romantic dreams than materialistic society. We walk together in this created world, untouchable because we’re spoken for and with by poetry. We seem to inhabit the same skin, often exclaiming, in the way that lovers do, how one of us has just said what the other was thinking. It’s all or nothing, total immersion. Falling in love is a madness. Not the involuted madness of brokenness and loss, but an inspired, expansive madness. Poetry, music, art, love. You respond to the throb, the pulse, of the god within. Falling in love when you’re mad feels sublimely sane.

  But the god is capricious. This feeling can disappear in an instant if a cough rakes through Michael’s chest, or if the noise breaks through to me, mocking and obscene. We’re walking a tightrope. During our moments of greatest inspiration, we’re most vulnerable to falling into the wreckage of our mundane selves. Our ecstasy can be ambushed in a flash, the inspiration turned to despair, and this sublime sanity exposed as a malicious lie.

  6

  Liminal Spaces,

  October 1972

  ‘The doc says I’ll be dead in six months.’

  Michael’s voice is flat and his eyes search my face for a response. I stare at him.

  We’re in the corridor outside the men’s dormitory. Michael has just returned to M Ward after seeing a doctor in the general hospital about his lung condition and physical health.

  I ask him, ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘That’s what he said. My kidneys are fucked. My lungs are fucked. I’m done for.’

  Michael looks down the corridor. I follow his gaze and see the scene as a black-and-white photo in which mannequins stand to attention. A woman leans against the wall. A nurse in white carries a tray. Doors open into shadow.

  ‘What else did the doctor say?’ My voice feels like a piece of string in my throat.

  Michael mentions his kidneys again and something chronic, an infection, but his eyes are unfocused. Or maybe it’s my mind. Everything is blurred. I don’t understand; I want an explanation. But Michael just shrugs, holds my gaze for an instant, then looks down. His bony shoulders express a fatalism that makes me weak.

  As someone pushes past us, going into the men’s dormitory, Michael takes my hand. We walk along the corridor towards the day room.

  Michael dead in six months. I can’t take this in. I become air. You could put your hand through me.

  In the day room, I see the other patients as a cluster of waxwork models posing on the couches and at the tables. As if from above, I see Michael and me looking like a couple of strays. His beanie has slipped forward to his eyebrows, and his shoulders slope at an angle as he leans towards me. I look small beside him, my long hair hanging straight and loose, and my eyes wide open. We’re holding hands. It’s a film I’m in, but I�
��ve forgotten the plot, what’s supposed to happen next.

  *

  The doctor’s prognosis seems impossible. I feel I must do something, but I don’t know what. My mind has short-circuited; it can’t process the idea that Michael could die.

  That night and the next day we don’t talk about what the doctor said, but we speak of death. Michael tells me that his nights are long and difficult. He talks of having ‘the ta-tas’ – of wanting to end his life. I don’t know what to say. You can’t talk reason to death, and sometimes not even love. I just listen to his desperate monologues and speak to him about his poetry and our future together, hoping that he’ll find a flicker of hope.

  I’m finally coming to realise that he’s been in a state of collapse for some time. His self-portraits have been highly romanticised, even those concerning his illness. He’s been speaking to me as if his life were imaginary, as if he were a figure in a poem or a story, living down-and-out but revelling in the struggle and transforming it into poetry. Now this gloss has faded, and he lets me see his misery.

  The past year has been the worst of his life. It included devastating losses: the death of his father, the ending of his long relationship with the artist Hilary Burns, the sale of the house where they had lived, and a motorbike accident that resulted in severe head injuries and sixty stitches in his leg. While in hospital he was treated with morphine, which re-addicted him to heroin. He then moved to a rented room in inner-city Darlinghurst.

  I see the stories of his life as a junkie as if from a distance, as stills from a documentary, too raw and sad to take in close up. Severely depressed, he couldn’t read because of the head injury, and he was driven by his addiction. At times he was sick with pleurisy and pneumonia, unable to care for himself. He often spent days alone in his room, but he also hung out with other junkies or spent nights trawling the streets, looking to score drugs, trying to keep out of the way of the police. As he describes these times to me, his despair is palpable. ‘Been down so far, don’t know if I can pull myself up,’ he says.