by Fiona Capp
I am a tranquil lake
to mirror their joy and pain;
and all their pain and joy
I from my own heart make.
Their letters reveal that Judith was exhilarated and, at times, daunted by the ambitious nature of Jack’s philosophical project. For the past 2000 years, Western philosophy had sought to better understand how we know what we know. It had been a search for general principles or underlying truths. Since then, humanity had blithely assumed that it was progressing towards greater certainty in its knowledge of the world and itself. In the 1940s, when Jack was developing and refining his thesis, Anglo-Saxon philosophy was dominated by logical positivism, a movement which rejected metaphysics and ethics as a collection of meaningless pseudo-propositions, and embraced the logic of science. Jack felt that this line of philosophy had capitulated to science as the ultimate method of inquiry and analysis. Science, particularly physics, had increased human power over, and insight into, the environment, but philosophy had failed to rise to this challenge. For all the advances in scientific knowledge, humans had not advanced their understanding of life’s meaning. We now had the atom bomb but no way of dealing with the fear, the uncertainty and the sense of crisis it generated.
It was Jack’s opinion that philosophy’s greatest achievement so far was the recognition that our collective worldview or sense of reality is constructed through language. And because language arises only out of cooperation between individuals, it is a shared inheritance that binds people together. Modern science and philosophy had, however, atomised experience and undermined this sense of a shared reality. The result was a prevailing sense of fragmentation, alienation and meaninglessness, as reflected in the work of modernists like Samuel Beckett and T.S. Eliot. The two world wars, the destruction of the natural world and the misuse of technology were all symptoms of this ‘modern psychosis’: the breakdown of the old worldview. We had reached a point in history, Jack argued, where reason and intellectual analysis were failing us. According to Judith, Jack shared with Jung the view that this breakdown, at a personal level, was triggered by the undervaluing of intuitive experience. What was required was a form of emotional intelligence (although neither of them used this now popular phrase); a future in which ‘the values of feeling’ were prized over rationality and materialism.
In many ways, Jack’s vision is only now being realised. Writing about the climate crisis, philosopher Clive Hamilton argues that a new consciousness cannot be forged purely through a scientific understanding of the world. It must come out of a different conception of reality, one that allows for ‘participatory knowledge’ as well as scientific knowledge. One that allows for the ‘mystery of being’ as well as scientific certainties. ‘Such an understanding of the world requires a transformation of our attitudes, our values and our institutions; but above all it requires an expansion of ourselves.’ It is the very argument that Jack was making in his philosophical writings and that Judith would continue to develop in her poetry and her essays on the environment.
Jack regarded his thesis as ‘an intellectual atom bomb’ that would bring about a ‘revolution of thought’. He believed it was the only thing that could defeat the real A-bomb. At this time, neither Jack nor Judith believed in the political solutions on offer. To Judith, politics was ‘the froth on the top of the cauldron . . . not what makes the water boil.’ The important thing was to find out why the water was boiling. Jack believed that he had, and Judith was won over by his conviction and the force of his arguments. Although his ideas would never have the explosive impact he hoped for—perhaps because their time had not yet come—positive reviews in British philosophical journals of his second book, The Structure of Modern Thought (published by Chatto & Windus (1971) after his death) would prove his philosophical arguments to be sound.
The low sun was slanting across the park, gilding everything it touched. It was that hour of day when figures from the past might step out of the shadows, or when we feel a piercing awareness of all that has gone. Sixty years ago, Judith and Jack had sat here on this lawn, locked in passionate discussion about how philosophy might save the world. It was a strange and moving thought: the depth of their concern, the responsibility they felt, the belief that ideas and poetry could make a difference. And swirling around them would have been people like us taking their afternoon stroll, wanting nothing more than to enjoy the last rays of sunshine and to contemplate the pleasures of the night ahead.
As we headed back to Anna’s house for dinner, stopping occasionally to pick up yellow-tinged frangipani flowers that had fallen on the footpath, I thought of Judith returning alone to her windowless room because propriety made it impossible for her to live with Jack. Public spaces like the park were all very well for romantic encounters when in the first flush of love but, as time passed, Jack and Judith longed for a place of their own. While they lived apart, their only shared, truly private territory was each other. Judith would later capture this in the poem ‘Two Hundred Miles’ in which a lover, who is separated from her beloved, imagines herself rushing back to him. Nothing else matters but seeing him ‘because you are my home’.
As lovers do, they inhabited a universe of their own. The lack of recognition from the academy for Jack’s ideas, combined with Judith’s sensitivity to the fact that she and Jack were ‘living in sin’, heightened their sense of existing in a separate dimension from everyone else. There is a conspiratorial mood in their letters as they talk of how ‘the world is going to obstruct us as much as it can.’ But, insists Jack, ‘we are going to be very happy & defy the world.’ This hostile world is epitomised by the suburbs and the city itself, the world of convention and orthodox thought. In one letter Jack writes: ‘We live so much on the heights that when we descend to the valley the view seems restricted.’ It was a figure of speech that captured the kind of landscape both aspired to. Not only did they lack a private place where they could be intimate, but the lofty intellectual landscape they shared put them at odds with their social and physical environment.
Although they did begin negotiations for a block of land in the suburbs out of desperation for a place where Jack could devote himself to his writing without the draining demands of physical labour—the war had left him with serious heart and gastric problems—they were much more attracted by the possibility of a house on Tamborine Mountain, eighty kilometres southeast of Brisbane. Like the many artists and outsiders who have headed for the hills—the Dandenong Ranges near Melbourne, the Blue Mountains near Sydney or the Adelaide Hills—they were instinctively drawn to the natural fringe rather than the urban centre.
In Judith’s mind, the city was, at best, nature tamed and trammelled. She didn’t write many poems about cities—out of over four hundred poems in the Collected Poems, only about half a dozen refer to cities or are set in them. In these few poems, cities reek of failure, greed and fear. They are grimy and despoiled by human waste, or are sexually and intellectually sterile. Judith’s growing frustration with living apart from Jack (in one letter she says ‘I think we’ll live and die in separate houses’) and her sense that the city itself is to blame are powerful undercurrents in ‘The City Asleep’, which came out of this period. The poet addresses her lover who is somewhere else in the city. While the stone walls of the metropolis and the rain seem to shut them off from each other, the poet senses that ‘When we are most, then we are least alone’. While physically separated, sleep joins them as they descend into mankind’s storehouse of shared, primordial images: the realm of the collective unconscious.
By this time, both Judith and Jack were immersed in the writings of Carl Jung. The way the poem takes the reader back in time, beneath the stones of the city into underground catacombs, is highly reminiscent of a famous dream of Jung’s in which he found himself in an old house built upon the old city wall in Basel that had many levels in it, each lower one from a more ancient period. At the very bottom was a cave or tomb filled with prehistoric pottery and bones. It was this dream
that inspired Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious. As well as taking us into the subterranean landscape of our shared psychic origins, the poem ends with the buried ‘seed’ of the individual self that ‘aches and swells towards its flower of love.’ The city might keep the aching lovers apart, but Judith brings them together through this journey to the ‘beginning of the world’.
When Judith and Jack bought a small cottage and settled in the lush, tenebrous surrounds of Mount Tamborine, this journey continued. Here, in this conservative, rural community they would live as husband and wife even though they did not marry (because Jack’s wife would not agree to a divorce) until a few years before Jack’s death. Here, Meredith would be born and grow up. Here, Judith would write most of her poetry and Jack would complete his magnum opus. Although the poetry Judith would write during the next thirty years would bear the imprint of subtropical Queensland, the landscape she charted would not correlate neatly with any map. It would be as much an internal landscape as an external one. Inspired by Jack’s philosophy, her fascination with Jung, the exhilaration of being in love and the primal darkness of the mountain’s rainforests, her poems would dig deeper into the realms of the collective unconscious as she took her readers on a journey to ‘time’s own root’.
NINE
My Red Mountain
Low, smoggy cloud hovered over Brisbane the day Anna and I headed for Mount Tamborine. We took the Gold Coast freeway through outer suburbs and then turned off to the rural foothills of the Mount Tamborine plateau. ‘I don’t remember any of this,’ Anna said, gazing out the window while I drove. She wasn’t getting those flashes of deja vu that normally accompany a return to landscape from childhood. Having grown up in Brisbane, she and her parents had occasionally driven up to the mountain for day trips. Although these visits were infrequent, they made a profound impression because of the contrast between the bright summer heat of Brisbane and the wet, cool darkness of the mountain. Something about the moist darkness also made her fearful. She and her parents had walked beneath a waterfall and she had been frightened by the slippery rocks.
But nothing Anna saw now was familiar. Where were the tall, vine-tangled rainforests? Where was the mysterious, disturbing darkness? The road was climbing but there were only occasional patches of forest. Before we knew it, we were driving through a stark modern housing estate that, if not for its elevation, might have been somewhere on the fringes of Brisbane. Through a break in the trees, we saw the sea in the distance, and the tall white pillars of the Gold Coast shimmering like an ever-rising Atlantis whose satellite suburbs were now pushing into the foothills of Mount Tamborine. When Judith first arrived in Brisbane in 1943, Surfers Paradise was a small coastal town. At that time, Jack had a cottage there. Before they became lovers she would visit him with books from the university library, and would go body surfing on those long white beaches, never imagining that one day they would be overshadowed by high rise buildings. During the three decades that Judith spent on Mount Tamborine, she watched the Gold Coast swell into this sky-scraping metropolis. By the mid-1970s, she was lamenting that large portions of Tamborine were being subdivided for development. ‘Already the last of the gravel red roads are being bitumened . . . And the Gold Coast approacheth closer.’
By the time we reached the top of the mountain, the vegetation was lusher and the houses and guesthouses had more established, fern-filled gardens which blended into the landscape. With its Swiss-inspired buildings and wedding-package feel, the tourist centre of Mount Tamborine reminded me of the Dandenongs. Unlike New England, which I ‘knew’ through the poetry, I had only vague images and expectations of Mount Tamborine before arriving here. While the New England poems capture a distinctive and recognisable terrain, the poems inspired by Mount Tamborine are different. In them, Judith would make general references to ‘my red mountain’ and to the rainforests, waterfalls and cliffs, the ancient ferns, flowers, vines and giant trees, the red soil, birds and native animals. Yet for all her evident delight in this new-found world, the poems don’t evoke an identifiable place. The feeling I was often left with after reading them was of having entered a universal dreamscape (albeit with a subtropical flavour); of having delved into the rich compost of our psychic origins.
At the same time, the landscape of the poems—particularly those about her relationship with Jack and Meredith—is full of intimate, personal associations. For all three of them, the gardens and the rainforests of Mount Tamborine were not just emblems of their love but a living expression of it. Meredith recalls how ‘the rich dark rainforest and its clambering plant world, the lush gardens and profusion of flowers, felt to me all of a piece with the strong and easy happiness that flowed between my parents and in which I bathed as my natural right.’ This personal landscape and the universal dreamscape of Judith’s poetry were, of course, inseparable; as are the unconscious and the collective unconscious.
Judith’s deepest intuition, which shaped her whole life, was of the interconnectedness of all things. A sense not unlike that expressed by Wordsworth in ‘Tintern Abbey’: ‘A motion and a spirit, that . . . rolls through all things.’ But, for Judith this ‘spirit’ was not God in any conventional sense; it was more a form of energy. In a letter to a friend, she wrote that she had never been able to understand why we had ‘divided godhead’ from humanity: ‘More and more I feel there isn’t an “I”, nor even a “we”, there’s an It. Oriental this may be, but it gets truer and truer for me.’ Distinctions between ourselves and the external world were arbitrarily imposed by our ‘dividing intellect’ which alienated us from the rest of creation. As she wrote in the poem ‘Rainforest’:
We with our quick dividing eyes
measure, distinguish and are gone.
The forest burns, the tree-frog dies,
yet one is all and all are one.
It was no wonder Judith took to Jung, with his cosmological view of the mind, and his conviction that the gods of the ‘old religions’ and myths were personifications of aspects of the human psyche. ‘From time immemorial,’ Jung wrote, ‘nature was always filled with spirit. Now, for the first time, we are living in a lifeless nature bereft of gods.’ The Enlightenment might have destroyed the spirits of nature but ‘not the psychic factors that correspond to them.’ We most often glimpse these psychic factors in our dreams. As someone who kept a dream diary, Judith was highly attuned to this unconscious activity. She told her friend Nettie Palmer that she had particularly wild dreams when under anaesthetic, ‘involving the whole of life and death and God and firmaments of screaming stars.’
In moments of great intensity, she also experienced what might be called ‘waking dreams’. One evening, not long after they moved to the mountain, when she and Jack were out looking at the stars, she had a revelation of dizzying intensity. An epiphany, it would seem, inspired by the sheer exhilaration of being in love, their shared intellectual understanding of the world and the brilliance of the night sky at this elevation. It was, she would later recall, an ‘almost unbearable’ experience of infinitude, of ‘being part of the galaxy, and of the galaxy itself being part of the consciousness of man.’ In his memoir, Jung described a similar oceanic experience: ‘At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons.’
Later that day we would discover the old, windy road up the mountain which wended through rainforest and bush, and which Anna recognised as the route which she took with her family on their weekend visits. Curiously, this road is called the ‘new road’ by the locals—even though it was laid in the 1920s—because it was the first bitumen road up the mountain from Brisbane. The road we had come by was known as the ‘do-it-yourself road’ because Tamborine residents had got fed up with waiting for the state government to act and had decided to build it themselves in the 1950s.
In 1953, Judith wrote a poem called ‘Sanctuary’ t
hat lamented the incursion of a road through a special place full of ‘antique forests and cliffs’ clearly inspired by Tamborine Mountain. The poem told how, for thousands of years before the road was built, there stood an ‘old gnome tree’ until it was cut down by ‘some axe-new boy’. This reference probably drew on a local story of the ‘great grandfather Peter’ macrozamia or cycad, an ancient fern-like tree which was destroyed by some young men looking for fronds to decorate a hall for a party. In the poem, regardless of a sign saying ‘Sanctuary’, the road sweeps ominously on, leading into ‘the world’s cities like a long fuse laid’.
As I got out of the car and looked around at the quaint cafes, galleries and New Age gift shops, I could almost hear the road sizzling beneath my feet.
The next day, Paul Lyons, a retired computer engineer and local historian, took me to where Jack and Judith’s first house, ‘Quantum’, once stood. We pulled up out the front of a quarter-acre block that sat in the middle of a large farm, like an island in a sea of green. There was a very new-looking house to one side of the block and not much garden.
‘This can’t be the house,’ I said.
‘It isn’t,’ he said dryly. ‘I helped pull theirs down.’
Ten years before, most of Quantum had burned down and the owner had asked Paul if the historical society could make use of the remaining timber. During the demolition, in a cavity between the outer weatherboards and the kitchen wall, he found the sign Quantum which Jack had carved, in raised block letters, in a solid chunk of tallowwood. The sign was now kept in the Mount Tamborine Historical Society archives.
I couldn’t help feeling that Judith would have been delighted with this find, and not just because it was made by Jack and held fond memories. I think she would have also appreciated how it was found. Its excavation from between an inner and outer wall of the house was such a perfect metaphor for the surfacing of repressed material from the unconscious, as happens in dreams or times of crisis. The house and the life it had once contained had vanished, but this relic, which brought with it the lost world of Quantum, was a reminder of the role the unconscious plays in our conscious lives.
