Knowers: A Conversation with James Cowan

Introductory Remarks by Arthur Versluis

When first we met, Jim was an experienced adventurer. He had explored the wilds of Borneo and been among headhunters; he had gone far into the Australian desert outback, and been among the Aborigines; he had gone to New York and London; he had worked on a dodgy Middle Eastern air flight company; he had had all manner of adventures. His adventurous nature came naturally to him, from his ancestors who came to Australia from Ireland, and from his father in particular, who was a flight navigator for Qantas. Jim was an inveterate traveler, a rolling stone who could not stay in one place too long. In those early years of our friendship, Jim rode endurance rides in the Australian outback on his flighty Arabian horse, through the most wild of country. 

He was already a novelist, but in addition to writing fiction, he began to explore Aboriginal ways of understanding the remote and harsh Australian landscape, in books like Sacred Places in Australia, Mysteries of the Dream-time: The Spiritual Life of Australian Aborigines, and Aborigine Dreaming: An Introduction to the Wisdom and Magic of the Aboriginal Traditions. I have on my wall a gift from him, the first Aboriginal painting of the Dreaming that he had gotten, done on bark by an Aboriginal elder in the 1970s, long before the idea of Aboriginal painting of sacred landscapes became more widely known.

I remember being awakened in the middle of the night—I think it was around three in the morning—by a telephone call from Jim in which, bewildered and still groggy, I heard his excited voice explaining that he and his wife Wendy were going to go off to Balgo, Australia, in the outback, in order to live among the Aborigines. And indeed, they did exactly that, living in an Aboriginal community at Balgo, making it possible for the Aborigines to paint acrylic versions of their traditional Dreaming places. These paintings pioneered that genre of Aboriginal art. And Jim and Wendy came away with many entertaining stories of this period, the first of their sojourns in unusual places.

In the mid-1990s, Jim published Mapmaker’s Dream: The Meditations of Fra Mauro, and then two years later, A Troubadour’s Testament. These were the breakthrough books in which Jim began to explore his signature style that combined historical research, limpid prose, and a distinctive use of narrator’s voice with a slight surrealism. Mapmaker’s Dream won the Australian Gold Medal for Literature, and those two books brought him and his work into the public eye in a different way, with much critical praise.

Later, they moved to a small town in Italy, where Jim researched and wrote various books, including Francis: A Saint’s Way, and began to explore his mature understanding of what literature could be. During this period, he continued to write fiction, and it was during this time that he began to develop what he later came to term “metaphysical realism.” After returning to Australia, they then moved to Argentina, spending time in the country of Jorge Luis Borges, immersing themselves in its distinctive combination of European and Latin American cultures. 

Eventually, they moved back to Australia, near the idyllic community of Byron Bay, where Jim was to refine his masterwork, the Kingdoms trilogy, a series of three interlinked novels that together brought into being the mature form of his distinctive literary perspective, deeply imbued with his vast erudition and cultural knowledge garnered from a lifetime of sojourns and adventures around the world. In these books, he expressed his vision of what literature could be, not just as a reflection of the physical world, but rather as a flowering of the full range of human life, including its spiritual dimensions. 

During their time near Byron Bay, Jim continued to write, non-fiction as well as fiction and poetry, including an array of essays on disparate topics including mysticism, technology, what he had learned from Aborigines over the decades, and much else. It was the period in which he began to sum up and complete his life’s work as a writer. He completed a Ph.D. from the University of Queensland, his thesis later published as a scholarly monograph. And during this period he encouraged the development of a local intellectual community via occasional Philosophy Café events that brought in dozens, sometimes up to a hundred people for lively, open discussion.

It was then that he was diagnosed with cancer, and although he underwent various kinds of treatment, it inexorably began to take its toll on him. But he remained intellectually alive and engaged with the community in Byron Bay, as well as with a wide range of correspondents and contacts around the world. And he continued to write other works, including poems and essays. He was always reading and writing, an explorer of the mind, too. 

In this latter phase I flew to be with him and Wendy, and brought along a digital audio recorder. We had had so many extraordinary conversations over the years, but this now had a special quality because we knew that the end of his physical life was not too far away. Though I was there longer, on five days, each day in the morning, outside in the courtyard, with the exotic birds in the background, we spoke about the themes that brought together his life’s work, about how his Aboriginal contacts and his highly cultured literary and philosophical life intersected with his fiction, and about what advice he had for a young writer.

We were well aware, of course, that the dialogue is itself a classical form, and that in our conversations, we were participating in a form that went back to Plato, and that recurred throughout Western philosophical and literary history. Giordano Bruno wrote dialogues; so did Schelling; so did many others. It is very much an exchange—that is, I am participating in the conversation just as he is—and through our back and forth, something very distinctive emerges. It is, in part, a summary of his life’s work.

People commonly take “genius” nowadays to refer to what one “is,” as a prodigy, often someone with a particular kind of knack, for instance, an uncanny ability to make money or to invent gizmos. And of course, those things are achievements of a sort. But the word “genius” originally referred to someone’s inner spirit, the distinctive life force and animating power that makes that individual unique and full of life. Plotinus’s genius was said to be a god. Here, I will say that in the ancient sense, Jim was full of genius. You can hear it clearly in the audio, for that matter. Hence the title: for the conversations are about the intersection of timelessness and time.

Jim also was fully cultured in the most profound sense. I realize that a term like this is out of fashion, but in truth, it is never truly out of vogue because it expresses a refined and erudite sensibility, one that incorporates all the life experience and knowledge from disparate sources one has attained over the years into one’s full being. It expresses not only an intellectual, but also a realized spiritual aspect of one’s nature. 

A close friend who heard these conversations in audio form wrote me and said that they were a moving experience, particularly the last one, the advice to a young writer. Why? In part, no doubt, because in it, Jim is conveying his life’s experience as a writer to someone who seeks to be a writer, to take up where he is leaving off. It is in some sense, his testament, his bequest to us. And it is also empowering, meaning that he is handing the baton to you, dear reader, should you wish to take it up.

In what follows, you get a sense of this most refined and remarkable of men, and through what is here, you can participate in our conversations too. This conversation is part of a book, Timelessness: Conversations on Life, Literature, Spirituality, and Culture (New Cultures Press, 2020), and is made available here by permission.

Knowers

_{Copyright @ 2020 Arthur Versluis, all rights reserved, no reproduction without written permission from the copyright holder.}

JC: We emerged from our wonderful mornings of discussion to ultimately arrive at the sense of the value of, let’s call it megalithic cultural life—and we acknowledged that these places and artifacts and constructs are enmeshed in a spiritual life of this time, whether it’s associated with stars and moons and order in the Heavens, so to speak, and that is then spread through culture in terms of practice, which is religious. The important thing now is we’re addressing the issues of the material aspect of the megalithic culture as we piece together the certain reality we hope that might be valid. We also need to address and be open about what sort of spiritual life that can enact, and that’s what I’d thought we’d discuss today. 

AV: The starting point that you’re posing is megaliths—which can be represented by large stones, like menhirs, and in miniature by something as small as churinga stones. Megaliths of course exist across Western Europe and also of course while you might be referring to the stones of Australia, I suspect that when you say “megalithic,” you mean the megaliths of Western Europe and coming to terms with what their meaning is because they’re so widespread. And in the most Western part of both France and the UK, Ireland, Scotland, especially along the coast, they are present still, yet they are overlooked. They are ignored. They exist and they exist pretty much as they have for thousands of years untouched. But what do they mean? How do we incorporate their meaning into a contemporary context? I think that’s what you’re talking about and that’s a good question. And it ties in more broadly with what spiritual light is in the first place. What would you have to say about what megaliths have to offer us in an era in which technology has reached such sophistication and machinery is so sophisticated and complex and distracting? What do megaliths offer us? What is it that we can draw either from Aboriginal or from European ancient cultural traditions or artifacts? 

JC: I think that gets to the root of what I’m trying to express—and I hope, with your help, to tease out that sense that ultimately all the work that’s done on megaliths at the academic level or scholarly level is still confined by certain realities tied up with geometry, mathematics, and a kind of vague understanding that these places might have some embedded knowledge that we’re not privy to, which is quite right and I respect. But the problem of course is that the people doing the investigation of these places are largely social scientists, people who have come out of a certain kind of discipline—archaeology, astroarchaeology, all of the sciences that have popped up in the last 25 years—and they are still driven by a certain kind of empiricism that they are looking for to ascertain and confirm within what they’re doing. And so the site itself ultimately becomes an experimental venue rather than a cultural venue. And that’s what I think is often missing in the general dispersion of these ideas in books and things like that because they don’t want to get into spirituality. I was discussing it with a scholar and I could see he didn’t want to go there, because he thought that would go outside of the parameters he set up through his academic background. And so where I mentioned the idea of a spiritual life, inside that endeavor and how one accesses it, strikes me as the core of the question. If we don’t understand the principal values behind it, we’ll always only be reduced to measurements and signs or fences around it to keep out the populace. In an age where, as you rightly point out, technology has reached its apogee and we’re completely distracted by it, there is also the fact that because religions generally in the West anyway have been declining in their impact on cultural life, except on the fringe where you have Sufism or Buddhism creeping into the West, which is fine, but it’s an importation to a certain extent. Trying to fill a vacuum that Christianity has left in a wake of its exoterism, I suppose. And so the spiritual life in the broadest sense is either deeply pious and filled with the notion of piety, or it ends up in a fringe area where people—eccentric in their relationship with spiritual life because they find they can pick up brand new techniques from Buddhism and chanting techniques from Tibetans, all of which is valid, but they’re ultimately grasping at something that is of another tradition, where what we’re talking about in terms of megalith is still inside our tradition it’s just very early and that the spiritual life that has inherited that, my sense is—has an absolute validity for the 21st century man if you’d like—that he or she can find through access to the megalith. I use the term broadly, as you know. They are able to partake of a certain kind of spiritual reality, which they’ve probably felt reluctant to do inside the context of Christianity, or they didn’t want go to Buddhism, or they didn’t want to become Sufis, but they still grasping for some meaning on the societal and personal level. I wonder, what is it about the spiritual life that is valid to the people of an ancient tradition, that we can look at or re-look at today? And that’s what I thought was worth while exploring with you. So, I’ll ask you your thoughts about that. 

AV: The first thing I would say about megalithic sites and stone cairns like those at the top of the great hills overlooking half of Ireland, is that those are situated in very particular places. They don’t appear just anywhere. They are in very particular places and they require us to go to those places, which are wild. They are in nature. Sometimes you’re walking through herds of sheep in the high hills. Sometimes you’re walking through forests. But there are certain characteristics—certain aspects of those places. Sacred springs, holy wells—that speak from a very specific place—a specific area with certain kinds of characteristics that you can begin to identify and come to read like a language. And so it’s not that, from my perspective, there’s an opposition between what I call indigenous Europe and traditions from elsewhere or traditions that arise elsewhere because what we’re talking about is really about reading the language of nature, which is something that one can do elsewhere, but what I’m specifically pointing towards is that these monuments, these places, exist in Europe. And they are of Europe, and that’s significant, and by experiencing them—by hiking to one in the high hill country, you’re in some way contacting an entirely different way of seeing the world, because you’re literally, as well as figuratively, leaving the modern world behind and entering into another way of relating to the natural world and the natural world, not just as an assemblage of biology and geology, but as spiritual reality. Now Tibetan Buddhism, for example, offers particular disciplines and particular practices that may very well be helpful in understanding what we’re talking about in a different way and in a deeper way. And that’s fine as far as I’m concerned. There’s no inherit opposition between them. 

JC: Inclusiveness is what you’re talking about too—that sense that all could be included in that great term we call the spirit. 

AV: That’s right and the other thing is that because exoteric Christianity—you could say literalist Christianity is so far removed from what we’re talking about—it becomes necessary to find our way back to deeper connections to the natural world, often times through other traditions. It’s why you went to live among and engage with Australian Aborigines. It’s necessary to do that in order to understand more deeply the nature of Australian sacred places. There’s no other way. At the same time, what people often don’t realize is that there actually are sacred sites in Europe as well and we’re just not aware of them. We’re not familiar with them. 

JC: Thousands too. 

AV: Thousands, tens of thousands. It’s an extraordinary inheritance.

JC: It’s a Dreaming landscape—as we understand Aboriginal Dreaming, but in this case the Dreaming is gone. We have to find it. You’d have to find it where it’s not—and that’s the interesting thing. We’re talking about megalithic culture—like I was talking about the Torajans lost their capacity to write letters because they got washed away by a flood and they in a sense lost language. And the way that the megalithic cultures are no longer present, they are no longer with us, so we’re having to renew ourselves to the point where we’re extracting new information from old artifact and that’s where the spiritual life seems to me is buried in those stones and the rocks and the landscapes, etc., but we’ve lacked the specific tools to engage in that landscape outside of the normal popularization of Druidic activity and getting dressed up in costumes on certain days of the years, etc., which is perfectly fine, but I’m talking about something entirely different. That the spiritual life, at say Stonehenge, would’ve been rich—a tapestry of cultural activity that brought forth from the alignments and the specific arrangements if you’d like of nature at a given time of the year—that resulted in deeply spiritual significance. And that had a powerful effect on the culture to keep them together—keeping their stories together, keeping them figuratively speaking one shared language. Watch in the films how eagerly the Aborigines looked at the ritual that was being performed in front of them. They’d probably seen it fifty times, but it’s still terribly important to engage in that ritual activity in order to find a spiritual message. And at the end of that documentary, the Aborigines say, “Well, it’s all over, you can go home,” a surprisingly abrupt remark after three days of heavy-duty work on a ritual. But ultimately, that’s perfect because they’re just saying we’ve enacted the spiritual life in a certain kind of way—think about it, but we’re not going to say it. It’s all right, but that’s how they are: so people would say that’s pretty sort of matter of fact, but Aborigines are matter of fact. They don’t have that kind of courtesy that we would have. They would never say to you “thank you” if you did something for them. The word doesn’t exist. Why thank somebody? But we have a close relationship, I would do whatever I can and if I’ve got $2, that $2 is yours. The word “courtesy” is a European construct, and I very quickly realized I had to think differently in terms of Aborigines. People would say, “They didn’t thank you, James.” I would say, “Why would they?” We were engaged in something between us that doesn’t involve a thank-you note. And so in a sense, I’m saying that that spiritual life, which we’re talking about in the stones, we have to find a way to articulate it. And that ultimately comes down to the creative environment in which we like to place our souls and relationships and this material. That’s why I make such a to-do about language. How important language is and how important words are what they actually mean and what their etymology is, because you then slowly but surely are releasing imagination into the world that we’re pursuing, which is the spiritual light and my sense is that the spiritual light of these people both past and present is determined largely by processes—what’s the word? preambles, that are consistent right through the whole millennial history. You’re not grafting a new thing on, for example, sentences. People say, well, Christians, they brought asceticism into the world. Of course, that’s patently not true—we know that. But in a sense, it was clearly an important aspect of the spiritual life. It was a part of the language of the life—the ascetic life and I write about that a lot. I write about the ascetic life and even Christians can get quite upset—they say, “Well it’s not like doing good.” I say, “No, it’s got nothing to do with good works.” In fact, it’s outside that  preserve of good works, which you’re comfortable with, so that the ancient life that we’re talking about and its relevance today—it seems to me that we have to, in a sense, find a way of expressing what it would be like to be megalithic. All my life as a writer, I wanted to ask, “What is it like to be an Aborigine?” The empathy factor is quite important in that relationship, and if you’re a good writer, you can embark upon that journey, but that’s the journey that I’m talking about in terms of the spiritual life. Aborigines might know about ritual, initiation, pain, loss of identity, loneliness, being subincised, damaged, introduced to esoteric material at a certain time in the ritual activity. Kind of like a university for those young boys of nine, ten, eleven, when they go passing into the process of learning the spiritual life of their culture. And it seems to me that also is a part of what megalithic culture has yet to address in terms of the writing about it. It’s all of what we’ve discussed, and if you’re going to make it relevant to the twenty-first century, and to people who are all yearning. Of course, all of them as you know say, “Well, I respect trees. They’ve got spirit and the landscapes do to.” They go into these kind of wonderful joyous paeans about “I worship nature.” That’s the keyword. I worship nature. I don’t need to worship a God or I don’t need to go to church, etc. because I’ve got nature at my foot, but they actually don’t explore beyond that. They have no sense of what is the language nature is going to teach me about the spiritual life? And that’s where I’ve seen this discussion and the work that you’re going to do is going to lead to that perhaps in addressing our inheritance. 

AV: What is that you would say about the Dreaming and about your experiences living with Aborigines? Working with Aborigines during that, especially with that generation of men like Big Bill Neidjie [d. 2002, a Kakadu Aboriginal elder, the last native speaker of that language]. You had the good fortune to know such people, sometimes called men of high degree. They’re initiates within that tradition—a tradition that goes back tens of thousands of years. So what did you draw from them that could be of value or help for somebody in the modern world looking at, say, a megalithic site?

JC: I think that’s where we have to actually resuscitate concepts that most people find difficult to talk about publicly or indeed to address. And I do, when I talk, bring them up. And actually the response is usually very good, because someone has broken the ice, so to speak. But I would say, take just the example of prayer. Why is prayer so important? People say, “Oh, well, it’s a way to say hello to God, and say thank you very much for fulfilling my outstanding arrangements.” They don’t necessarily look at prayer—in general, they definitely don’t look at prayer—as a metaphysical discipline, not just a spiritual one. I say things like, “Well, consider asceticism.” Most people just can’t understand asceticism. It’s outside their periphery. Why do people live in monasteries and don’t engage with the opposite sex and basically live an hermetic life? It’s very hard for you to get across to modern people that ascetics actually are practicing a very particular discipline, which affects you right now because that monastery’s functioning isn’t a part of the spiritual machinery of our time. And if it’s not functioning, then there’s an empty shell, and so the monastery, I always say, is the cog, latching onto other cogs, throughout Europe, through the monasteries and for that matter in the mystics along the Nile River, etc. These people are functioning for us. In the spiritual life, you might think so or know so because you’re just—you just think of them as living in sheds or whatever. I say, “You’ve got to stop thinking like that. Don’t think about these people as being escapees from real life.” That’s the other line that people use: “Why don’t they engage and do good works?” I say, “They are doing good works, but it’s not good works that you’re talking about. It’s another form of good works.” It’s about refining sensibility. It’s about refining language. It’s about refining activity so you have a skepticism and you have prayer. And you have solitude and you have silence and you have a lot of things that entail the practical life of a monk or a nun that to outsiders seem like just a waste of time, because they don’t have any valid understanding of where they go because we’ve lost that knack. And so that the megalithic culture seems to me, if it’s brought into our world as a valid expression of the spiritual life, it allows one in fact to have a better, a clearer canvas because it’s actually not tainted by Christianity or anything else. You say, what’s prayer? It’s Christian. No, it’s pre-Christian. No, it’s also Pagan and let’s get back to that aspect of prayer. And slowly find the language that gives good expression to this new form of thinking that comes out of an ancient rocks—that’s the modernity that I was alluding to. 

AV: So you can see practices that entail a life in solitude and prayer within a Christian context that is not only Christian? 

JC: Absolutely. 

AV: And that’s part of what we’re talking about broadly in terms of spiritual life. It’s not good works in the sense of constructing a building for somebody. Although, there’s nothing against that, but it’s a different kind of good work. But how does that connect to what you learn from the Aborigines? 

JC: That’s where I’ve been and come from. And it took me many years to reframe the questions that I asked Aborigines, because as I went into it, I learned more, and so therefore you’re having to revise whatever your simplest question was three or four years before, or whatever. But ultimately I came away with a sense that Aborigines, when we were able to dialogue, saw things like prayer in a similar but different way to us. They wouldn’t pray in the kind of formal way that Christians do and I think Buddhist do as well. For Aborigines, prayer was largely a retreat from the real world. What they call is real—small r— is entering into a domain where their spirit and even their soul perhaps was enlarged and enhanced. And that could only come about by engaging in ritual. Ritual seems to me the missing link in all of the discussions made. They talk about ritual in a Catholic sense, but really it’s just kind of formalism that occupies the space for an hour and a half. It’s not the genuine sense of the ritual as we noticed in the Aboriginal ceremony when they were throwing the fire over the guys, getting burned, and that ritual had a very different sense about it than a priest holding up the wafer and saying da da da and formally going well, which is no longer a ritual per se. It’s just an act to give some sense to why people are in there in the first place. And that engagement physically between the man, the land, and the myth—to me is the bedrock of the spiritual life for Aborigines. So you can’t detach one from the other. You can’t say, “Well, go away and pray.” You say, “What’s prayer?” He said, “Well, you go away and dance.” Yes. That that is prayer. Or when they walk along the cave wall of the great serpent Jarapiri, and they pray. They pray all the way along that thing. They’ve got their prayers. They know the wall. But nobody would ask that question about Aborigines. They wouldn’t say, “Well, they’re a prayerful nation.” And probably Native American—they wouldn’t ask the question with a Native American prayer for nature or whether they practice asceticism. Yet yes, they do. Young boys, you off to the bush for three months. Survive. Take a boomerang and a spear or whatever, and you live there and you’ll be depressed and you’ll be distorted and you’ll be hated. But you’ll come back a man. So that asceticism is embedded in the ritual construct of becoming an adult, if you like. It’s not the asceticism that we understand in a Christian sense or in a Buddhist sense where they sit for a very long time and meditate. So when you can get those things working in your head from an ancient culture, then you can see “Oh, there is logic to this. Asceticism, prayer, solitude, silence are the four truths if you like of the ascetic life. I think that people would respond to that. I do think they will respond because it allows the freedom to say, “Well, I used to love nature but now I’m beginning to know why I love nature and I’m going to put a little more into it in terms of my prayer.” Even to pray—to pray—how many people pray? It’s considered to be a religious act rather than a genuine evocative act. And I find when I do discuss these things, which I inevitably do in public space, people respond quite well. They may get over the shock of it. You explain how things work. How an ascetic lives and what it gives to that person. Because that’s the other thing. People will ask the question, “What is it that a spiritual life is going to give you?” It’s quid pro quo stuff. I always say, “I can only tell you my experience with great spirituals is that what they offer is their presence and their presence is so powerful that it in itself is a prayer. And you’ve rubbed up against the prayer. And you walk away from it knowing what an extraordinary moment that has been in your life to rub up against that prayer in the presence in the condition of that man, that life, his soul, his going against the grain of his culture perhaps.” And if that’s teased out in a right way, not in an indoctrinating way, you will find people respond to it—my sense is that people want that. They don’t want Christianity and it’s old forms. They can’t stand Abrahamic culture, a vindictive law, an eye for an eye. Ditch that. Ten Commandments—well, they were relevant in their time, but I don’t know if they’ve got much going for them now. They can find all sorts of excuses to erase Christianity from their psyche, even though it’s embedded in them, because they’re people from that cultural inheritance. So that’s what I wanted to ask you—how you thought—and probably it’s just stimulating thinking about it—but the sense that there is a way forward as a creative writer. As you engage in this material, to bring forth from it, its essential, primordial metaphysic, that is spiritual. It’s not just an interesting set of concepts, that it touches you deeply and that people can be touched by it. And that therefore we start to frame the vocabulary of expression of a megalithic spirituality. It hasn’t been done. That’s why we’re talking about it. I tried to do it in Return to the Dreaming and you’ll see how I’ve worked it through. Coming to grips with landscape, voice, ritual, and the Dreaming itself—the myth. Blending them all together as a journey back along this timeline over the space to become who I am, and it ends in a rather beautiful way too. That’s what I’m talking about. And I think that is what you understand and I think you probably feel was that was not so much the missing link, but the thing you hadn’t arrived at yet in your research and your studies. You’ve just got a clear intimation it’s there. 

AV: That’s why I’m broaching the question of working with and being with Aboriginal people because it seems to me analogous that there’s much to be drawn from your experience as a highly literary sensibility drawing on and coming to understand that other perspective that’s so ancient and what we’re not talking about here necessarily, although it’s possible, but I don’t think we’re necessarily talking about Paganism as it’s usually understood. It’s more a question of how we are in relation to our own cultural pasts and our own roots in Western Europe. I think what’s happened in the last several hundred years is on the one hand, we’ve developed, coming out of Western Europe, extraordinary technological prowess. But at the same time, to a large extent, we lost our own roots. And there’s a degree to which in order to recover that, we need to come to terms with the significance, the meaning of our own history and our own roots. And that’s what I’m talking about. And part of that is what you’re referring to as the spiritual life, which is different than religious life. Religious life has to do with particular social aspects and what we’re talking about can manifest itself in religious life and often it does, as you’re referring to, in terms of manifestations, whether it’s ritual or social. But the spiritual has to do with the inner life and that’s where the challenge that you’re posing lies. And with regard to myth, something that we’ve referred to before, mythology is conceived often as separate category from literature. It’s a separate category in which we’re looking at the misguided beliefs of misguided people from the past. These kinds of artificial constructs, as it were, that they “believed in” in their benighted state, and of course that kind of perspective cuts us off from our own collective cultural origins. Materialist or literalist beliefs that automatically reject mythology cuts us off from meaning. And so a lot of what we’re talking about in terms of the relative disorientation and disconnection of contemporary European humanity either in Western Europe or in the islands, or for that matter, in North America or in Australia or elsewhere—the loss of roots can only be ultimately restored by going back and understanding in a deeper way the literary and mythological expressions of spiritual reality. That’s where what you’re talking about and writing about in terms of your experiences with Aborigines may be helpful. When Aborigines tell a story of the meaning, what are they telling the story of? 

JC: That’s a point I think I make in that little essay I gave you—is that essentially a myth—and by the way, I often use the word mythos because I want to break out of that sense that, as you say, words like “myth” are contaminated by pejoratives, so if you use the word “mythos,” you break away. Immediately if you can get language to do something it’s not used to doing, it arrests people in their reading process. Even words like “shaman”—everybody has a preconceived notion of a shaman and that’s it. They don’t actually know what a man of high degree is, he’s not a shaman, but he manifests the qualities of a high degree—thus putting him into a place where language comes into play. Where ritual comes into play. It’s not all about getting high on a drug and running around exalted. But that’s the perception, so I think one has to relook at the way language is used in the relationship to the expression of these ideas and also to have a sense that—with Aborigines in particular—it necessitated me going back and looking at the way their language was arranged on the page in terms of the words as best as they could be translated, but literally translated, not creatively translated, which is another dimension there too. But when you see the way words are placed on paper and the written that’s attached to the expression because that’s very important—like Gregorian chant. Ladadada. People said it was useless, but it’s actually a very finely expressed form of rhythm that gets to the bones. I don’t know if you notice how exact those young Aboriginal men were when they danced. They all landed exactly at the same time together. There was very little rehearsal or choreography, but they got it right because they’ve got the words in their mind that bring them into that relationship. I know it sounds so strange, but I think that we need to look at the way language is used in relationship to ritual, which is something that nobody has properly investigated. It’s in that parameter that the spiritual life is embedded. It’s just that it’s not embedded the way we are familiar with it. It’s hard enough to break with your own culture, but it’s even harder to rebuild another in your mind that gives meaning. And ultimately, I thought that why one should address a spiritual life and the idea of megalithic cultures as a modern issues is that it does allow people the opportunity, as you rightly point out, to go back to roots. But secondly, it’s the one way that’s probably left now in this day and age, to go back to meaning. Because meaning in essence is the ultimate expression of any ritual activity. You come away with meaning in your body. And that’s something that people just don’t address because they don’t understand what meaning is in context to the passage of spirituality or numen. Numen in voice. Numen in language. Numen in fate. Numen in sweat. Numen in the construct on the ground as we saw in Aboriginal ritual. Numen in megalithic stones at Stonehenge. All of those things—they are actually all together like cogs in a wheel, they move and they shuffle and they release energy for example. The cogs of the spiritual life are there to release a certain kind of energy into being and that is something that sounds materialist at one level, but actually it’s the only way people understand today if you can capture certain terms like I’ve just done. You can say, yes, I can understand—it’s got meaning. But ultimately you want people to understand that to embrace a cultural expression like this, it doesn’t mean that you suddenly become someone loopy, with a clover in your hair kind of way, that’s not what I’m getting at. That absolutely needs to avoided. Nor does it mean you have to give up being a Christian or Buddhist or—they’re the conventional means by which you’ve expressed yourself since childhood or that you’ve practiced and developed. But you can live more than one life spiritually. I can have Hermes on the wall and Christ next to him. Doesn’t bother me. I see them both all in the same kind of term of numen. And Aborigines do too. They go to church on Sunday. Listen to the prayer and haven’t said a word. And they go back and they’re back in the Dreaming and chatting away. I asked Mick about it. He said, “Well, I can do that. I can go to two places at the same time that are beautiful.” And I never forgot, in my book, I don’t know if you ever read my novel Toby’s Angel. You must’ve seen it. Well, the character, Ray, from Raphael the Angel.  Toby Gray was an allegory of golden fleece, by the way, Tobias and the angel. He said—the angel said, “I just go up and down in my mind.” And when people read that, they laugh and go, what a strange expression. I said, “Because an angel has the capacity to rise up and live in that domain. But he can come down here too. He’s going up and down.” He’s not going anywhere in life on the road because Toby said, “Well, where do you want to go?” Raphael said, “That doesn’t matter to me. I go up and down in my mind all the time. That’s my destination and journey.” And it seems to me that that’s the life of a megalithic man in his spiritual life. That needs to be worked on, because we haven’t done enough work in that area yet. We have a palimpsest here: we’re trying to play with ideas that are in our mind—almost a morphosis fashion, but we’re trying to dig deeper and find out why and what. That’s my sense of the spiritual life in relationship to this exploration of the megalithic. 

AV: What we’re talking about is primordial in the sense that when you go to a cairn high in the mountains, when you go to a holy well, which to reach you have to first of all find where the entrance is—maybe through a guide. Find the path. Then make your way along the path. And then you recognize it immediately when you’re there because there are signs and offerings. Those are primordial places—the top of a mountain overlooking the entire landscape, a spring where water is coming out of the earth pure and immediate, and you can look into the spring and see the darkness, out of which the water is coming. And it’s pre-mythological. It’s not necessarily that there’s a story that’s attached to it. Although there often is. But the kinds of places we’re talking about are primordial and archetypal—like going to the top of the mountain. Going in the cave. Crawling through its passage: a cairn is not just a pile of stones. It actually has passageways like birth canals in it as long as it’s still standing, that is, through which you crawl. Crawling through a birth passage into this area in which you can then sit or stand. And that too is primordial. It’s crawling through this passageway into a different world. So what we’re talking about is in some sense, pre-mythological, meaning prior to language, prior to fiction or poetry, but which can be given an expression through those things. And that then leads to thinking about the creation of literature not just as—the creation of mythology—not just as what exists frozen in the past, but in some sense, can reach expression in new ways today. What would you have to say about the role of literature in terms of expression of the primordial? 

JC: It’s a question that I grappled with for most of my writing life. My feeling is that literature has a role to play in primordial expression, and I think that primordialists of the past—people like Guénon and Coomaraswamy, while they didn’t necessarily address language in the way we’re talking about, possibly hadn’t reached the point of understanding how linguistics and language essentially are a part of the spiritual life—it’s like a graft. I grapple with it for a long time and it got to the point where as a writer, there was no alternative but to grasp the nettle of finding new expression within the constraints of the English language and its rules and regulations so to speak. But nevertheless, find a way to make more vivid the metaphoric life of language. Does that make sense? Make more vivid the metaphoric life of language, which as you know in the last 150, 180, or 200 years, is that the reductionism of industrial life in England and later on in elsewhere, flattened out language to extinguish its richness. Language became more efficient at doing what it does because it conveys information quickly. Give me that flat. Give me that wrench bucket. On and on and on it goes. And so the language is—language as hyperbole—has been lost. And one of the things I used to love about Aborigines when they do those dances they do, was they get so excited and so angry if you didn’t say it the right way. And then they’d say “I’m the one that puts this show on. Who is he?” An act of hyperbole. People would say that’s just boasting. It’s not. He’s saying, “I’m the essential ingredient to make this thing come alive. I deserve recognition as much as the song itself.” Wow, I love that. It’s just the sense of power that’s in their voice and when they discuss these, particular in those ritual environments, they get very heated with one another. They’re going to knock each other out. It’s not that—they’ve allowed their chests to ventilate language in a way that changes them from being an ordinary Aboriginal that’s just coming off the back of a truck to somebody that’s already coming in touch with the other and that’s why it’s essential to paint people up. Put all that stuff in. Red on their face. Change their whole appearance because they’re already moving out of the normal space of life into the surreal into the super-real space, and that I’m sure is an essential part of the megalithic way, if that’s not too tired a term. But it’s the sense that they have very particular mechanisms for accessing the spiritual life, which then translate into all sorts of ramifications for society, ethics, love, emotions, moral, danger. All the things that go on—I’ve never ever had a sense that Aboriginals didn’t have a high ethical stance in everything they did. Far more than we did. So there are a lot of times that they say, “You can’t do that.” No, you can’t do it. It’s against the culture. We wouldn’t do that, we’d tolerate the difference in the terms of ritual—it’s all right. If he wants to kick up his feels now, it’s fine because it’s personal expression. They don’t like that. It’s got to be straight on the line. That’s the way it’s been for 2,000, 10,000, 20,000 years. That quality evokes in most 20th, 21st century people a sense that their freedom is being taken away. And that’s the key to it. People think if I can’t give my own expression to this, then I’m no longer a free person and to overcome that is one of the difficult things of making relevant a megalithic spirituality if you’d like. Because people would say I don’t want to go back there. I don’t want to sit for an hour and then say the Jesus prayer or whatever. I just want to pick this stuff up as I want to, like I do with this machine in my hand. But that’s where I think literature in the old primordial sense has some role to play. And it has to do with how you use language. How you play with it as I suggested in that piece we read last night. That there is an element of play in all ritual. I think here of the book by Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, arguing that most activities that man engages in are an elaborate play, ludic—that play is an essential part of our souls and modern man is—I don’t know what the Latin word is for efficiency, Homo efficiensis is a modern construct, for man was never like that in the past. He liked to play. He liked to have his festivals throughout the year and the ritual because that gave meaning to life. And the temple gave meaning to life. And the megalith gave meaning to life and that I’m sure will resonate with the modern mind that doesn’t want to revisit Augustine or a couple of texts by great Buddhists. They wouldn’t want to go there because it’s too serious for them. So my sense is that that’s where the spiritual life inside this new envelope we were discussing will challenge a writer. It’ll challenge you. I started it. I did start it and I’ve gone a way along the path, and I feel Palace of Memory I shared with you was essentially about transcendence—having to do with hidden knowledge. It was all about how men find meaning in growing vegetables, feeding a tortoise, getting a philosopher to engage with you among the flamingos in the garden. There’s a quite complex interrelationship between nature and ideas in the garden. It’s not just a bunch of philosophers wandering around. There’s a whole wonderful sequence, which you’ll love. There’s a Chinese fellow named called Ko Hung comes to town. He gets off the boat at Palermo, and he meets the geographer that I was talking about. And I have him going down to the docks every day to meet people to get new ideas and he draws Ko Hung into King Roger’s world and he gets him into the garden. Why? Because Ko Hung comes to the places as an alchemist, but he also comes as an escapee because everybody wants him, since he makes gold. But finally because he knows herbs. He knows plants. And there’s almost two chapters, I think, where Ko Hung and what he represents in terms of flowers and plots is absolutely surreal, but I took it from ancient Chinese texts. I didn’t make it up. I merely gave it its new dressing in terms of a man who comes from China and ends up in Palermo and becomes a friend of King Roger. And that’s sort of language that the writer is going to have to deal with. You have to break down the barriers when you think, “Well, I can’t use this because it has historical associations that I can’t extract it from.” I’m saying you can. You’ve got to find a way to do it. So I found through a Chinaman—Chinese people, they didn’t get much mention in Europe, because there were very few of them. But there were Hindu temples in Alexandria pre-Christianity, because travelers came from India and places like that, so people like our friend Plotinus were familiar with that in his time. Down the road was a Hindu temple, and there were Hindu priests and when you talk to people from India, you get different perspectives from life. So the writer today has to draw on that new configuration through language and careful use of metaphor that he wouldn’t have done in the past. He would just write on, get the characters moving, get them talking, through in a bit of patchwork locale, and off you go. That’s what I’m excluding. I put it in. But it’s allusory. It’s not there in the modern realist sense. It’s put in there—usually within that context there’s always something going on again underneath the surface of whatever I’m describing in terms like Ko Hung coming into town and when he’s buried. They buried him—and later, when they opened the coffin, they found nothing. Just his neatly rolled clothes and his hat. [laughs] He disappeared. In other words, he was an illusion from the first place. You couldn’t do that in normal realist literature. You have to find this totally different way of expressing things that’s satisfactory enough for young readers to understand, “Oh we’re in Palermo.” And the Palace of the Normans is down the road, but the Palace that I’ve created through the paintings on the roof of the churches and things like that, in the book—because the character of Roberto goes in there to have a look at it and then he has a complete break, his mind completely loses contact with reality through the images coming down upon him—streaming down these Christic images. He embarks from that point on into the garden. The hardest thing was to find a way to get him into the garden in the real time today without the readers saying that can’t happen. I had to find a way of doing that and I did it by finally putting him in the church of the Palace of Normans, the tessarae and the colors and the light—all of that basically became hallucinatory, if you like. That allowed him to get into the garden, and then I was off with the garden at my disposal. So that’s what I’m talking about: the way you conduct your images and the way you address your metaphors. You have to create new metaphors. But you have to do it specifically. You’re not just going to do it for effect. You want your metaphors to be in the text. You don’t want them to be eroded or got rid of as in modern language—the idea of a metaphor is very low in the order of writing space, but allegory, metaphor, symbolism—all of those things have to be given a more robust life in contemporary literature from my point of view for this kind of writing to present itself, which allows things like the visitation of the megaliths to come alive. To come alive!

AV: What we’re talking about really in part is the renewal of literature through reintroduction of origin, reintroduction of the primordial. It’s not that it’s artificial—what we’re talking about in the sense of artificially creating some kind of ancient or quasi-ancient tradition. It’s about making things new again. It’s about renewal in the literal sense of re-new and what’s being renewed comes out of nature. It comes out of a new sense of nature and what it means to be human that is somehow also archaic. In some sense, it’s both archaic in ancient and it belongs to the future. And it in that sense, what we’re discussing is both the origin of culture and the renewal of culture. 

JC: Absolutely and I think that the issue of literature as you earlier expressed is, while it sounds quite facile because it’s the sort of the thing that people say, “That tree speaks to me.” What they don’t quite understand is that when we say, “nature speaks to us,” to me that’s an immensely challenging linguistic problem because it is trying to attach the idea that nature has a language that we understand in the real sense and the primordial sense. But that we have failed to recognize that the language that we think nature is speaking to us is not the language we think it is. And so from a writer’s point of view, when I say you have to refine your metaphors, you have to change the way you put your metaphor together, not for effect. You’ve got to be very careful that the metaphor you create is embedded in a real sense of its rightness. And that way, if I was to say, “Well, when we open up the leaf of a tree, we measure it mentally. We know its shape roughly and we accept all of those accoutrements of a leaf as being a leaf.” We don’t then look at the leaf any more in that. We won’t say, “Well, what is the meaning of leaf? What is its leafness?” And that’s the key to this kind of writing. That you’re trying to release through metaphor and the other things that you’re using the timelessness of the sentence. I told you about that a few days ago when I say the sentence has to be timeless—time has to be removed for it in order for that sense to become more spiritually compressed. Then when you look at the leaf and say, “How does that leafness affect me?” The only way you can do that is through a new metaphor. A new way of writing. You just can’t say the leaf is green, it grows on trees, it falls, it’s deciduous, it’s shaped like—that’s irrelevant, because I want leafness. That’s where the genuine literary process comes into play and that’s the hardest thing. And you have to be intellectually well equipped, but you have to be spiritually well equipped because you’re grappling with the leafness as an expression of deep primordiality, and when you write it and you get it, you got it. You know when you’ve suddenly hit a metaphor in those poems in which I gave you yesterday. You’ll find there a range of startling metaphors carefully thought, worked, constructed in order to break the rhythm of the line, the sensibility, the verbosity, you feel like, so that as the reader, you say right, where am I now? I’m saying you’re in the Dreaming. I’m trying to take you into the Dreaming through a poem, so that you no longer see the real world outside. I want this poem to be your only reality for the given time that you’re in it. And that’s different than just the normal literary process, which as we talked about earlier, has got the gap between it and the Real. And one’s trying to find that return to primordiality in language and that’s why etymology and Greek and Latin, for us at least, Sanskrit for somebody like yourself who has contact with that ancient language, you go back to that time and time again. I’ve got a Latin dictionary. I don’t speak Latin, but I know it. It’s in my blood. I did study it, so I know how to construct it, but I can’t say that I can ever read fully or speak Latin. I’d love to do it. That’s the same with Greek. Those are our tools and so I think one has to—if we’re getting to that new language in literature, which expresses the primordial, which expresses the megalithic culture, you have to go to those extreme limits to find that language. I’d be very careful about the way it’s being used down to every color. Every nuance. Every adjective. Hemingway never liked adjectives, and said they should never be used. But actually, they’re there, and you have to occasionally use them because they do have an effect, so I’m never going to take that austere kind of posture myself. One has to allow adjectives to creep in occasionally, because they’re beautiful words too. So that’s what I mean when I say a spiritual life within this context relies on this new journey—old journey, new journey. Back into the way language constructs itself and that comes from leafness and finding a way to get the leaf literally to do its job on us and that I think will release this kind of power that Aborigines and the ancient peoples of prehistoric Europe would have understood and made it understood because they had two languages. They had their day language and their secret language. I remember telling you about the way that they have two languages and sometimes three to express certain realities. We have got to have that sense of a double or treble language and what I said to you that I in the book Palace of Memory, the king has a name and he has his body. That was a deliberate articulation of the idea that Name, or Logos, if you like, must be in a sense attuned for its own sake. Not just that’s King Roger down there, he’s rotting. His name is intrinsic to his essential soulness, and adjacent to but separate from flesh, so again that sense of how do you make this language that we’re talking about work in strange oddities like that or Ko Hung wandering through all these herbs and creating a whole new space intellectually and spiritually in a garden who was dedicated to European virtues and things like that. So as a writer, you asked earlier what advice you’d give to a young writer—it is the essential need to do a lot of spade work early in your career when your ideals are not congealed in terms of reading broadly across cultures and understanding the contiguity between the two or three or five and being happy with it. It might take you years to actually acquire it, I was thinking about this conversation in which we were chattering away about Plato and Plotinus and this woman who overheard us was wondering, where am I? This is not a normal world. This must be that other language. Right? For her it was probably a breath of fresh air because she’d never heard this kind of talk, but we are so confident in that world not as scholars or as academics or whatever, but because we’ve actually taken it in our body. That it’s the leafness of the culture that is now a part of our construct so when you and I talk or when I talk to our friends, they always say well, you bring so much history to the table and you always know where to find things. I say yes, only because it’s in my blood. It’s no longer something that I picked up from a book. 

AV: That’s the other end of the spectrum of what we’re talking about in some respects, but they’re connected. On the one hand, being in the natural world, being in a primordial place, coming to understand that anew for the first time in that archaic way is where we started, but where we’re concluding is also the importance of culture, and culture as the summation, as drawing from what’s gone before and expressing that in a second language—a language which is not that of efficient, bureaucratic, orderly, mechanical speech, but rather a secret language, which requires a deeper understanding and it requires all of that cultural familiarity in order to be able to work within it and so on the one hand, you have primordiality. And on the other hand, you have the summation of cultural knowledge that you’re drawing from, and both of those are actually necessary. By talking about the first, we weren’t suggesting a kind of Rousseauian posited life as a blank slate in nature, but rather on the one hand, going back to origins, and on the other hand, not rejecting but fully understanding and absorbing the totality to the extent one can of one’s cultural inheritance. And both of those things are necessary. 

JC: Yes, are you conscious of that distance of yourself from other people in the way that I’ve expressed it?—that there are certain people, like you and I, who are knowers rather than watchers? I expressed in the Trilogy that we are knowers. We were watchers. We’ve made it our business to become knowers rather than just watchers. You can be both at the same time, but the watcher is somebody that accepts with due diligence what is being offered, whereas a knower is somebody that says, “But the secret story on the churinga is underneath it and I’ve got that, you don’t.” Do you feel that sometimes? 

AV: Yes, of course. And perhaps that’s a perfect place to end.

JC: [delighted laughter].