‘The Allure’ is a companion piece to Phillip Hall’s previous article for The Blue Nib, ‘Hounded’, which can be accessed here
I am the eldest of six, born into a fervent, modest and loving family. Evangelical Christianity was our cornerstone, always nurturing and sufficient – until, for me, it wasn’t. Holding onto God has been like clutching at a handful of water, no matter how careful, you just know it will seep out somewhere. My hands remain wet, but the promise is gone. As a young man I lost a baby son, and then a few years later, exactly ten weeks apart, I lost both my younger brothers in separate accidents. I side-stepped grief counselling, instead brawling with heartache, survivor guilt and trauma on my own. And religion was an absolute failure in consoling or explaining. I felt bereft:
The Moment of Death
is as significant as taking a dump, there are no
prayers, no new age
trite words beyond words
I have unwrapped a son
born too soon in an afternoon’s bloody mess
of wrenched bedding
I had a brother, broken and leaking, die
fallen in scenic wonder and collected in my lap
the unraveling long wait for air
ambulance retrieval
Another in hospital with tubes
and drugs and things it was my decision
on doctors’ advice, to turn off
life support and watch
colour drain
Perhaps because of our rather baroque
sacramentality, I am addicted
to aesthetic minimalism, to a vigil
suffused with the labored breathing of the dying breath
that falters in farewell
Mine is the failed breath of those keeping watch
the strain of nostalgia, the incandescence
of loss
But the closest I now get to any
ascetic tradition of ecstasy and insight
is lifting stuff
at the gym, or drunkenly
slicing up my thighs to tip my toes
in the pool of blood coagulating
neatly on the floor
My mum came from a long line of problem drinkers and gamblers, she knew grog’s damage, and as a consequence, for her, we were proudly tea-total. But as I became consumed with my grief, seeking divergence in over-work, grog became my escape, my natural way to relax and wind-down:
Bacchus In Ruins
(As meals are made for laughter, so wine gives joy to life
but indiscretion sprouts wings. Ecclesiastes 10:19-20)
The Luftwaffe exposed
Bacchus beneath rubble, twice born of fire and nursed in rain
a dual gendered, liberated boundary, lounged in disarray
the grace of Bacchus is our release
into pleasure, where prayers
to a fennel staff topped with a pinecone might
adjust unshackled abandon and
sadness:
‘In drinking wine, we drink him’ wrote
Euripides in The Bacchae, but in this contest
to be the ‘one true vine’ I have drowned
in fundamentalism rushing to rub myself out, to empty
cask and glass in the mirror
of precepts: ‘to thine ownself be true’:
I am soursob weeded shit
sniffed on unwashed fingers, and I thirst
to gape camel-like at hubris and catastrophe
ah, I resent every day surrendered
to moderation, the guttural groaning
that celebrates order, a life denuded
of ecstasy and defeat:
I am fallen
not to revelry, but to self
hatred, lust
for transcendence, and my appeal
for guilt free suicide is the poured libation
of metastasis with treatment denied:
Nonetheless, I still love all those
suburban honeyeaters under clear
blue, spring rich skies, but
even in sunshine, my worth is shrouded
and I’m stuck self-medicating against
the blue.
Within a few years I was drinking about a litre of wine every day. And, unfortunately, grog not only gave me some letup to my stress and anxiety, it also gave me license to self-harm by cutting. Self-harming was not something I chose or planned, so I didn’t need to rationalize it to myself or my partner. It was just something that started to happen every month or so as the pressure-cooker inside me needed release:
blood lust
why do I need blood
to leech from my thighs and pool
at my toes, to make plain
the pain I feel
why does my spirit stress
greater secrecy for the gashes
I have made than for my own
anus I am ashamed, and addicted
to slashes entrances
onto me
but still I want my children (&
~their partners) to process
past my naked scarred, stiff trunk
and see me
Of course, like my drinking, cutting started as pretty mild, slowly becoming more severe as I needed to see more blood to feel release. Eventually I had a big breakdown in late 2014 which resulted in a suicide attempt and period of hospitalisation. I guess this was the circuit breaker I needed, forcing me to submit and get help. I now drink far less, and go for long periods when I don’t drink at all, which is a boon for my mental health. Grog is my gateway to despair.
I have been blessed with family who have stuck by me when I have surrendered to so much mischief, and I have also been lucky with the professional help I have received. One psychologist, knowing the dangers grog threatened me, and knowing my obsession for Australian Football and The Western Bulldogs (my local team) got me substituting alcohol with footy cards. So now, instead of counting change secretly for my cloak-and-dagger grog, I openly save my pennies for footy cards. And as my collection grows, the grog giant dissolves:
The Passion of Cards
for Martin Axelsson & Steve Wang
Pulling into Flinders Street Station I’m on guard
against all those four-litre, fourteen-dollar casks
once secreted into the corners
of my home,
grog’s mouthful giving
license to mischief:
Exiting
the station I need to pee
so, bee-line to the NGV
I only work
in a clean stall:
Now I channel spirit
into footy cards, considering
the cost
of each indulgence against
another cask not drunk:
Consequently, I have a calling
to Card Zone and should
have departed at Flagstaff but don’t know the way
so awkwardly
I pick a path the length of Swanston:
My consolation:
not tempted outside Clocks at Flinders
(a welcome bar) where Mirka Mora drenches
my morning in irreverent, wide-eyed
children, animals and angels all captivated
in a longed-for garden mural:
At home I now count
change openly
my family teasing, which card my new quarry:
I collect
only Doggies (female and male),
and arrange each token
in guernsey number so
with each purchase the whole
collection must be freed
and reassembled:
This album travels
close, a passenger
of cards against pints;
it gathers signatures, medals and cups
and is a portrait gallery
of an evolving player list as I track
down those who managed
a handful of breakout games before injury’s cull; all custodians
of ephemeral, fantastical feats; and from these sleeves
proof I belong.
I can no longer work, so am home alone (unsupervised) for long periods of time. My clever partner anticipated this as a problem. The solution was as perfect as it was simple. I needed a dog to keep me sober, loved and needed. She adopted for me a rescue greyhound – genius! But I am lucky for more than my partner and hound. I also have four miraculous adult children who are never embarrassed by my brokenness, and periods of hospitalisation, by the mental illness that has come to define too much of who I now am. They reassure me by spoiling me. I am lucky and connected. And their love and nurture gets me through:
Spring Symphony
for my daughter, Ceinwen, who took me to ‘The Planets’
after Gustave Holst & the Hammersmith Socialist Choir
Our places booked
we are headed for Hamer Hall’s passage,
a train our preferred carriage:
So now she takes me by the hand, leading me
                out the door to ramble
                                                       into Sunshine:
           Every garden bed blooms
oranges, mauves and pinks, while lawns
are studded with soursob yellows and the dandelions’ airy
white globes:
                       The nature strips’ green grid
is an upright haunt
of flowering gums, paperbarks and callistemons; while casuarinas
are encased in deeply furrowed, dark, hard bark with canopies of wire-like
foliage and inflorescences grouped in whorls
                                               forming short cylindrical spikes:
Such a harvest
of seed and honey eaters, and above
it all – a Tullamarine flight path and daylight moon:
Exiting Flinders early we cross the Yarra for more gardens
a picturesque land where purple pea has been cast
a life line in the ark, and we are free:
She takes me to bronzed pathfinders
where a male nude is a hammer thrower in action
while a female nude is still a reclining water nymph, waiting:
But her impatience subsides
into childhood at Genie, a kitten fantasy
where delight has wings, and other children
now climb and play:
At Hamer Hall we ride
escalators down to glittering
sunken walls where anticipation is a crystal
pulse and flicker:
Seated in this concert hall, my back is that little bit straighter
in my vintage Footscray guernsey
because to soar as a Doggie
was once grounded in union patronage; and patriotism
is also a Holst hymn for the Hammersmith Socialist Choir
where ‘This Hath I Done for My True Love’; while sacraments
are a Morris Dance before the altar
as the kneeling Red Vicar is Christ Militant with incense,
swinging in the bell tower: remember
victims of the bleak midwinter:
Holst loved Hardy’s green forsaken land, redeemed
in a Commonwealth’s News
From Nowhere where working class brass
bands and socialism could be delivered
with a trombone from a bicycle’s saddle:
Here the movement of bodies
is a symphonic haunting
of us all;
though Mars is a storm
where chromatic major triads sprawl
across staccato, and the slow heave of bassoon and horn
is a defeat in growing menace; but Venus is peaceful, resigned
nostalgia, sighing
with relief as Neptune’s wordless and off-stage female
chorus recedes to eternal silence:
And in memory
of Jupiter’s jollity
I am in tears, bustling
currents of shifting
stress, adjusting a hitched-up
spirit once again held
in a daughter’s hands.
Phillip Hall publishes the e-journal Burrow
I am so thankful of my partner (Jillian Hall), my four children (Rhiannon, Aidan, Ceinwen & Kian), my parents (Joan & Ray) & my two brindle boy greyhounds (Charlie Brown & Billy Blue). I am nothing without family.
Powerful words. The landscape is out-standing, full of images that speak of place.
Those words of emotions that lie close to the skins surface are, glittering.
Alluring poetry!
Thank you, Margaret. That is very generous & kind. It was very easy writing this in the safety of my own library, but I feel a little uneasy now, but we are all confessional now, I guess.
This is so moving Philip and the poetry strikes deep. i particularly love the last poem and was uplifted. i also love that music! Powerful, brave and uncluttered work. Thanks.
Thanks you, Robyn. Your positive response to my work is something I will cherish. Ah, the music of Holst (a utopian communist dreamer with enough generosity & vision to inspire us all – I love him)!
You’re welcome Phillip. Yes I often play ‘Venus’ before sleep’. I travel away with it ….