As alluded to earlier, my Graphology cycle of poems has been ‘in progress since 1995 and was/were collected in three volumes as Graphology Poems 1995–2015 (Kinsella 2016c).2 The graphology poem included below, however, is from a subsequent series entitled ‘Graphology Soulaplexus,’ which explores (as the name suggests) interactions between not so much the ‘soul and body’ in the metaphysical sense, as the ‘soul’ as in the networks that make up the natural world. My main concerns are the disturbances between human desire to understand and respect nature and humanity's simultaneous sad and devastating urge to exploit and profit from it. In these poems, the key is the observer's status vis-a-vis the subject, and the subject's autonomy, or lack of it. What are the politics of observation, and what are their consequences to the observed/subject? The soul being presumably unquantifiable and non-empirical, we express our grasping for order through quantifying and calibrating what we see around us – even our own bodies. Likewise we seek to control time, the ultimate uncontrollable, by measuring and adhering to its supposed control of us. And data flows into the poem because the soul seeks a measure, to set itself in a material world.

The other two poems included here are also concerned with the intangible in terms of the measurable, the observable. Facts and ‘hauntings’ might seem like contraries, but they are of the organism of existence – of the plexus, the network of veins and concepts. In the Bell Clapper, we have mathematical precision in the spiral, and we can trace and map it, but we also have the associative diversions of language prompted by observation (comparative language, figurative language, spiritual language).

Evelyn Araluen's Dropbear (2021) contains what I consider one of the best stanzas in ‘Australian poetry’:

Because to hold him is to hold the tree that holds these birds I cannot name, and a word spoken here might almost sound like home

This is from ‘Learning Bundjalung on Tharawal’, and Araluen is a descendant of the Bundjalung Nation. What makes this stanza so potent is the language-searching of the poem that holds it – learning names, knowing words that come out of a totemic relationship with country means knowing bird or plant in essential and consequential ways. Earlier in the poem, we read:

Dropbear is a book-work of incredible depth and complexity – complex in its structure, and also, as Derrida thought things need to be when under pressure, complex in its thinking. It meticulously excoriates colonial storytelling in which allegory is trauma operating insensitively and with disturbed and cruel irony. A poem such as ‘Mrs Kookaburra Addresses the Natives’ satirizes such story-making while gaining intensity through modulating tone from adult telling to children's reception, and exposing many levels of patronising crypto-mythmaking. We read later in ‘Appendix Australis’ of ‘atavistically charged Banksia Men with their skinny black legs and wide black mouths’. Araluen's poetry ridicules and exposes the Gibbs story's inversion of who the threat to children's lives actually was (official white government policy). Dropbear is a book of agency and recuperation.

My interior dream-world of writing has always been dominated by two apparently utterly polarized and incompatible fantasies.

One fantasy is that of the tome, and, in its logical extension, the library. As a child, I dreamed of one day possessing a library whose walls would be lined with leather-bound volumes from floor to ceiling. Images of Sir Walter Scott’s library at Abbotsford from the 1970s tourist magazine In Britain, for which my post-expatriate parents had a subscription, provided the visual template for my imaginations. I was so determined to realize this dream that I even created my own fake leather-bounds out of cereal packets, with wrap-around carboard covers and horizontal stripes across the spines to mimic the stitching ribs. The monumental volume of impressive girth retains for me a magical appeal, its mass and density in inverse proportion to its elusiveness as a presence within my own oeuvre. Nothing I have ever written myself has ever attained the tangible completeness of such a book, nor have I ever managed to accumulate the sheer number of pages that such a tome ought to have, always symbolized by magical numbers such as 500 or 1000. Perhaps one day, however, released from any necessity to pander to readerly stamina, the constrictions of publishers’ budgets, or any other such practical considerations, I will compose that opus magnum of such proportions, a true encyclopaedia that contains everything that could be possibly said about the subject. That book would be a library of Alexandria in miniature, a fabulous compendium of the knowledge of the world.

The Coopers Across Three Continents

In the nineteenth century, letters formed the inner fabric of any family relationship, whenever members were separated, temporarily or permanently, by war, emigration, prison, marriage or the search for work. The correspondence of the Cooper family demonstrates the importance of letter-writing for sustaining family bonds across space and through time. They illustrate several of the points already made about letter writing in Chapter 12, but they also show how correspondence enacted family relationships and made kinship connections a reality.

The Cooper epistolary consists of 381 letters, mostly concentrated in the 40 years between 1859 and 1889. They have been carefully transcribed and annotated (with only the occasional error and omission) by a descendant. Some are torn, incomplete or eaten away by silverfish. The majority have survived intact, some along with their envelope, wherever one was used.

The correspondence linked an extended family which centred around Maria Cooper, born Maria Louisa de Smirnove in London in 1804 or 1805 (the name was later anglicised, becoming Smirnoff). Maria was related to Russian nobility; she was educated at the prestigious Smolny convent in St Petersburg, then reserved for daughters of noble families. Her father served in the Tsar's diplomatic service until he was assassinated in Rotterdam when Maria was only 10 years old. We do not know how she met her husband Leonard Cooper II, but she married him in Madras when she was

23. He served in the British colonial administration, eventually becoming High Sheriff of Madras. The family correspondence maintained these historical links with Russia and India.

‘The ecological crisis we face is so obvious that it becomes easy – for some strangely or frighteningly easy – to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected’ (Morton 2010, 2). This maxim may provide the basic tenet of what Morton calls ‘the ecological thought,’ and of other theories that consider the inextricably connected nature of various global systems (Servigne and Stephens 2020, 39–40) and paradigmatically exemplified by the (at that moment of writing still raging) global COVID-19 pandemic…but it also explains poetry. What does poetry do? Why do we write it or read it? Do we write it or read it because of what it does? What when it fails to do what we want it to do? Does it change the world? Does it change anything? Is it supposed to change anything, or is it simply? I ask these questions because I am aware that in this day and age, poetry is almost universally discounted as a trivial, precious ‘aesthetic’ pursuit that has little relevance to the world of economics, politics, or public affairs. Pupils and students hate it, teachers detour around it, the public does not read it, and it becomes more and more difficult to publish it. But its residual presence is nonetheless so imperious, if only as a hollow in the civic landscape, the fact that ‘it survives | In the valley of its making’ (Auden 1975, 142) is so quixotic that we must wonder at its persistence, and pursue the question of its mode of insistence.

Orpheus's Post-Creation Song

Trees are dwellings but houses are knocked down when it suits those more powerful than those who occupy the house. Analogies won't help people see the necessity of preserving habitat – only connection or reconnection with habitat will bring great shifts within globalized localities. Each of us operates under our own bodily and emotional needs, but we also consider the needs of others, especially those with whom we share familial and communal connections. Others’ needs can become justification for a personal action of degradation as much as altruism or responsibility or obligation is necessitated out of those same relationships. In reconfiguring a relationship with global habitat as well as local habitat, it seems to me that a return to orality/aurality or gestural conveyance, to word of mouth, to ‘writing’ through biodegradable very temporary marks, is the literacy of biospheric health, through signs made by the body itself. Story-telling is both a shared and specialized art – communities are sustained by storytelling which become a creative repository of knowledge, a phantasm of data and implication.

This year as I go jogging up the mountain behind the house on the lower slopes of Kozjak, I see three snakes on three successive days. The first two encounters are barely even sightings. I hear more than I see: a brief rustle in the grass and the glimpse of the tip of a tail disappearing among the tussocks and aromatic bushes. On the third day, there is a real meeting: a snake crosses the track in front of me, zigzagging across the rough-cast concrete only a few metres ahead of my feet. I slow and swerve to let it make its crossing, but do not stop or turn tail (unlike the day I nearly stumbled on a brown snake up on Mount William, when my flight-reflexes worked a hundred times faster than my brain). I merely utter a loud ‘Whoaaa!’ expressing surprise and admiration – not fear. As far as I can see, it is not the nose-horned viper, the infamous Poskok, so this one must be fairly harmless – perhaps it's merely a karst meadow viper (Vipera ursinii macrops), the planinski žutokrug. What grabs my attention most is its progress – a lithe, serpentine movement across the ground that propels it with astonishing speed into the grass off the side of the track. The snake appears to have, even better, to be mobility in itself. It doesn't move an immobile body using identifiable limbs; rather, the whole body appears to be a sinuously motility. Each of the 150 ribs, with its attendant muscles and scales, may be used as a contact point and a thrust focus, whether to the side, as in undulatory movement, or downwards, as in the caterpillar movement.

One of my colleagues makes a couple of very apposite points about new materialisms and posthumanism. One approach to new materialism, he says, would be to use it as a filter for seeing how texts portray the world: do they depict matter as inert or as alive? This, however, he points out, denudes new materialism of any innovative force whatsoever. (It merely coopts the new materialism as the latest in a line of -isms that are then coupled to the rather tired paradigm of ‘representation’, itself a successor to the earlier listings of ‘the theme of […]’.) The second approach, he suggests, is to look for the ways that texts embody in their more experimental manifestations, new materialism and its perspectives, by deviating from the norm of the book as we have come to know it. This, however, assumes a norm that is coded as non-material. These two approaches both defuse the potential force of the new materialist approach by leaving other ways of seeing, and other academic practices around the text intact (Schmerold 2019, 6). In a very similar manner, a few pages further on, he makes a cognate point about Braidotti’s posthumanist agenda. He shows that posthumanism repeats most of the standard repertoire of critical humanities tenets with which we are familiar: the injunction to work across disciplinary boundaries, or to criticize self-reflexively the assumptions of our intellectual endeavours and the positions we work from. (Auto-critique functions here as a replacement for action rather than as a spur to altered action, thereby reinforcing the well-known role of academia as a ‘containment’ of otherwise unruly forces within society.)

What binds the stories in Old Growth?

Technically, a concise use of language – an attempt to ‘capture’ more than is apparent in as few words as possible. Even in the longer stories, this is the raison d’être – to let place and event make intense exchanges through evocations of particular language. I am strongly interested in the ‘colloquial’ and how we ‘see’: so there are maybe strange mergings of sight and sound. On a thematic level, the threads – sometimes overt, sometimes more subtextual – that run through all the stories are ‘enravelled’ around isolation and alienation, but with an ongoing desire for connection: to people, to the land, to something that is hard to pin down.

Whether it is loss imposed by forces outside one's control, or something almost catastrophic brought on by one's own actions, that loss is given ways out, ways to redeem itself, to find anchorage. I suppose, in the end, I am interested in ‘justice’ and egalitarianism for all people and all living things, especially when they are under pressure from external forces and wrestling with internal uncertainties. It's almost a case of working and reworking the unbalanceable equation – never giving in, wanting to find hope even where it seems elusive or impossible.

There's always something ‘strange’ at the edges of even the most mundane action or circumstance – selling desk-sets in the city can be as loaded an emotional condition as a child wishing the annihilation of an oppressive parent.

On a hot night laying on top of the sheets watching lightning flashes without rain, fire could arrive so fast we’d barely be able to rise.

These are the conditions of crisis, a crisis we make by increments—portions— on a hot night laying on top of the sheets.

In declaring war on fire, governments distract from their ‘growth!’ and ‘development’ refrains, fire could arrive so fast we’d barely be able to rise.

Some people will have a chance to evacuate, others will be led to safety, and some will burn, on a hot night laying on top of the sheets.

Will these containment lines hold back the climate-deniers, the fire in its cauldron, its search for lost oxygen, fire could arrive so fast we’d barely be able to rise.

We are all ‘in this together’, watching smoke-dead skies, hearing billions of animals die in coaled undertones— on a hot night laying on top of the sheets fire could arrive so fast we’d barely be able to rise.

—JK

J. M. Coetzee has his fictional Australian writer Elizabeth Costello, in the novel of the same name, attend an honorary doctoral graduation in Johannesburg sometime around the turn of the century. There, Elizabeth’s sister Blanche, erstwhile classical scholar, now a nun turned hospital director at Marianhill in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal, gives a speech entitled ‘The Humanities in Africa’ (Coetzee 2003, 119–23). The global context of that speech, positioned in the novel at ‘at the end of the second millennium of our era’ (ibid., 123), has in some ways changed quite radically in the two decades since Coetzee’s novel was published. Yet at the same time, Coetzee’s multiple framings, displacements and refractions of the arguments presented in that fictive semi-Socratic dialogue allow it to retain its validity. Precisely because of such shifts, the speech provides useful leverage for a possible recalibration of the literary humanities in our era of a multifaceted global crisis.

Elizabeth Costello’s sister Blanche sketches a brief genealogy of the human sciences, from their origins in Biblical textual scholarship seeking to unearth the true meaning of the Christian gospel, enriched by classical linguistics, history and interpretational technology, towards the free-standing classics and cognate disciplines of textual interpretation. She discerns a significant loss of the originary goal of the humanities: the search for Christian salvation. But in its place, she identifies the emergence of an alternative narrative of salvation: that of Hellenism.

The Bible

The Bible arrived in Australia on the First Fleet, both in print and inscribed on the decorated bodies of convicts. Evangelical chaplain Richard Johnson brought with him, on behalf of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 100 Bibles, 400 New Testaments, 500 psalters and 200 Sermons on the Mount. At the same time, the Bible crept in unannounced, frequently cited in convict tattoos. In the examples presented in Meredith Lake's excellent account of the Bible in Australia, one George Dakin had a tattoo citing Proverbs 14:9: ‘Fools mock as sin’. Joseph Dummet, aged 14, exhibited Adam and Eve and an inscription from Genesis: ‘the serpent beguiled me and I did eat’, while John Oldershaw, like many other convicts, was illustrated with a crucifixion and the admonition ‘Prepare to meet thy God’. Convicts’ Biblical tattoos often expressed their contrition, but they could also express hope in the future, as seen in the popularity of anchor motifs. The anchor is usually interpreted as a symbol of hope, as indicated in Hebrews 6:19: ‘hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast’.

The Bible was an instrument of colonisation, translated by missionaries in the hope of ‘civilising’ the Indigenous inhabitants of their newly appropriated Promised Land. Migration, guided by God's Providence, was a Christian enterprise. New settlers were intent, in the words of Genesis, on going forth and multiplying, and at the same time exercising their dominion over every living thing that moved upon the earth. According to Meredith Lake, the half-century between the 1830s and the 1880s was the ‘golden age’ of the Bible in Australia, when churches were built and thousands of copies of holy scripture produced. In this period above all, the Bible was a familiar meeting place.

Tracy and I condemn this project that we see as an outrageous exploitation of nature for human art. It seems to us vain, self-serving, and gratuitous. Yes, books are printed on paper that mostly comes from trees, and that's already an issue all writers, including us, need to deal with, especially where and how the materials to make that paper are sourced.

But to actually plant trees, let them live a hundred years – by which stage their lives and deaths will have become an integral part of an ecosystem under great pressure – is to laugh in the face of extinction.

Yes, the sin is much the same as things most of us are perpetrating daily directly or indirectly, but to place ‘art’ over ‘nature’ in such an ‘art for art's sake’ way is to overtly place an artist's work as being worth more than biosphere, tree, nature, planet itself.

This is a ritual of capital and an extension of an ideology in which art is actually separated away from cultural necessity into one of personal ideation and declaration of self being bigger than the tree that will outlive one, to be rendered into the materials of ongoing presence.

The eternal youth machine has to be fed by something. Surely, this is just another form of environmental exploitation purporting to be worth more than itself. Writing in the now, which these authors do with obvious pertinent and skilful contributions in general to literary and social discourse, is a relevant act. Yet, although they are ‘using’ as many of us also ‘use’, at least we don't have to suggest the tree exists as idea and entity for the art.

The ideal library is infnite, and the ideal librarian knows exactly what you’re looking for. My suggested reading list is the antithesis of that ideal: it's laughably incomplete, and I really don't know what you’re looking for. And yet, you might luck out and fnd something useful when my subjectivity briefy meets yours.

I wrote multiple books for musicians that address creative health directly or indirectly. Here they are, in order of publication.

• • Indirect Procedures: A Musician's Guide to the Alexander Technique (Oxford University Press, 1997; fully rewritten second edition, 2013). The frst edition has been translated into French (2000), German (2002), and Japanese (2009). The second edition has been translated into Chinese, simplifed characters (2018). The Alexander Technique lends itself to many interpretations and applications. Mine might be abbreviated like this: Become alert to the connections that organize and determine your existence: connections among body parts; connections among the physical, the mental, and the aesthetic dimensions; connections from gesture to gesture, from thought to gesture, from thought to thought, from thought to speech; connections between you and music itself, connections between you and the audience.

• • The Alexander Technique: A Skill for Life (Crowood Press, 1999; fully rewritten second edition, 2021). The frst edition has been translated into Japanese (2010) and Estonian (2013). This is a much shorter book, not specifcally for musicians.

The writing process is itself an adventure. It takes time, it involves an element of risk. It never quite knows where it is going. It has its own logic which is not that of the simple linear accumulation of information, nor that of the step-by-step unfolding of a sequential argument. Its route is non-linear, circuitous, ‘digressive, and […] progressive too,—and at the same time,’ in the words of Laurence Sterne (1985, 95). When its movement is forward, it is not driven from some remote site far from the frontline. On the contrary, its creativity comes directly from the contact zone, from the ebullient moments where language experiments with its own immediate history – what it was only a moment ago – in a series of microseismic shocks. Writing confirms Badiou’s (2006, 211) intuition that ‘[t]o intervene is to enact, on the border of the void, being-faithful to its previous border.’ Writing develops from its own ‘leading edge’, like life itself, in the dictum of Simondon (1995, 224) who claims, ‘The living lives at the limit of itself, on its limit’ (qtd in Deleuze 1990, 103).

That is why the model of ‘writing-up’ I knew from friends in the natural sciences (often associated with a last-minute professional identity crisis), based on the notion that academic writing is a mere transcription of pre-existing findings, never quite matched my experience of writing. Writing does not confirm the given, it brings forth the new.