Eremos

I don’t recall a time when the world has been filled so equally with anxiety and hope. Now that the obvious has been exposed—that a maze of skewed values is responsible for much of the economic downturn—it is time to contemplate another way of doing ‘business’. At the recent Eremos AGM Jonathan Inkpin described the Australian Aboriginal concept of ‘business’, a concept involving ceremony rather than aspirations of material profit. Jonathan’s address comprises the first two articles of this issue, and our cover by Rob O’Brien seeks to illustrate Jonathan’s three P’s: Pilgrimage, Promise and Presence.

Liminality, the experience of being in between or on the threshold, is a recurring theme in this issue. Australia, as Jonathan suggests, may be in search of a soul, experiencing that liminal space between the overlay of colonial and Western materialism and the inner truth of the land and its prior peoples. In a more personal way, Frances MacKay, on her own threshold as she leaves her home of fifty years for life in another state, examines the dimensions of transition.

There follows a poem recently received from Diana Neutze as she stands on the final threshold, experiencing a prolonged transition between life and death. Diana, who for years has been suffering advanced multiple sclerosis, says that it is not a sign that she is having a good day because she has written a poem, but that it is a good day because she has written a poem. Eremos stands with Diana and all who suffer illness and impairment as they endure this challenging liminal space.

George Emeleus writes about ‘Faith and Science’, concluding that when they are not seen in opposition they raise profound questions of meaning. In a different voice, Jeff Guess recounts his experience as Poet in Residence in a South Australian school. With permission, we have reprinted one of his students’ poems, Fall of Icarus. I was struck by the poem itself, but also intrigued because Icarus, as seen in Bruegel’s painting, turns up again in the next article by Peter Willis. In reviewing Diana Neutze’s new book of poetry, Peter quotes W H Auden’s poem in which Icarus falls into the sea unnoticed by a world in thrall to the Western practice of ‘business’—a world unconscious of meaning and ignorant of symbolism. Icarus had to fly upwards in order to escape the Cretan labyrinth. Intriguingly, this labyrinth had been built by Daedalus, his architect father, and even father and son had been unable to find a way out.

Are we currently trapped in a labyrinth of our fathers’ (as governments, forebears, elders of either gender) making? Is Icarus a symbol of dashed hopes or, as Jeff Guess’s student poet would have it, of noble aspiration? Or is Icarus an early Christ-figure, bearing all dichotomies in the one life and death? You only have to place some other artistic representations of  the fall of Icarus alongside Michaelangelo’s Pietà to imagine this.

Thanks to Sue Emeleus for her usual column on books, and to Sean Gilbert for telling us about the Artist in Residence program at his church.

And don’t forget to take advantage of the special offer on gift memberships, available only until 28 February.

Jacquie Pryor