A state of mind is, in other words, rather like the weather. It is open to so many influences, it changes with different pressures and it is inescapable. Like the weather too, it is an endless, useful talking point. Talk about feeling, talk about mood, talk about being up, being down, is at the heart of most conversation: it is the prompt or cue that you can quickly turn to, it offers the tone which you lapse into. Like the weather a state of mind is also a highly unreliable guide.

There is also, however, an obvious play or pun in the phrase. A ‘state’ of mind could be a state in the sense of the state as a political formation. It could define, in other words, a broad political temper or a general feeling for the times we live in – something rather similar to what the nineteenth century called the Zeitgeist, the ‘spirit of the times’. Turn the phrase around in this context – play with it as ‘mind-state’ – and you arrive at something rather terrifying. It becomes a term which defines a dictatorial, bureaucratic society where intellectualism and power are too closely related. Orwell’s 1984 portrays a ‘mind-state’ in this sense: this is a world of total media control where ideologies have taken over everyone’s mind, where memory-loss is built into the information system – electronic documents disappear day by day, truth changes day by day – and where only an extremely powerful political minority have the power to switch off the surveillance systems. Only this elite know that the information poured out through the media system and the political system is fake. Such information is propaganda designed to numb the senses and enslave the people. This dire level of informational control may not be quite the same as the ‘info-tainment’ which washes daily through our minds from the mix of media and commentary that most of us regularly consume. But the parallels with Orwell’s imaginary future world are striking and depressing all the same.

The political and social temper of the times need not be envisaged as being quite so awful as 1984. Yet the political state of mind is a construct, nonetheless. It’s a product like any other item necessary for consumption and survival. Being a state of mind it can be talked about as buoyant, depressed, uncertain, confident, aggressive, angry, hopeful, disillusioned, turned-on, turned-off: Its definition is a major preoccupation of specialists who assess the mind-state and likely actions of a variety of groups – electorates, small business people, finance advisers, international investors, and so on. The recognition and appraisal of a state of mind are crucial, for example, to employment rates, to investment confidence, to the overseas perception of ourselves in the world at large. Similarly, the state of local and international stock markets is constantly represented in media reports as an entity which is as much psychological as monetary: today was ‘bullish’, lively, depressed, down, whereas yesterday expressed a returning ‘confidence’ in the dollar. Over the past few years most of us have become familiar with these misleading, predictive phrases about international and local gloom, wariness, and confidence. Or another example: voters are collectively described by a commentator on ABC TV as being disillusioned, uninterested, angry. In an example like this, it is as if we are being asked to look on at ourselves – and all our differences – as symbolically represented as a single state of mind. We are represented as the look-alikes of an unhappy, distrustful person who has lost interest in life and is angry about interference, politics, and outsiders.

This interlinking between public and private states of mind is at the heart of my fascination with the phrase. Private mood and public mood play off each other. In many contexts – professional life, economic life, and politics – private mood and public mood are often treated as more or less indistinguishable. Personal state of mind and public state of the nation are treated like mirror images of each other. Many claims about nation and national characteristics would not make sense unless a fruitful confusion between the individual psyche and national psyche was taken for granted. Anyone, for instance, who talks about what a typical Australian’s typical behaviour is like runs the risk of conflating a private and a public mind-state – though it usually becomes clear very quickly that most of these ideal types are identity-images trundled out for propaganda purposes. Talk of battlers, the pervasive talk of ‘ordinary Australians’ (was there ever an ordinary Australian?), talk of the suburban, fun-loving individual all imply that there is somewhere a version of the psychological type who conforms to the role of battler, ordinary Australian, or suburban hedonist; and that this person also identifies a part or fragment of a bigger national psyche. This conflation of public and private state of mind is one of the reasons that we can identify our fellow citizens as consumers and opinion-makers, say the commentators. That’s also one of the reasons why they may well vote for us, say the politicians.

Poetry also has its role in the interplay between public and private states of mind.

Serious and significant poetry often captures or reflects that interplay, making it meaningful in ways that sometimes are beyond even the writer’s intentions. Many great poems have this capacity to negotiate between private and public worlds in ways which novels – no matter how important as documents or testimony – mostly do not. Poetry has a capacity, it might be argued, to sum up key states of mind, states of mind representative of a period as well as of an individual. Shelley’s political poems of 1819 are examples of such work, including what at first reads like a purely emotional, individual, and private piece like ‘Ode to the West Wind’. Yeats wrote several very famous poems of this sort. The most quoted is probably ‘Easter 1916’. They are anxious, observant poems which combine a private and a public sense of his times. Likewise Pound did this very successfully in poems like ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberly’ and less successfully and succinctly in various parts of the ‘Cantos’.

These are all obvious and well-known examples; and that fact too – the fact that these poems seem effortlessly to become part of the canon, regularly appear in anthologies, and are usually the poems which students are obliged to ‘do’ at school and university – is itself a phenomenon worth remarking on. They are the poems which, over long stretches of time, make crucial contributions to the common perception of many generations of readers. But they are also the poems which hold public and private states of mind in balance: they demonstrate how large events transect small events like light through a prism. They are like epoch-making photographs. And like those photographs, their unforgettable images resonate with meanings beyond the moment when the image was shot.

They don’t have either to be poems which refer overtly to moments of public crisis. William Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, written in the relatively happy year of 1750, became one of those poems for many generations of English readers. It’s a history poem, a poem which reflects on community and divisive historical experience, but it is not written in the heat of political and economic turmoil or out of the disillusionment of Easter Rebellions. Kenneth Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’ – the people’s choice in the recent National Poetry Day poll – may possibly have a similar function for us. I went back to have a look at it, wondering why an arguably finer and much more public poem like A.D. Hope’s ‘Australia’ or a much more amusing, ironic poem like Campbell’s ‘An Australian Dream’ or something more demotic by Les Murray had not been preferred. It could of course have been chosen simply because ‘Five Bells’ was a poem which a number of ABC-type viewers could remember from school or perhaps because of its association with John Olsen’s Opera House painting. More likely the reason is because ‘Five Bells’ is so successfully a ‘state of mind’ poem in the sense I have been describing. Subtly, hiddenly, yet very tangibly, the poem traces the connections between private perception and public world-sense. It is a classic performance on the theme of vision and disillusionment – in other words, it is a rehearsal of what is now recognised as a deeply traditional Australian political and cultural theme. Together with being about grief, the poem’s subject matter is to do with rootlessness and frustrated passion and intelligence gone to seed. It is an elegy for someone who, in Slessor’s phrase, has no suburb. Those battlers, ordinary Australians, and Labor party suburbanites intelligently identify with its themes. What’s more, Slessor’s locally-referenced, mellow, tuneful voicing of his language apparently still resonates centrally in the national psyche to a degree, one suspects, that ideolect, bush-yarning, and Ocker affectation doesn’t.

It would be inaccurate, however, to suggest that this is the only kind of poetry which deals with the connectedness of public and private mind-state. An equally long-lived poetic the figure – it could almost be termed a ‘manoeuvre’ on the part of the poet – is to do with withdrawal. At heart, this is the poetry which comes from a private confrontation with the period in which you live. This manoeuvre is a way of saying that the times are so impoverished, world affairs so unstable, and politics so rotten that the poet imposes a voluntary exile on himself and his work and withdraws to some little known or obscure place – a garden in the country, a shack in the bush, the edges of a village. Withdrawal becomes a necessary mode of defence and ultimately becomes the means of achieving a balanced, productive life. Usually this involves meditation, Taoist and Buddhist study, and the study of nature.

This figure of withdrawal is, for examples, the often-repeated figure of the Chinese scholar poet. Strikingly, there is an almost de rigueur mythic protocol in the biographies of such poets. This is the life-history which Robert Gray captures in a recent poem called ‘The Life of a Chinese Poet’. Gray writes of how, aged fifty-four, a typical scholar poet went home to his native village, having never gained a preferment, distressed by what he heard of the luxury and incontinence of the court.

I find a similar reference in my old, battered Penguin edition of the poet Wang Wei. In its preface, the translator repeats what is more or less a cliché in the histories of these writers: he speaks of a fall from public power, a moment of confusion and danger, a sense of withdrawal and self-disgust. ‘He was,’ says the translator, ‘not interested, “not involved”.’ To experience these disasters – which are moments both of private crisis and, in particular, of failure in the public system – seem to be as necessary to this sort of poet as a painful, disembowelling martyrdom is for a would-be Catholic saint. But what was, I wonder while I am checking the quote I’ve just given, what was Wang Wei’s offence? If you move the example into a contemporary context, our contemporary Australian context would suggest that it was no more than the fact that he was axed by an illiterate, crisis-inspired team of management consultants. Or perhaps he was knifed by a vicious colleague with a paper-thin ego during a down-sizing operation in some demoralised, ineffectual bureau. Perhaps he just gave up in the face of a future life of gross overwork, daily crisis, poor wages, declining working conditions – and he panicked. Maybe with good reason. Just as likely, no doubt, Wang Wei was himself the perpetrator, caught like a Federal MP rorting his travel allowance or disgraced because he failed to acknowledge a conflict of interest in some Federal or State decision. In fact, it turns out, he was caught in the political crossfire in a rebellion; he probably did do wrong; he was lucky to survive as an administrator and civil servant.

This ingredient of disgrace and disarray, or of a private despondency about world affairs, is ironically where a reckoning with the public state of affairs is re-introduced into the poetry. At one level, engagement with politics, economics, and government is overtly excluded; even to become famous for your work is accidental, and not a goal sought for. Yet all the same, it is precisely the separateness between the pursuit of happiness and understanding on the one hand and a sense of the futility of worldly success on the other which requires of the poet a deeper, more philosophical understanding of a ‘state of mind’. In ‘The Life of a Chinese Poet’, Robert Gray sums-it up via a quote from a Chinese critic as to do with the acquisition of a state of simplicity in depth and poignancy in tranquillity. We recognise this state under many forms: it might be to do with strict practices and theological interests, or it might just be everyday and orderly. Indeed, the pursuit of this state of mind is not too far from that most ordinary and sensible reaction to world affairs, namely, to concentrate on the family, try and save some money, and do a few things like taking up gardening or some regular yoga. In this context – unless you are a poet and feel impelled to take up the obsessive rigour of writing as part of this balancing activity – the achievement of a balanced state of mind becomes a recommendation for an inward-facing, safe, domesticated life-style in which stability and freedom from anxiety are put high on the agenda. For others, stress-management courses are the option especially if they’re the sort of highfliers who want their simplicity and tranquillity on the side after a day of crisis management, angry e-mail, and breathless mobiles. There are more worrying signs, however. A perverse misinterpretation of the withdrawn, balanced state of mind is now regularly cropping up in those naive, deeply cynical newspaper articles (there are more and more every week) which tell us how being forcibly disemployed – say, around age 54 – is actually a genuine creative opportunity which will open up new prospects provided, that is to say, you know how to deal with your unhappy and unnecessary feelings of resentment and anger. Newspapers in particular are starting to spew out this new, callous genre of economic rationalist propaganda.

Poetically, however, the state of balanced withdrawal might lead to Wang Wei’s poem ‘Crossing the Yellow River on the way to Ch’ingho’:

Sailing in a boat in the great river
Waters mounting to the edge of the sky
Sky and waves suddenly part
And there was a city vast and populous
And on we went and there were more towns
And mulberry trees and flax between them
I looked back towards my old place –
A waste of waters right up to vaporous clouds

In fact, though, you do not have to go Chinese to recognise this figure of withdrawal and engagement. When Les Murray went off back to the bush, he was doing what many a poet since Horace had done before him. Retreat to a country estate – your Twickenham, your farm – in order to get out of the distractions of the political, corrupt, immoral world, but use it also as an opportunity to comment on both your own garden environment and the wider environment. And, if you are a satirical poet like Alexander Pope or a polemical poet like Murray, attack and damn your contemporaries. It may ultimately be good for them.

In other words, the European poetic figure which is much more familiar to us and which replicates the Taoist figure of poignant balance is a direct figure of engaged withdrawal. The late Hans Blumenberg, that extraordinary scholar of the image and theory systems which underpin Western scientific modelling, called it ‘the Epicurean metaphor’. Interestingly this metaphor abounds in popular, literary, and journalistic media in present day Australia. Blumenberg defines the metaphor as a particular way of looking at the world especially relating it to that Epicurean philosophy which, like the Latin poet Horace’s, requires of the good life that it be a life lived in a safe place from which you look on at the world’s troubles. Most commonly, Blumenberg says in his book-length essay ‘Shipwreck with Spectator’, it is an oceanic metaphor. Its most usual symbolic representation is that of a spectator looking out over a troubled, stormy, chaotic ocean in the middle of which a boat is being wrecked and the people drowned. A good Epicurean compares his or her happy state with the poor unfortunates who are going down. It is somewhat how Milton described the state of blessed in Heaven.

Over time, the metaphor is modernised. According to Blumenberg, the position of spectator and the scene depicted become indistinguishable. Everybody, he says, finds themselves on the boat. When recently on ABC Radio the commentator Rod Cameron talked of the disillusionment of Australian electors and of how ‘they were looking for a port in the storm’ he was using this modern form of the Epicurean metaphor. Much commentary on Australia’s fate in relation to international money markets is Epicurean in this sense: the country will ride out the Indonesian crisis, there is bad weather ahead and so on. If you are of one persuasion you believe that we will remain on the shore, in a safe place. If you are of another, then you see Australia positioned like a leaky row-boat somewhere to the south of the Chathams.

As just mentioned, much pastoral poetry is Epicurean. And I have often thought that there is an implicit, structural Epicurean metaphor at the heart of media consumption, particularly TV watching. Feeling safe and comfortable and at home, just like any good Epicurean, I switch on to watch the bomb-blasts, the famine-zones, the civil wars – that angry, chaotic ocean – of the rest of the planet. When the English sailor Tony Bullimore was rescued from his up-turned boat in the roaring 1940s, the Epicurean metaphor was made literal before our eyes. Safe at home, drinking a glass of wine, the TV pictures showed me the rescue. Despite its appositeness to his situation (and perhaps to our own) Bullimore may not at that moment have been thinking of Burkhardt’s renowned reformulation of the Epicurean metaphor in relation to proto-modernist social and cultural experience: ‘We would like to know the waves on which we sail across the ocean; but we are ourselves these waves.’

That is the point I have been getting at here. What to do when times go bad? In one of his many meditations on bad times, that gloomy, brilliant epigrammatist E.M. Cioran once wrote: ‘However pitiless our denials, we never quite destroy the objects of our nostalgia … ’. What Cioran was saying is that people never overcome the sense of loss when times go bad, never lose the sense that a better period – a Golden Age, a Silver Age – has slipped by and never accept the lack of an alternative to the unhappy, stressed out, declining, barbarous present. That’s the issue which I am trying to get at here by talking about the poetic representation of public and private states of mind – a hankering sense for what is lost and an insistent denial as to the nature of the loss. Both the figure of crisis and the figure of withdrawal are ways of dealing with those moments. That is to say, they are ways of dealing with a time where it is impossible not to be caught in a reflection on the interconnectedness of public and private mood. You have no choice but to think out how you stand in your own time. The question is simply thrust upon you. In times much more dramatic than these, Yeats called it the moment of change, the moment of ‘terrible beauty’ in his poem ‘Easter 1916’. In another world and another register, A.D. Hope’s poem ‘Australia’ describes it as the moment of return where you give up on ‘learned doubt’ and ‘the chatter of cultured apes’.

Cioran’s description of the ineffectual, despondent present-day of his time is couched in excoriating, existential language. He goes on to talk about a time which ‘is no more than a caricature of itself, a parody of the immutable, a prostrate (sic) becoming frozen in a timeless avarice, huddled over a sterile moment, over a treasure which impoverishes it.’ That’s what hankering for the Golden Age or the Silver Age makes you feel like. Put more pragmatically, it is like saying: How not to feel a sense of nostalgia for one’s memory of a once high standard of living, a clear purpose in times gone by, or a clear confidence in cultural direction and meaning? But was it ever – Cioran’s penetrating irony asks his reader – was it ever really like that? Never easy to fix, driven by a complex version of philosophical pessimism, Cioran suggests that it was not. He defines this need to believe in a Golden Age as a nostalgic belief in a time when there is supposed to have been ‘an authentic, positive eternity, which extends beyond time’. No way of appropriating it, he writes: did we ever really possess it?

Perhaps such a question is not intended to be answered. For certainly as soon you try to answer it the problems in talking like this immediately begin. My perspective is just mine. The evidence I adduce for my sense of well-being or its opposite means the well-being of publicly owned media, of publishing and writing, the art world, theatre, universities – in other words, the well-being of the world I know and care about. The people whom I know in these areas have had an appalling struggle to survive over the past decade or so – particularly inside public institutions like universities, government agencies, and the arts. Gloom and distrust seem now to have become ingrained responses. Other by no means peripheral matters like low wages, declining working conditions, the poverty of country life, the plight of the small towns, the feeling (not the fact) that there is no politician in the country who takes the situation of unemployed people seriously, the imposition of over-bureaucratic procedures on organisations which are in a state of disassemblage and chronic shortage of funds – these sorts of tangible, yet oddly undefinable issues sail in over the horizon like thunder clouds.

Even worse, the economic rationalism which has visited these absurdities on the path-breakers and the humble alike has had so few outspoken critics. As we have done so often, we have adopted a foreign idea with an intensity which not even its inventors can credit. With the exception of minority parties which appeal to a minority of intellectuals and the One Nation party which appeals to a resentful heartland, political and economic debate has been seriously curtailed if not entirely stifled. Surely, I would suggest, this is the main reason why those previously mentioned battlers, ordinary Australians, and suburban hedonists all deeply despise a consensual inter-party political process which so damages the quality of everyday life. You would need to be an Emile Zola to effectively render the sense of bitterness, the acid sense of despair, which resides at the centre of what someone like myself might perceive (and sometimes does) to be the national state of mind.

Phrased another way, we are living through a period where there is a predominant feeling (in the words of one critic) of ‘a distrust for (our) own nation; a fear that responsible clever people will just not be found … This sense of hopelessness may prove to be an accurate forecast.’ Many readers will recognise of course that these are Donald Horne’s words written in the 1960s: they come from that still highly pertinent, predictive, ironically titled book The Lucky Country. More, if these words are still pertinent, that is not because nothing has happened and no major changes have occurred between 1964 when the book was first published and today. Certainly one of the things which has changed since the mid-1960s and the late 1990s concerns precisely Cioran’s ‘objects of nostalgia’ – that is to say, it concerns the nature of those values whose loss, real or apparent, we collectively regret. These values are part-myth, part social description. (They were, however, somewhat ‘Golden Age’, that is, idyllic and nostalgic, even when Horne was first writing.) They address questions like: Is Australia still an egalitarian society? Are we a nation still preoccupied with being in or out of the mainstream? Have some of those core myths about dead centre and terra nullius been resolved in the mind, in the psyche, of the nation and not just in the nation’s legal process? Is Australia still a tolerant society, able to live intelligently and creatively with its histories of migration? Is an Australian a person identifiable through a specific set of national characteristics and practices – as clearly Horne thought back in the 1960s? Is the notion of the identifiable local ‘type’ true of anyone in any modern country at the beginning of the twenty-first century? They are questions which, if they must be posed, cannot be posed outside the context of current anxiety and recession. But are there answers to such questions? What I can say is that, for a pessimist, there was not and will not be a Golden Age.

One final thought. When I was thinking about writing this essay, a phrase of the Italian essayist and novelist Roberto Calasso kept on recurring. It is from the concluding section of his best-selling The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. At end of the book Calasso describes the event – a marriage ceremony – at which the last meeting between humans and the gods took place, a meeting whose disastrous consequences Calasso’s book so expertly studies. ‘Myth,’ Calasso writes, ‘is the precedent behind every action, its invisible ever-present lining … For every step, the footprint was already there.’

That determinism, that fatefulness, in the relation between myth and human action is why tampering with myth is so dangerous: myth precedes what is done. It is also, according to Calasso, why not understanding myths leads to such blindness and anxiety. If this little teaser of Calassian thought matters to me, it is because I clearly have been trying to intertwine two themes: that of poetry and its role as clarifier and organiser of mythic perception and that other information-laden, myth-rich perception, the public state of mind. It is also why, to me, the choice of ‘Five Bells’ as the poem of 1998 is so indicative. For ‘Five Bells’ could justly be called an ‘Epicurean’ poem, a poem about looking into the ocean from a safe place, a poem about looking on at a drowning man. No less strikingly, however, it is a thoroughly modernist poem, a scientific poem, a poem at home in the world of Einsteinian relativity. Slessor explains this in his notes when he describes how the action of the poem takes place entirely in the mind of the viewer and lasts only a few seconds. He describes his thinking about Joe Lynch’s death as virtually a random or passing thought: but it is exactly thus – as an object of nostalgia, as an issue which simply will not go away – that the subject of this thought requires from him such a deep and extended recollection. That is why it is such a good poem, such an everyday, such an intimate poem. It takes place, that is to say, in a passing, temporary moment. It takes place in the blink of an eye.

REFERENCES

Hans Blumenberg: Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans Steven Rendall, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1997

Roberto Calasso: The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, trans Tim Parks, Alfred A. Knopf. New York, 1993

E.M. Cioran: History and Utopia, trans Richard Howard, Quartet Books, London, 1996

Robert Gray: New Selected Poems, Duffy and Snellgrove, Sydney, 1998

Donald Horne: The Lucky Country: Australia in the 60s, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1964/68

Poems of Wang Wei, trans G.W. Robinson, Penguin Books, London, 1973