By Declan Fry
SPIRITUALITY
murriyang: song of time
Stan Grant
Simon & Schuster Bundyi, $39.99
Murriyang: song of time is about the struggle with irreconcilables. How to love – much less believe – in God when the world often seems godless? Grant puts the case plainly at the book’s outset: “My world is turning, I have walked away from my career, my father is in his final years, I have more years behind me than ahead and now God is whispering to me.”
The book alternates between two sections, “BABIIN” and “Murriyang”. Unfortunately, as in much of Grant’s recent writing, the theological and philosophical sections in the Murriyang passages tend to act like scaffolding, if not armour. The Voice to parliament, the referendum, and Grant’s move away from journalism are all adverted to, but at a remove. They are abstract; emotions are close, but not too close. The book’s strongest feelings – pain, love – often give way to lofty but generalised meditations. Whatever is personal and specific tends to be obscured by the conceptual: time, politics, Australia.
At one point I literally sighed: Grant opens one chapter with a lovely account of washing his face in a river and encountering a kangaroo near his parents’ home, his mother and father still waking, the day beginning. Yet the scene gives way, almost before it has itself begun, to invocations of Einstein, Bergson, Yeats, Darwin, Heraclitus, Parmenides …
Why are so many writers and reference points assembled? Is it the idea that enough wisdom, strung together, might offer a peephole to understanding? More often it feels like a substitute for personal interrogation: in the book’s most eye-glazing passages, barely four pages can pass without Coltrane, Michelangelo, Medusa, Rimbaud, God and George Steiner turning up (this last, himself an inveterate reference-maker, is perhaps an ironic addition).
Stan Grant writes about politics and family within the context of belief.
In the BABIIN passages – the word is Wiradjuri, meaning “father” – Grant writes about himself and his family, focusing in particular on Stan Grant snr, a Wiradjuri elder who has helped to preserve and revitalise Wiradjuri language. Grant writes about struggling to be intimate with his father, a man he describes as someone who hardened himself in response to the world’s violence. At times, Grant himself recalls fearing him; now he fears he is running out of time to know him.
He sees himself as incapable of the delicacy one of his brothers shows while tending to their father. He has to face a vulnerability and “infirmity” that is “raw and confronting”. The admissions of both revulsion and anger at physical loss and mortality are among the book’s strongest passages. “I am ashamed of how I have struggled,” Grant writes. It is not only the struggle with death, but, even more, the struggle with intimacy: to be close. To gain time when time is running out.
In a sense, Grant admits, time is of the essence because he fears having lost it. Having spent so much time away from loved ones, devoted to journalism and geopolitics – to abstractions that could never love him back – he wonders what it was all for. Generously, some of the silence surrounding his own feelings about himself or those close to him might be read as representative of the book’s grappling, not only with time, but those things related to it, like silence itself: the silence of failing to understand, or the silence that comes with waiting, whether for understanding or simply for the arrival of the unnameable. As Grant writes of his return home to his parents, “they wanted nothing from me, just for me to be there”.
Murriyang’s “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe” passages of philosophical and geopolitical reflection are fine, I guess, if overly familiar. They rely upon false dichotomies, melodramatic stand-offs (“Scientists might tell my parents their faith is a weakness, OK, now tell me the equation for tears”) and other bits of windmill-tilting. The social media critiques and doesn’t-the-present-just-suck monologues have a “man yells at cloud” quality to them; even Reddit’s most boring sections would cringe. Contemporary music? “Derivative, nostalgic and banal”. Poetry? “Obscurantist wordplay”. Art? “Shock value over aesthetic beauty”. Even contemporary architecture can’t escape: “functional but rarely awe-inspiring”. “Of course”, Grant writes, hedging his bets at the eleventh hour, “there are exceptions, mostly overlooked”.
But by the time Grant gets to wondering whether Thomas Hobbes ever held a child or injured baby as he pondered life’s tendency to be “nasty, brutish, and short”, it’s hard to know whether the book’s accompanying “Music of Murriyang” playlist shouldn’t have included – or simply acknowledged – Sting’s Russians, or maybe Vangelis’ Tears In Rain.
There is something vaguely Kierkegaardian about the way Grant pits modernity – here, basically everything since the Enlightenment – against God. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard worried at the distance between theological difficulty and human indifference, the paralysis of faith and freedom, the generations who “knew the story of Abraham by heart” yet still managed to sleep at night. “Writing about God is something that invites scepticism,” Grant writes, not exactly sceptically.
But what if writing about God is itself an act of scepticism? Perhaps God needs his sceptics just as Christianity requires sin, its visions of hell and damnation. To invite scepticism, you need only crack the door open a tad; the devil takes care of the rest. And what if God’s punishment disappoints, or never comes? What if someone desires punishment? It’s the old joke about Catholicism and kink, sure.
Next to one passage, when Grant asks God’s forgiveness for sipping his father’s pineapple juice, I wrote: why bother God in such a moment? As Grant acknowledges, the taste is sweet, the act is human, and, Jesus Christ, isn’t the Song of Songs in the Bible, too? Ultimately, Grant sides with an understanding of God that comes through non-understanding: God is whatever cannot be fathomed, a kind of negative theology.
In some ways, this is both the most personal and the most abstract book Grant has published. I admired its bravery, but I wish it went further. When Grant describes Australia as “the black milk I drink at dawn”, or two talking heads on TV having “black holes” for eyes, or – in the book’s most adventurous chapter – a family conversation in which everyone is God (“HUNGRY – God’s soft voice speaks louder – ARE YOU HUNGRY?”), there are signs of a more radical author at work. As Grant writes, “When I say Australia, I am still discovering what that might mean.” Here’s hoping he never finds out.
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