The Meaning of Recognition Read Free Page B

want more of those gondolas. You shall have
them, because he wanted more of them too. He was sick, he knew he was sick, but he was so hungry to look, and to register what he saw.
    Below our window to the left
    about a dozen more of them
    were swaying in between thin crooked poles,
    neatly unattended and exposed,
     
    reminding me how some religions in the east
    expect that people entering a shrine
    should leave their shoes outside,
    as a mark of their respect.
    From that, you would think he was going to live forever; or anyway you would think he thought so. And in fact we can stay in the same book, and merely go back a bit beyond the final section, to
find magnificent poems that either fail to mention his fatal disease or else, even more remarkably, mention it as if he hadn’t got it. A startling example on this point is ‘A House in
the Country’, one of the boldest things he ever did, a poem that puts a house into world literature the way Pushkin did when he described the lights going out in the soul of Lensky. At the
risk of rampant intertextuality, I’ll quote the stanza presaging his final use of a further quotation that we now know he would forever make his own. But notice also what the stanza does not
presage. Notice the effect that it could have employed but didn’t. When we notice that, it will lead us to the most amazing thing about him. It has already been established, before this
stanza unfolds, that the house is riddled by a subversive presence.
    I gazed at this miniature apocalypse
    of countless termites writhing in exposure,
    no doubt programmed to crave the opposite
    of Goethe, who had cried ‘More light! More light!’
    and as the seconds dropped away as small
    and uniform as termites a feeling burrowed
    into me as bad as if I had cancer.
    One ‘as’ after another, linked like a little chain of worry beads. How can he, of all people, be so definite about being indefinite?
As if I had cancer
.
Well, we can be reasonably sure that the house has it. In the last line of the poem, the narrator is worried that for the house there might be no cure.
    I set off at a fast walk, worried about
    what was going on underneath my feet.
    The house has it, but an intergalactic literary critic who stepped off a spaceship could be excused for deducing that the poet himself does not have it, or he would have written a different way.
The intergalactic critic, however, would be deducing the wrong thing. At one stage I was myself the intergalactic critic, and I can remember all too well how, with regard to Hodgins’ career
as a poet, I got things exactly backwards. Stuck in my study in London, a long way from the Australian poetic action, I first noticed him in a little poem about a dam in the country. The poem
popped up somewhere in the international poetic world: the
New Yorker
or some anthology. (If you’re serious about poetry, it’s probably the best way of finding out what’s really going on: when a poem hits you between the eyes even though you don’t know
anything about the person who wrote it, the chances are better that the person in question is the genuine article.) The rim of the dam featured a pair of ibises.
    Two ibises stand on the rim like taps.
    Immediately I reached the correct conclusion that Philip Hodgins had the talent to write anything. It was the only correct conclusion I was to reach for some time. By the time I read about
Hodgins at length, in an essay by Les Murray now included in
A Working Forest
, Hodgins was nearing death. When I started to read Hodgins himself at length, I started in the middle and
somehow convinced myself that his illness had snuck up on him, and had become a subject only towards the end, when he became aware of the threat. This was a conclusion easily reached from the
seemingly untroubled richness of his central work. But it was the wrong conclusion in the biggest possible way. For a student of literature, the advantage of living abroad is that he is less