have been catapulted twenty thousand years into the nearer past,
or into my own future ... and I thought oddly that if I were to
lower the telescope now to where I had been standing at the
entrance to the drive I would see my own puzzled, upturned face,
but as a self I had already outgrown and abandoned, not minutes
but aeons back (Malouf, 1985:23).However, the boy, in the midst of this numinous experience discovers:
... at the point where my self ended and the rest of it began that
Time, or Space, showed its richness to me ... I drew back, re
entered the present and was aware again of the close suburban
dark – of its moving now in the shape of a hand. I must have
known all along that it was there, working from the small of my
back to my belly, up the inside of my thigh, but it was of no
importance, I was too far off. Too many larger events were
unfolding for me to break away and ask, as I must have, ‘What
are you doing?’ I must have come immediately. But when the
stars blurred in my eyes it was with tears, and it was the welling
of this deeper salt, filling my eyes and rolling down my cheeks,
that was the real overflow of the occasion (Malouf, 1985:24),
and
Nothing of what he (the professor) had done could make the
slightest difference to me, I was untouched ... but what I had
seen – what he had led me to see – my bursting into the life of
things – I would look back on that as the real beginning of my
existence ... (Malouf, 1985:25).
This ‘deeper salt’ that filled the young narrator’s eyes is evocative of the
grain of salt that dissolves in the ocean and symbolizes the uniqueness of the
individual but at the same time the merging of that individuality with the Absolute.
Thus, even the potentially traumatic sexual encounter becomes remote and
irrelevant because it has no relation to the real self. Ego has been transcended.
What is also significant in this passage, as elsewhere in the corpus, is the way
Malouf enters into the mind of his characters and enunciates not only the
humanness of the event but its mystical, spiritual significance and the influence of a
higher consciousness or being towards which the human soul moves to assume its
true identity and nature.
The Malouf corpus resembles the Dreaming of the Australian aborigines
because the places where the annunciations occur become sanctified regions
illuminated by memories but within a continuum that gives them relevance to the
past, present and future. However, unlike the soul of the aborigine, the soul of the
white person in the Malouf corpus, with mythic latitudes and longitudes removed, is
adrift.