(e) Deeper into Time and Place
Place for David Malouf facilitates the act of becoming. Places are
remembered because of the things that happen within their borders, even including
the objects within them that will leave the human body marked and scared; the
body that gets cramps, sweats, stinks and grumbles or soars:
... till it might be angelic, gifted with unique, undeniable powers...
of eternal instant being. I t is always in a state of becoming
(Malouf, 1990:54).
I mplicit in the Malouf corpus, however, are meditations on the fragility of
physical existence and its ephemeral nature. Malouf attempts to superimpose
something over this physical existence in place: the last paragraph of The Kyogle
Line exemplifies this. After seeing the Japanese P.O.W.s in the railway wagon and
meditating on the layers of experience of both his father and grandfather, Digger is
led to the perception of another existence that parallels the physical one but
transcends it bringing him to an unnameable destination or place.
The same pattern exists in the essay, A Place in Tuscany. Richard Tipping
and his exacting, technical production crew may be in the same physical place as
Malouf but their perception of it is entirely different, at a different level of
consciousness. Their presence, in fact, affects the natural order of Malouf’s place,
causing it to become snow-bound, like a cordon sanitaire. I t is only when they
leave that the transformation will be reversed, that its mythopoeic antecedents will
be restored:
... and become a story that some child ... will tie his life to across
fifty years (Malouf, 1985:102).
I n the essay in which he writes about Campagnatico ... a village in Italy that
I happen to know well, and the villagers’ perception of the nature of the nuclear
cloud from Chernobyl, Malouf says that the idea of the cloud ... had entered their
imagination in the most physical terms (in Green and Headon, 1987:21). Malouf
tells us that these simple village folk had no idea of nuclear physics, the anti-nuclear
movement, fallout or international politics, yet once they had grasped the horror of
it all, even though it was unseen, their imagination made it real to them. Here, as
in many other instances in the corpus, Malouf seems to be describing a process
similar to that experienced by some people in their late years, or in dementia or in
mystic experiences where they are aware of their immediate, familiar circumstances