The most potent factor in these experiences was an awareness of place,
either in the subjective interpretation of the influences embedded in the place
where I was born and lived or as in I srael and Greece; as a mythic, symbolic,
historic almost archetypal dimension. However, that is not sufficient to explain the
significance that these places and other places have had on my life or the sheer
enchantment of place in literary works has exerted upon me and the readers and
writers involved in my research and, I suspect, most people.
This influence might best be explained in the Hebrew word makom, or true
dwelling place. I have dwelt in many places and yet there seems to be with all of
them a hierarchical attribution of affective energy, an attachment of an
indescribable and strangely inter-reliant nature. So it is that my soul increases
when it sees the islands of the Aegean and loves the silence of a forest; places of
reflective solitude that reveal the magisterium of the earth. Yet it is between my
simple apartment and the rocky crags overlooking the Pacific Ocean on the South
Coast of NSW that my soul has found its true dwelling place in a strange, timeless
and measureless continuum.
This need for the soul to find makom, its dwelling place, was profoundly
revealed to me by my foster son Riza. A Hazara, a descendant of the I ndo-Aryans
and the Moghols of Ghanghiz Khan who invaded Afghanistan in the first quarter of
the thirteenth century (Mousavi, 1998:24), he, like other members of his tribe, was
persecuted by the Taliban and twice tortured by them. At fourteen years of age, he
fled the austere place of his birth where all his life and experiences had been
entirely contained. Not possessing a sophisticated notion of flight or knowledge of
the great seas and oceans and their archetypal power, he began his courageous
journey, crossing mountains and valleys unknown to him, to be delivered, by some
persistent providence, to their magisterium. His soul was then to experience places
he had never before even imagined. He was taken into the ‘place of air’, which he
had previously only experienced naively, and then weeks later, terrified, in a
disabled boat, becalmed, across the ‘place of ocean’, not sleeping for fear of being
thrown overboard but also in fear of the strange night noises coming from around
and below the boat as it drifted. I n Australia he was amazed by the ‘place of the
modern and free’, where huge glass doors opened magically, without human effort
and of tall, graceful buildings that expressed the mind and life of a different people.
Yet, often, like David Malouf’s Ovid, Riza, too, in hearing no word of his own
language, was rendered dumb, literally communicating with grunts and signs:
ron
(Ron)
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