‘We’re still alive! Sometimes, it takes a funeral to remember that’

But I’ve been thinking and maybe the kid was right, after all. The seasons are changing. One afternoon recently, it hailed so much the whole suburb was covered an inch deep in dream-like snow. It was hail, sure, but it may as well have been snow. It looked like snow and the children made snowpeople and jammed the freezer with dirty snowballs. No one had ever seen anything like it. This was in Melbourne, in the outer-inner north, Wurundjeri country, where it hasn’t snowed since 1882. In the morning, it was still there, huge banks of it, as if proof were needed: no, it wasn’t a dream.

Maybe there’s a season for coming face to face with yourself, and with what you’ve done to the world.

And what is autumn anyway, or winter for that matter, since the four seasons (like Vivaldi) are something of a European imposition on a land that has always been more nuanced?

“There is a season,” said the priest, “for everything under heaven.” Frost and bark-harvest season. Fire season. Flood season. Cyclone season. A season to be jolly. A season for plague and drought.

As I write this, it’s spring, although it feels like mid-winter; it will be summer when you read it. The other day, I walked down by Merri Creek in Melbourne, where the flood waters had receded. It stank. The grass lay flattened in ash-coloured mud, and the trees along the bank, mile after mile, were strung, like evil Christmas trees, with garbage. Speaking of leaves ‘n’ shit, I thought. Maybe there’s a season for coming face to face with yourself, and with what you’ve done to the world.

My friend, Amy, a student of tantra, reminded me that, from a certain perspective, even these scraps of filthy plastic are sacred, that there is no moment that isn’t imbued with glory. Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be disgusted. Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t help to clean it up. It just means that – at a certain point – it’s no longer a question of whether things are for us or against us. “Ladies and gentlemen,” said another Buddhist teacher, “I must tell you, there are no reference points.”

Loading

Words start to feel kind of clunky round about here. “If you say God exists,” Thích Nhat Hanh said, “you’re wrong. And if you say God doesn’t exist, you’re equally wrong. You cannot use your notions of being and non-being to describe God.”

Which has left me wondering about my so-called profession: namely words, and notions.

An actor and voice coach came to speak to the class of fiction writers I teach. He showed us how to sit and stand, and how to speak from our guts instead of from our heads. He asked us to think of every word as onomatopoeic, as somehow embodying the thing it referred to, rather than simply, coldly symbolising it.

A word, he explained, is a journey of syllables around the mouth. Then he asked us to memorise and speak aloud a single haiku. The one I recited was by Masaoka Shiki, who died in 1902 at the age of 34.

A haiku is just three lines and I read these ones very, very slowly over a period of 15 minutes. So, I thought, overwhelmed, this is what words can do, occasionally, when we ride out to meet them. Not for the sake of the dead but for the living, it felt like a funeral.

My life –
How much more of it remains?
The night is brief.

In memory of Max Riebl (1991–2022).

Miles Allinson’s latest novel, In Moonland (Scribe; $30), was published in September last year.