Exhibition Reflection: Grounding Feelings

By Diana G. Barnes

A reflection on Grounding Feelings focussing on Titania’s speech, Judith Wright’s poem ‘Gum-Trees Stripping’, and Robert D. FitzGerald’s poem ‘Song In Autumn’ and briefly Hans Heysen’s charcoal sketch ‘Country Road’. This is one of a series of responses to our Exhibition Unsettling Certainties: Emotions Exhibited. For a taste, please click here.

Looking across the materials assembled here to represent the theme Grounding Feelings, I see visions of natural physical landscapes filtered through the human emotions of artist-creators and rendered in words and pictures, and in ink, charcoal and paint. Being a historicist, I want to try to place these items in some kind of chronology, recognising that these topographic representations derive from different places and times, some actual, others imagined. Some look backwards to bring ancient traditions into dialogue with the present, others scrutinise the here and now. And yet I perceive that each of these communicative acts asks me to consider “What can we, emotive and fallible, humans know of our environment?”

The oldest text here is the soliloquy of Titania, the Fairy Queen, a speech delivered to her husband Oberon, the king of the Fairies, in her first appearance in Shakespeare’s late sixteenth century comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In it she articulates her refusal to bend to Oberon’s will. Oberon resents Titania’s preoccupation with an Indian boy in her care, and wants to use him as one of his guards. Titania desires to keep the changeling close. In this speech Titania describes how Oberon’s jealous “brawls” fuel “winds”, that suck “contagious fogs” from the oceans causing rivers to break their banks. This stormy unseasonable weather unsettles seasonal activities: flooding prevents the oxen from pulling their ploughs and the ploughmen work in vain; the mud ruins the Morris dancers’ celebrations; corn rots on the stalk; the maze garden becomes overgrown; and “rheumatic diseases do abound” among “human mortals”. This sickness or “distemperature” has “The seasons alter[ed]” and neither spring, summer, autumn nor winter wear “their wonted liveries”.

Titania’s description of unsatisfied desire, jealousy, and megalomania effecting environmental change, harks back to the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In Ovid’s tales unregulated passions drive humans to defy the will of the Gods, the Gods retaliate by transforming them into stone, into trees, or non-human animals. In this soliloquy Titania speaks truth to power; she names what she sees, but she does not play a simple blame game. She acknowledges that she is implicated: “this same progeny of evils comes / From our debate, from our dissention—We are their parents and original”. Although Titania recognises that she plays a part in the environmental disorder she observes, her revelation that environmental responsibility is widely dispersed does not have cosmic consequences in this play. Climatic disaster is averted, metamorphoses are reversed, the natural order is restored and the warring parties put aside their differences and reunite in festivities proper to midsummer: this is a comedy after all!

How can we read this merry tale of environmental transformation and climate change averted today? Looking at it from the vantage point of a global climate already warmed beyond comfort, Shakespeare’s magical resolution to climate change wrought by jealousy, greed, and megalomania, is a sleight of hand, one that seems like a naïve, wishful, solution to a problem that has become urgent and impossible to ignore. Titania’s speech captures something of my own sense of disempowerment in the face of environmental change. I can point my finger at the causes, but I recognise that I too bear responsibility as a consumer in a global economy that drains the planet of resources, and unsettles local seasonal temporalities. I can only view the solution presented in Shakespeare’s play wistfully, nostalgic for the certainties that anchored thinking about seasonality in late sixteenth-century England. This is not my world.

The three twentieth-century Australian poets represented here, however, anticipate my realities more accurately. Judith Wright’s well-known environmental activism is expressed in “Gum-Trees Stripping”. She acknowledges that intellectual legacies of western learning cannot sum up the “need’s born within the tree” that respond to “light” and set the “sap” to flow “tidal like a sea”. She stretches her lines to respectfully acknowledge the truths disclosed by other ways of knowing. She writes that “words are not meanings for a tree”, and here she does not simply point to language, but to other poetic techniques of generating an impression. She cites the poetic convention of simile: “these rags look like humility, / or this year’s wreck of last year’s love, / or wounds ripped by the summer’s claw.” In these examples the poet views the natural landscape through an emotional lens, but this does not satisfy Wright. It bears no truths. “Wisdom lies outside the word / in the earlier answer of the eyes” suggesting that poets must look once again, carefully and attentively in order to discern in “the hermit tatters of old bark” histories communicated through “the charcoal scars of fire”, alongside “the red, the rose, / The stained and sculptured curve of grey”, that is, a seasonal colouration that reflects the tree’s temporality “the hermit tatters of old bark / split down and strip to end the season”.

Settlers came to Australia with a western poetic legacy of easy and emotive pastoral similes which blinded them to the realities of their environment. Wright suggests that in order to discern the Australian bush, the poet must begin by careful unguarded, unfettered “quiet” observation, “and not look / for reasons past the edge of reason”. This she implies would be “truer”. This preparedness to look again, to look carefully is communicated in Robert D. FitzGerald’s poem “Song In Autumn”, also in the University of Adelaide collection, and it is interesting that he worked as both a surveyor and a poet. I have not the space here to extend these reflections, but in brief we see in Hans Heysen’s charcoal sketch “Country Road” a concern to observe afresh, to view the Australian bush with new eyes and represent it with a truth to nature, that would persuade viewers of its majesty and enkindle in them a passion to preserve the natural environment that he felt was being too readily degraded through widespread logging and clearing.