On Lust and Longing Read online

  I knew Minou was a fragment of my soul, which has always, inexplicably, harboured the feeling it is part Chinese. I’d loved her as a character; she was a deceitful, infuriating young woman, and had been a pleasure to write. Now that I’d killed her I felt light and free. I felt alive again.

  I felt alive—and angry.

  I felt I could kill M for jilting me . . . In fact, I WOULD KILL M. I pictured an assignation for which I would arrive with a 20-centimetre Sabatier in my shoulder bag. I saw blade thrust through ribs.

  But then mentally I drew back: if I got close enough to knife him, to hold him in my arms, I would melt with love again.

  A pistol would be better.

  I looked up ‘pistol clubs’ in the yellow pages, rang and asked how to join.

  And when I was arrested, convicted, jailed? I welcomed the idea. I imagined the undisturbed hours of writing, the fruitfulness and, yes—the freedom—of a regimented, routine world, a world stripped of trivia.

  The strange thing about hell, once you have actually moved in, is that it feels quite comfortable.

  I don’t recall how much longer I was insane, maybe a day or so, but at some point a glimmer of light entered my mind when I realised that giving my son a murderess for a mother was hardly better than a suicide, and that if I were in jail I would not see him often. The whole fantasy faded and disappeared.

  There were just a few people who were aware of my relationship with M. One of them was Sir Richard Kirby, who had known him for twenty years. Kirby and I had spent hundreds of hours talking, so he knew me well. He was a wise, thoughtful old charmer whose judgments of character were subtle and elegantly informed. Without revealing too many details, and certainly none of my murder plans, I told him the story. He listened, and after a silence said, ‘Thank God, Blanco, that it’s over. You would have ended up sticking a knife in him’.

  When you have needed someone enough to go mad and plan suicide and murder, your being is tempered by the experience of suffering and gains a modicum of wisdom from it. You forgive yourself. You forgive him. And so, finally, my strongest feeling was compassion—for M, for me, for his wife.

  The refugee novel had concluded with the impulsive woman dead and the rational one alive, pursuing her career, her yearning for what she has lost shoved behind a wall of ambition. It was made into a rather vapid movie a few years later, with the marketing line, ‘Two women. Two worlds. Together they must risk everything’. There, compressed into nine words, was the rubble of my heart. I often reflected how lucky I was so few people knew the story that lay behind it, or I would have had a wider humiliation to add to chagrin.

  In the late 1970s I’d noted that the news media presentation of M was mostly so simplified as to be not much more than a cartoon. I was offended that public debate relied on such spindly legs, and wanted to do something about it; I wanted to make my own presentation of M, in a biography. At the time, it was no certain bet for good sales; many of the cleverest commentators had already written M off, and if they were right, the book would arouse only academic interest. He had agreed to be in it more or less to indulge me, since the project required from him nothing except interviews with me, and it was merely another of the myriad favours asked of him every day of the week. When our grand amour had crashed and burned, I was appalled to realise how little I had known about him. Inspired by failure, I flung myself into research.

  M and I did not talk about the past, except fleetingly, on our first day of working together: 3 January 1980. We were still deeply attracted to each other, but we both accepted that personal wishes bow to force majeure. He had not yet entered parliament—he would do so in October that year—but had been thinking many steps ahead, to a general election in 1983, with himself as leader of the Labor Opposition. ‘Divorce could cost Labor 3 per cent,’ he had fretted several times, back when this was an issue for us. As it turned out he had made the right decision: for himself, for me, for his family, for mine, for his party—and, as became obvious, for the nation.

  My husband and I were trying to make a go of our marriage again, but neither of us had our heart in it. I still longed for love. I had to make frequent interstate flights for research at a time when nearly all one’s fellow passengers were men. I found myself seated, staring at their faces as they approached along the aisle, wondering, Would you love me? Would you? They seemed tense and distracted, their own eyes searching for their seat numbers or space in the overhead lockers. None of them appeared to notice the lost dog sitting in row 5.

  The need for love was like a persistent mild illness, mentally pushed aside and forgotten most of the time, then flaring up without warning. Meanwhile, I worked tirelessly on the biography. After two years and three months it was complete, and by then, I had recovered from M: research and writing had sweated him out of my system. People asked me often, ‘When you were doing the biography, did you and he have an affair?’ I replied, ‘No’. I don’t know what I would have said had they asked the correct question.

  I was already thinking about my next book, which I had decided to set in Israel, a country that had enthralled me with its towering hostilities and psychological knots. Israel, as a country, and Palestine, its rejected brother, tell the most complex and passionate story of longing in the twentieth century: longing for God to honour His promise to Abraham, Jews longing for a decent life, safety and freedom, Palestinians longing for respect and a national purpose. Israel and Palestine seemed like ill-assorted travellers struggling together up a mountain track with millennia of religious, emotional and cultural baggage on their backs, and an abyss at their feet. I imagined a main character blundering around Israel/Palestine dealing with contemporary problems while trying to reconnect with the divine intimacies of the past—presented in the guise of her harsh and unpredictable Israeli father. Before returning to Jerusalem, where I had decided to stay, I started my background reading, the Old Testament being an essential text. I sat down with King James, began at Genesis and ploughed on until Malachi—in turn spellbound, bored, disgusted, uplifted and dumbfounded. Here was described a direct line of connection to Being, but it was also a millennia-long collection of riddles: how could people love the ranting sadist so often depicted, who made all kinds of threats, the final one being that He would come in a ‘great and dreadful day’ and ‘smite the earth with a curse’? What might be ‘the burning bush’ that announced to Moses, ‘I AM THAT I AM’? Were the messages as brutally flat-footed as they sounded—‘an eye for an eye’—or was this sacred book, this ‘mass of delights’, a majestic art of signs and symbols, its surface brightly veneered with obvious meaning, its truth concealed and mysterious, beyond the understanding of untrained minds? Inner restlessness pursued me as I read. I felt as powerless, bewildered and overwhelmed as a child confronted with the mysteries of adult life. After decades of slumber my soul was awakening. I burned for comprehension.

  The biography of M was published in October 1982 to such success and publicity I could not go about unrecognised. I wanted anonymity again, and with relief flew off to Israel for more research. In the streets of Jerusalem, knowing nobody, unable to understand the chatter going on around me, I was free, and dying by the quarter-inch. I missed my son, back home in Canberra. I missed giving him love. Phone calls were cripplingly expensive and the time difference made them psychologically disjointed. On a cold spring morning I went to Tel Aviv to vote in the 1983 federal election, and returned that night to find Jerusalem hushed beneath snow, and the heating off in my apartment building. The shops had closed for Sabbath, there were no cars on the roads, the whole city had retreated into a warm family bosom. On the other side of the world my former Muse had just become prime minister. My book about him, revealing the richness of his life and his strength of purpose, had helped persuade those who mattered to make him the leader of his party, from which point electoral success was assured. But I had no wish to join the victory parade. I had regained my power and was now travelling away from him, with an unplanned r
oute and unknown destination. All I wanted, at that moment of triumph, was dinner and a hot bath.

  Once I was back in Canberra, my husband and I agreed our marriage was over. He had found a new, talented and beautiful partner. We were amicable, but my son and I argued bitterly. I sat down to write and no words would come. I badgered myself for just a paragraph, a sentence. Writer’s block is a curious phenomenon: was mine from fractured relationships? From overwork? From something else entirely? All three, I think. It worsened daily. In the end I could type nothing. I tried handwriting. One day, my hand refused to write at all. I had been trying to make a grocery list.

  I dreamed of being lost in a strange city and too scared to ask directions, not knowing what I was looking for. Awake, I felt an almost palpable pressure from something unknown, urging me to stop, turn around and examine my life. Of course, I had been examining—even discovering and creating—myself through writing. This was a call to search out a hidden room.

  Tentatively, without conviction, I began to retrace my steps—back to my teens, when I had first come in contact with the writing of the nineteenth-century Hindu sage Rama Krishna; my twenties, when I’d meditated; and my thirties, when I’d begun a spiritual practice to which I’d been introduced in Indonesia. I’d rejected them all for one reason or another, but the real reason was that my nature was not ready to be disciplined.

  In the early 1980s Canberra offered a smorgasbord of ‘spiritual’ delicacies for a hungry soul like mine, but not all were nourishing or wholesome. I took a delicious bite here and there—Siddha yoga, Benedictine meditation and prayer, Jungian insight—but in the end found I was most at ease in the gentle, dowdy, well-educated milieu of The Friends, the Quaker Meeting for Worship. The writer’s block dissolved and I was able to finish the Israeli novel. In reviews, both Jews and Palestinians found it annoying, which rather tickled me. I won another literary prize, this one international, with a ticket to London to receive the award—but by then I had lost interest in writing. Towards the end of 1985 I had met a mystagogue who, one word at a time, as if for a kindergarten child, had begun teaching me to hear and comprehend the still, small voice within. What I was discovering was so vibrantly alive that writing, in comparison, seemed insipid. I started to feel gratitude for the simplest things—a tree in leaf, the sun shining on a wall, a dog wagging its tail. The present moment was numinous, perfect, and sufficient.

  Einstein said, ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious’. With the help of my spiritual director, without fanfare, without realising what was happening at first, I had set out on a mysterious journey. Like a journey in the physical world, it offered wonders and delights, astonishments, mishaps and confrontations. It was compelling. Even the bad patches, the long blank deserts of doubt, the descents into numbness, horrible at the time, once traversed, were cause for rejoicing.

  By the end of the 1980s I was living in Sydney, happy and serene. If I wanted anything it was a pipedream about joining, or establishing, an egalitarian spiritual community in some beautiful bushland setting. Problem One was finding enough like-minded souls to create such a community. Problem Two was I enjoyed the pleasures of the city and the flesh too much to abandon them: friends, travel, books, movies, boyfriends, looking over my son’s shoulder as he started tertiary education. I loved being single. I had my own bed and my own front door. Men were for fun. For me, to take on one for better or for worse would be ditzy. I would have liked a lover who shared my passion for the spiritual life, but all the spiritually committed men I knew were either unavailable or unattractive. As a writer, I was dillydallying, accepting official positions in professional organisations, sitting on boards, fiddling with screenplays, speaking at conferences. Except for a small group of friends on their own journeys, with whom I shared a common language of electrifying intimacy, nobody I knew was curious about or had the vocabulary for discussing what had captured my soul. On Sundays I went to the Quaker Meeting for Worship in Devonshire Street; I meditated morning and evening, and each day read sacred, mystical, metaphysical or exegetic texts.

  One afternoon, in November 1988, the phone rang and, with amazement, I recognised M’s voice. He had tracked me down through a mutual friend, and asked if we could meet.

  He suggested a time, a place and a way—an exercise that was now excruciatingly tricky, since wherever he went he was under guard and accompanied by officials, not every one of whom he trusted. We met in a confidant’s house in Sydney, both very nervous—but then we rushed into each other’s arms, laughing. We laughed at ourselves, and with delight and with relief that we still loved each other. Our happiness was intensified by the imaginative solutions we had to find to be able to meet: a red wig, a stetson, the kindness of friends. We knew we each had other lovers, and that we were not going to be foolish a second time.

  I began to write again: articles, an essay, travel pieces, the outline of a novel.

  Then, in the second half of 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, drawing to Saudi Arabia a huge coalition of military power to do battle with him. Among the panics and rumours of war were ghastly stories about chemical and biological weapons, and hysteria mounted. M had committed Australian forces. At all our rendezvous we talked about the Middle East situation and its possible consequences. In Quaker meetings on Sundays, witness after witness would stand to pray for war to be averted but, as the storm gathered, prayers became denunciations of our government for adopting violence as its method. I remained seated and silent. Some Quakers were going to Iraq to be human shields to try to save schools and hospitals from being bombed. I felt pulled in two: I believed in the truth that arose from the meetings for worship. I also believed M was right that there was no option but to fight. I believed the Quaker ideal of non-violence had become the enemy of essential action. I began to feel more and more loyal to M, now cast in the role of villain, and felt awkward when I arrived at Devonshire Street. Spiritually sensitive people can pick up the negative thoughts of others, often painfully, and although I said nothing inside or outside the hall, I knew I could not continue to worship there without becoming disruptive to the meeting. Out of respect, in December I left. The war began in January 1991.

  By the end of that year, M’s parliamentary career was over and one of the most important women in his life, his private secretary and companion lover for more than twenty years, was dead. Alive, she and I had disliked each other, and had not met or spoken for years. But days after her funeral, and for many weeks after that, when my mind became still or I meditated, her pretty, elfin face, smiling warmly, appeared—now as a friend, who urged me closer to M.

  My spiritual director had begun taking a keener interest in my development. He had encouraged me to establish and lead a small group in Sydney, which caused astonishment, if not hilarity, among my bohemian neighbours in Woollahra when on Sunday mornings they heard us singing hymns in my apartment. Within the Christian spectrum our church was Johannine, metaphysical, and at the furthest remove from fundamentalism. Its liturgy was exquisitely beautiful; at its main building, in Melbourne, its (male and female) priests and deacons wore gorgeous vestments; its altar, vases of fresh flowers, candles, live music, painted windows and chapels were all lavish. Everything spoke tenderly of love for the Christ—not to mention longing for approval from the soft, wily blue eyes of my spiritual director, who was both the Pope of this ecclesia, and privately an exuberant friend, welcoming guests with hearty food and wine and afterwards demanding that we do the washing up.

  Although he thought writing was a waste of my time I wanted to share my discoveries of mystical life through fiction. I was working on a novel built around the rehabilitation of an injured female eagle, an eagle being the symbol of the Gospel of St John. The injured bird was my metaphor for a soul struggling in the snares of the senses. The eagle’s rehabilitation is the light in a dark story whose villainous character was partly inspired by wondering about the scientists who created chemical and biological weaponry—in Iraq, a
nd throughout the world. A woman, Diana, is protagonist/heroine, and man-shy. Unknown to her, she has an ally in a wildlife photographer.

  Near the end of the novel the eagle, Aquila, is released into the wild. But as she flies free for the first time since her injury, a male eagle appears in the sky.

  In seconds, [Aquila] had found a thermal and was rising in a soaring spiral, pausing, rising again, weaving a pattern against the sky. The other bird was descending . . . it flared, made a vertical climb and stalled, wings open, pinned to the sky like the eagles that stand for empires. Once more it swooped and rolled and turned a cartwheel in the air . . . dancing . . . Aquila had been flying in a leisurely circle. But when the strange bird stooped at her for the third time, she abruptly began to fly at the spot where it would begin an upward climb . . . Swooping towards each other, the two great birds flung themselves backward, their legs outstretched. Their feet locked like acrobats’ hands and, one above, one below, they whirled through the sky—and whirled, and broke, and leapt apart, and seized each other again to spin, tumbling and twirling in the nuptial dance.

  At the end of the book, Diana overcomes her angst about being diminished by a male partner; she accepts the photographer as her lover.