An excerpt from ‘Dream Geographies’

Alexis Wright’s essay on Praiseworthy in HEAT Series 3 Number 16 covers many aspects of the writing of the novel. One the most moving sections, excerpted below, deals with her use of notes and treasured objects. 

The writing of Praiseworthy was loosely guided by a collection of notes and treasured objects that helped fire the vision of the book, the total life-world – the multiple realities of characters such as Dance, the moth-er, flowing right through her dreaming. The shape of things that live in the heart, the life force of all worlds and of all peoples, the great harvest of sensibility, wisdom old and new, intellect, drive, sheer guts and tenacity – these were some of the ideas that I learnt from over a half century of work in the fight for Aboriginal rights.

The Aboriginal world is littered with research, lived experience. There are no barren fields here, no parched lands left unploughed, where the manifestations of our concerns will not be found. In this vast inland world of the heart and mind, it’s like country, all-flourishing, all-blooming, all-embracing, all-encompassing in its compassion, as it is equally pot-holed with constantly falling bombs. Many stories are about the idea of home; Praiseworthy is an attempt to create that home in the mind, an enormous house of country, the mainspring of the flow, the flood of realities.

A museum of objects in my study that accompanied the long journey of writing still cast their wonderment through thoughts and imaginary possibilities; the many pictures on the walls and desk – a small print of a Rainbow Serpent, birds, art, photos of dust storms, haze, smoke, a young boxer, mythical landscapes in Asia – all had this responsibility. On my desk and on bookshelves sit small objects gathered from literary travels across the country and the world, and those given as gifts; statues of Chinese and Japanese mythical creatures, wisdom gods of literature, sea, and sea travel, a demon-queller from Japan, netsukes – a hare, a dragon, a finch, frogs – and found objects from the natural world, including seed-pods of mangroves, various nuts of tropical trees, beetles, butterflies and moths, and the iridescent legs and wings of small insects that had been caught in a gleam of sunlight shining through the trees and hitting the leaf litter beneath.

It’s a place of numerous possibilities where I have spent long hours in thought, imagining, and writing – whether in the world of my study, or else, carrying this world while writing in natural environments. I have found inspiration in the random gifts from a windfall: a feather from the local birds, or a perfect bird’s nest that had floated down from the highest tree in a night storm, and fallen undamaged into the garden. In the decade of summers taken to write this book, I have watched travelling butterflies dance their life through bushlands and over our gardens.

In and from a huge wellspring of thoughts, all gathering exponentially in the creation of the Praiseworthy world, was the powerhouse where everything was studied, argued and imagined. In creating this world, every angle, word, sentence of the page grew very much alive in my mind and helped me to maintain the focus and direction, extending imagination over a long period until the book was finished. Even before the first word hit the page, I probably always knew that this was going to be a huge literary work, the type of story that the elders in our world would say will take a long time to tell. A story they told in segments, without rush, and why rush? Our world is of millennia, a culture interconnected across the entire continent through its law stories – this is huge. A world much fractured by the enormous consequences of colonising theft of land and resources, and on alert to continuing attacks on one’s sovereignty of land. Our plight that connects us to the growing millions of others, the landless and the persecuted throughout the world suffering from wars, colonisation, climate change, and being torn away from their traditional homelands – this is huge.

In such a large work, it was important to constantly keep the sense of direction of what was possible, so that nothing could be taken away from it no matter what circumstances intervened in the journey from a constant flow of distractions. So no matter what was happening, or where I was, I was always able to concentrate and continue the work on this long book. It did not matter whether I sat in my university office, or my study, or in the garden, or in a park, or in the bush, or if I was travelling, or sitting in a café or a meeting on the other side of the world, the focus on the book came too. The focus remained, because what held the focus, were simply the small joys of being in the world where I lived, and belonged, or in the small joys I found elsewhere. This helped me to retain some sense of myself through what I wanted to write, as did my having learnt to be able to write anywhere, or at any time, while remaining totally oblivious to anything else happening around me, as long as I was not directly disturbed.

While looking through the twelve notebooks used in the writing of Praiseworthy, I have marvelled at some of the contents, or felt unnerved by the copious notes, many scribbled quickly to catch the flow of thoughts, and the now illegible instructions that had been quickly written in the middle of the night. Some of these notes were made around three a.m. – the time when my mind began examining the concerns of the book, or had begun composing new lines to be written. Other notes were about dreams, and written quickly in the hope of catching the essence of what had been dreamt in the moments while it was quickly fading away. The hope was to keep these ideas safe by corralling them in a jumble of words on a page, and writing quickly what would never be remembered quite so vividly hours later in the morning.

These notes were a loose guidance to ideas, inspirations, problems, reminders, lines, dreams and wanderings of the mind travelling to places – land, sky and seas near and far – some existing, some forming dream geographies of vast limitless space, but also derived from other universes pounding away in the mind of the world – either human or non-human worlds of the great and the small, or ancestral realms. It was a full harvest of imaginaries. It felt like a river of imagination gathering the head waters, and flowing, or racing, through a maze of thoughts and facts. And more and more as I wrote, the book became a question of how to capture the impossible scale of all of humanity nose-diving into increasing apathy while the world was becoming hotter, and increasingly more out of control from being long governed by human stupidity and greed. How do you capture the worldwide scale of the unimaginable, the universality of our alienation from each other and from all other living and non-living beings, of what is actually holding us together, the sum story about where our humanity had reached or evolved? Praiseworthy became that world, a small but universal world that mostly felt it would be recognisable anywhere.

The journey of writing this book was long, and the notebooks show their age through their use and how they became dog-eared and worn. The pages are filled with notes written in pencil, which perhaps fortuitously, fades more quickly. I should have written in ink. Some of the notes are long, others just lines, or words, indicators. Sections were later either coloured with highlighters, or have flight-line ringed sentences – guiding later drafts of the book. Various pages were turned inwards, or tagged, or have flattened corners. The books have yellow or pink reminder tags, mostly with scribbled notes. These reminders were to prompt a particular thought in the imaginative workings, the next sweep of creating an even greater measure of imagination in newer drafts. The markers appear like road signs preserving what would later be moored in the flood of thoughts coming down the river, and that would be joined by the currents from the next moment of time. Some thoughts were marked by a symbol in the form of a ring containing a single cross, or multiple crossed lines that might resemble a flickering star. These symbols were easily identifiable reminders of a need to continue going back again to these notes until no longer needed. Many of the symbolised notes were often returned to a year, or years, later, and finally, were reviewed in the last round of finalising the manuscript, when a line was drawn through what ended up being used in the final draft.

Much else was jammed between the pages of these notebooks apart from notes. What has been assembled is another miniature museum, relics of the natural world, picked-up reminders of a former existence as part of the life from which it had originated. All these treasures hold infinite stories that are not just of themselves, but also, tell of a multiplicity of relationships and their place in the interconnected web of life. These wonders exist separately in their own universes, but felt as though a gift had been given to help ground the book I was writing, to take it back to the ground, the house of country that had stood the test of time, the atmosphere metaphorically, as well as the actual weather conditions, to help give the book strength in a natural framework tightly held together by the nuts and bolts of co-dependency, interconnection, the recipe of the world, to give it everything that is of importance to a story about desire for survival.

The inside covers of the notebooks were used to save a substantial collection of news clippings, an off-beat record of the world through those years of writing the book. There are pressed leaves, wildflowers, feathers of owls and colourful parrots and lorikeets, swans, finches, cockatoos, picked up on walks, hundreds of walks, of walking alone while deep in thought, that in the end, amounted to much of what went into creating this book. The feathers alone form a catalogue of walking through many seasons in different parts of the country.

You will find in these notebooks: broken wings of butterflies, such as the brown forest butterflies found in the summer months when the woods were abundant with their dance; travelling beetles crawling in their hundreds in the leaf litter. This collection was a part of much more. All these objects were studied and, if not intentionally, were thought about as works of scale as were the patterns on a butterfly wing which are composed of millions of scales, grandiose designs developed over aeons of time. All of these collected objects were a reminder of being grounded while facing the realities as we have done in the past, and will do so in the future in dealing with other major concerns which hold no beauty, nor added comfort to our combined humanity. These were story worlds that were drawn from in Praiseworthy, to add to the significance of being grounded, to know the tiny but integral scale of your belonging in a timeless culture of country, while staring into the abyss of the world.

The objects I had collected were enchanting reminders of the magnitude of beauty that exists far beyond oneself, and that had come with a message about what is important, and alive, and part of the universal story, the interior world of our dwelling, the house of country that becomes a part of the bigger house of the world in the writing of a book that sought to capture this spirit of the times, and the size of the bell ringing for our time.

These notebooks are not exceptional. Notes were only ever written quickly. Mostly scribbled in the moment. The contents are signposts, depots, trains stops, for launching directly into further elements for creating an imaginary world. Together as a collection, the notebooks just remain as a small visual memory of the frequency of making notes that were either used soon after the note was made, or were later returned to numerous times. Mostly, they were a very rough reference guide, a panacea of a book in the making, and an informal index for what would eventually become a work of scale.

Praiseworthy is now a published book that I can barely believe I was capable of writing; its skeleton is these notebooks, the slender, bony, more-like-fish-bone remains, a sketch map in total, all bound together on top of a bookcase. Yet their pages remain as keys that can still prompt, open the faded memories, that come flooding back from the internal vault, the burial place when the life you had given the living manuscripts ceases to live.

In the deep recesses of the brain, the mind has learnt how to store completed challenges during the recuperation period, of healing the senses and the body, that comes after the completion of a book. The emotional part of writing, the toll of the memories of working on Praiseworthy, has now mostly faded, but memories of becoming lost in the work return from time to time. These belong to a thousand different ways of losing the way, that sometimes still run like stray dogs prowling in my dreams. Perhaps, it is only the ghosts that will occasionally return to say, let sleeping dogs lie. What was once constantly worked through in the mind while developing the book is now finished.

As I think about what comes next, I wonder how literature might again become an endeavour for building lasting value, one of trying to reach impossible horizons. The equivalent, say, of those deep thoughts that have been carried in epical story lines, those story laws from ancient time created by our ancestors, the spiritual creation-beings who wrote the country and left behind everlasting stories of laws in the traditional song lines of millennia. The ancient story maps that have lasted the distances; that have been kept solid and maintained through the minds of generations of our people adhering to ancient systems of law, knowledges and wisdom; kept alive through the responsibility of holding the future of all times continuously; and have remained as the crisscrossing of the routes taken by the creation-beings through an interweaving of the relationships tasked with responsibility for keeping these storyline laws strong.

In another way, we might look to Antoni Gaudi’s Basílica de la Sagrada Família in Barcelona, the monumental cathedral he devoted his life to building for his God who was not in a hurry to see it finished. Why not then take time to strive for great art as it attempts to speak about the harrowing depths from which the overwhelming imbalances between the sorrows and the joys grow?

To read ‘Dream Geographies’ in full, purchase HEAT Series 3 Number 16 in print here.