FEBRUARY 2005 - ISSUE 4 - ISSN 1448 - 632

 COMMUNING WITH DAVID MALOUF: CONSIDERATIONS UPON SALVATION

GREG SMITH

Abstract 

Moments of salvation occur in a acute awareness of self and nature and others. Such moments significantly counteract the post-modern destruction of the "delicate equipoise of the human psyche" (Eagleton) to bring richer realisations of a greater perspective about one's coordinates in time and place, and mankind’s duty to care for the earth.

Such moments can indeed become experiences of liminality, of reaching and crossing thresholds with greater courage than has been attempted previously. These moments bring a pull to the sublime, bringing a sense of the broader vision, of the bigger picture, that transcends and explains the ordinary.

This sense of the sacred, like “the tug to immortality” (Malouf), engenders altruism. For the concept of salvation shifts the frame of reference beyond one's own interests, pursuits and experiences to more enduring ones. In short, it vectors experience towards personal transformation.

The following article provides a hermeneutical reading of Malouf’s “The Crab Feast”(1980) that brings to bear the twin dimensions of annual neighbourly banqueting and the universal hope for salvation where the poet sings of such a moment of realisation. One could call it a moment of salvation for being an intense realisation of his shared mortality.

Introduction

This article[1] reports an aesthetic journey within a theological domain in its attempt to read poetical images from the point of view of religious experience and insight. In better integrating faith with the poetic insight, I am striving to link the arts and religion. This journey builds an intertextuality between the discourse of salvation, the texts of our lives and the poetic text. I argue that the hypotext of salvation suitably contextualizes Malouf’s discovery in this poem.

The idea of communing with a poet in my title suggests seeking - or having found - higher understanding or heightened receptivity. It is said that kindred souls commune through their inspired artistic creations: through writings, art, and shared acts of kindness. I do not dare to claim this privilege but I do seek to read sympathetically with his aspiration to deal with mortality. Communing with David Malouf in his special love feast in this poem is a dangerous game indeed, for it brings new knowledge, new states of awareness and new imperatives. The title swings on the feast he describes in this poem to suggest this artistic connection as well as some eucharistic resonances in the feast. For the poem swings on a critical moment focusing on the universal struggle to reconcile appetite and love.

I find that Malouf’s understanding about the status of humans in the universe produces a decisive turn about our responsibility, which becomes an ecological mandate to bring about rescue to our natural world.  For there is a dreary silence in the disappearance of species, such as the Queensland green frog. Being the most evolved, the most complex, the most knowing species, we humans urgently need to be responsive and responsible about our actions upon Mother Earth. The arrogance of our species renders us blind; yet we all breathe the same air, bleed the same blood. I will be suggesting that re-reading this poem brings us to a portal, a threshold of liminality, which incurs increased responsibility by envisioning what could be done better, in a better vision for life on earth.

Although it is not now so apparent in Christianity, so much of other world religions turns on ritual and kosher food – what one eats and when and why. So I expect my title, “Communing with Malouf” also suggests a social dimension in its possibilities for communal salvations. Mindful of the Western predilection for individualistic views (e.g., “my soul at any cost”, or “each soul will receive its dearest reward”), we must rate those hints of salvations gained as members of broader social groups as more valuable. Indeed, my interpretative journey is conducted within a formal religious tradition, where the aesthetic, religious and the social are not separate. For as Mark Helm notes, “all dimensions of life, sublime and mundane, are touched by a religious vision. . . Religious convictions are of public and not only private significance.”[2] Thus, any references to salvations gained as members of the human family and especially as families of faith will be prized, since social descriptions are truer characterisations of our fate as humans. In exploring a menu for the senses, Malouf envisions a greater good for the human community. Yet that salvation is not certain; the choice can go either way; we risk catastrophe in refusing to commune like this poet.

My paper rests on the claim that some key insights bring new and irrevocable stages of awareness. One critical insight can turn a life around, can bring a whole new spotlight to bear on present reality, and indicate a new path into the future. Creative insights lie at the basis of major scientific discoveries. Events like the enlightenment of the Buddha are the beginnings of major new paradigms. I am saying that major new paradigms do in fact save us. They bring rescue from ignorance, bring new insights and world-views to bear, and resolve and close off tensions. In a real sense a significant insight can be a salvation for the race. Relevantly, in his Paris Review interview William Faulkner[3] noted how the essential quality of a great writer is this capacity to question harmful practices:

The most important thing is insight, that is – curiosity – to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.

Malouf’s insight in this poem is a hard look at the stuff of the world’s redemption. Our survival and salvation as a race depends on our relationships with each other and the world we inhabit. He offers a unique perspective that critiques the past as a way forward to ask why: must it be this way? For him, the stuff of creation becomes transformed by insight into instruments of salvation.

Salvation in conserving ecology

Of course, the definitive salvation comes with the Word that is Jesus. But I am also saying that Malouf's insight in this poem shares some of that finality by achieving a new state of awareness, by embedding an urgent ethical mandate.  When the poet discovers that both he and his food share the one flesh, have coexisted in the same temporality, and face the same fate subject to the same laws of existence, he arrives at a unique and irrevocable insight. For he sees his love feast as a momentous transgression.[4]

Now twenty-five years after its publication, we can read it as the basis for an ecological theology. Today’s mainstream Australian readers seek such a re-enchantment with the sacred, and Malouf is well sensible of this heart-felt desire. So in this reading, I rather eschew the popular reading of this poem as an erotic fancy[5] as happened in the World Poetry Congress in Sydney in 2001 in favour of an interpretation from within the community of believers such as Luke Ferretter[6] has outlined is valid in his Christian Literary Theory (2003). Ferreter builds on Stanley Fish’s “interpretative communities” concept to validate a Christian view as an identifiable perspective on public data. This interpretative community is the worshipping community

Salvation resolves ambiguities and indifference in a determination to face reality perceived in a new way. As a salvation, a critical insight resolves the crisis of inactivity, ambiguity, indifference and lack of urgency. It closes apprehensions and opens a new comprehension. Listeners are never the same after such a revelation. So this consideration upon ‘salvation’ by the academy can test the linguistic, semiotic, hermeneutical, and performative capacities of this poem for our faith communities.

Reading for consciousness of salvation

I hold that the poem re-enacts a singular moment of insight at a portal of salvation (in the sense of a comprehensive gateway of contact to greater riches, goods and possibilities). Romancing the metaphor of a banquet, the poem reviews present practices but also vectors forth a crucial understanding for the future in dramatizing a symbolic meeting point. In this portrayal, his act of eating becomes a moment of revelation, becoming so strong a transgression upon species that it profoundly effects changes in the poet’s worldview about what really matters.  The crab feast opens a new pathway to a final statement about the state of the world, where the poet becomes a brother to creation, a citizen of the earth, a responsible human inhabitant, an enlightened poet, and even a reconstructed male. Malouf captures himself here in a moment of spiritual awakening, when a gift is granted, a rescue is won, and where a menu for the body becomes a mandate for the soul. In its performative modality, the poem grants access to a final comprehensive sense of the interconnectedness of all life of earth and to our common fate.

In effect I am saying that in engaging with this public poem, readers experience poetry as a significant locus for imaging social salvations. In describing that dynamic, John Coulson observes that, “the real assent we make in faith (expressed in metaphor, symbol, and story) is of the same kind as the imaginative assent we make to the primary forms of literature.”[7] Faith survives like an ember in the imagination. For theology and literary criticism share the resources of the language and require mutual support. In both domains, metaphor dislocates customary usage in order to create new meaning,[8] and stories “perform the classic task of imagination: they dissipate and destroy single mindedness and substitute diverse levels of never-ending interpretation.”[9] Thus, as he puts it: “imagination safeguards us from fixation.”[10] So in encountering symbols and stories in literature, we can indeed reach moments of self-consciousness and even personal transformations that can change lives. In its “enlargement of consciousness” as Coulson puts it, in the workings of the imagination to re-envision reality differently, new life-changing insights can progress heard guarantees about theological truths.

The common key is that both poetry and theology engage the imagination, to envisage a better reality.  Whereas theology seeks patterns in universals, poetry gives sharper focus to the particulars of experience, usually to imagine it transformed. Transformative self-consciousness works through the praxis of the imagination. For instance, in responding to the Chernobyl nuclear cloud passing over his Italian village, Malouf himself talks of a writer’s power to access what can be grasped beyond the first level of perception, the senses. He says: “As writers we have the duty – and we ought to have the capacity – to work this imaginative trick or miracle; to provide an experience of the imagination that will have the . . . effect of immediate illumination and understanding.” [11] He sees that anticipatory grasp of realities that are other-than-sensory and not-yet as very much a saving power for individual persons and indeed whole peoples. So poetry and faith both engage the imagination; that exercise of insight saves us.

In that sense then because the poem reports a irrevocable and irrefutable state of awareness, it presages emancipation, rescue, redemption, liberation, a decisive resolution of tensions, and salvation.

I aim to show today how Malouf’s poem plots just such a significant moment of realisation, so that it comes to save the poet from past ignorance for the sake of the future. For both the believer and the poet seek remedies for the common good of communities. Both poet and theologian are public voices serving their respective communities. Sharing their insights can benefit both publics. Indeed, when they find crossovers on common concerns, religious readings are possible.

Let’s apply this to another Malouf text. Consider just one example from An Imaginary Life[12] where the character the Roman poet Ovid speaks directly to the reader about humanity’s evolution:

Our bodies are not final. We are moving, all of us, in our common humankind, through the forms we love so deeply in one another, strain towards in each other’s darkness. Slowly, and with pain, over centuries, we each move an infinitesimal space towards it. We are creating the lineaments of such final man, for whose delight we have created a landscape, and who can only be a god.

As a religious reader, I find the poet’s intimations upon mortality here for instance are not private fodder but vital fare, essential good food for the community of his literary readers and for faith community readers too. I find “The Crab Feast” breaks open surprising challenges to us all, to be found in what W.H. Auden called “the privilege and panic of mortality.”[13] In the poem’s realisation of our common mortality, we can share in the poet’s intense subjectivity so as to transform our social objectivity. Because ideas impact upon lives and insights can change practices, in that sense then poetry saves us.

Malouf’s feast has the fervour of Heidegger and the flavour of Sobrino. What makes this insight or jouissance “stick” as irreversible is that it is sourced in primary elements (like the unprocessed food from the sea) and natural processes (the universal act of eating). It is presented as no artifice that can be misunderstood and equivocated upon. The mangroves, the broken shell, the salt sea, the raw crab flesh, and the man’s saliva compose empirical basics in a repeatable recipe for discovering salvation.

Others could read here the poet as a gourmand acting as a priest of the high rites of salvation. But I hear him as a prophet, a seer, and a sage critiquing human kind as the reckless harvesters, consumers and exploiters, as the odd cogs misunderstanding their place in the clockwork of nature. The ironic paradox is that the way forward through the portal to salvation is to realise that it begins in transforming those basics, that Man can only ‘take in’ this re-envisioned reality by transforming practices - his thoughtless greed and habitual ignorance. Malouf makes unthinkable cosmic harmony look possible. Malouf’s overheard monologue in this poem focuses upon a key intersection of aesthetic, social, political, ecological and religious concerns.

Intimacy as a locus of salvation

Finally to close these introductory comments, briefly consider intimacy that is the central datum in this poem, for as the first line reads: “there is no getting closer than this.” Intimacies can be either chosen or presented, pursued or discovered, as when someone reveals their hidden love or when a distant relative reminds us of a family secret long forgotten. Intimacies can be embarrassing when presented at the wrong time as unwelcomed or unexpected. There is a greater thrill in a new intimacy than in restored intimacy.

There are always degrees of intimacy, even beyond physical, psychological or social boundaries. Sexual intimacy is not the only or best example of an intimacy, but of course it is understandable to almost everybody. Intimacy is a social construction. Degrees of intimacy mark out one’s place in the scale of things, locate one’s social coordinates, one’s relative place, caste and role in the social life of society. Intimacy best expresses our human selves as social creatures.

Intimacies sum up histories and identities. The Christian life is a journey of increasing intimacy. Of all human activities, the moment of intimacy and the feeling of intimacy are the best and most desired of good times. Intimacies express a heartfelt reality as no other communication does. Intimacies require and deserve subtlety and demand genuine responses. Having an intimacy is a fact to recognize and celebrate. Possession of an intimacy entails special responsibilities. For that reason, a refusal or denial of an intimacy can be very foolish and painful indeed.

Accepting an intimacy affirms the choice of the other towards oneself. It is an affirmation of the freedom and individuality of the other party.  Intimacy never occurs in a power relationship such as between an inferior and a superior. It denotes equality, close identification and respects individuality. It denies any merging of identities or fusion of personalities but affirms equal separateness. Intimacy comes in knowledge (as in a secret), in experience (as fire fighters feel), in shared subjectivity (as between lovers) or in facing a fate together (as one would recognise others in a new light on the sinking ‘Titanic’). Moments of crisis test the limits of these intimacies.

For our purposes in reading this poem, I see the intimate connection between hunter and prey, and between feaster and his food as the central metaphor of the intimacy of a meal. I read it that because this closest intimacy is identified and accepted, salvation is found in that life-changing insight.

Malouf’s persona in this poem discovers an unknown intimacy at an unexpected moment. In preparing his crab meal, he finds there is so much he has unknowingly already shared with the crab. So the consummation of the meal, the consumption of its good flesh, transforms his transgressive communion into a love feast. For he discovers in it a shared fate. He learns from a unique, clear-sighted intimacy between hunter and prey.

This poem may be an eighties’ indulgence in a celebration of personal luxury. But today we may be more likely to read it for an ecological agenda or as political resistance to unregulated fishing practices or to draw attention to animal cruelty in a world context reading. In the twenty-first century, I read it to experience the terror of intimacy, to risk a poetical exploration of the ecological consequences of the good life. The poem tests perceptions of the self to affirm the insight that we individuals are larger than our bodies, that human identity suffuses all creation, and that insight entails responsibilities for life on earth.

A Note on Method

I find that an important interim salvation is imaged in Malouf’s poem, “The Crab Feast.” While Malouf reports he is not now part of the Christian believing tradition, he is a product of its conceptual world. I believe his poetry echoes some of its religious categories. He says, “poetry is engaged in an imaginative reviewing and reordering of the world about us.”[14]  In re-ordering public viewpoints, poetry previews such decisive changes, with radically reordered thinking. This poem plots that moment of decisive insight, of transformed attitudes, that envisages the salvation of humankind as beginning with respect for the ecology of this earth.

This discussion employs a reader-response hermeneutic in a conversation between the Christian scriptures, lived faith and insightful fiction. This is an exercise constructing some contextual theology at the interface of reading Australian literature in the living context of the Catholic tradition. Employing Larry J. Kreitzer's concept[15] of "reversing the hermeneutical flow", I will be seeking enlightenment upon the themes and motifs of a classic Christian doctrine through reading Malouf's poetry. In particular, these crossovers will achieve validity in the intensity of realisation generated when we find rich associations and discover coherences relevant for today’s readers and believers.

This hermeneutic is generating an intertextuality of Malouf’s writing and today’s world, where we juxtapose what is new with what is old, like bringing treasures out of a storehouse (Matt 13:52). Reading the works of Malouf this way seeks to explore the gap “between what is inside and what is outside the text”[16] I am not doing eisegesis, an idiomatic and idiotic peculiarity of imposing meaning upon the text, but intergesis, an act of “rewriting or inserting texts within some more or less established framework.”[17]

My hermeneutic will respect the integrity of the poem as a literary text, not treating it merely as data for the theological domain, but reading it to seek human insights about authenticity, the chances of re-enchantment, and about the prospects for a moral rearmament to transform our lives and society today. I propose to use salvation as an organizing concept and interpretative framework.

David Malouf: poet of salvation

Malouf’s limpid writing has an open, seemingly non-technical quality about it that is democratic and accessible. By examining what is concrete to the senses, he is a master of significant detail, creating emotive atmospheres in the selection of what is pertinent. He stresses what is tangible while at the same time accessing the limitless world of the imagination. In this two-fold process, he is a master of metaphor. I find his writing has a heuristic quality with its ebb and flow of impression, elaboration and disquisition. His prose is enlivened with refreshing observations and descriptions to undergird his narratives to create themes of relevance today. His lexical novelties hold real appeal for their appropriateness and precision.

Malouf is master of the equivocal, exploiting the many ambiguities of the post-modern condition.  Janus-like, his point of view while very really in the present involves past and future at the same time. Malouf negotiates with what is foreign. He questions our place in the universe and addresses common feelings of alienation. Malouf is a traveller who transforms experiences from other places.  He reports an inductive, embodied wisdom; there is wide appeal in his personal conservatism.

Malouf successfully intimates the universally longed-for unity of Nature. His own connectedness with nature in his poems like “The Crab Feast” (1980) appears also in his characters’ benevolent relationships with their immediate physical environments, such as in his 1994 novel Remembering Babylon his characters enjoy the “taste of the world [in] its greenness”[18] and Gemmy Fairley finds “the land up there was his mother”[19] These spiritual and metaphysical intimations about reality offer strong cogency for today’s readers.

Unashamedly, he provides self-transforming epiphanies as remedies for his characters who are enmeshed in the languid boredom of constrained lives, so that like Janet McIvor at the bee hives, they too can be “drawn into the process and mystery of things”[20] so they can be at home in their circumstances, at home in the wide living universe. Noel Rowe in a 1985 lecture notes how “trusting in the transformative and unitive powers of the imagination, he [Malouf] invites us to recover a naivety of belief and an extraordinary reverence for the hieróphanous nature of ordinary objects. [He] Malouf argues the need to ‘redeem’ the unknown dimensions of consciousness and being.”[21] Malouf shows how his characters achieve transformation and “re-establish the continuity in their lives.”[22] Such a message of promise seems badly needed in this terrorised world of 2004.

In his passion for valuing the gift of being alive, Malouf offers readers a belief in a second chance, a kind of secular grace as a genuine interim ‘salvation’. In Remembering Babylon, Gemmy and his two aboriginal visitors were seen mysteriously apart in “their silent communing.”[23] In Conversations at Curlow Creek, Michael Adair’s final reconciliation with his own history is dramatically satisfying if somewhat romantic. In Malouf’s basically optimistic framework, his characters are able to find direction and make progress with their lives. Kevin Hart notes how Malouf could be said to strive “to keep open the risk of transcendence.”[24] For that openness to the possibilities for transformations, I regard him a poet of redemption.

Feasting on crab meat 

A short search on the internet shows that the annual summer event of a crab feast is indeed a celebration of the good life in the USA. “Full Moon Over the Crab Feast” could well be the title of a true story about one of Baltimore, Maryland's, most loved delicacies - steamed crab. A Crab Feast is:

[A] huge block party that everybody comes to . . . Everyone has been coming for the crabs and camaraderie . . . Last weekend, young and old feted the blue crab. Hungry crab lovers savoured steamed crabs, crab cake sandwiches, crab soup, soft shell crab sandwiches — and more. Huge vats of crabs were the only things steaming [there that] Saturday.[25]

For the wonderful white meat, hard won from the crusty shells of this ‘brute blue’ native crustacean of the Chesapeake Bay area is highly prized and celebrated as a distinctive Maryland delicacy. Its power to bring cohesion to local communities is celebrated in advertising: I quote

Maryland crabs are definitely not fast food. A Maryland crab feast is a long, leisurely afternoon or evening spent with friends and family around a large table wrapped in brown paper, with conversation and a favorite brew flowing freely. Though their name implies a solitary lifestyle, their bounty implies a convivial gathering that is wholly Eastern Shore. [26]

It seems that tasting that luscious, white meat is like a gourmet indulgence on special occasions for eating in summer among US work colleagues, friends and neighbours in clubs and neighbourhoods. The term has become a powerful icon for Americans to reconnect with their neighbours and to celebrate their common humanity.  In this casual banqueting on the very finest fruit of the sea, the nation seems to be retrieving what it can before that precious resource runs out. For already the Mississippi crab products are suspected of food poisoning as a result of environmental degradation.

Arts critic, Jan Werner, writes of the novelty of a crab feast arts event held in New York under the banner: “Wall Street Crab Feast: A Participatory Performance Trafficking in Vernacular Culture” in these terms: “As globalisation increases and regional differences blur, holding something as homey and site-specific as a crab feast within the gray canyons of Wall Street seems especially poignant”[27] in the wake of the September 11^th World Trade Centre bombings. Bridging the vernacular, a crab feast has become a social ritual for many.

My meditation then on David Malouf’s 1980 poem “The Crab Feast”[28] is a reading that brings to bear these twin dimensions of annual neighbourly banqueting and an image of universal hope for salvation. For Malouf too in his boyhood visits to Scarborough near Brisbane on annual holidays also feasted on juicy crabs caught in Moreton Bay. No other fish on Friday could have such meaning as this.

Thematic analysis

 “The Crab Feast” appears in verses of either three or four lines each, in ten numbered sections or scenes of about equal length, with each section running to about thirty lines. In 253 lines, this is a substantial poem for Malouf and the centrepiece in my opinion of this rich and rare anthology entitled “First Things Last.” For it does pick up the anthology’s title as a meditation upon the impact of the last things, or as we hear in Christian doctrine, the “four last things:” death, heaven, hell and purgatory. Indeed, an eschatological vision would put these four last things first as the most basic determinants of meaning in the life of the Christian, both spiritual and social.

‘The four last things’ is a distinctive Christian metaphysical framework identifying the religious believer and a distinctive attitude on life. I believe Malouf’s inverted title critiques our procrastinating habit of putting the important things, especially religious truths, last beyond our immediate attention. Malouf’s monologue with his seafood meal does affirm their shared mortality and is a reflection upon their share in the gift of life when two fleshes become one. For me, the poem has these eschatological resonances.

To anticipate our reading, I might summarise the poem this way. It is a monologue stressing intimacy with his seafood platter, a crab now become meat for his meal. As the poet begins to eat the crab meat, he reflects upon the bargain between the species, where one is hunter and one is prey, in a battle of the species. In this “compact between us” (line 187), he realises how species have assigned places in the eco-system. He learns too that the object of his appetite in fact eats up himself as its lover too. Appetite and desire consume both the desirer and the desired. Counter-intuitively, he asserts that humankind assumes “a dangerous clawhold” when it claims the right to dominate all other species on the earth. Finally he notes how language cannot express the unspoken agreements, the “terrible privacies” that make possible the battles between the species. That moment of reflection, an exercise of the “creative capacity to grasp a single apprehension of the unity of things,”[29] generates a rich poem upon both their shared mortality in a shared communion as one flesh. He comes to realise his one communion is a transgression upon species. Realistically, the poet notes how his reflection is still only a fruitful product of the world of words.

Such an intensive recollection has many theological references and applications. I suggest that the poem espouses intimations of mortality and, as he puts it, invokes a “tug towards immortality”. The poem plots the movement from puzzlement to insight, dissolving security into challenge, and transforming self-referentiality into a responsible awareness of life on earth. Poems with such interior communication take on the character of what I call 'whispers of the sacred' or as Les Murray would say, they permit access to the numinous. For bringing access to the meaning of being alive, and in stressing their shared mortality as man and beast in a critical instance of its processes, the poem constructs an inter-subjectivity about all life on Earth.

This poem is a very pertinent harbinger of ecological salvation. In my reading, salvation is an identification of such moments of intense experience, which foretell a greater awareness of self and of others in relationship with oneself. Such rare moments repair the post-modern world’s erosion of the "delicate equipoise of the human psyche,"[30] as Terry Eagleton puts it, to bring richer realisations of a greater perspective about one's coordinates in time and place. Saving moments can indeed come in such experiences of liminality for reaching and crossing thresholds with greater courage than has been attempted previously. I regard these significant moments as whispers, hints, traces or outlines of the sacred. They reveal an identification of impulses with a pull to the sublime.[31] These saving insights convey a sense of the broader vision, of the bigger picture that transcends and explains the ordinary. For me, the poem’s particularities crystallise universals about the Christian life.

The poem’s hints of salvation shift the frame of reference beyond a focus on an individual's own interests, pursuits and experiences to broach broader, more socially meaningful ones. Reviewing his transgressions inspires the poet (and subject to degrees of identification, the reader also) to envision salient impulses for a better world. In this sense do I say that whispers of the sacred engender altruism. I read Malouf’s phrase, the “tug of immortality,” as an experiential vector towards personal transformation, and towards an ethical identification with the creatures of the earth and sea.

Textual analysis

The poem’s 253 lines appear in ten sections of about equal length. I have named them as: 1. Encounter, 2. Desire and deception, 3. Reconnaissance, 4. The Hunt, 5. Watching you, 6. Sparring partners, 7. Shared Kinship, 8. Vulnerability, 9. Learning to die, 10. Resolution/ Identification. However even this grid and the poem’s regular patterning form cannot lay bare the poem’s fuller meanings. Like a magnetic field, the central apprehension is recounted though ten connected perceptions, recollections, conversations and conclusions I call scenes. The ‘I’ statements compose a thin narrative thread round a central spiralling datum.

A schematic outline using the personal referents in Malouf's poem[32] as keys suggests this movement to consciousness of responsibility. In this grid, I have isolated the speaker’s own “I” statements as keys to my reading:

Fig 1: Malouf’s “The Crab Feast” 1980 featuring the speaker’s key phrases as interpretive keys to the progress of its revelation. © G Smith 2004

The poet sings about a moment of insight being an intense realisation of his mortality, that I call a moment of salvation. Rather than being morbid through, this apprehension of the unity of things becomes productive, for it charts promises of limitless development. It bears some monitory warnings about dominance and excesses of pride and power.  Its central metaphor, “the tug of immortality” vectors an abundance of greater potentialities:

It was always like this: each an open universe

expanding beyond us, the tug of immortality.

In other words, in recognising and responding to this felt ‘tug of immortality,' the poet realises more about his own freedom to respond to other liberations being possible in this life. Within this newly realised framework, reconciliation with nature makes sense when some order arises out of the painful chaos. Thus, in true Maloufian style, recharting the past becomes a vector to a better future.

The crab’s death, and more generally any death, necessarily closes off the inherent possibilities and potentialities that being alive offers. Yet while the poem's persona seems to suggest an evolutionary futility with the inevitability of both their deaths, he intimates that a greater meaning could have been attained for "an open universe [was always] expanding beyond us." [33]

Section 1 begins the poem on a note of rare intimacy, that there is “no getting closer/ than this” (lines 1-2). Breaking open its shell has revealed all secrets, and having the most impact was the taste of the meat, described as “moonlight transformed into flesh” (8-9). In this most intimate contact, the crab being broken open reveals the paradox that its meat, born of lowliness and sewage under the mangroves, yields this most exquisite fruit of (Moreton) Bay. That observation elicits a revealing admission from the poet, that “[if] I knew you existed / I could also enter it.” This reference has a double effect, to elicit an admission of previous cowardice, and to describe the salt water of the Bay as an “alien domain,” the alien place of its proper Otherness. That place metonymises his entry into intimacy. He says he has invaded both that abode of coolness, mystery and growth that the crab had occupied as its natural habitat, and now indeed invades its shell. Both invasions bring death. This tension between alien and familiar places sets up the poetical bridge between the poet’s present unfavourable circumstances and a superior place of sublime immortality he says the crab has already entered through death.

The language of desire occurs again when describing the merging of actors in the drama of life (we “must be one”) to offset his observations about the “ways we differ.” This sets up an eschatological vector in the monologue. The poet imagines fulfilment in the act of eating as a communion, wherein the crab meat assumes a new habitat to give life again “under the coral /reef of my ribs.” So this act of eating has begun some reflections on identities and commonalities. Foregoing narrative in favour of a series of interpretative modalities, the poet frames up a sustained meditation on sharing the ecological life.

Section II flashbacks to earlier events when the poet had gone fishing, when the noonday light did not in fact “reveal us as we were” as one would expect, but that the noonday light in fact had deflected attention and disguised identities. That was the period of their “variant selves” when outward appearances, like “stalk eye a periscope” and his polished, crafted “Doulton claws,” alienated from each other in their bodily presentations of themselves.  Yet while those features kept them apart, the poet now admits his own appetite drew them together: “I wanted the whole of you” as “raw poundage.” Christian readers may well hear echoes here of how desiring the fruit of the Garden of Eden led to Eve’s shame. The poet notes how this desire brings him shame for his transgression. The Section’s concluding imagery of the kiss or communion meal “on my palm, on my tongue” further analogises the unitive associations developing and structuring this most intense monologue.

Section III develops the poet’s recountal of time and place perspectives before the feast. Fragments of narrative merge with impressions, as the poet exorcises his past perceptions, of sand and light and dark and spaces. Echoing the mystic’s language of via negativa, the poet tries to account for the sense of presence that the crab’s evolving nature seems to have offered, while he had not grasped it. Despite drawing breath in the very same world as the crab did in life, now he realises his own ignorance; he was innocently unknowing, was not conscious of the enormity of the crab’s presence and nearness in a parallel existence.

He says his false perspectives felt like he had been foolishly hunting the “spaces in a net,” among the “chunks of solid midnight” for illusions like “star-knots in their mesh.” Ignorant that they were in fact both connected in life, he now realises they are actually connected with each other in overlapping appetites. Whether from blindness, or wilful ignorance or biological determinism, he realises the deed of hunting the crab to death was unfortunately necessary to bring about these liberating reflections.

Section IV extends the effects of the crab’s death to portray it as an interpretative juncture for them both, for each has had a tortuous journey though the colours of the rainbow. The poet-as-hunter analogises colours to describe the journeys each has had: that the crab had eaten death in his acceptance of fate. Now the poet imagines his own species as an out- “cast wheezing.”  He recounts how from appetite he hunted the crab as part of evolution’s plan: “I hunted you / like a favourite colour, /indigo”, obeying biological imperatives, to “push on through the spectrum” of colours, from light to dark, “out into silence, and a landscape/ of endings, with the brute sky pumping red.”

This section IV plots the poet’s discursive reflections; the poet surmises that his hunt reveals “what rainbows / we harbour with us,” in short, the human journey through the many changing colours of the rainbow indicates the manifold possibilities for growth and development they each contained, and the widest range of capacities for evil too. Chameleon-like, it seems, humans will explore their variant selves, even in killing. That end-point is a silence indeed, for all imagined possibilities are to be resolved in that one real fate.

His use of colour suggests play, abundance, depth and polyvalence.[34] Colour amplifies and multiplies effect. Colour suggests various potentials. By suggesting they each had rainbows within them, the poet suggests those potentials will now never be realised. That failure in their encounter amplifies the central theme of “the tug of immortality.” In a better world, it seems, man and creature could have come to a better arrangement whereby their lives are redeemed, the one from the taint of power and the other from definition as prey or victim. As a result the poet surmises, that the vector from eros to agape might still be possible.

Section V heightens the apparent differences between them even further, developing the relatively different circumstances of crab and poet in former times. Now in a minor key, the meditation explores the temporal dimensions of difference, as the poet marvels at the many unrecorded battles for survival that must have occureed in soundless engagement on the seabed, musing that any call to arms to defend its seabed existence was silenced. Now he too realises he is a part of this on-going unseen, silent drama of evolution in progress.

Yet even more ironically, they both simultaneously belonged to the Dance, a term capitalized to nominate undoubtedly the Dance of life, and ironically the macabre fate of the inevitable Dance of Death to come. Circumstances dictate that all life is doomed: the crab in “its submarine retreat” and he in the hunt, which when seen on the larger canvas is a fatal ritual. Evolutionary circumstances dictate that all life is locked into an endless cycle, but when some human consciousness of rescue enters in, a sense of mutual salvation breaks the cycle of determinism. In effect, the free action of the enlightened human in an ecological consciousness ("live and let live") would bring about the salvation of both of their species. Thus, Malouf's exploration of differences here in fact leads to these saving revelations about their suppressed commonalities.

In Section VI, Malouf’s character extends the ‘dialogue’ into the affective domain. The poem now portrays them as two people meeting who were very different but who came into intimacy by exploring their differences, in the suggestion that “we were horizons / of each other’s consciousness,” as lovers would be, one with the other. The speaker suggests it is as if the crab and hunter shared a consciousness of greater possibilities, that “something more would take place.” Could it be that that appetite actually feeds the tug of immortality, and that love is a lure for that fulfilment, the eventual salvation all intimates desire? When the hunter enters the sea to hunt for the crab (“I crossed the limits / into alien territory. One of us / will die for this”), he plots the course of transgressive desire. He knows crossing the boundaries of caste or species driven by desire must bring its unforeseen consequences.

Because in unreconstructed practices, desire must always be consummated on contact, in their significant encounter “transactions uninsistent” will at last be revealed. Beyond this crossover when appetite brings about the crab’s death, those intentions are revealed to be rude and basic. As Malouf wrote a year later: “love remains a power to be reckoned with.”[35] This stanza explores the affective forces of desire and appetite, and the karmic consequences of consummation.

In Section VII, the hunt and its consummation are recounted metaphorically: “We are afloat together.” The moment of contact is exhilarating; each in his different element (air and sea) finds he counterweights the other. The feaster (inevitably a hunter) and his food share a kinship that could never be univocal. They belong to different orders or castes of creation. Man is meant to hunt; crab is meant to be eaten (“my teeth seek you in the dark”). Despite their imagined differences, man and crab duel in an unfair match: “No, the end will not be like this.” Eventualities defy expectations; nature’s laws and unbalanced forces plug for predefined outcomes.  Any affinities in this world are still mere words; the present reality is struggle and conflict and domination. 

Section VIII explores post-capture inevitabilities with the stunning phrase: “you broken before me.” That both man and animal share life, and now flesh, means that they are engaged inevitably in a power struggle for life. The present practice is to eat the prey; the crab’s fate is to be hunted and eaten: “that sort of power kills us.”  It dictates that desire commits, love submits and intimacy consumes. Nature’s laws will ever be so: “I will be / broken after you, that was the bargain.” Any other law he says would be imagining blue sky in the moonlight; the tug to immortality is part of love’s aspiring while the fact of its eating requires dealing with mortality. The dramatic juxtaposition of the phrases “I am with you in the dark” and “The secret flesh of my tongue enters a claw” seals the strange, unfair bargain between the different species. Reaching salvation entails struggle; neither party emerges morally clean. This hard-won outcome is the fruit of overcoming the suffering of apartness and misunderstanding.

Section IX further develops the poet’s realisation of the consequences of the capture. Killing in the crab’s native element “here in your kingdom”, the hunter learns regret and the guilt of his transgression: “your weight hangs upon me.” Experience teaches him: “so this / is what it is to drown.” It seems capture and consummation heighten differences and anaesthetize feelings. Action brings knowledge as Eden’s lesson shows. The poet’s own composure afterwards should be modelled on the prey’s: for it is better to die in dignity with “no thrashing”, with “less than the usual disturbance”, and “to die smiling . . . beyond speech.” Contact and death should defy shame; guilt is an unnecessary emotion where the biological rules of engagement prescribe the outcomes.

Finally, Section X returns to the debilitating reality that the poem is a rhetoric of mere words, “words made you / a fact in my head.” The poet admits the fiction but reasserts the lesson: the crab will ever be food, and the laws of encounter are consumption and death.  Their final and yearned-for bliss, “Assembled here / out of earth, water, air,” is attained only it seems through a profound change in practice, in “a bolt of lightning.” Now in review it seems only impulse not attraction brought them together, and that impulse unfortunately was not love but appetite. Appetite is no substitute for love. They find they have failed to pursue the tug of immortality; they have ended up being just what they were; transformation was a mere dream. I hear an echo of Judith Wright’s observation:[36]

We are caught in the endless circle of time and star

That never chime with the blood.

Put in other words, the human race is unfortunately almost always out of sorts with its natural environment. It seems a full vision of the true integration in a final salvation is too often beyond our habitual horizons.

Conclusions

We have seen how this poem brings transforming insight that is the poet’s salvation. Heidegger notes how poets are uniquely aware of the fractures of this world, of the gloom, dregs and filth of unholiness. Only in knowing these particularities can they then recognise the holy:

Holiness can appear only within the widest orbit of the wholesome. Poets who are of the more venturesome kind are on the track of the holy because they experience the unholy as such. Their song over the land hallows. Their singing hails the integrity of the globe of being . . . Salvation must come from where there is a turn with mortals in their nature[37]

In reaching for these realms of wholeness and plotting the changes that are necessary, the poet sings of deliverance, liberation and salvation. Malouf puts it another way to note that: “What we experience through imagination, if it is deep and immediate enough, is every bit as real, every bit as useful to us as what we experience directly in the everyday.”[38] Such new knowledge is decisive for finding transcendence.

“The Crab Feast” is a tantalising exploration weighing up the exigencies of living and the dream of loving. In ten linked scenes, the poet finds that love promises the tug of immortality. He finds the biological and the psychological are at odds. Flesh is “so much air, so much water.” That is the shifting reality within which we act, while on the contrary, being utterly respectful is caring-love’s vector. Desire dictates the exercise of power; care would yield respect to live.

The poem could be read psychologically to say that any salvation, if it is to be won at all, will come not in a fantasy but in a grasp of the stuff of our ecological reality, in a central apprehension of unity, from “a native grasp on the gist of things.” Clearly, Malouf writes about the possibilities of human transcendence over greed, impulse, and exhaustive fishing practices.

I have argued that the key phrase, “the tug of immortality” at an interpretative level identifies evolution’s progress towards more rather than less, towards more development, more complexity, and more fulfilment, to abundance and more ethical states of consciousness. Like any vision, its colours vector towards alerity. After all to paraphrase Teilhard de Chardin, the point of life is to see. Salvation then lies in sharing the release from eternal biological life, in being “open to the dream” by accepting death, which is the incontrovertible reality of all living things. The poet finds that both he and the crab share this reality.

My eschatological reading shows that as living creatures both the poet and the crab are destined towards better ecological living arrangements. Death is not the only or final certainty, because clearly the crab has already preceded him beyond their predestined “fixed terms” upon “not-quite-solid earth” into “a love feast.” Optimistically, he notes how “it does not finish there,” for each of them always was “an open universe expanding beyond us, [experiencing and responding to] the tug of immortality.” When he writes, “You drag me under the light of this occasion to others,” the poet identifies his transgressive encounter is a gateway to a higher, ethical consciousness about the bigger picture of life.

That moment of insight resolves the suffering of separateness and unsatisfactoriness to bring a true salvation.  It shows that what's desirable at face value may be ethically repugnant. To sum up, we could say that in valuing the Good Life, finer fare should bring greater care, about who we are and what we do. The theme of intimacy in his approach to the love feast offers Christian readers many strong references to faithful action for the world within the intimacy of sacramental communion.

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