The Heart of the Human Quest for Enlightenment: Judith Beveridge launches The Diwan of Nawid by Mal McKimmie

By Admin on July 15, 2024

The Diwan of Nawid by Mal McKimmie, Puncher and Wattmann 2024, was launched by Judith Beveridge at the Flinders Street Gallery, Surry Hills NSW on 4 May 2024

It is a great joy to launch Mal's extraordinary and beautiful book The Diwan of Nawid. As I mentioned on the back cover, it does seem to be one of a kind in Australian poetry because it draws not on the Christian tradition to explore spiritual experience, but the Hindu bhakti or devotional path.

Many Australian poets have used Christian schools or doctrines to articulate their relationship to the Divine - I can think of Kevin Hart, Les Murray, Francis Webb, Peter Steele, to name a few, but I haven't come across a book of poetry in this country which takes the practices and concepts of Hinduism to its heart and opens them up for the reader. I can't think of an Australian collection that explores or explicates the guru/disciple relationship. A few poets such as Harold Stewart, Michael Heald, and Robert Gray have written poetry influenced by Buddhism, but The Diwan of Nawid is unique in the way it places Eastern thought at its centre, the way it makes the guru/disciple bond so tangible.

There are many practitioners and devotees in Australia of Eastern traditions and a great many will admire this book and take umbrage and comfort from Nawid's poems, his devotion to his guru, his intense search for divine Union, his struggles and difficulties. But this is not simply a 'niche' book – for spiritual experience is fundamental to human life, and we have as humans, a deep-seated desire to know more than we do, to be reminded of how strange and mysterious life is, that there are experiences of a whole different order beyond what physical laws seem to suggest. We all want to surrender our small identities and be touched by a life larger than our own. All spiritual paths have a commonality of experiences, Nawid is that 'everyman' at the heart of the human quest for enlightenment.

I think it's true to say that poetry has always been the best way to affirm the sacred as a living experience in human life – even if the poems mourn the absence of union, or they journey through the dark night of the soul, even if they speak about the ignorance, the stumbles and difficulties (and a lot of Nawid's poems do that very thing) — poetry seems to be the best way to express the often illusive intensity of our inner lives. Partly this is because poetry is connected so intimately with the breath, much more so than other linguistic expressions. Poetry employs tools which enable both reader and writer to access truths in non-discursive ways: it uses patterns and repeating structures such as rhythm, assonance, alliteration, a recurrence of words, phrases and images. People also access spiritual truths in non-discursive ways, often through silence, through meditation, through chanting, through letting go of conceptual thought, through the intercession of a guide, through the influence of someone wiser than us.

What I really love about Nawid's poems is the way in which he follows his 'own heart's language' – to use a phrase by Jane Hirshfield. Perhaps one of the dangers of writing poetry which explores the spiritual quest is to fall back on the old cliches, but Mal is such a skilful poet that he finds unique metaphors and analogies to articulate Nawid's feelings and thinking. For example, the poem 'God Gave a Gift to God', wonderfully explores and extends the idea of the birthday and the associated idea of gift-giving, but the poem takes a very inventive turn as Nawid begins to talk about himself, not as a gift to God, but the wrapping on the gift. "That gift is not me. I am merely the wrapping. God is unwrapping God's gift and that is fine by me." This is a powerful metaphor because it is full of humility, faith, trust and it implies that the self has layers which must be discarded, that there is something beyond the small self which is of value.

In many of these poems there is the element of surprise, there's an unexpected change of key, a turn, a moment when the speaker understands the processes he is confronted with, and the images go where you don't expect them to go. For example, the poem on page 36 begins:

The Lord is putting me in a straightjacket
so that I can move neither left nor right, forward nor backward.
Strap by tightened strap, buckle by buckle,
Lock by lock and chain by chain…

as the poem progress the image of the straightjacket is metaphorically reversed and becomes a means for liberation. I really love these turns and changes in the poems because they provide a sudden reworking of the relationships in the poems. Nawid's initial misgivings will always turn to faith and trust in the methods of the guru.

And in 'I arrive at the Door of the Lord' Nawid likens himself to 'a donkey/ misbegotten and lame, halting and shabby.' Nawid's humour comes to the fore wonderfully here also as it does in the Gift poem, and I'd like to read the whole poem for the exquisite way in which the horses and the donkeys are juxtaposed and how they become symbols for humility, also vanity, competitiveness, illusion, status. This poem also has the element of fable or story which is a traditional way in many religions of imparting wisdom.

I arrive at the Door of the Lord

and am greeted by an attendant Angel
who, with an Angel's curiosity, asks me:
"What is it like to be incarnated
in a human body?"

"It is like entering a town riding a donkey
misbegotten and lame, halting and shabby,
only to find that all the inhabitants speak
(and dream and draw and sing and write)
only and always about horses.

And not just any old horses, never just
any old horses!
But many hands high and brushed to perfection
nimble of step and regal of bearing
thoroughbreds all, faster than the wind
mane and tail flowing.

This is the clamour, the pageant,
the captivating vision
that residents enthusiastically describe

while sitting atop
the unattractive and unwanted donkeys
upon which they, too, rode into town.

Unattractive and unwanted because
a donkey that can outrun death is ludicrous.
But a horse?
A rearing, stamping, glistening, muscled,
pure-bred, fantastical horse?
Well, such a horse can try!"

Yes, this is what I will tell the Angel
while Nawid, my ludicrous but sturdy donkey,
who carried me all the long hazardous journey,
sleeps his well-earned tethered sleep.

Many years ago, I left the town in which I was born
out of a foolish loyalty to this stumbling animal
that will be the death of me.

Or not, as the case may be.

In 'Why fear sudden imbalance, Nawid?' we have this stunning image in which Nawid tells himself:

You are a feather missing from one of God's immeasurable wings.

It awaits your perfect weightless return.

Another traditional way that poetry and spiritual texts impart wisdom is through paradox. Paradox is an important feature as it can open up new ways of thinking and feeling without having to worry about resolutions. Paradoxes cast into relief the complications and contradictions of human life. Paradox is great device for illuminating the conflicts between the spiritual and the physical. In some of Nawid's poems, the reader is confronted with some seemingly inextricable concepts:

Nawid is told:

Everything that you hear and see and think I am,
I am not.

And everything that I am not
leads to a door that opens inwards like death,
but while you are alive.

- 'What could I say that your ears could hear?'

And this:

The God of forms stands resplendent upon
the outstretched tongue of the formless god
and speaks for the formless God who has no tongue.

- 'The God of forms stands resplendent upon'

These are like riddles and Nawid, throughout his poems, understands that it is paradox that reveals perhaps more than any other device the experience of the spiritual quest: that it is at once empty and full, there must be a willingness to embrace pain, one must wear a straightjacket in order to be free, the wound is both open and closed, to find yourself you have to surrender yourself, there is the impossibility even the absurdity of the divine encounter yet it must be sought. All these are liminal spaces and paradoxes constantly remake one's relationship to knowing. Mal knows very well how paradox is a part of enlargement, and how it is a threshold state and how it requires faith to stand with in its tensions and to wait.

Nawid is gentle, funny, consoling, humble, wise, he speaks to us all on a level that is never preaching, never didactic but always personal, immediate, open, authentic. I'd like to read 'Those ants wandering the rim of the well', which is a truly lovely poem about transformation, about keeping up the discipline of spiritual practice, about losing the self but finding the true Self. There's a beautiful turn in this poem, as the images and metaphors come into a transformative union in the lines:

Those ants wandering the rim of the well
are your thoughts, Nawid, looking for crumbs.
They are always hungry. Pay them no mind.

Keep to your discipline. Keep peering into the well,
waiting for God's breath to ripple the mirror until
your face is replaced by another face.

Keep to your discipline even after this,
for God will breathe again and your new face too
will be replaced by another face, and that by yet another.

This will keep happening until there is nothing reflected there
but the night sky's emptiness and a single burning star
that shimmers as both mystery and memory.

O child of the faceless one! O pure sufferer!
You will be a hermit in the desert of your own thirst then,
able to do little but weep morning and evening

slowly filling the well with your tears until
both you and it are brimming over
and you can drink your fill of that star's light.

The language as in all of Nawid's poems is wonderfully lucent, this is poetry of breathtaking clarity coupled with fine interweaving of image and perception. The language is straightforward but beautifully textured, playful, layered: complexity of feeling has not been compromised or sacrificed.

Again, I'd like to congratulate Mal on his lovely book and to congratulate the publisher Puncher & Wattman for bringing this fine and very unique book into the world.

- Judith Beveridge

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Judith Beveridge has published eight books of poetry, mostly recently Tintinnabulum (Giramondo Publishing, 2024). She was poetry editor of Meanjin for 10 years and taught poetry writing for 16 years at post-graduate level at the University of Sydney. Her books have won major prizes including the 2019 Prime Minister's Award for Poetry for Sun Music: New and Selected Poems. She lives in Sydney.