What I am
Reading
I am
reading and re-reading all the time. From the news of the trade journal, Books
and Publishing, when I first wake up and look at my phone to when I go to
sleep holding the latest issue of Mekong Review. I also read a lot of
new work by new writers across poetry, essay and prose, all in the process of
editing Portside Review. But when I think about what I am reading, I
think about the books that will always have a place on my shelf. I read them in
my memory and my present, and, of course, my future, all three moments in time
woven around these written words.
*
There was
a time when I used to read a lot of Western philosophy, especially Georg Hegel’s
Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Max Weber’s Essays in
Sociology, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations but
also his Remarks on Colour. I gave that up after I left Melbourne six years
ago and simply wanted to make my life simpler - going to the beach, playing
tennis, drinking beers. That did not mean I stopped reading.
I turned
then to the East, reading about where I was living in Kerala, with stops along
the way in the Tao Te Ching in the John Minford translation (and the
Ursula K Le Guin and many more) and Lal Ded from Ranjit Hoskote and Tamil
Sangam Poetry from ML Thangappa. I gave that up too, when the sun came out
and I had work to do and I moved on, when travel was easier than sitting still.
After
Kerala, we went to New York, and I read in one sitting Emily Wilson’s Odyssey,
which was a scholarly and popular phenomenon when judged by commentary and
sales. A true corrective to the belief that poetry does not matter or have a wide
audience. I had, of course, been grounded in the classics before this, with the
first book I ever owned being Bulfinch’s Mythology, awarded upon my
graduation from primary school, and a study of the Greeks at college in
Philadelphia many years later, which I am, of course, never not reading.
*
With all
this travel, I read often in translation, often from the Spanish or from Indian
languages, be they novels or political theorists, occasionally a poet or two.
There was a time when I was versed enough to read in German and Spanish because
of my doctoral qualifying exams, and I have made my way through language
classes in Mandarin, Japanese, French, Ngarluma and Noongar. But, I am terrible
with languages, a true master of none, a horse that is led to water and cannot
drink, and I am okay with that. English provides enough reading material even
as we filter it through an imperfect lens.
But, I
often read the translations of my own work, going backwards and forwards
between English and other languages, especially from India, including my
ancestral tongue of Malayalam. Sometimes, the script is different, but what we
talk about when we talk about translation is how context is built from a word
to a line to a phrase to a paragraph to a page, from a seed to a forest, simply
from ink on a page. Reading always means reading the country into which a
forest can grow.
*
I have
been back home for four years now, and reading what I read matters to how I
read it as well, reading means reading on Bibbulmun Country. I have less time
on my hands than I used to and that means I have become more selective, have to
carve time from granite for books, and to watch seeds grow in ashes alone. When
I can, I have been reading Martin Luther King’s last interviews and his Letter
from Birmingham Jail, taking my time to savour what needs to be done in the
length, height, breadth of life, as one cares for oneself, for others, for
nature. I have been reading Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, renewing
my acquaintance once again with a practical handbook for organising, which I
have not done since my days in aged care with a trade union. And then, there is
Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare, which I read for tactics in
non-violence, more love and stay than hit and run, but thinking instead what a
small band of pacifists can do when war is marching on all around. It seems
more pressing now than ever before.
*
After I
wake up and read the trade journals, I find myself scrolling through The
Guardian and The Conversation. I don’t really read them, but skim,
peruse, pass over, only enough to keep me abreast of the outline of world
events, the headlines if you will. And everywhere, it seems violence is there,
from deaths in custody to border skirmishes to all out wars and invasion. I do
what I can in response to this, which is simply to write letters and read the
ones I get in return, from bureaucrats and diplomats and politicians, from the
people who have a different kind of power to us writers and poets and editors.
And, all I do is ask them for peace in our time, peace in all time, in the hope
that they know how to read it right when the time comes to make a choice that
matters to us all.
*
Robert
Wood is the Creative Director of the Centre for Stories and the past Chair of
PEN Perth. He has been a Sydney Review of Books Emerging Critic and an
Endeavour Fellow at Columbia University. The author of five books, Robert is
interested in dreams, enlightenment, nature, suburbs and philosophy.
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