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JAMES K. BAXTER'S OTAGO WORLDS Lawrence Jones
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Page 30
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If caves symbolically become the womb of the Earth Mother, then hills become her breasts, the landscape her body. When he flies north out of Dunedin, the poet sees the land below in those terms: My mother Gea below me is undressed Showing her stretchmarks got by long childbearing. When he flies to Dunedin to take up the Burns Fellowship, he sees that 'a quarry like a cancer / Has cut away half of the smaller breast of Saddle Hill'. A prose commentary makes more explicit the significance: . . . perhaps . . . a wiser but less affluent society might not have allowed half of Saddle Hill to be cut away - a symbolic amputation of one of the breasts of the earth mother. At Aramoana he turns away from the Venus figure in the surf , the dream construction of the boys on the beach, to 'my dream, in nooks / below the sandhill cone, where Gea / speaks in parables of rock'. The prose commentary spells out the implications: . . . my own dream, my way of hiding myself from death, from the lack of spiritual support in all created things, is to turn to the least demanding and the most supporting reality, Gea, the earth herself, the oldest of the tribe of gods. The sandhill cone is her breast, the mats of cutty-grass cover her ancient vagina - my words, if they are to make sense, depend on her and return to her as the symbolic ground of existence - away from her I feel lost. . . . |
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