THE DREAM OF WEARING SHORTS FOREVER

by Les Murray

To go home and wear shorts forever in the enormous paddocks, in that warm climate, adding a sweater when winter soaks the grass, to camp out along the river bends for good, wearing shorts, with a pocketknife, a fishing line and matches, or there where the hills are all down, below the plain, to sit around in shorts at evening on the plank verandah - If the cardinal points of costume are Robes, Tat, Rig and Scunge, where are shorts in this compass? They are never Robes as other bareleg outfits have been: the toga, the kilt, the lava-lava the Mahatma's cotton dhoti; archbishops and field marshals at their ceremonies never wear shorts. The very word means underpants in North America. Shorts can be Tat, Land-Rovering bush-environmental tat, socio-political ripped-and-metal-stapled tat, solidarity-with-the-Third World tat tvam asi, likewise track-and-field shorts worn to parties and the further humid, modelling negligee of the Kingdom of Flaunt, that unchallenged aristocracy. More plainly climatic, shorts are farmers' rig, leathery with salt and bonemeal; are sailors' and branch bankers' rig, the crisp golfing style of our youngest male National Costume. Most loosely, they are Scunge, ancient Bengal bloomers or moth-eaten hot pants worn with a former shirt, feet, beach sand, hair and a paucity of signals. Scunge, which is real negligee housework in a swimsuit, pyjamas worn all day, is holiday, is freedom from ambition. Scunge makes you invisible to the world and yourself. The entropy of costume, scunge can get you conquered by more vigorous cultures and help you notice it less. To be or to become is a serious question posed by a work-shorts counter with its pressed stack, bulk khaki and blue, reading Yakka or King Gee, crisp with steely warehouse odour. Satisfied ambition, defeat, true unconcern, the wish and the knack of self-forgetfulness all fall within the scunge ambit wearing board shorts of similar; it is a kind of weightlessness. Unlike public nakedness, which in Westerners is deeply circumstantial, relaxed as exam time, artless and equal as the corsetry of a hussar regiment, shorts and their plain like are an angelic nudity, spirituality with pockets! A double updraft as you drop from branch to pool! Ideal for getting served last in shops of the temperate zone they are also ideal for going home, into space, into time, to farm the mind's Sabine acres for product and subsistence. Now that everyone who yearned to wear long pants has essentially achieved them, long pants, which have themselves been underwear repeatedly, and underground more than once, it is time perhaps to cherish the culture of shorts, to moderate grim vigour with the knobble of bare knees, to cool bareknuckle feet in inland water, slapping flies with a book on solar wind or a patient bare hand, beneath the cadjiput trees, to be walking meditatively among green timber, through the grassy forest towards a calm sea and looking across to more of that great island and the further tropics. This is a long and complicated Murray poem, but rewards those who persevere with it.    I must admit I haven't yet discovered what 'tvam asi' means, nor quite understood the line: 'Satisfied ambition, defeat, true unconcern' which seems slightly contradictory to me.   But I love the piece about shorts being an angelic nudity, spirituality with pockets.    This is a vintage Murray line. Tim Pitt-Payne has been kind enough to email me since I first put this poem on the Net to help with a bit of explanation of the phrase: 'tat tvam asi'.   This is what he says:- "As I understand it, this is a maxim in Hindu philosophy. Literally translated it means "thou are that". I think it's understood to be a statement of non-dualism (i.e that the difference between subject and object is ultimately an illusion). When Les Murray quotes this the first word is a pun on "tat".  I think he's gently mocking the sort of Westerners who adopt a little bit of Eastern philosophy as a fashion statement. So, he's saying that shorts can be the sort of "tat" worn by the kind of Westerner who would quote a line like "tat tvam asi" to show how pro-Third World (and how spiritually "deep") they are. I don't think he's attacking Eastern philosophy: he's having a dig at a particular kind of Western interest in Eastern philosophy." And since I was sent that I've been reading the new biography of Murray called "Les Murray, a Life in Progress" by Peter Alexander (published Oxford).   In this book, I discover, Murray has a genius for learning and speaking and translating languages, which is why his poetry often includes snatches of foreign phrases.  *You can order this title from Amazon.com Return to the Index - Go to the Main Page .