Short Black 10 Killing the Black Dog by Les Murray

Author:Les Murray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Books Pty. Ltd.

After a silver summer

of downpours, cement-powder autumn

set in its bag. Lawns turned crunchy

but the time tap kept dribbling away.

The paddocks were void as that evening

in early childhood when the sun

was rising in the west,

round and brimming as the factory furnace door,

as I woke up after sickness.

Then it was explained to me

that I’d slept through from morning

and I sobbed because I’d missed that day,

my entire lovely day.

Without you, it might have been a

prophecy.

1997

AFTERWORD

It is now eleven years since I wrote the lecture which became Killing the Black Dog. The book has enjoyed a steady sale since it appeared. This new edition, however, allows me to correct an error which has hung on its heels for a long time. When I came back from my coma in 1996, sheer euphoria of survival dismissed the depression fairly completely for a couple of years, and deceived me that it was gone. But I was wrong. As the last years of the twentieth century counted down, I came to realise that the atmosphere and themes of the disease had merely taken a holiday. Slowly but surely they crept back on me. They would never again be as savage as in my worst years – though at times they would send symptoms as bad as any I’d ever suffered. The returning illness would once again shoot crippling arrows into my life, keeping me from literary occasions, making me swear on TV, causing me to blaze up or wizen at any challenge. I was made to remember who still owned the game.

All was not dust and ashes: I had many more ‘good’ days than before my near-death. Occasional moments of equanimity surprised me. When I was set on by the entire Australian quality media in 1999 for writing a draft preamble to the Constitution for a prime minister they loathed, I was unperturbed. The text was intentionally aimed at their throat, proposing inter alia to ban rule by fashion and press hounding of dissenters, and they would be frantic to protect themselves. The editor of our one national daily later wrote to me to gloat that most of the letters he had printed against me had in fact been written in-house by his staff. More satisfying was the success I’d had a few years earlier with a poem I wrote (‘A Deployment of Fashion’) against the targeting of lone women by the media; the practice declined sharply straight away and has not really come back with its old brio. Best of all, I had been spared to finish Fredy Neptune. I’d fallen deadly sick in the middle of Book 4, and feared I’d never get to see how the story ended. Reception of the book was hostile in Australia, except among individuals, but major success gradually came from overseas.

The last poem written before my liver collapse is ‘One Kneeling, One Looking Down’. In the years since, I have gone on probing with my pen at matters raised by depression. Aphorism has helped me to clarify some things, including my relations with the political culture of my time and country.

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