Stan Grant’s brave new book invites us in – but don’t get too close

SPIRITUALITY
murriyang: song of time
Stan Grant
Simon & Schuster Bundyi, $39.99
Murriyang: song of time is about the struggle with irreconcilables. How to love – much less believe – in God when the world often seems godless? Grant puts the case plainly at the book’s outset: “My world is turning, I have walked away from my career, my father is in his final years, I have more years behind me than ahead and now God is whispering to me.”
The book alternates between two sections, “BABIIN” and “Murriyang”. Unfortunately, as in much of Grant’s recent writing, the theological and philosophical sections in the Murriyang passages tend to act like scaffolding, if not armour. The Voice to parliament, the referendum, and Grant’s move away from journalism are all adverted to, but at a remove. They are abstract; emotions are close, but not too close. The book’s strongest feelings – pain, love – often give way to lofty but generalised meditations. Whatever is personal and specific tends to be obscured by the conceptual: time, politics, Australia.
At one point I literally sighed: Grant opens one chapter with a lovely account of washing his face in a river and encountering a kangaroo near his parents’ home, his mother and father still waking, the day beginning. Yet the scene gives way, almost before it has itself begun, to invocations of Einstein, Bergson, Yeats, Darwin, Heraclitus, Parmenides …
Why are so many writers and reference points assembled? Is it the idea that enough wisdom, strung together, might offer a peephole to understanding? More often it feels like a substitute for personal interrogation: in the book’s most eye-glazing passages, barely four pages can pass without Coltrane, Michelangelo, Medusa, Rimbaud, God and George Steiner turning up (this last, himself an inveterate reference-maker, is perhaps an ironic addition).
Stan Grant writes about politics and family within the context of belief.
In the BABIIN passages – the word is Wiradjuri, meaning “father” – Grant writes about himself and his family, focusing in particular on Stan Grant snr, a Wiradjuri elder who has helped to preserve and revitalise Wiradjuri language. Grant writes about struggling to be intimate with his father, a man he describes as someone who hardened himself in response to the world’s violence. At times, Grant himself recalls fearing him; now he fears he is running out of time to know him.
He sees himself as incapable of the delicacy one of his brothers shows while tending to their father. He has to face a vulnerability and “infirmity” that is “raw and confronting”. The admissions of both revulsion and anger at physical loss and mortality are among the book’s strongest passages. “I am ashamed of how I have struggled,” Grant writes. It is not only the struggle with death, but, even more, the struggle with intimacy: to be close. To gain time when time is running out.
In a sense, Grant admits, time is of the essence because he fears having lost it. Having spent so much time away from loved ones, devoted to journalism and geopolitics – to abstractions that could never love him back – he wonders what it was all for. Generously, some of the silence surrounding his own feelings about himself or those close to him might be read as representative of the book’s grappling, not only with time, but those things related to it, like silence itself: the silence of failing to understand, or the silence that comes with waiting, whether for understanding or simply for the arrival of the unnameable. As Grant writes of his return home to his parents, “they wanted nothing from me, just for me to be there”.