Part 1, published just prior to this, provides an overview of John R. Raser's life with details on his writing, teaching, and other activities up to his transition from Professor at Western Australia's Murdoch University to life in a small costal community south of Perth.
Gracetown Groove
The following excerpts from some of John’s letters provide a picture of the Gracetown years…and his thoughts about life…and death.
April 1987 (to his father): It is Sunday afternoon in Cowaramup Bay and our house glows golden and green with an early autumn rainstorm. I’m writing from the garden house at the back of the main house…converted into a study, library, carpentry workshop and surfing equipment area…it’s a bit of a retreat for me…surrounded with fruit trees, grapes, garden, and flowers. It’s hard to imagine that the ocean is just a hundred yards away, except for the booming of the surf off the rocky point that encloses our bay. The autumn swell has begun to run and nearly every day I spend a couple hours riding the big waves that pour their energy onto the reefs with long and feathering breakers.
I’m revelling in the joy of spending about two days a week carpentering and transforming this house into a work of art, planting trees and gardening, surfing and taking long hikes, reading a lot…and administering the rentals that provide my major income.
December 1987 (to his father): On Christmas eve it will be two years since I resigned my professorship. It still feels good. Now, at the age of 52, my academic life of 25 year feels more like an interval than a lifetime career. I also have not written much during that two years. It has seemed like a time to withdraw from active participation in the social affairs of the culture and to learn silence and reflection, to learn to listen rather than to speak so much, to cultivate solitude rather than interaction, to immerse myself in the natural world more rather than in cities and institutions and ideas.
October 1989 (to a sister): I’ve been surfing and working. Becoming intimate with power tools and building skills is deeply pleasurable to me and I intensely enjoy the designing side of it—when a design is transformed from an idea into a part of a house—and looks even better than you thought when visualizing—there is a sense of satisfaction something akin to writing a good article.
Surfing remains my passion, my muse, my fountain of youth, the bellows for my metabolic fire, my preoccupation, my daily joy, and teacher about power and fear and ageing and grace and ecstasy. My surfing is also a great mystery to me. I’m supposed to be much too old. But I just get better and better (my thought: his natural testosterone levels helped).
June 1990 (to a sister): I’ve made it my work (for income) to do up properties which I bought very cheaply because they were run down and unlivable. So what I’ve done is transform myself from a professor into a builder. If I work at the rate I have been for the past two years, then in about five years…they will all be in quite good condition, worth quite a lot on the market, paid for, and bringing in good rentals. That’s my real retirement plan.
We had an early birthday party for me and then I went off to my land near Bridgetown to spend some time alone there in my cabin. It was absolutely beautiful in midwinter, with mist and frost and daily rain and then sun showers. Cold at night but I chopped wood, read, tended the winter garden, wrote a bit of poetry, mused, enjoyed solitude for a spell. I thought 55 was a good time to do it.
I decided cowardice is one of my failures and one I have never had the courage to face or admit. Not that I’m big on brooding about my failures. I also came to realize that nearly all the writing and teaching I have done in my life has been powered by a sense of moral outrage. I seem to have lost that. I live now more in a state of wonder.
June 1993 (to a sister): The Australian Supreme Court has just passed down a decision granting aboriginal groups the right to lay claim to vast tracks of Australia which have been held as “Crown Land” for 150 to 200 years and exploited for the benefit of the European world. The country is in an uproar. After 20 years and two months in Australia I do not know a single aboriginal well. Or even, to be accurate, at all. The same would be true of 99.99% of all non-aboriginal Australians. Never in my life, from the American ghettoes to Javanese villages to African desert dwellers, have I encountered people who seem so utterly “other” to me. I guess that’s what the Europeans who came here and enslaved and exterminated them thought [and] what the aboriginals thought about the Europeans too. The dance is not over.
October 1995 (to his sisters, on the death of their father): For me as a small child, Daddy was God on earth. Huge, bearded, all powerful, he was quick to anger and to laughter…my confessions of sins…were made to him in quaking fear and tears and he personally made judgement, punished with deliberation, forgave, and then held me close in love. Later as I became sexual and developed a questing mind he became my antagonist, my wrathful judge, and for a time my just barely tolerant and tolerated Father. From the age of about 14 until perhaps 30, he seemed almost my enemy. But as I became a strong adult and my life vision—my youthful life vision—disintegrated with too much success and too much madness I became wise, he became compassionate, and we became friends. Friends we stayed—though we sometimes were angry with one another—until death claimed him. I have often been left in astonishment at the strength of my love for him. Of his for me.
His living so long with mental vigor, good senses, physical mobility and even enjoyment of his sexuality despite diabetes and overweight have been a source of confidence for me about my own future and natural life span. Largely thanks to Daddy’s course, I feel myself at 60 to be a youngish man with a fair expectation of 30 or 40 more good years. If I do live so long and if my children, grandchildren, and all who are to come should venerate me when I am old in the way his tribe have venerated Daddy, I shall consider myself very fortunate indeed.
January 1997 (to his sisters): I suppose most of you have by now heard of the tragedy in our little village of Gracetown. A section of sandstone/limestone cliff fell down onto the beach at a very popular surf break just 200 yards from our house and crushed nine people to death, while four others escaped with injuries. I ran to the spot with a shovel and pick. Faced with a hopeless task, I despaired, but more people arrived and within an hour 150 or so of us were working under the still threatening cliff hang to dig the bodies of our neighbors out.
The media descended…pitiless in their exploitation of our children’s and our grief. State and national politicians came and strutted and posed and extended their sympathy in a pre-electoral frenzy. Professional counselors and social workers…sums of money offered by magazines for [someone’s] story. After it was over, the crushed bodies solemnly reburied, the cliff face madly and senselessly demolished by bulldozers, our names and faces off national television, the whole town—all 200 of us—came together at the beach one night and all got roaring and tearfully and hilariously drunk. Now three months later, I can say that tragedy transforms communities. A touch of the sacred has entered our relationships. We are more serious, more generous, more respectful of one another, but most of all, more affectionate.
I have become increasingly disenchanted with most of what the human project spends its time doing and more enchanted with the world of nature, the ecstasy of dreams, the flight of imagination…I sense the Cosmos as a living thing, humanity as we know it a brief flaring, too violent and vainglorious but an enchanting flame for all that. I love my life and feel the most fortunate of men.
July 1998 (to a sister): We are all well and happy as the human condition permits at the end of this most fascinating and troubling century and millennium. I”m eager to get into the next one, to see what it’s going to hold. Probably unimaginable things. Wonders and horrors, I should think. And the transformation of the human race into something quite different, I’m sure, given our increasing development of an external nervous system and our explosive capabilities for fiddling with genes and body chemistry. Questions about the future we don’t even know how to formulate.
Three of John’s sisters were able to visit him in Australia, at different times. Lois, who wrote of his golden tongue, also noted in her tribute: “He was a man with a special talent for expression and for friendship. As the only brother, his sisters rare times with him not only were full of laughter but of his sensitivity to each of our personalities and needs.”
March 2000 (to his sisters): The pellucid light flooding my Garden House on this hot summer day inspires me to try to write a letter…but it’s hard to concentrate. On one side of the newly floored patio next to my typewriter, the fig tree is plumping overripe fruit onto the ground every few minutes with a loud rustling of leaves as the figs fall through them and a soft plop as they hit the ground. On the other side, the ripening olives are starting to purple the olive tree and the flower garden underneath. I eat a half dozen figs each morning…and every couple of days I pick a quart or so of olives and put them in brine. Our gardens here and on the land at Bridgetown have reached such a state of development now that we are in year round harvest.
It’s been a bit of a party atmosphere around here. An inpouring of friends and progeny has kept the house humming. So much so, in fact, that we get quite desperate to find time to live a normal life…and to engage in healing practices.
Then there is this…do I really want all this fuss (re his cancer diagnosis) made over most fortunate me when tens of thousands of children and helpless people all over the world are being starved, shot, maimed, diseased, and otherwise slaughtered by greed, religious and political idiocy, and callousness and ignorance everyday? Something wrong somewhere. But one must not reject love.
Still I ponder these things. I’ve been reading the journals of Thomas Merton, who—along with Tielhard de Chardin—is, I think, the greatest Catholic philosopher of the twentieth century and whose writing has had a major impact on my life over 50 years. His question is “How much is my wealth and privilege costing other human beings in suffering?” His agonizing over the question led him to take a vow of poverty. My answer is that I simply don’t know, but because of how I understand the world, to not seek power or wealth, to love beauty rather than possessions, to cultivate a garden rather than a position.
I thought I might make a few comments on death, as one who over the last three years has become much better acquainted with this inevitable outcome of life. First of all the cliff fall with its nine killed taught me that death could enliven those left behind. Secondly, I was overwhelmed to learn from Amanda (sister closest in age to John who died at age 67 on June 26, 1999) that death could be peaceful, loving and full of grace. Before I had believed it must somehow be horrible. For myself, I have no fear of it at all, though I do regret it. Like Daddy, “I love this world,” and am reluctant to leave it.
I’ve spent the last fifteen years surfing giant Indian Ocean waves, and you must understand that every time you put on your wet suit and begin to make your way over the reef you are quite aware that you are doing something that may well kill you, but you are doing it anyway for the sheer joy of the ride. So you get used to facing the prospect of imminent death, and choosing to continue doing what you love despite the danger. And when you are taken by a wave and hammered onto a reef as I’ve been several times…it comes as a cold realization that you may well be dead in two minutes. But you keep fighting. Automatically! You don’t give up and let it take you.
I am afraid of prolonged, intense pain. Not only for its effect on me, but for its effect on those around me that I love. I’ll try my best to avoid it if it comes to that. On this score nature has provided some serious help. Thank God!
So am I going to live on awhile or die in the next few weeks or months as the doctors have decided? Who knows? Sixty-four-year-old men are not supposed to survive advanced lung cancer very long. But [they] are not supposed to surf the outside bubble at South Point or to be virile and generally healthy as they were at twenty or to be full of mental and emotional piss and vinegar either. So if I’m going to bow out, I’m going to have to be knocked flat on my back and unable to get up before I accept it as inevitable.
When it does, I’m pretty sure I’ll go contentedly. Who knows, there may be a whole new adventure ahead. I do believe the cosmos is alive, and I always have been and always will be a part of it. I can imagine being able to abandon this metabolic fire of flesh, this individual spark of consciousness, without regret. The spark may flicker out, or it may become part of a larger knowing. If the first, that seems OK—though somewhat out of character in this radiant cosmos. If the latter what a glorious surprise!
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