Literature & Theology, Vol.
. No. , June , pp.

"
doi:10.1093/litthe/frp019 Advance Access publication 27 April 2009

EQUANIMITY: LES MURRAY,

L E V I N A S A N D T H E B R E A T H
OF GOD
Ian Cooper

This article provides a close reading of Les Murrays poem Equanimity

in the context of Emmanuel Levinas ethical thought. It argues that Murrays
poem can be located in relation to Paul Celans concept of the turn
of breath, a hermeneutics of voice and address that points to Levinas
understanding of the face of the other. Equanimity both works out a
conception of encounter with the other that has strong parallels in Levinas
(particularly concerning the themes of speaking and seeing), and seeks
to move beyond an ethics based in difference by incorporating speech
and vision into a theology of grace.

IN AN essay on Embodiment and Incarnation, Les Murray denes the poetic

experience, the thing poets and their readers share, as strikingly physical.1
He sees it as closely connected to, and affecting, our breathing:
We only half-notice, consciously, that our breathing has tightened and altered,
submitting to commands from beyond ourselves. It shifts in and out of this
sympathetic obedience as the experience oscillates within us, coming and going
in its successive small peaks of intensity. We may say that the poem is dancing
us to its rhythm, even as we sit apparently still, reading it. It is, discreetly,
borrowing our body to embody itself. (Embodiment and Incarnation, p. 259)

In poetry, then, something is embodied, and that process includes the reader
too, who becomes part of the embodiment through the poems effect on the
physical process of breathing: embodiment refers at once to the materials
in which a work is realized, and to its somatic effect upon the beholder
(pp. 26364). And the dynamic quality of this experience lies in the frequent
turns (oscillations) of the breathing voice. Indeed Murray describes the
breathing movement of poetry as providing a harmony between the two
main modes of consciousness, one that is characteristic of waking life, one
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Abstract

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we call dreaming (p. 260), which is to say poetry is a certain kind of speaking:
I call properly integrated poetic discourse Wholespeak, while discourses based
on the supposed primacy or indeed exclusive sovereignty of daylight reason
I call Narrowspeak. The former embraces all good poetry [. . .] the latter
embraces most of the administrative discourse by which the world is ruled
from day to day (p. 263). The contrast between Wholespeak and
Narrowspeak encompasses a further contrast, between dreaming and daylightthe concern with types of voice is also a concern with types of vision.
Yet Murrays distinctions are dialectical, since the vision possible in poetry
is a fusion (p. 261) of dreaming and daylight. This would seem to imply that
the proper integration of Wholespeak will somehow have to include
Narrowspeak: an account of fullment must nd a place for the diminishments of restriction.
Murrays descriptions can be related to a famous account of poetry in
terms of breathing and turning, that given by Paul Celan in his speech The
Meridian (Der Meridian) (though Murray himself does not make the link).
Celan sees poetry as a line (a meridian) which simultaneously separates and
connects (Murrays idiom of distinction and encompassment implies a similar
pattern). For Celan the words of the poem take us between words, into the
space where words emerge. As such poetry is what he terms a turn of
breath, an Atemwende.2 The site of poetry is the point where the speaking
voice turns (oscillates, in Murrays words). And just as Murray sees poetry as
a tightening and altering of breath in submission to commands from beyond
ourselves, so for Celan the turn of breath is the basis of what might be called
poetrys ethical dimension. For The Meridian argues that the poem is a quest
for encounter, a turning towards: The poem intends another [will zu einem
Anderen], needs this other, needs an opposite. It goes toward it, bespeaks it.
For the poem, everything and everybody is a gure of this other toward which
it is heading.3 The poem is a constant moving to its own edges, towards
the epiphany of the other.4 For both Celan and Murray the turn of breath is
a turning beyond.
The thought of Emmanuel Levinas is based on that encounter with the
other, and regards it as the founding moment of ethics.5 Levinas insists, in
opposition to Heidegger, that being with others is primarily an ethical matter:
the fact of other people and their singular embodiment is not reducible to
the project of individual authentic existence that Heidegger associates with
Dasein, but rather interrupts it and puts it into question.6 Furthermore, in our
encounter with the face of the other, we receive a call to responsibility
(a command from beyond ourselves, in Murrays words) which is a revelation: The proximity of the Other, the proximity of the neighbor, is in being
an ineluctable moment of the revelation of an absolute presence [. . .] His very
epiphany consists in soliciting us by his destitution in the face of the Stranger.7

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MURRAY, LE VINAS AND BREATH OF GOD

Nests of golden porridge shattered in the silky-oak trees,

cobs and crusts of it, their glory-box;
the jacarandas open violet immensities
mirrored at on the lawns. (ll. 14)

The opening lines enact a manifold movement: between the tiny, enclosed
space of nests and the openness of the trees immensities; between fracture
(shattered) and reection (mirrored); between the three stages of a suggestive chromatic diminuendo, with gold moving down into violet, and nally
into the colourless dark of shadow. And from that dark the poem moves
again to light, the light which casts the shadows, and is the highly particular,
dening aspect of the scene being depicted: the droughty light, for example,
at telephone-wire | height above the carports (ll. 1011), which is contrasted
with the news-photograph light of a smoggy Wednesday (l. 12). These lines
are dense with detail but highly nimble in their recurrent geometry of
lines which organises the poems sense of perspectivelight which follows
the plane of telephone-wires marking suburbias highest reach before the
onset of unending sky, and which, in fact, lls out that vastness to make
it the enveloping source of vision, the innite backdrop to our seeing: it is
that light of the north-west wind, hung on the sky | like the haze above
cattleyards (ll. 1314).
Colour, light and dark are the main co-ordinates of this scene. In the details
and associations a certain patterning emerges. The smoggy Wednesday,
caught in newsprint, smudges into a reminiscence of a poem often heard
behind Murrays landscape lyrics: Hopkins Gods Grandeur, where the
world wears mans smudge (l. 7) and morning light shines through the
smog of the brown brink eastward (l. 12).9 But there is another poem
to be mentioned here: Eliots Ash-Wednesday, a poem also full of colour,
whose title refers to a liturgical smudge, to the mark of Lenten, purplish
(violet) time. Eliot applies the colour thickly: Who walked between the

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Levinas connects the utterance of the other to absolute presencethat is,

to the primal utterance of God. His theological ethics is worked out (primarily
in Totality and Innity) against a rich background comprising the elements
identied by Murray: voice, vision, narrowing and plenitude. Accordingly
this essay proposes a reading of one of Murrays best known poems with
Levinas in mind. Equanimity is drawn from Murrays own most sustained
reection on being with others, his collection The Peoples Otherworld (1983),
whose title suggests a turning between two worlds, or perhaps a metaphysical
division between darkness and light.8 Light, darkness, the turn of breath
and the face of the other come together in Equanimity.
The poem proceeds from a blissful vision of suburban springtime:

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195

birds, singly and in ocks

hopping over the suburb
[. . .]
hungry mountain birds, too, drifting in for food, with the sound
of moist gullies about them (ll. 516)

The scene is marked by the grid of intersecting lines that the birds describe,
and these lines point back, past the gardens and carports, to the mountains,
and ultimately to the hazy lightness of sky. Perspective in this poem, then,
is guided by any number of possible turns, caught in a multiple and dynamic
visual trajectory: our gaze is focused on the details of suburban scenery,
yet also turned outward to a landscape (and a sky-scape) beyond it, the two
planes connected by the drifting presence of the birds.
And in that focus something new emergeswhat might be called an ethical
dimension. We are told, rst of all, that talk of the good life tangles love
with will (l. 8): turning to expound the moral meaning of this composition
of place, the poem is quick to dispel the notion of this balance as the golden
mean .10 And indeed the associations brought by the mountain birds
commute seamlessly (carried by a drawn out and uniquely pure internal
rhyming, on sound itself) into something that clearly undercuts the vision
of contentment:
we must hear the profoundly unwished
garble of a neighbours quarrel, and see repeatedly
the face we saw near the sportswear shop today
in which mouth-watering and tears couldnt be distinguished. (ll. 1720)

The culminating image of the poems rst section, the hungry and tearful face,
presents itself in the destitution by which, Levinas says, the other solicits us.
The destitute face near the sportswear shop (famine [. . .] and the embodiment

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violet and the violet (IV, l. 1). Such time is held in the violet immensities of
Murrays jacarandas too, which emerge from the fracture, the shattering,
of goldand in evoking them the poetry quietly compresses a sense of
brokenness amid balance, the tincture of sorrowed purple. Indeed the scene
evoked in Murrays rst stanza, with its play of colour and its tilting into
shadow, bears some likeness to the chromatic pattern of a famously enigmatic
image in Eliots poem, which guides the gaze from immaculate white, through
purple coloured trees, to shade: Lady, three white leopards sat under a
juniper-tree | In the cool of the day (II, ll. 12). However, the play of
light and colour in Murrays scene shifts it into movementinto a relationship
with a surrounding landscape, and into the criss-cross patterning of birds
ight:

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MURRAY, LE VINAS AND BREATH OF GOD

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of consumerism11) stands in contrast to the balanced ease of the poems

opening scene, but it also emerges from itbuilt up to in the hunger of
the birds, it is part of what, within that scene, the poem has been quietly
associating with shattering or vulnerability, and a further dimension of the
colour violet: it is the emergence in the poem of esh and blood. Levinas
is emphatic that the ethical subject is an embodied being of esh and blood,12
and sees the perception of want and famishment as underlying the responsibility imposed on us by the other, appealing to me in its destitution and
nudityits hunger (TI, 200). The effect of the image in Murrays poem,
we might say using Levinas terms, is to put us into question,13 to make us
aware that the vision of gently suffused light and contented existence that
the poem has described belongs to a realm of ethical life, being with others.
As such the image is a turning in the poem, a juncture in which move two
opposite and complementary possibilities: fullment and need. Moving in
from the edge of the scene it turns us toward the centre of the poem
human community.
Levinas thinks neighbourliness and otherness, proximity and distance,
simultaneously.14 Murrays poem too runs them together: the birds drifting
in from the mountains bring with them the vision of that face. Levinas terms
offer a suitable means of following a poem concerned with light and dark,
and with openings, dimensions and immensities. The face is for him the
opening of a new dimension (TI, 197), a dimension he regards as distinct
from the space described by the illuminated horizon of seeing: vision opens
upon a perspective, upon a horizon, and describes a traversable distance [. . .]
Vision is not a transcendence [. . .] Light conditions the relations between
data; it makes possible the signication of objects that border one another.
It does not enable one to approach them face to face (TI, 191). The vistas of
lit space, for Levinas, do not themselves reveal; they must leave something
unseen, and are dened by their relation to an outer darkness they cannot
illuminate: light [. . .] itself remains relative to an elemental and obscure
ground (TI, 192). That is, vision itself conceals, until it is cut across by something that transcends it. And that transcendence, in which what is seen is
the limit of seeing, interrupts visionit is a revelation of a different order,
an eclipse of perspective: It captivates us by its grace as by magic, but does
not reveal itself [. . .] It is the face; its revelation is speech (TI, 193). The face
cannot be subsumed into the totality of a viewing perspective, since the face
insists on its ungraspable otherness, its essential irreducibility to the gaze of
the one who looks upon it. As such it disrupts the visual plane by opening it
(it is openness pre-eminently [. . .] its vision is the vision of the very openness
of being, TI, 193). Through its refusal to be grasped and appropriated, then,

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197

Quite different from inertia, its a place

where the churchmans not defensive, the indignant arent on
the qui vive,
the loser has lost interest, the accountant is truant to remorse,
where the farmer has done enough struggling-to-survive
for one day, and the artist rests from theory
where all are, in short, off the high comparative horse
of their identity. (ll. 2531)

Equanimity is the axis, the midpoint of movement (and so still but not inert)
of being in the world. And as possibility, it is opening, directing us both to
the centre of identity and to the edge of it. In Levinas the traversable distance
of perspective, of things whose signicance is dened through the way they
border other things, in itself reveals nothing, and must be interrupted by
a limit, a line that breaks through space and vision and opens them into the
new dimension, revealed in the face. Similarly, in Murrays poem equanimity
is where perspective, the sphere of identity achieved through comparison
evoked through the witty vying of internal contradictions as the traversable
space of community, with its churches, elds, nancial and cultural activity
is nudged off kilter, and in that moment re-centred. Equanimity is the line
running through existence that brings existence back to itself, where identity
is realised as something in excess of its self-denitions and particular perspectives. And since it is central to awareness it mostly ickers on the edge
of awareness, of perspectives which, because they are partial and narrowed,
push their own axis to the margins. But it can be neither refused nor
striven towardsit is simply there, as concrete as a law of nature: almost

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the face of the other lets us glimpse innityor rather it does not: the visual
glimpse has already been transformed into the uttered word. Speech cuts
across vision (TI, 195), the epiphany of the face is entirely language15
it is a call. The call of the other at once limits the freedom of its interlocutor
and founds it, by revealing its inevitably ethical bearing, its grounding in
responsibility.16 And in the uttering of that call, Levinas believes, lies the
others holiness (TI, 195): this revelation means we can say that the dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face (TI, 78).
In Levinas account ethical encounter, and so the opening of the dimension
of the divine, are rmly rooted in the everyday. Indeed he takes the view
(clearly against Heidegger) that to call things everyday and condemn them
as inauthentic is to fail to recognise the [. . .] signicance of the ordinary.17
He is concerned with ordinary life as the locus of revelation. And this is the
concern of Murrays poem too. The signicance of the ordinary for him
consists in its revealing what he calls equanimity (l. 25):

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MURRAY, LE VINAS AND BREATH OF GOD

Pity the high madness

that misses it continually, ranging without rest between
assertion and unconsciousness. (ll. 3335)

And this resting, this quietness where something is revealed, is connected

to the question of language, or voice, in this poem. It is a quietness that
underlies the conversational tone of the poem, that is felt each time
Murrays long, expansive sentenceswith their illustrating gestures of there
is more to say, for example, and their summarising interjections (in short)
ow into their ending cadence. Murrays lines extend through a myriad
punctuation marks (he makes especial use of the semi-colon, an acute written
marker of between-ness, like the hyphen in the title of Ash-Wednesday20),
and to read them is to become aware of the movement and pause of the
speaking voice, to gather breath and then gently, protractedly to let it out
before, in each nal diastole, breathing in again. This owing of language
to recovery is precisely a realisation, in voice, of equanimity. The point of
recoverythe point of quietness, where assertion stops and identity is opened
up, revealed, to itselfis the turn of breath, the Atemwende. The exhaling

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beneath notice, as attainable as gravity, it is | a continuous recovering

moment (ll. 3233).
Equanimity as this poem understands it, then, has a sacramental bearing: it
is the means by which the particularity of being in the world is revealed
in a universal (an innite) aspect, as being most fully realised on the edge
of itselfwhen it is made open. But it is perhaps one of Murrays most
noticeable achievementsand certainly one of his major divergences from
the mainstream of the Modernist aftermath (one he shares with Heaney,
for instance in the sequence Clearances)that he does not rarefy this revelation, but rather states it as the underlying condition of lived existence.18
Revelation in Equanimity is seen as intrinsic to the modest details of ethical
life. The poem is concerned not with the wrought evocativeness of,
for example, Geoffrey Hills epiphany poems,19 but with a world of
identityof subjective being, subjective beingsand the way that identity
is opened up beyond itself, shown something, and therefore shown itself
most clearly, through its being with others. The continuous recovering
moment of equanimity is the axis of identity because it is the axis of
identities, the line running between selves that joins selves together
and therefore takes them out of themselves; it appears, reveals itself,
absolutely between any defensive or indignant assertion on the part
of the churchman, the accountant or the artistthe moment where identity
rests. To be shut off from that moment, to enclose oneself in particularity,
is to be restless:

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199

voice narrows constantly to a re-gathering, a re-expansion that is the silent

condition of new speech. Breathing, the background rhythm to life, is constant relling, fullment.21 In a six-line sentence that brings the long
mid-section to a close and perfectly exemplies this taut expansiveness, the
poem rises to a new level of insight:
Through the peace beneath effort
(even within effort: quiet air between the bars of our attention)
comes unpurchased lifelong plenishment;
Christ spoke to people most often on this level
especially when they chattered about kingship and the Romans;
all holiness speaks from it. (ll. 3742)
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Speech cuts across vision, says Levinas, and: language thereby announces
the ethical inviolability of the Other and, without any odor of the
numinous, his holiness (TI, 195). If vision is always a laying claim to
others, an act that appropriates the seen to itself what Murray calls
a dimension of the selfs assertionthen speech, being addressed by an
other, contests the meaning I ascribe to my interlocutor (TI, 195), opening
the self beyond its own perspectives. Voice, expanding from and contracting
to silence, takes vision beyond itself. And breathing, the suspension and ow
of quiet air that enables voice and unnoticeably underlies physical existence,
is the most powerful signso fundamental that we hardly notice itof shared
bodily life, participation in something that exceeds the individual self, as
Murrays account of breaths tightening and altering describes. Our breathing,
over which we have no control, no power of assertion, is the half-felt
bodily marker of what Levinas sees as our primal ethical obligation to the
other. And this insight into otherness might also be seen as Murrays version
of an idea expressed by Celan. The paths taken by poetry are, in the words
of The Meridian, paths on which language becomes voice; they are what
Celan calls creaturely paths (kreaturliche Wege).22 Certainly the path taken
in Equanimity is a vocal one, and its climax is the realisation that in its
essence shared life is not simply creaturely, but created (Murray insists on
the link between creation and poesis23). Shared life is life sustained by gift,
unpurchased plenishment. Accordingly the dening and ultimate instance
of voice, whose breath moves through creatureliness and confers dignity
on the vegetative life of the body,24 is the utterance of what Levinas calls
the innitethe voice of God.
But Murray has been taking a step that Levinas does not. He sees that
dignity as based not ultimately in difference but in something beyond difference, a unity that speaks through grace, dened as the dimension which
theology calls infusion.25 Infusion for Murray is the entering of the innite
into the nite, its self-giving. Murray has said that all grace is really one; the

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MURRAY, LE VINAS AND BREATH OF GOD

There seems to be no Narrowspeak in him [. . .] His words constantly go beyond

the expected [. . .] His cures most often have no paraphernalia, and seem to
come as directions spoken with authority, as by an author to a character [. . .] He
also speaks with calmly terrible knowledge of the future, which being within
time is also partly subject to human freedom and human device [. . .] When He
speaks of laws, it is never in the one-dimensional terms of legal Narrowspeak.
He transposes them into their full poetic value [. . .] He gives the Law its more
tremendous dimensions, showing it in the way it exists in the Kingdom, or
to put that another way, He consistently shows us the Law as it is when raised
to the power of love and grace.27

The implications of that transposing quality in Christs words, revealing

more tremendous dimensions, are apparent in the way his voice is present
in Equanimitybreathing a restfulness that calms breathless chattering about
kingship and the Romans. For what Murrays poem emphasises in that referenceand in the lines past tenseis the historical located-ness of that voice,
which is to say of infusion, Incarnation, itself. The moment of revelation,
when nitude is opened to the innite, is a moment in worldly human
time, a moment, that is, attended by worldly human circumstances, social
and political (kingship and the Romans). God speakshas spokenin
a particular time and place, and thereby gives to all other particular times
and places a revelatory potential, the breath of quickening stillness that
is equanimity. The innite, then, reveals itself in its familiarity, and being
with others confronts us with the Law as a command that is both unfulllable
and already met, and so transposed, by one who is like ourselves but capable
of a supreme love, a perfect equanimity, that gives our breathing grace.
To catch the breath from which holiness speaks is to look upon and recognise the face from whose mouth it comes. It is for this reason that Murrays
poem starts a movement back from voice, towards vision, or rather begins to

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grace in the shape of a tree, in someones walk, the grace in a kind action, are
all ultimately the same.26 And that ultimate oneness of all grace comes from
the participation of individual, nite life in the innite life of God. As such,
when we transpose this theology of infusion into the sphere of community
what we might call the poems ethical understanding, its concern with an
ethos, a being with otherswe see that the other, captivating us by his grace,
as Levinas says, does not in fact reveal by virtue of his ungraspable difference,
but rather by virtue of his otherness turning us toward recognition: of the
presence that is infused into the life of both parties. That presence, the poem
now states, is God born in the likeness of men, that is, Christ.
Christs speaking comes at the close of the long mid-section, as breath
approaches a turning. Murray has discussed that voice at length:

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201

From the otherworld of action and media, this

interleaved continuing plane is hard to focus:
we are looking into the light
it makes some smile, some grimace. (ll. 4346)

That simultaneous pulling towards and obstruction of vision is the tension

the poem comes to dene, and to see as necessary: hearing the voice of
God transposes us back into a world of visionof looking, focusing in the
lightonly for that world to occlude what the experience has revealed to us.
Where in Levinas vision has to be broken through in order for revelation
to happen, in Murray the revelation of the Word is a breaking into vision,
into recognition, that is then itself broken up, refracted into non-recognition
and ambiguity (of faces contorted by staring into brightness: the line of
the mouth that is variously smile or grimace). This then is the fate of
Wholespeaka distortion of perfection through narrowing. And that distortion is precisely the reason why Levinas insists that the innite does not
enter the world of visible and touchable things: It is to the extent that
the word refuses to become esh that it assures a presence amongst us.28 In
Levinas terms this must be the difculty with any theology of Incarnation
that we cannot possibly see the face of God, since vision is always a concealment in the traversable distance of objects. Having moved away from Levinas
understanding of voice and vision, then, Murrays poem comes back to it,
to acknowledge its fundamental insight. For Murray, concealment through

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give the converse sense to that described by Levinasthat voice too is taken
beyond itself, through seeing. Vision, Levinas says, describes a traversable
distance, a realm of objects that only becomes a site of revelation when it
is cut across by speech, converted into voice through the command uttered by
the neighbour. That command, revelatory of something that is absolute by
virtue of its sheer difference from the visually perceptible, and appropriable,
world of things, is issued by the face of the other, and opens us to the innite.
The face, then, always already converted from visual encounter to vocal
command, is the point at which the innite is registered precisely through
its not being grasped as nite matter. Indeed this non-embodiment of the
innite is the basis of Levinas entire account of the relationship between
the face and revelation: The Other is not the incarnation of God, but
precisely by his face, in which he is disincarnate, is the manifestation of the
height in which God is revealed (TI, 79). God is revealed in the vertical
height that is innitely beyond the mere lateral signication of things on
the plane of visual recognition (TI, 191). In Equanimity, however, the
speaking of holiness returns us to seeing. But it also confronts us with
the difculties of seeing:

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MURRAY, LE VINAS AND BREATH OF GOD

More natural to look at the birds about the street, their life
that is greedy, pinched, courageous and prudential
as any on these bricked tree-mingled miles of settlement,
to watch the unceasing on-off
grace that attends their nearly every movement,
the same grace moveless in the shapes of trees
and complex in our selves and fellow walkers: we see its indivisible
and scarcely willed. (ll. 4754)

The tempting response to the light we cannot focus is to look away, to

be xed instead on the momentarythe ickering movements of birds that
populate our visual horizon as points in which we glimpse grace. But the
recognition of such dispersed, punctual grace is inadequate to the fullness,
the continuity, which the poem has already associated with infusion, and
so not a proper recognition of grace at all. It takes part in what Levinas calls
the visual signication of objects that border one another, but it is not
a revelation of presence, of the plenishment of the visual plane. However,
in this passage the poem itself silently intimates a different perspective. The
move from the jumpy perception of on-off grace in birds, to the recognition
of the same grace moveless in the shapes of trees | and complex in our selves
and fellow walkers, takes place within the ow of one long unstopped
passage, one gentle exhalation, and the transition from birds to ourselves
occurs without so much as an adversative conjunction or even a copulative
verb. Flickering is taken up into continuity, by the poems words and our
breath in reading themand on our breathings last movement, before it
comes to rest, rides an emphatic visual realisation: we see.

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vision is the dening characteristic of the otherworld of action and media,

oblivious of the restful recovering moment. It is the obscuring vision of
a certain way of talking and breathing: of Narrowspeak.
This is the world seen by Heidegger as governed by das Man, where
genuine communication is impossible because everything is broken down
into the sterile meaninglessness of idle chatter (Gerede), which through the
seductions of its surface sense always obstructs proper understanding.29 It is
the world in which the churchman, the accountant, the farmer are not at
the edge of the perspectives variously conferred by the the high comparative
horse of their identity, but rather dene, assert themselves incessantly against
and according to one another and thereby, in Heideggers sense, negate the
possibility of realising an authentic existence for themselves.
First this world is felt to be the other of the peace beneath effort, the
interleaved continuing plane, which from here will not be seen in its true
and perfect proportion. But in its most subtly drawn out turn of breath, the
poem moves from that closed down perspective towards a new insight:

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That it lights us from the incommensurable

we sometimes glimpse, from being trapped in the point
(bird minds and ours are so pointedly visual):
a eld all foreground, and equally all background,
like a painting of equality. Of innite detailed extent
like Gods attention. Where nothing is diminished by perspective. (ll. 5459)

These lines return us to Levinas. For him, light cannot establish a transcendent
perspective because it remains caught up in an irresolvable sliding between
presence and absence. It displaces the emptiness of darkness and so produces
another void, in the space where darkness was. And though the coming of
light into un-illuminated space is a lling up, a plenitude (TI, 190), it does
not take us beyond a eld of forces over against one another (nature, we might
say), in which things simply and impersonally are (that is, a world governed
by what Levinas calls the il y a).30 Darkness, once negated, simply asserts itself
as a negation, over against light: there is this void itself [. . .] In driving out
darkness the light does not arrest the incessant play of the there is (TI, 190).
Light is not transcendent; to be in illuminated space is to traverse the plane
of the void, and to traverse it is not equivalent to transcending (TI, 190). For

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Breathing and seeing, voice and vision, are therefore inseparable for
Murray. The breathing of the poemor rather the way it makes us breathe,
tightening and altering our breathopens us to a vision of the world.
The momentary, fragmented perception of grace, which is the most it
seems our unfocused perspective can attain, reveals itself to be part of a continuity that is not a matter of isolated ickers but rather encompasses the
whole sphere of vision, objects and the shapes of trees. Poetic experience,
as Murray understands it, is a turning towards this realisation, a turn of breath
through speech and cadence that does not so much cut across vision, as make
proper vision possible. For the commands from beyond ourselves that we
half-notice through our breathing are, as Levinas says, the expression of an
ethical obligation to the other; but full awareness of that ethical dimension
arises through our recognising fellow walkersother selves with other faces,
independent of ours but infused with the same grace. And recognition of
those faces, the poem suggests, is itself recognition of the interleaved continuing plane which was hard to focus. As such Equanimity is not in fact
content with a Heideggerian analysis of this otherworld. Where Heideggers
account of everydayness serves to reinforce a separation between the fallen
public realm and the transgured self-isolation of authentic being in the
world (Heideggerian grace), for Murray chatter, assertion and relentless
action themselves only exist through the underlying possibility of a resting,
and therefore a heightened vision.
The nal movement of the poem guides us towards seeing this:

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Levinas, then, we cannot be lit from the incommensurable. For Murray,

however, traversingwalking, as he saysthe realm of lit space provides
us with the means for seeing beyond it. In Equanimity light belongs,
as Levinas says, to the plane in which the surface of an object moves into
vision and touch (TI, 19091), the plane of things that there are in the world,
and that are therefore always potentially threatened by a tipping into concealment and negativity, the emptiness of the void (TI, 190). But it also belongs
tois continuous with, in the language of the poemthe plane that comes
into the world from beyond it, the plane of infusion. The focus of that
interleaving is the surface that is seen or touched, but not simply as a
thing: the site of an ethical relation and substance, the face. And since the
ethical power of the face always lies, as Levinas says, in its destitution, its
appealing in nudity and hunger, the realisation of fullment in the serene
vistas evoked at the end of the poem is inseparable from responsibility to
the tear-lled visage seen at the beginning. This Levinasian conception
of space, vision and the ethical, going beyond Levinas, is the basis of the
poems nal lines.
Recognising the lighting of the world through grace, though, will always
be momentary (we sometimes glimpse), even when we have learnt to
look not to the uttering of birds but to our fellow walkers. Levinas shows
that the plane of perspective always entails a narrowing, a foreclosure of
recognition or entrapment in the point, as Murray says. However, the
poem has argued that grace works by moving beneath the bars of our attention; pre-eminently this is demonstrated by our breathing. Narrowing may
be inevitable, but narrowing is also expansion. And indeed the poem narrows
to its point, the limiting xations of the pointedly visual, with inescapable
emphasisnot just with punctuation, but with a double pointing: with a
colon. This is part of the poems seeing and breathing; both are present in
our reading response to it. For a colon is a strikingly visual mark of both
closure and connection. A colon invites us to look through and beyond it,
opening itself into what follows. And that expansion is made possible and
carried along by the rest and re-gathering that occurs as the voice reaches it,
by the turn of breath. We are trapped in the point, our perspective not open
but narrowed; but in our breath such tightening is always ahalf-consciousresponse to something outside us that speaks a command, puts us
into questionan acknowledgement of our being with others. Breath is
always opening us beyond ourselves, and therefore reopening our vision,
turning it from the point to the indivisible continuous grace in us and our
fellow walkers. It is the constantly present, and therefore scarcely noticed,
expression of the redemption of space within space: not of the empty plenitude of the il y a, characterised by a chaotic and indeterminate swarming
of points (grouillement de points),31 nor of vision being cut across by a

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205

manifestation that is already discourse (TI, 66), but rather of the plenishment reected in visibly recognisable and spatially located sites of breathing
in faces. And space redeemed from narrowing is the vision breathed out in the
last, balanced cadences: a eld all foreground, and equally all background,
detailed and also innite. To glimpse that is to breathe with the rhythms
of Wholespeakto be in the world of perspective but freed from its diminishments. For Murray poems make us aware of our breathing and our seeing,
and therefore of our capacity to experience such momentseeting, but
recovering and therefore always recoverable, quietly given in grace and
therefore innitely possible.

REFERENCES
1

3
4
5

L.
Murray,
Embodiment
and
Incarnation in The Paperbark Tree: Selected
Prose (Manchester: Carcanet, 1992),
pp. 25169, at p. 258.
See P. Celan, Collected Prose, trans.
R. Waldrop (Manchester: Carcanet,
1986), p. 47. Original in P. Celan,
Gesammelte Werke in B. Allemann and S.
Reichert (eds), 5 Vols (Frankfurt a. M.:
Suhrkamp, 1983), III, pp. 187202.
Collected Prose, p. 49.
Ibid.
On Levinas and Celan, see K. Ziarek,
Inected Language: Toward a Hermeneutic
of Nearness (New York: SUNY Press,
1994), and M. Eskin, Ethics and Dialogue
in the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandelshtam, and Celan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
See M. Purcell, Levinas and Theology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), p. 79.
E. Levinas, Totality and Innity: An Essay
on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 78.
C. Gaffney, Les Murrays Otherworld,
Quadrant 78 (1984) 5558 (p. 55). See
also V. Brady, Caught in the Draught:
On Contemporary Australian Culture and
Society (Sydney: Angus & Robertson,

10

11
12

13

14

1994), pp. 17790. References to

Equanimity follow Les Murray, New
Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet,
2003), pp. 178-180.
On Murray and Gods Grandeur, see
two essays by C. Pollnitz: The Bardic
Pose: A Survey of Les A. Murrays Poetry,
Southerly 40 (1980) 36787 (p. 379), and
Folie, Topography and Family in Murrays
Middle-Distance Poems, Australian Literary Studies 20 (2001) 4363 (p. 47).
M. Leer, Gravity and Grace: Towards
a Meta-Physics of Embodiment in the
Poetry of Les Murray in C. Gaffney (ed.)
Counterbalancing Light: Essays on the Poetry
of Les Murray (Armidale: Kardoorair Press,
1997), pp. 13758, at p. 156.
Ibid., p. 157.
S. Critchley, in Idem and R. Bernasconi
(eds) Introduction to The Cambridge
Companion to Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 132,
at p. 21.
See C. Davis, Levinas: An Introduction
(Cambridge: Polity, 1996), p. 49.
On Levinas and the concept of Fernnahe,
see B. Waldenfels, Levinas and the Face
of the Other in S. Critchley and
R. Bernasconi (eds) Cambridge Companion,
pp. 6381, at p. 74.

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Selwyn College, University of Cambridge

idc22@cam.ac.uk

206
15

16

17

18

20

21

E. Levinas, En decouvrant lexistence avec

Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1974),
p. 173. Translation by C. Davis, Levinas,
p. 132.
Ethics as First Philosophy, in S. Hand
(ed.) The Levinas Reader, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 7587, p. 84.
Purcell, Levinas and Theology, p. 82. See
E. Levinas, Existence and Existants, trans.
A. Lingis (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978),
p. 45.
On Murray and Heaney, see M. Leer,
This Country is my Mind: Les Murrays
Poetics of Place, Australian Literary Studies
20 (2001) 1542, at pp. 2021.
See Epiphany at Hurcott and Epiphany
at Saint Mary and All Saints. For an
account of Hills treatment of various
themes considered here, see R. Macfarlane, Gravity and Grace in Geoffrey Hill,
Essays in Criticism 58 (2008) 23756.
See C. Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), p. 211.
Murray sees the breathing of poetry
as connected to sleep: see Poems and
Poesies, in The Paperbark Tree, pp. 34155,
at p. 343.

22

23
24
25
26

27
28

29

30

31

Celan, Collected Prose, p. 53; Gesammelte

Werke, III, p. 201.
Embodiment and Incarnation, p. 263.
Ibid., p. 265.
Ibid.
In an interview reproduced in J. Davidson,
Sideways from the Page (Melbourne: Fontana
Collins, 1983), p. 357.
Embodiment and Incarnation, p. 268.
The Transcendence of Words in The
Levinas Reader, pp. 14649, at p. 148.
Indeed, Levinas states that in the approach
of a face the esh becomes word, the caress
a saying: E. Levinas, Otherwise than Being
or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), p. 94.
M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans.
J. MacQuarrie and E. Robinson (London:
SCM, 1962), p. 212.
The horror of the il y a is insomnia,
the sleeplessness which is not yet consciousness (Purcell, Levinas and Theology,
p. 89): the absence of the resting moment
which both Murray and Levinas see as
made possible in ethos.
Levinas Reader, p. 31; E. Levinas, De
lexistence a` lexistant (Paris: Fontaine,
1947), p. 96.

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