Timor Mortis Conturbat Me

What was I saying about mortality in that last post? Eileen's comments made me think hard about academic generations, too, and today I'm marking the passing of two former colleagues, who have died within three weeks of each other, Mary Dove and Terry Collits. Writing their names together suddenly takes me back to the days when they were my colleagues and friends, in all the quotidian messiness of teaching, meetings and memos.

Mary came to the department as I entered my honours year. For her class I would spend hours in the department library looking up the etymology of every third word in Piers Plowman and learning how much I didn't know about medieval literature. She also took an extra class in Old French: I used to translate lines and lines, pages and pages of text.

Terry was already a lecturer at Melbourne when I was a student, and eventually became a compassionate and sensitive head of department, publishing Post-colonial Conrad to great acclaim in 2005.

Friends and colleagues have helped me compile an obituary for Mary, which will appear in the next issue of Parergon. I thought about posting it here, but won't, since I haven't sought permission to quote them on the blog. If anyone would like to contact me for a copy, please do so. Writing this obituary was one of the hardest things I've ever written, and I'm so grateful I had the help from people willing to share their memories and impressions.

These two colleagues — the medieval exegete and the nineteenth-century Marxist scholar — in many ways had little in common. But in my mind, and in my memory, they are held together in the same moment of my own career, when I was looking for a way of becoming an academic.

Years ago, when I visited Yale for the first time, for some reason we toured the cemetery there, and I was a little shocked and amused to see how many of the tombstones of professors were inscribed with the titles of their books. But it is an odd question, the issue of one's academic legacy. It's true, as they say, that I won't want to be remembered for the meetings I attended, or the grant applications I compiled. But I might well want to be remembered for the books I write, for they aren't just projects and exercises; they are labours of love and anxiety, ongoing dreams of the perfect synthesis of ideas, examples and structures. They are never such, of course, even though they take me so long.

I won't want to be remembered just for the books, of course, or just by people who recognise their titles. But I'll stop here, lest I seem to be writing my own epitaph.

Hard Times for Breast Cancer Survivors

I know there's a lot of dispute about the term "survivor" for anyone who's had cancer and is still alive. But when you read about two women, roughly your own age, who've died of breast cancer in the last week, it can be a bit tough; and you do feel like a survivor, with all the resultant complexities. Not guilt, exactly, but certainly a shiver that barely separates you and your own excellent prognosis from them and their much harder stories.

And when they are famous, there's a lot to read about them: pictures of them, their children, and reminders of their public achievements.

I think a lot of Australian women thrilled at Kerryn McCann's marathon victories, especially those with children who saw an elite athlete just powering on through with her inspirational running. She died last week at 41.

And yesterday, Dorothy Porter, a wonderful poet, also succumbed to breast cancer at the age of 54. I loved her work, and heard her read and speak a couple of times. Link to a beautiful photograph that I think is copyright-protected.

The only time I spent any different kind of time in her company was on the oak lawns in the Botanical Gardens in Melbourne, where she had invited a small group of people to celebrate the life of Gwen Harwood, who had died, also of breast cancer, a few months before. We each read our favourite poem. I read "Dialogue", an early poem addressed to a stillborn child.

If an angel came with one wish
I might say, deliver that child
who died before birth, into life.
Let me see what she might have become.
He would bring her into a room
fair skinned —— the bones of her hands
would press on my shoulderblades
in our long embrace

[She asks what brought the ghost to her; and the child replies...]

— It is none of these, but a rhythm
the bones of my fingers —— dactylic
rhetoric smashed from your memory.
Forget me again

I had never heard Gwen read this in public until I was interviewing her at the Melbourne Writers' Festival in 1992, when I was writing my book on her (you can download a full-text pdf from the e-print repository). She had agreed to do it over lunch, but all the same, had to pause, half-way through, and collect herself.

Ahhh. These women. This disease. These deaths.