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Shadowboxing With God
| Article
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20324 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1992 |
2,476 Words |
| Author
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Melinda Worth Popham
Novelist Melinda Worth Popham is the author of Skywater. |
Not long ago, a friend of mine who died and came back told me what it had been like. It had happened over fifty years ago--he was in his early teens at the time and is now in his late sixties--but every detail of his account was as vivid as if he had just that moment been pulled from the water.
He described the elaborate thought processes he went through: specific good-byes to each member of his family; thoughts of the anguish his death would cause them. He also described angles of vision and pulled-back perspectives impossible for him to have seen from within his own body, including the sight of himself, seen from afar, rolled under the keel of a sailboat.
He spent eight or so minutes underwater before being rescued, and it was thanks only to the near-freezing temperature of the water having slowed his metabolism to hibernation speed that he did not suffer brain damage.
My friend, who is Jewish and nonreligious, did not find his death to be a "Christian" experience. But having had an out-of-body experience was so pivotal to him that it led him to later explore--through impromptu, self-induced experiments--the recapturing of that total separation of consciousness from body. In other words, it redefined him to himself.
Reading Tim Winton's Cloudstreet, I kept thinking of my friend's account, using it as a sort of template to overlay on the drowning and revival of the nine-year-old boy named Fish Lamb, who is the spiritual epicenter of this extraordinary Australian novel.
Poverty and tragedy bring the Pickles and Lamb families to No. 1 Cloud Street, a "great continent of a house." Although the Pickles have inherited it, the house that they come to call Cloudstreet "doesn't belong to them." Sam divides the house and yard in two and rents one half--the sunny side--to the Lambs. But, as we all know, a house divided against itself cannot stand, and therein lies the story of these two families struggling to belong and struggling, too, for faith in an omnipresent divinity.
Of luckless Sam and alcoholic Dolly Pickles' three children, Rose is the one who matters. Ted takes off with "his comb and his hormones" to shotgun marry and be a jockey; Chub is a nothing. But Rose is a child who forgoes childhood to be the only responsible adult in the household. A reluctant school dropout, she not only brings home the bacon but cooks it for the family
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