Leunig was a great artist who believed the world is full of enchantment and spoke of the ‘ecology of the soul’. So said Emeritus Professor David Tacey at Leunig’s memorial service in St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne, on 30 January. The following is the longer version of his eulogy which had to be shortened for the occasion.
In preparing these notes on Leunig’s passing, I came across some remarkable words on death found in Leunig’s interview with Roland Ashby’s A Faith to Live By (Morning Star Publishing). Michael quotes the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, who said: ‘To die is like a very small hole, you have to get through it. You have to make yourself very small’. Michael responded: ‘I like the idea of having to become simpler and smaller at the point of death’.
Leunig’s work is of monumental significance, not only to Australia, but to the modern world. The metaphysical significance of his work escapes many of those who have smiled and laughed at his cartoons for the last fifty-five years. He attends to the spiritual life in our time, exploring the problems of finding and nurturing spirit in a materialistic age. Our society is in a ‘dark night of the soul’, seemingly devoid of spiritual concern, although at the same time Leunig sees the possibility of renewal and re-enchantment everywhere, especially in nature and human interiority. He makes much use of naïveté or innocence as a way to reconnect with spirit and combat the corrosive effects of rationality.
Starting almost from scratch, and accepting our secular disbelief as his first premise, he builds a cosmology which respects the needs of spirit and soul. He affirms the existence of something inside us, which he calls ‘heart’, that is capable of guiding our way. He sees great value in the interior or true self. Indeed, in a world where religious authorities are often disregarded, the only spiritual option available is to develop a mystical interiority and commune with the God within. He says that faith today requires an inner life; it is ‘the still small voice’ that guides us.
One of my favourite Leunig’s is a melancholic figure seated beside a gravestone under a dead tree, wilted flowers in hand, surrounded by tombstones marking the death of Santa Claus, supernatural figures, fairies and God. Our lives normally move from the cradle to the grave, but Leunig’s depiction of the spiritual journey reverses this: we begin in the graveyard of our intellectually ‘enlightened’ world, and if we have enough spiritual intuition and desire for life we might move toward rebirth. Leunig says: ‘I was born into a time and a family and a condition whereby I was taught and encouraged to believe in fairies and pixies and the invisible and the use of imagination’. But as he grew up he witnessed the death and demise of each of these imaginal figures.
Whatever ‘God’ might mean to us now, his old form has been killed off. He can no longer be imagined as a manlike figure in the sky. Leunig’s cartoons show all the wondrous things that have been killed off by our enlightenment. And now humanity is threatened by this disenchantment, leading to the sense that spiritual life is not merely some kind of intellectual activity that brightens things up, but is somehow integral to the functioning of life. That’s why the tombstones include humanity, friends and family. Integral to his work is the Biblical saying: ‘Where there is no vision, the people perish.’ KJV Proverbs 29:18
Leunig is a great artist; I would say his works are as important as those of T.S. Eliot in the realm of poetry: In ‘The Waste Land’, Eliot wrote:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter.
This is a poetic description of Leunig’s cartoon; the mourning figure is seated amidst a ‘heap of broken images’, where the sun beats and the dead tree gives no shelter.
However, in a philosophical mood, Leunig says: ‘I think it’s the natural condition of life that we are lost from God or beauty much of the time. Much of the time we struggle for our faith or our belief of something that comforts us. I have now learned to accept that. I once thought it was a failure of my religious impulse that I could not hang on to God for meaning. I felt it was a failing. Now I tend to see it as part of the natural condition which must be stayed with. But it passes and we move in and out of it. If we could be in the divine state all the time it would all be just too easy’.
Leunig took the duck as the leitmotif of his work. What is the duck saying or doing in his work? The duck in his cartoons represents the spirit, which animates life and gives meaning. In the foreground of this cartoon a duck points its beak at the solitary figure in an accusatory way. The duck is alarmed at the man’s despondency, as if to say ‘Wake up! Why are you so depressed? The world is full of enchantment, even if you can’t see it’. It is as if Leunig’s duck is saying: ‘You are sitting in a graveyard of your own making; the world beyond human society is capable of renewing your life.’ In this spirit, the poet Rilke wrote:
But for us existence is still enchanted;
still in a hundred places the source. A play of pure powers,
touched only by those who kneel and wonder.
‘Us’ in the first line refers to poets; for the poet’s existence ‘is still enchanted’.
There is a spiritual and environmental hope in Rilke, as in Leunig: although society seems spiritually exhausted and has lost its way, the natural world can provide many possibilities of renewal.
Enchantment is only available to ‘those who kneel and wonder’, said Rilke. Leunig doesn’t worship ducks. This is a metaphor, of course, for the necessity to ‘kneel and wonder’ before the mystery that is spirit. Birds have symbolised spirit throughout the ages: the dove, the eagle, the hawk, and geese. So why not a duck?
Leunig’s work seeks to revive public interest in prayer, in the perspectives that open up to the secular self when it adopts a reverential relation to the world. His work is subversive in that it reverses the values of secular society.
‘I ask the reader to bear with the absurdity of the image and to remember that the search for the sublime may sometimes have a ridiculous beginning … The kneeling man knows, as everybody does, that a proud and upright man does not and cannot talk with a duck.’
Michael Leunig, A Common Prayer (Melbourne: Collins Dove, 1990), unpaginated.
Spiritual renewal will not come through clever applications of the human will or reason. It will only come through doing something that the rational mind might see as ‘absurd’ and would disagree with. This realisation leads Leunig to affirm the tradition of the holy fool, the holiness of what seems foolish to the mind. Much of his humour derives from the ironic disproportion between the values of the spirit and the values of the world. Awakening spirit does not seem ‘useful’ to the world; but leads to Life.
1 Corinthians 1:27: ‘God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the world.’
William Blake: ‘If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise’, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793
Perhaps foolishly, in the eyes of the world, Leunig’s anti-hero sets forth on a journey, following the duck. In his writings and cartoons, Leunig refers to ‘the direction-finding duck’, because it discerns the way out of spiritual darkness into light. Following the duck can lead to a new dawn, whereas if we stick with the mundane perspective we would be back in the graveyard. The duck, or we might say, the spirit, keeps us oriented to a larger perspective, to one outside the gloom of the modern condition.
Leunig is introducing spiritual life into a committedly secular society. This means he has to tread carefully. As a humorist, he needs his audience to laugh with him, not at him. The image of the duck is humble, disarming, everyday. If Leunig had arrived at a more elevated or conventional religious symbol, such as a god, angel or supernatural force, his audience would have laughed at him, rejecting his overtures to the spiritual. Without humour, the secular audience might have dismissed his spirituality as pretentious or unAustralian. As long as he can get the audience to laugh with him, it will most likely not reject him as a God-botherer or someone suffering from a God delusion.
Like any creative artist setting out to rework the religious project for a secular age, he runs a double risk: upsetting the secular by his religiousness; upsetting the religious by his lightness of touch.
In Leunig’s cosmology, humour plays a major role in challenging, and breaking down, the resistances of secular rationality. Leonard Cohen sang: ‘There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in’. Leunig explores the potentials of humour to crack open the secular self and expose it to the sacred. He described his cartoons as ‘public prayers’, and was conscious of doing this in the context of ‘a spirit of the times constricted by fashion anxiety’.
Leunig admitted that his spiritual work involved risk. ‘I opened my heart to derision’, he wrote in his preface to When I Talk to You: A Cartoonist Talks to God.
‘The creation of my prayers has involved feelings of considerable vulnerability, because I understood that such things are readily and gladly misunderstood. They are my fumbling experiments and they mostly derive from a situation of deep personal struggle which was difficult, wonderful and radical.’
Michael Leunig, When I Talk to You: A Cartoonist Talks to God (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2004), unpaginated.
The heart, he says is ‘crying for help’. He indicates that patience and tolerance are needed in order to ‘attend’ to the heart. It is not going to speak to us in our language, but it will use its own.
Leunig’s work points to the need for an ongoing dialogue between ego and soul. The ego must renounce its control over the personality, in order to commence a dialogue with the soul. It must risk appearing foolish to others, and even to itself, by holding conversations with invisible figures and taking the soul seriously.
Leunig’s work seems to ask the question: Where does the heart go to school? Where do we educate the sacred heart of humanity? Our society has a great deal of data and information, but wisdom is in short supply, because it has been left behind by social progress and abandoned in the unconscious.
Religion is not merely something we do, but something that is done to us.
Leunig teaches a ‘wise foolishness’, a stance which enlivens spirit but confounds the mind.
Religion is presented as enigmatic, gripping; not a system of belief or a series of propositions, but a set of mysteries to be experienced first-hand.
The heart is seen as the intelligent centre of religious experience, as it is in Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross; the eighteen-inch drop from the head to the heart; Leunig belongs in this tradition of mystics and writers.
I found Leunig enormously helpful in teaching spirituality to university students over many years. In my experience, students respond to the humour and irony of his work. His humour can make the big religious topics more accessible and immediate: topics such as sacrifice, humility, trust, prayer and worship come alive. Young people are often profoundly alienated from traditional religious language, but Leunig finds a language they can readily accept.
Leunig coined a phrase I like: he spoke of the ecology of the soul. The human soul is mysteriously linked to the larger life of the world. If we lose our souls, this can hugely impact on the natural world beyond us, depleting it and reducing its life. Hence for Leunig, the ecology of the soul is intimately tied up with the ecology of the world.
In Leunig we find a plea that society recognises the sacred as important and meaningful:
‘There’s the personal longing for the transcendent, but there’s also the longing for the recognition of the transcendent – that it matters to society, that it matters to my fellow creatures, that we can talk of it, that we allow for it and know of it. To live in a non-believing world is a particular anguish, and I don’t know whether that is a condition of ageing. Sometimes it becomes unbearable to be surrounded by non-believers, people who flagrantly proclaim a kind of non-belief in any value… It’s that seeming inability to ask, ‘is there nothing higher?’ that I find disturbing. Sometimes you can find yourself amongst people who feel nothing higher, and this is a very particular kind of loneliness which becomes unbearable at times, particularly if you work in journalism’. Roland Ashby, A Faith to Live By (Melbourne: Morning Star Publishing).
Leunig’s spiritual experience is decidedly Christian, but it has a ‘universal’ or mystical aspect that is able to speak to people of any background or tradition. This to me is vitally important: we can no longer afford to support religions that divide people and award membership to some and exclude others.
Michael Leunig: A rare genius who showed us the geography of the Australian soul.
Dr David Tacey is an Australian public intellectual, writer and interdisciplinary scholar. He is Emeritus Professor of Literature at La Trobe University in Melbourne and Research Professor at the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture in Canberra.
Books by Leunig:
Michael Leunig, A Common Prayer, Melbourne: Collins Dove, 1990.
Second edition: Melbourne: HarperCollins Religious, 1998; 1999.
Michael Leunig, The Prayer Tree, Melbourne: Collins Dove, 1991.
Second edition: Melbourne: HarperCollins Religious, 1998; 1999.
The most recent collection of his spiritual cartoons and prayers:
Michael Leunig, When I Talk to You: A Cartoonist Talks to God (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2004).
The memorial service for Michael Leunig can be viewed here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6L8yQa68Ok