Michael Leunig.
When Australian national treasure Michael Leunig died last week aged 79, the sense of loss was profound. I had the great privilege of interviewing this man of extraordinary creative gifts, insight and sensitivity, in 1996 and 2000. The following extracts from the interviews explore his yearning for beauty, enchantment, the transcendent and eternal, and his desire to be a voice for the voiceless.
RA: In Goatperson you satirise just about every aspect of modern life - from our obsession with money and material acquisitions, to our infatuation with success, achievement and celebrity. I particularly like the plodder’s response to being told he won’t be attractive or clever – “how divine”. You aren’t a great fan of modern life, are you?
ML: I find myself just plying my trade in this kind of questioning of modern life – it’s part of the duty of the cartoonist. So, I have to rather ignore the suggestion – not made by you but others – that I am a bit grumpy about the whole thing and I am maladjusted. But it’s probably true that is suits my temperament.
Yes, in some ways I am not a fan of modern life. I think we are in the grip of some dynamic process which is inhuman, particularly with regards to the speed of it, and it seems to produce all kinds of miseries. I believe every age has its particular miseries and I am fascinated by the particular miseries and afflictions of our age. Your question is like saying to a doctor, “You’re not a fan of the human body are you, you’re always concerned with its ailments”; and he answers, “No, I’m very concerned with health, in fact”. So, I am very concerned with a healthy situation, and I am concerned with sanity.
RA: One of your great gifts is that you haven’t lost a sense of enchantment, wonder and beauty, and indeed for you it appears that the apparently simple - birds, trees, flowers, etc. - and even the apparently ordinary and mundane - are a great source of joy.
ML: That is true. It seems at this point in life it is a wise, practical way to be – that you can find much in little. You don’t need much to do this, you don’t need many resources. You don’t have to spend much money to be enchanted, so it’s an efficient state of being.
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 use the imagination. I was allowed to play alone and a child spontaneously comes into an enchantment if left alone in a protected and good enough environment.
I was left alone - benign neglect, I suppose you could call it. If you leave someone alone for long enough and give them shelter and food, they will become enchanted. I think being enchanted is the natural condition of the psyche, the soul. I believe we have to hold on to that in the face of the onslaught of materialism and organised commerce and ‘adult’ values.
RA: The late Cardinal Basil Hume said, “A beautiful thing speaks to us of God. What we love in any creature is only what is a reflection of God. It is the beautiful which can arouse in us wonder and lead us to a response which is not exclusively rational and rightfully so, in that we are not simply rational beings but so much more.” Would you like to comment about that?
ML: When I hear you say that I immediately sense how narrow I feel society is becoming, in the excluding of that dimension from life. To reduce life just to the rational is to rule out so much pleasure and enjoyment in the non-rational, in the beautiful, and the cultivation of a sense of delight and beauty. I feel we are in danger of abandoning the language of delight and beauty and are becoming embarrassed by it. In this we have tended to copy our technologies. I think we are presently aping and styling our lives upon the functioning of the computer – fast, cold and informational.
RA: You see beauty and God’s hand in some unexpected places. In one of your prayers in The Prayer Tree you ‘give thanks for the invention of the wheelbarrow and the existence of the teapot’.
ML: Yes, well these are the things that hold us together I think. You know the Buddhists understand about a teapot and the importance of this simple functional thing. It’s simple and functional but it also seems to be divine and perfect.
A wheelbarrow! What a wonderful thing to help someone move some earth! It is an entirely good, loveable object and it is sad to me that our modern consumerism tries always to invent a better and more gimmicky wheelbarrow, an electric wheelbarrow, or a motor driven wheelbarrow.
There is such beautiful meditation in wheeling a wheelbarrow or raking a rake! What a lovely thing is a rake! How wise and healing these knowledges are – procedural wisdoms about life which can be so foolishly and quickly lost. There is a lot of simple procedural knowledge like this which makes life bearable, liveable and pleasurable.
I suppose I am always trying to say, look, there are such joyful and good things that are being repressed, being shut out. This is silly, bring them out and maybe this is divinity! Many of these things, such as the teapot, have evolved over centuries. Consider putting flowers in a vase. Some young people have forgotten that you can get a vase and put flowers in, and that this might actually be more than decoration – it might be an icon which unconsciously reminds us that nature is beautiful, alive and that we can touch it. So, we are broken by modern speed and input, and some of these fundamentals are just lost to us.
You know there are kids who have never seen a shovel to load sand in their life. They haven’t had an opportunity to shovel a load of sand, they have never known the beauty of that. Perhaps wheelbarrows might be a better thing for a school than computers. That may sound extreme but we need to give kids their hands back – not just hands to press buttons, but hands that can bend, manipulate, hold, craft and touch. Bring their senses back and you bring God back, you bring feelings back. A computer is a lovely tool, but schools must be careful not to make kids passive. Give them their senses.
RA: In many of your cartoons you express a longing for the transcendent, something beyond ourselves and this life. There are world-weary angels who want to return “home”, and in one cartoon you depict life on earth as a holiday before returning home, and in another there is the shout of “hurrah” at the thought of not being in this life much longer. A book you have drawn inspiration from is the mystical text The Cloud of Unknowing which talks about the anguish of a separated existence from God in this life. You obviously feel some sense of this anguish. When have you most felt a sense of separation from God?
ML: 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 or 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!
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 – it’s an increasing 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 post-modern condition – “I’ll wake up and see what today brings and I will adjust my life according to the new market rules or the stock exchange or whatever,” and 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!
RA: How do you think we can put ourselves in touch with God?
ML: At the very simplest, I think as Van Gogh said and St Francis would have said, we must find nature. Just to be in the presence of nature your feelings and ‘little seedlings’ start to awake. So, if we disassociate ourselves from God we cut nature out too.
More and more we turn nature into a commodity, into eco-tourism. But we must integrate it into the way people live every day.
I think God is found in suffering also. It can be in suffering that we connect to the truth of ourselves, and when we are broken, we cannot avoid facing reality. I see in a sense this is what life has always been about – the search for beauty and truth and God and authenticity. It’s also about finding one’s animal self, one’s ‘birth self’ if you like, one’s simplicity, one’s humility, one’s mortality and vulnerability. But these are the things people don’t want. These are the things that society tells us we don’t need, we shouldn’t have. Society says we need protection, we need strength, we need wealth, we need style and grandiosity.
Sometimes I think if you can make something which is beautiful and simple, then you have found God. Too often in this world what we construct seems as if it is made not by God or by connection to God. There are so many buildings made by computers, set squares, rulers and formulas. I think modern architecture has lost its soul. It is impoverished, atheistic and empty.
RA: When have you perhaps most felt a sense of communion with God?
ML: It probably sounds like a cliché, but there is the time of the great exhaustion of a difficult patch, a suffering time, and being worn out by that; and then a sort of descent into God, if you like, and a sense of joy when one is amazed and surprised and delighted. It’s irrational - I can’t describe these moments. They are so ordinary and unmemorable too. One remembers the sense of gladness, that all is OK, it is good, it is right - in spite of all the war and suffering and whatever and my own mess - it is precisely as it is meant to be.
RA: A feeling of letting go?
ML: Of letting go, and the utter relief and surrender to the entire mess, that it is beyond me, and I accept that it is beyond me. And there is a sense of God there.
RA: Would you describe your cartoons as a way of worshipping?
ML: Look, the best things are! A lot of them I do very solemnly and resentfully as I get older because of the compliance involved in working to deadlines, and I feel like I am betraying myself. But the best things are definitely a worshipful thing, an offering into the world, and that always produces my best work.
It has been my private nourishing sense when I am working that I am doing this for God, in the same way that Bach or whoever makes music or makes anything ultimately because it’s something to do with God …
RA: Who do you see as the voiceless and in what sense do you speak for them?
ML: Individuals generally are voiceless in the face of this great onslaught, which is modern society, with its vast media empire. For many people life isn’t as dazzling, colourful and powerful as the mass media tells them it should be, so they take their own existence into themselves and hide. They have a voice which is quite often entirely oppressed and almost unknown to themselves.
I think my work is often therapeutic because I often give expression to this inner voice. For example, I might make a small piece about a person oppressed and ground down by tiredness. This life is actually very exhausting. It doesn’t give humans much time to contemplate anything. We are not resting ourselves and there is the feeling we have got to keep working and pushing really hard. So, I draw the person running and running and running – for no apparent reason. And suddenly I find that I have touched on something that is perhaps universal.
Sometimes the more primitive my work, the more people are responsive to it, and the more therapeutic it is. Once I used to believe in the great creative life of original ideas – now for me it’s more a question of keeping basic ideas and values and feelings alive. I’m now more concerned with maintaining that which is really embattled and under siege and that which is down to its last gasp. And it seems to me there might be vital things that are down to their last gasp …
There is a danger we are becoming consumers and market targets rather than citizens with souls. We are also animals with fundamental needs for well-being. I think modern technological society imposes a mad, grandiose ego model to live up to. Once the Church could be accused of making strictures about what we should be. I think contemporary life is far more tyrannical and demanding.
The individual is overwhelmed by the magnitude. We have embraced technology and economic systems that are just unfathomable and massive and all-powerful. I think television is a totally destructive and corrosive medium. People are living lives through television and films and the media rather than through their own lives. They are living reactively and passively all the time. We feel we need all this stimulation but in fact we need very little.
I believe overstimulation actually poisons the soul. And death of the soul leads to incapacity for love. Love is an impossibility when we are overstimulated, when we are being rushed at high speed and also when we lose our faculties, our dexterities. The soul has to love, and the species has to love in order to survive. It’s a fundamental aspect of ourselves, because it’s through love that we intuit. The birds intuit where they must build their nest. They intuit when winter is coming. We also intuit our place in nature and the scheme of things – but I think this capacity for intuition about our place in nature is severely impaired and deadened. Modern society is assaulting nature, taking it away and killing it off at an accelerating rate in spite of what we know. It is a kind of madness that we have stopped intuiting. We have become the village which tips the sewage into its own well.
We should think of the soul as the canary in the coalmine. When it gets sick you know you have got to act.
RA: I was intrigued by one of your cartoons where everyone is running around madly, driven by their own personal devil on their backs.
ML: I suppose there is a kind of driven quality in society. When Jung visited some Indians in America their description of Europeans affected him greatly. They said something like – Oh the Europeans, we see their faces, they have hard faces and greedy eyes. They are always wanting something.
RA: Your drawings also reflect a re-awakening of interest in devils and angels.
ML: I don’t understand why, but it seems that we have to keep drawing these types. Perhaps evil has to be depicted in this very primitive, almost comical way.
RA: What do you think happens to us at death?
ML: I like what D.W. Winnicott, the great British analyst, said about dying. He said: To die is like a very small hole, you have to get through it. You have to make yourself very small. I like the idea of having to become simpler and smaller.
RA: A dying of the ego?
ML: Yes, perhaps it is simply that.
RA: In an interview with Doug Aiton in The Sunday Age you said “I am getting reassuring, almost stimulating glimpses of … eternal life.” What did you mean?
ML: There is a kind of letting go of the particularities of this time in which I live. You start to relate more to nature. You start to identify with all cultures and all humans. The problems of existence and this whole matter of living you start to see as having been essentially the same for the past 2000 years.
You begin to feel for all things from all times and places so you are no longer a creature of these times as much as you used to be – concerned with the novelties of the moment. I have been shedding the technologies, the gadgets. I don’t have a television. I cook with things I have always cooked with.
I believe if you can move away from the time in which you live and allow yourself to be drawn to the eternal aspects of life, and the simple tools which simplify life, then you can almost move from this life automatically into what follows in another.
We need to realise we don’t need that many things in life really. We can do with a lot less if we can learn to slow down and still ourselves. We have got to be more genuinely happy with less – something which is entirely possible.
RA: You were brought up an Anglican. Do you still go to Church?
ML: Yes, occasionally. Taking communion still has a moving, cleansing effect on me. I become a lighter person after communion. I walk out of the church after communion and I feel simplified, refreshed. I don’t entirely understand it but I think I have been healed. The sharing, kneeling, someone kneeling on either side of you – this is the most astonishing feeling! This is a kind of humility, I think. It is an acted out humility which reminds you of your humble being.
RA: Like the man kneeling before the duck, in one of your cartoons.
ML: Yes! He is attempting to speak to the duck you see, which is an act of madness, and this is what people would say about prayer.
From A Faith to Live by, by Roland Ashby (Morning Star Publishing and Darton Longman and Todd)