Voyager: Dr Gershon Maller

Distinguished and award-winning Australian poet, long-time mentor of Sophia, and beloved friend, Dr. Gershon (Gary) Maller OBM, died this week in Melbourne after a long illness.

Last week, I sent a friend a poem of Gary’s. The poem, Rogue Objects, is a terrific piece. It is, I said, “clever, philosophically grounded, metaphysically deep….and with a quirky humour.” It occurred to me afterwards that this is, in fact, an excellent description of Gary himself.

Gary’s initial degree (with First Class Honours), undertaken as a young man, was in philosophy, the discipline and worldview of which was to provide the intellectual architecture for the life which was to come.

How do we perceive? How do we know? What “is” to be known? How do we conceive of and formulate understanding of the world—and how do we speak of it, with what T.S. Eliot calls the “shabby equipment” of necessarily limited language?

These were questions at which Gary toiled away across decades, both in philosophy and in poetry—shaping, crafting, revising, refining.

To be a poet is to be “a maker,” but it is also about being brave enough (as young Soph said in The Poet) to be “a process not a stagnation,” to be an active explorer of what it is to be human.

In the process of “becoming,” in other words, we discover how to be.

Gary was just such a voyager.

The journey was life, and the craft (yes, the pun is intentional) is consciousness.

In one of our conversations in the last few months, Gary and I talked about consciousness. We talked about quantum physics, Kant (his beloved Kant!), of unknown knowing, of how we must peel perception (ironically) to “see.”

We discussed the realisation I have had since Sophie’s death: that love…Love…underlies all things. It is the great vibrational current of the universe, the grand harmony in which the soul sings.

As Max Planck (one of the most significant and influential scientists of the last hundred years) observed, consciousness is fundamental to the universe. It is not just the means, it is “the matter” (which is not “matter”—heh, heh, Gary).

Love is, I said to Gary, the “concentrated coherence of consciousness.” It is the fierce and focussed crystallisation of being; and yet, in the experiencing of it, love is inherently not about self—other-directed, as in its most essential form it needs must be.

Gary replied that he thought that this was “just about right.”

I do too, dear G. I do too.

At the beginning of the year, I wrote a little three-line poem:

To love with a pure heart
Is the gift of sorrow

Such a price is paid for it

I have paid that price in Sophie’s death. The weight of the knowledge given is very clear to me—as it was to Gary, during whose illness the clarifying understanding of “what matters” became intensely real.

To love “with a pure heart,” is to love completely in terms of the other. This is the deepest understanding of human existence. It is the lesson we are here to learn. It was a lesson Gary learned well.

He loved Tina, his wife of nearly 60 years (“Wonderful Tina,” as Gary always used to say). He loved his children and grandchildren and all his family. He loved Pearl, his and Tina’s sweet-natured greyhound who died some years ago. He loved the magpies who visited his balcony for comfort and conversation (and a treat or two). He loved his friends from many years. He loved beautiful Soph, and he loved me, his philosophical friend, long distance, across the map-miles between us.

In a conversation Gary and I had last week, we discussed recent research into the fact that some people do not seem to have an “inner voice,” an interior monologue of self-awareness (theirs seems to be mediated non-linguistically). I sent him an article to read (typical Gary: still interested, still learning, even in palliative care).

He replied (by email):

We need to distinguish inner voice from inner sense and outer sense and both from pure apperception

Inner sense is my awareness of the representations in me which include outer sense 

to be continued 

Yes, “To be continued,” Gary. We will speak again.

Safe voyage home, my dear friend

With love,
R