Had I dozed off? All of a sudden I was aware of two
   * gentlemen, two real presences, in my room steadfastly
     perusing John Peart's painting Black to Black. The painting
     had been usurping my absorbed attention. Their
5    concentration convinced me that it had their respect as it
     did mine. Neither spoke for some time. Each, despite his
   * short stature, had a commanding presence. One, thick-set,
     Churchillian, stared from fiery-eyes under a noble, idea-laden
   * forehead. His hair, a sable silvered, floated about
10   his head in not unattractive confusion. An air of extraordinary
     good nature and kindliness was expressed in his gestures.
     His deep voice held the suspicion of a German accent.

     'Ah, John' he said 'I feel in my heart that the
15   implications of this work are vast and its mysteries
     inexhaustible. It is not a landscape painting yet it
   * takes my eye (and therefore me) into a reassuring twilight
     kingdom where the threshold is dearer than love and where
     one is led further than hope could go. But, how banal
20   that sounds!

   * The man addressed had rich auburn hair His fine oval face
     and dark grey eyes expressed such friendliness and intelligence
     as took my breath away. This most striking man, slim
     but of exactly the same height (162.5cm) as his
25   friend, was none other than John Milton.

     'But my dear Ludwig what can one say of any great work
     except banalities? The potential for expression through
   * these abstract paintings , as they are called, is so great they
     seem to the paintings of my youth as poetry is to
30   prose. Each worthwhile artist develops his or her own
     'vocabulary' as does ...

     Ludwig van Beethoven, for it was he, intervened,

     ... as does each composer. Yes! I must admit that my
     admiration for this painting is edged with envy. How can
35   music excite, as this painting does, those contemplations
     that lead one to intimations of grace? this work is not
 	condemned to have a beginning, a middle and an end. It has
     innumerable beginnings and innumerable ends, each different,
     each dependent on when and where the eye chooses
40   to look and cease looking. Communion with the mind that
     wrought it does not wait upon a performance and cease with
     the final notes. It invites long meditation and a mere glance
     can recharge the fruits of that meditation. As I stand before
     it I find myself wondering about much I've
45   written - especially many finales.
   * Milton In the solemnity of this work you forget that your
   * music speaks for all emotions, from the Summer storm to the
     Spring shower. The power in your music and in this painting
     would seem to come from eschewing narrative and so
50   giving free rein to the imagination. For, like you, I seem
     drawn as if into a landscape where the mind can venture on
     many levels of emotion, intuition and intelligence. Great skill
     is evident in the overall conception, in each colour and the
     way it is applied and whether glossy or matt; yet,
55   this great skill lies hidden in the earnest intent of the
   * painting. The meaning and the means seem to coalesce.

     Beethoven It is muted and dark in tone and yet it is not
   * sad but evokes the witching hour, the sweet coming on of
     grateful evening mild, when thoughts most easily roam and
60   ideas develop. Untrammelled intuitions, the hallmark of
     greatness, most surely hide in the earnest intent you discern
     in this painting. But, Milton, do not doubt the equal magic of
     verse. Why, this painting could have been
     inspired by your poem II Penseroso, could it not? II
65   Penseroso where Contemplation is the chiefest guest. Both
     you and John Peart know those boundaries in the mind
     beyond which truths not capable of articulation make themselves
     known to the intuitions. You have both used twilight,
     when day softens into night, as a metaphor for such boundaries.
70   1 think this painting is a doorway into that kingdom of felt
     truths that cannot be verified and cannot be questioned.

     Milton We both read this painting as a landscape at the
     witching hour, a time of reveries and of repose. Consider
75   this description of a reprise in your Eroica symphony and
     agree that, in this painting, Peart is treading where you
   * have trod. (Milton proceeded to quote from memory) 'The
     'heroic' movement of the bases has ceased, leaving us in
     strangely remote regions; the tumult of the day has

80   subsided and all is gradually hushed; the low horns and
     other wind instruments add to the witching feeling, and a
     weird twilight seems to pervade the scene. At length the
     other instruments cease their mysterious sounds, and
     nothing is heard but violins in their softest tones,
85   trembling as if in sleep, when the distant murmur of the horn
     floats on the ear like an incoherent dream'. That reprise and
     Peart's virtual landscape are as two voices that excite the
     same echo in every soul.

     But why do we interpret this as a landscape or a strangely
90   remote region? And what are our minds discovering as they
     roam through Black to black!

   * Beethoven Landscapes express nothing of themselves. All
   * is in our minds. A recent book puts it well: 'although we are
     accustomed to separate nature and human perception into
95   two realms, they are, in fact, indivisible. Before it can
     ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the
     mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as
     from layers of rock'. What we are interpreting as a landscape
     consists of those aspects of a landscape that
100  resonate with ideas that John Peart wishes to explore. Of
     course, he is not completely in control of or totally under
     standing of everything that each painted mark may mean,
   * for in art of this seriousness there are metaphysical
     intimations which each of us can only hazard at.

105  Milton It is for metaphysical intimations that we search in
     works of art. Some believe there is a kernel of metaphysical
     truth which each of us picks away at from our different
     vantage points always benefiting but never
   * arriving. Since I visited Galileo in Fiesole the heavens
110  have expanded beyond anything our minds can grasp; then
     the atom has been probed and its marvels recede infinitely
     and give birth to fantastical notions such as superstrings.
     This makes me believe that art does not lead to some
     inexpressible but encompassable truth but to
115  endlessly expanding or endlessly receding worlds. You
     pointed out that landscape is the work of the mind. The mind
     is infinite in its extent and through landscape allusions John
     Peart conveys the limitless scope of the intuitions he is
     exploring.

120  Beethoven Again I ask myself, why is it that this dark
     painting that suggests that hour when colour drains from
     nature - when all the greens merge into black - does not
     raise in us forebodings or dismal thoughts? (He and Milton
   * exchanged smiles - why, I could not guess). That time
125  when the moonshine is blending with the lights of eve is a
     time of tranquillity and perhaps John Peart believes, as I
   * have come to believe, that only in tranquillity can we achieve
     understanding.
     Milton There are exhilarating heights in the mind, the
130  mind has mountains; these heights imply depths, despair,
     cliffs of fall sheer. The quiet colours in this painting each
     in gentle harmony with the other, close in tone, never
     contrasting strongly, do not deny those heights and depths
     but insist that only in quiet introspection can they be
135  understood. Thus, John Peart has found in landscape an ideal
     metaphor exactly because landscape is the work of the mind and
     allows the mind to wander where it will, faces for instance,
     are less tolerant of our minds' meanderings; there is an
     imposed narrative in a portrait that influences
140  the direction of our thoughts.
     Beethoven Yes, one might believe Peart's strategy is to
     induce quiet introspection but this work certainly flows from
     levels in the mind deeper than those on which strategies are
     concocted. There is in this painting an
145  eternal quality - I can't express it better - a quality
     indifferent to our approbation or condemnation. The very
     simplicity of the work (and we know that, like the atom,
     simplicity is infinitely complex) holds some distant wisdom
     which demands our reverence even as it evades our
150  understanding. And this same quality is that of the
     Australian landscape - eternal, unchanging: a mammoth
     indifference to our adulation or disdain. The secret of
     the landscape's beauty cannot be penetrated by an act of
     will but unawares infiltrates the mind. And so would Black
155  to Black enter into communion with us. How showy the
     peaks of Austria seem to me now (I question some of my
     cadenzas rising up for admiration like the snow-capped
     Alps). The power in this painting, this Black to Black,
     comes from a simplicity that is not understatement or
     conscious tact but
160  the full expression of something as it is seen with the
     undeviating gaze of that eye planted within. This Peart must
     have learnt from the landscape as it seems has the
     Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe and after him Ross
   * Edwards (whose Nocturne I admire). Their music is
     humbling
165  in its purity of purpose; its conviction requires no crescendi;
     it is like an echo of this Australian landscape - unconscious
     of us and, at the same time, at one with everything that is
     central to our being.

     Milton It must be as you surmise. The Australian
170  landscape must be their inspiration. Great literature most
     often results from the effort to understand life (the unceasing
     'search for identity', witness Ireland). That understanding is
     often sought in the landscape. In America it was sought in
     the myth of the West and great literature
175  resulted; the steppes, the Russian prairies, were present at
     the birth of the world's mightiest novels. Here also. as you
     have suggested, the land haunts the writer, poet, composer
     and painter. Would Peart's Black to Black and Edwards'
     Nocturne for Solo Percussion be so evocative of
180* one another if this were not so? A novella by Philip Hodgins,
     an Australian poet, has filled me with wonder. It is (as is
     Paradise Lost) in blank verse but like Peart's painting here
     and like Edwards' music, Hodgins breaks entry into one's
     soul with the gentlest of means. Barely does he
185  stoop to measures that break the measure; whole lines are
   * of words of single syllable. In a quiet passage from Paradise
     Last I am shown to have resorted to such circular and
     completive figures as epanalepsis, epandos and merismus,
     irmus and even numerology. This art that seems
190  to emanate from the Australian landscape questions such
     sophistries.

     Beethoven Do not question your poetry in the light of this
     painting. Your means were pertinent to your ends, were
     never Vicarious or self conscious. Art employs different
195  means at different times as it passes through or seems to
     pass through the artist, whose main duty is to strive to
   * become true to Art's ends. The highest artistic inspiration
     seems to gather in certain places as a rising wave which
     breaks and withdraws. One wave rose in Spenser,
200  Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne and others and broke to throw
     your genius high on the strand. In Germany and Austria I
     was inspired and thrown clear by a wave that swelled with
     the mighty Bach and Handel, Haydn, Mozart and others. The
     wave, as I've called it, rarely rises in the same place
205  twice. Perhaps here is the slow gathering up of such a wave.

     Milton Only in hindsight is such a notion, intriguing and
     feasible though it is, capable of validation, in this land
     cultures have existed for more than 100,000 years and your
210 'wave' may have risen and exhausted itself here leaving
     work great beyond our comprehension but which is neverthless
     an unrecognised influence on these artists.

     Your experience of art working through you as through an
     apt tool is true to my experience too. Some maintain that,
215  standing aloof from Death, great art lives on bestowing
     immortality on the artist. But only art whose intuitions ring
     true as generation succeeds generation lives on. Those
     intuitions are beyond the artist's understanding and give
     credence to that feeling that the artist is merely

220  Art's medium. But, perhaps, it is not Art we feel working
   * through us but ‘the work of our minds' on our environment:
     mental, social and natural. So it may be the vastness, the
     mysteriousness of the Australian land, that stirs wise
     intuitions in the work of these painters, poets, composers.
225  This painting, Black to Black, now before us, justifies such
     an hypothesis.

     Beethoven The mighty Australian landscape reduces the
     enormity of death to an irrelevancy because it renders the
     self imperceptible in the eternal pulse of nature. The
230  dark in this painting does not evoke death - a personal
   * fate - because it knows absolutely that 'twilight and the
     evening bell' are not personal and sad but universal. These
     truer perceptions lead to truer art.

     This raises another question in me: can the truths held by
235  this painting, this Black to Black, and others like it affect
     the world? Can its intimations that come from - let us maintain
     it as a fact - the pervasive presence of a landscape whose
     vast stillness seems indifferent to us and our lives,
     nevertheless affect us and our lives?

240  Milton It may be held censure rather than praise to call
     " Peart a 'Political Artist' but all serious art is in some way
     political and cannot avoid moral implications. You and I had
     belief in God to give us conviction in our arguments. Not so
     John Peart: for him society (that political entity)
245* is an inanimate fantasy, only the individual has reality. For
     him the ills of society are due to the greed, fear and so on of
     individuals who have nowhere to turn but to themselves: no
     God, no political philosophy, no guru will come to their aid.
     Thus this painting, all serious
250  painting, assumes that truth cannot be discerned through
     any eyes but our own; that assumption has deeply political
     implications.
   * Paradoxically, the gentleness of this painting gives it special
     political force in a time when the media has so
255* calloused our minds that we weep more sincerely over the
     fictitious grief of a 'star' in a 'soap opera' than over a million
     starving children. The modern soul needs silence from the
     din of information if it is to hear truth. In tranquillity this
     painting would have us hear that great
260  political force, that most transforming power for good: a
   * still small voice. Indeed, as I said earlier, the power to
     persuade of this
   *'abstract art' lies in its ability to encompass far-reaching
     truths because it is not confined by the walls of
265  narrative. But what intransigence and thoughtful sensitivity it
     requires to avoid self-indulgent emptiness
   * in art so unrestricted. That sensitivity and intransigence are
     to be found everywhere in this painting.

     Beethoven Such self-indulgence can even insinuate itself
270  into sensitive and intransigent art. For though it is true that
     the deeper into ourselves we look the more universal our
     findings will be, that inward looking may cause our work to
     be so subjective as to be absolutely opaque and to make
     work of complete opacity is a self-indulgence, The
275  narrative in art, which you see as a limitation, often acts as
     an objective lighthouse to the mind adrift in subjective
     seas. And John Peart’s ‘objective lighthouse' could well be
     the Australian bush.

     People maintain that each age finds its own voice. In
280  fact, John Peart, Ross Edwards, Philip Hodgins and serious
     artists like them become the voice of their age. The great
     Australian bush has been rediscovered by them, is the work
     of their minds. Certainly it is a different bush than that
     discovered by earlier Australian poets and painters. The
285  history of landscape painting in Australia - the history of 
     trying to come to terms with life in Australia - has moved from
     attempts to understand the landscape's outward
   * appearance to attempts to understand its inner mysteries.
     Despite your reassurances, I am jealous of John Peart's
290  insights, charged with conviction and informed by this landscapes
     inner mysteries.

     Milton Do you know what this painting brought to my mind
     at first sight and persists in bringing to mind? In, the
     seriousness, the meaningfulness, of every mark it recalls
295  a page of your music in your hand with your corrections.
     How can you be jealous of a work serene and steadfast and
     clothed in a sensibility that echoes your creative acts?

     Beethoven I would never have credited you
     capable of such
300* an absurd conceit - but I thank you sincerely for it. How
     could the marks my quill made in answer to a mind
     absorbed in sound not sight be compared to this carefully
     and wonderfully conceived painting? Your wild aberration
     has put me in good heart! let us go and see the most
305  recent work of this John Peart. II will outstrip our
     understanding further even than this I suspect.

     They gave the painting one last intense perusal as if to commit
     every nuance to memory. Beethoven was still beaming
     with pleasure at Milton's attempt to console him, as, deep
310  * in conversation and hand in hand, they passed out of my ken.
     End of manuscript