Intimate Antipathies

by Luke Carman

  Looking back on that afternoon and all that led to it from the safety of my house on Mt Pritchard, staring into the same view I had conjured up in the dim halls of the Bankstown theatre, I wonder if I’ve paid for my time in the cult of Western Sydney. When I was excommunicated from the group, it was discovered that I was – and had been all along – a racist white supremacist, who conspired to steal government funding from other members of the collective, and in doing so had ruthlessly exploited the hard labour of socio-economically disadvantaged ethnics in the Western Sydney region. So severe was my denunciation, it remains unsafe for me – to this day – to attend panels or readings in Western Sydney, where the threat of being passively and aggressively snubbed looms above me like an inflatable sword of Damocles. It doesn’t matter: like many former cult members, I’m grateful to have my ties cut. It was fun for a little while, submitting my decency and humanity to a self-righteous cause, but somewhere between that last reading at the writers’ festival and my official addition to the collective’s long list of enemies, I’d come to see the fervid ideological ramblings of our movement for what they were – just another cult of personality preying on the credulity and tenderness of artistic types in need of something to make them whole – a predatory vulnerability common to those who are driven to create, and one easily exploited for amusement by a culture industry that thrives on the freak show and the carnivalesque.

  IN THE ROOM WITH GERALD MURNANE

  You academic types sure know how to make

  a simple thing complicated.

  GERALD MURNANE, GOROKE, DECEMBER 2017

  At a recent and highly irregular literary conference, a silver-haired professor explained that he had come to acquire his reputation by making of books ‘what others had made of religion’. The conference at which the silver-haired professor made this utterance was unusual for a number of reasons – the most obvious being that it was taking place at a small golf club in rural Victoria, and that Gerald Murnane was working the bar. Adding to the strangeness of Murnane’s presence, within the boxed confines of the club’s bar, was the fact that the author’s work was the central subject of the event’s presentations. Each academic who stood behind the Rotary Club lectern to give their talk would have to handle the intense activity of the author, busying himself in the background with the club’s ledger, cleaning glasses, and helping the ladies in the kitchen prepare the scones and jam.

  Gerald, as attendees adjusted to calling the author, attempted to ease the tension of the situation by having the convener, another professor from Sydney, read the following announcement before the event’s commencement:

  Gerald Murnane wishes to inform you that he will be available to listen to some of the papers today, but he does not feel obliged to be present for all the presentations, and may come and go at varying intervals. He would like it to be known that he is licensed to serve alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, and that the bar will be open for both from 12 noon onwards, with the bar’s licence permitting service until midnight. Anyone wishing to purchase an alcoholic drink will be required to sign the club’s ledger located on the bar. While there, Gerald would like to invite you to read a three-thousand-word palindrome that he has composed, located on the opposite side of the bar.

  With the tension in the atmosphere of the room thus eased for the assembled fifty or so conference attendees (the golf club’s maximum occupancy being somewhere close to this number), a series of talks began on the many intricacies of an author whose reputation was such that he had managed to draw at least those fifty pilgrims from every corner of the country to a town four hours’ drive from the nearest major airport.

  The night before the conference I slept in a cabin outside a hotel in a neighbouring village, best known for its sizeable rock, and ate a parmigiana larger than the plate on which it was served. At the table with me were three academics who had just arrived from Sydney and Perth, respectively. One of them, a lecturer from Sydney University who had met Murnane once before, claimed that the ecological structures beneath Murnane’s writing were largely influenced by an early religious education, despite the implied author’s assertion in the works themselves that this aspect of his mental imagery had long ago lapsed into a kind of incidental apprehension. By the end of our meals, as the bistro filled with families and the barking from the high-ceilinged bar began to grow intrusive to our chatter, we discovered that all four of us were Catholics of various degrees of practice, though we each went to our cabins without further comment on this coincidence.

  Towards the end of the conference, a bearded academic with an American accent pointed out that most critical responses to Murnane’s latest (and rumoured final) publication, Border Districts, had missed the obvious connection between its opening paragraph and the opening of The Plains, the author’s most canonical work.

  Two months ago, when I first arrived in this township just short of the border, I resolved to guard my eyes, and I could not think of going on with this piece of writing unless I were to explain how I came by that odd expression.

  This opening pledge to explain a resolution, the bearded academic with the American accent pointed out, is unmistakably a self-reference to the opening lines of The Plains, but with the essential difference that the latter begins with the narrator resolving to ‘keep [his] eyes open’, rather than guarded. The opening of Border Districts, the bearded academic argued, was in a sense a revision of The Plains, and this implied that, despite the author’s insistence that there had been no overarching intent behind the trajectory of his works, there might be an inexhaustible form of intention at work in his oeuvre, retrospectively repurposing the themes and images of the earlier books.

  Well before hearing this complex analysis, I had decided my own presence at the conference was an error of judgement. For one thing, I’d taken the place of an academic who’d dropped out late in the proceedings, and had subsequently supplied my name as an interested party. The academic who’d dropped out was aware of several books by Murnane stacked in a pile by my bedside, but what the academic did not know was that the earmarks and annotations in the books she had observed rarely progressed all the way from cover to cover. Efficiency is not my forte as a reader – I am cursed with the inability to finish the books wherein I find the greatest pleasure. The writing I most enjoy tends to get me so exercised by its effects that I am soon deep in a fugue state of mind, a kind of dissociative wandering from which I am required to return before I can come back to the page which started me off in the first place. No sooner have I read a sentence or two of this stimulating prose, which seems to awaken some novelty of consciousness in me, than I find that I have spent the afternoon hours pacing back and forth about the house, the book which started the whole thing in motion having been long abandoned on a bench in the hallway.

  In academic circles this does not count as an acceptable defence for canonical negligence, which is no small failing to be sure. Among the Styrofoam and scones, one attendee asked another the name of Murnane’s favourite racehorse, and the filly’s name rolled off her tongue in response, no hesitation. Another asked me if I’d seen ‘the church’ while driving through town.

  ‘What church?’ I asked.

  ‘Isn’t that your copy of Border Districts?’ she asked me, pointing to an uncorrected proof I’d been clutching through the afternoon. ‘The one in the book,’ she said, somewhat unnecessarily.

  There’s nothing superior about a critic who does not know their material, and there’s no excuse for professional readers whose memories for fiction are faulty, but I’d hoped my usual need to plaster over lapses in attention would be less laborious in the company of readers who’d come together to celebrate the work of a writer whose implied author freely admits a failure to ‘follow plots and comprehend the motives of characters’ in the novels he’d read, a trait he once again asserts in the early pages of Border Districts, and one which endeared the author to me for all eternity when I first came across it in Barley Patch, where th
e narrator justifies his own haphazard textual memory by explaining that ‘a person who claims to remember having read one or another book is seldom able to quote from memory even one sentence from the text. What the person probably remembers is part of the experience of having read the book: part of what happened in his or her mind during the hours while the book was being read.’ For the narrator of Murnane’s latest work, the ‘image-world’ of his ‘inner seeing’ during the act of reading is ‘often only slightly connected with the text in front of my eyes; anyone privy to my seeming-sights might have supposed I was reading some barely recognisable variant of the text, a sort of apocrypha of the published work.’ Doubly so, Murnane’s narrator explains, when it comes to the texts and books that intend to explain the inner workings of ‘the mind’ through ego, id and archetype. To these ‘drab’ attempts to understand the mental plane, Murnane’s narrator responds that he suspects his own mental territories must surely be ‘paradise by comparison.’

  When the bearded academic with the American accent asked my thoughts on the work from which I’ve quoted above, I could only respond that Murnane’s writing seemed to me an extension of lapsed religious liturgy – though it was hard to explain what I meant by that.

  On the drive home from the conference, I passed through a flurry of migrating butterflies erupting from the yellow grasses by the roadside. While their white bodies burst against the windscreen like puffs of chalk I realised that I could not give even a partial account of the ecstatic sense of Murnane’s writing, as it seems to me, without beginning somewhere else altogether.

  Many months ago, before I had the good sense to scrub myself clean of all social media, I came upon a post by an apprentice writer who was already well-known in local literary circles. Like all digital media the post was a complex arrangement of coloured pixels populated by a root logic of zeros and ones. I admit to knowing almost nothing about this esoteric relationship of numbers and colours, or the process by which they are transmitted over networks of copper or fibre optics – in this instance, the divisions of the zeros and ones and their transmission over the vast networks of cables and ethereal waves assembled on the small screen of my smartphone, in the form of thin black letters grouped into words, which were themselves ordered by an unseen intelligence abiding, from a distance, by the rules of our universal language, as dictated by the English strain of its external expression. These English words were transposed within a space beneath a square indicating the so-called ‘profile’ area of meaning on the electronic page, within which was displayed an image of a digital photograph of the apprentice writer’s face. The transmitted display of this photograph-image appeared to have been captured outside, originally, in the golden light of a warm afternoon, and the qualities of the subject’s beauty were evident even within the limitations of the square at the uppermost corner of the borders of my little screen. She appeared to be caught in a moment of joy – her mouth open and her bronze skin bathed in the gold-rust glow of the afternoon’s fall.

  The square in which her image was contained was arranged next to a rectangular border of apposite meaning, itself an arrangement in relation to a series of similarly boxed arenas of formal order, all of them containing their own transmissions of words and images through the electric alchemy of esoteric zeros and ones. In the rectangle adjacent to the image of the apprentice writer’s face, indicating a kind of authorship over the nearby properties, the following observation was transmitted in tiny black letters within the rectangular confines displayed on my little screen: ‘Writers obsess with writers, and thereby forgo an ever more interesting world.’ Beneath this transmission, according, as I surmised, to a three-digit number displayed inside a box within the rectangle containing the words quoted above, were several hundred similar rectangles, all currently invisible, containing what promised to be transmissions of messages sent in response to the first message. These rectangles of response were not visible on my little screen because the logic of the system was designed for maximum usability, and so in order to make these ancillary message rectangles appear, I would be required to touch with my fingertip a small arrangement of zeros and ones depicting an arrow lodged beneath the three-digit number displayed in the corner of the rectangle containing the original remark, at which the arenas of meaning displayed on my little screen would rearrange their complex borders so that several screen-lengths containing transmissions of similar rectangles in a dialogical proximity to each other would instantaneously appear underneath the original rectangle, with transmissions of faces in boxes beside the replies in keeping with the formal authorial indices with which the first message was likewise associated.

  For reasons which I could not at the time of encountering this transmission explain, reading the message about ‘writers obsessed with writers’, in a rectangular display bordered beside a box containing an image of an apprentice writer caught in the fine golden light of an afternoon experiencing a moment of apparently unselfconscious joy displayed on the digital slate of my little screen, caused in me a kind of psychic distress, an intense eruption of angst. Many months after encountering this transmission, I now suspect I know what it was that caused such a strong emotional reaction to what might, to the next person, seem no more than an innocent observation on the condition of writing and writers in relation to the wider world. It is not easy, however, to translate my suspicion about my reaction, except that the internal upheaval I experienced on reading the transmission about writers’ obsessions and the world at large is one related to a deep internal circuitry in me associated with the concept of blasphemy – an encounter with something ontologically profane despite its intent – though I would not have been able to conceive of it as such at the time.

  Even now, after many months of reflection, I am not sure how to articulate the relationship between blasphemy and the idea of literature without providing another earlier experience of the sort of dread that I now consider the result of encountering what I then understood to be unholy profanity. In a bookshop in Newtown, seven years since I’d left the inner city to live in the outer suburbs, I stepped into a bright, orderly shop called ‘Better Read Than Dead’ to see what books were being promoted by the staff who worked there. I had visited this clean, narrow shop with its calm blue-green storefront many times before during the years when I lived in the inner west. Always I entered the store with the same intention: to learn the opinions of the store’s staff on the particular books they were at that time promoting, and to check those opinions with my own response to the first few lines of those books. Learning the opinions of the store’s staff on the books being promoted involved no direct human intercourse, something that would have rendered me mute with anxiety – it was, rather, a simple matter of reading the handwritten reviews that the staff members had signed and placed beneath the books on the promotional shelves. In the same bookcase, above the books the staff had read and reviewed were the books that had sold well that week, with numbered squares on top of the shelves indicating which books had sold the best, with the number (1) indicating the biggest seller of the week’s big sellers, and the number (10) indicating the lowest. On the occasion I entered this bookshop, many years after having left the inner city for the outer suburbs, I picked from these shelves a book containing a compendium of short stories written by students enrolled in the University of Technology Sydney’s creative writing department. The collection was titled The UTS Writers’ Anthology. I cannot now remember whether this book was located on the bestseller shelf, or whether I was opening it to compare my own reaction to its contents with the account written and lodged beneath the book by the store’s staff.

  In the opening pages of the book I found an introduction by a writer who was at the time very popular, and who had recently won several awards for her latest work, though, as I’m sitting in the outer suburbs writing this account, I cannot recall either her name or the name of her awardwinning collection. At the end of her introduction, most of which I have forgotten, the following re
mark was printed on the rough recycled paper of the anthology: ‘Reading fiction is perhaps one of the few remaining secular paths to transcendence – that elusive state in which the distance between self and universe shrinks, long symbolised in literature and philosophy by a blue flower.’

  Reading these words some years after I left the inner city for the outer suburbs, where I am now writing this account, I can recall a vague sense of the sickening looseness I experienced, in the distance between myself and the rough recycled page on that particular afternoon in the narrow bookshop; a kind of motion sickness in the still confines before the borders of its neat teal shelves. Such was the intensity of the feeling that it seemed as if I had to reach a long way to put the book back in its place. I felt as though I might lose my footing in the reach. It is by no means obvious to me now, reflecting on the words by which this reaction was provoked, where precisely, in those thin lines printed upon the rough page, the source of that disorienting shock might be located, but I recall that I felt, vaguely, at the time, that the author of those words about the blue flower had taken some mental image of a sacred doorway between one world and another, and had pressed it between the pages of her introduction, so that an impression of its diffused essence had lifted from the materiality of the page and wounded my sense of reality, stranded as I was, momentarily, between the world of the page and the real world.

  Sitting in my old house on the hill in the western suburbs, in the heat of a twenty-first-century summer, with the rotating fan shaking the wilted leaves of the pot plants by the back door, I cannot recall how I dealt with my encounter with the words about the blue flower, written in the collection I discovered in the narrow confines of the Newtown bookshop many years ago. When I run through the many clipped reels of memories linked to the mental image of the narrow store and the words on the page and the cyan shelves, in search of lost time, all my attempts to follow the reader I once was, as he retreats from the book he has placed back upon the shelf, begin to unravel. I see him, thinner and fuller of hair, as he passes beyond the glass doors of the store, and the mental projection of what that afternoon might have looked like, leaps up and turns the memory to fiction, a scene assembled from cinematic clichés, of a slow rising-away from the busy pedestrian parade of Newtown’s streets, the parapets of shops built beyond living memory, and the reader who I once was, lost in the bright crowd forever passing along King Street, into the train station and the cafés, the hotels and bazaars.