Stream System

by Gerald Murnane

  When he was seven years old, someone had passed on to him a small collection of foreign postage stamps in an album. He read the names of the countries named on the stamps. He knew where some of those countries were in the image that he had of the world. No one in his house had an atlas, but he understood that the world was in the shape of a globe and that England and America, as he called the USA, were the two most important countries in the world and were, appropriately, on the upper half of the globe and far away from his own country. One stamp was from Helvetia. The stamp was blue-grey, and the image on the stamp was of the head and shoulders of a man with a high collar and thick, dark hair and a hint of sorrow in his looks. He, the owner of the stamp, wanted to know where Helvetia was, but no one he asked had heard of any country of that name.

  More than forty years afterwards, he still remembered that he had seen in his mind from time to time for several years images of a place he supposed to be Helvetia. He had seen some of the citizens of Helvetia going about their business. He had even watched for a few minutes the man with the high collar and the dark hair and had learned something that might have explained the hint of sorrow about the man. He, the owner of the stamp collection, asked his teachers and a few other adults from time to time where Helvetia was, but no one could tell him. As soon as he was able to use an atlas, he searched for Helvetia. When he could find no part of the world with the same name as the country in his mind, he felt for a few moments as awed and delighted as he would ever afterwards feel before the strangeness of things. He soon explained the mystery to himself by supposing that Helvetia was the former name of a country now named differently, and in time he met a boy whose stamp album included pages of information including the equivalent names in the English language for Suomi, Sverige, Helvetia, and a long list of many other names that he, the chief character of this story, might have used all his life instead of Helvetia to denote a certain place in his mind if he had seen any of them on the first few of his postage stamps.

  As a young man, he had sometimes regretted that he had never seen again the country that had appeared in answer to his need. Later, he had come to understand that the landscape of Helvetia was not the only such landscape he had seen. Whenever he was invited to a house that he had not previously visited, he would see in his mind at once the house as it looked from the front gate, the interior of the main room, the view of the back garden from the kitchen window. Then he would visit the house, and the other house would have followed Helvetia into oblivion. Sometimes, while he read a certain letter or answered a certain telephone call, the writer or the caller would become surrounded by rooms and gardens and streets that were doomed to disappear. Whenever he read a work of fiction, he looked past the characters in his mind to the landscapes that reached far back in the direction of Helvetia.

  He had proved to his own satisfaction that his sighting unfamiliar rooms and vistas was not merely an inferior sort of remembering: that his imagining—to use that word—was not merely a calling to mind of details he had previously seen but had then forgotten (and would forget again). He had never been able to believe in something called his unconscious mind. The term unconscious mind seemed to him self-contradictory. Words such as imagination and memory and person and self and even real and unreal he found vague and misleading, and all the theories of psychology that he had read about as a young man begged the question of where the mind was. For him, the first of all premises was that his mind was a place or, rather, a vast arrangement of places. Everything he had ever seen in his mind was in a particular place. He did not know how far in any direction the places extended in his mind. He could not even deny that some of the furthest places in his mind might have adjoined the furthest places in some other mind. He had no wish to deny that the furthest places in his mind or in the furthest mind from his mind might have adjoined the furthest places in a Place of Places, which term denoted for him what is denoted for some other persons by the word God.

  Between the ages of about four and fourteen, he visited often with his mother and his younger brother a certain house in an eastern suburb of Melbourne. On one of the walls of that house was a picture with the title In the Gippsland Forest. If he had ever mentioned the picture to anyone in his lifetime, he would have been able to use no more precise word than picture for the object whose details were still in his mind forty years after he had last looked at them. The object may have been an oil painting or a pastel drawing or a water colour or a reproduction or one or another of those three or one of a series of prints or, what he thought more likely, one of an unnumbered series of reproductions of an illustration by an unnamed person who drew or painted subjects suitable for framing behind glass and for being sold during the 1920s and the 1930s in shops in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne to young married couples who were furnishing their newly bought houses in those suburbs during those years. If he had stopped to think about the matter, he would have had to admit that the pictures sold to young married couples in the 1920s and the 1930s would have been the same in most suburbs of Melbourne, but whenever he thought of a young couple choosing In the Gippsland Forest for a wall in their new house, he thought of them as being in a shop in an eastern suburb with a view of the blue-black ridge of Mount Dandenong visible from the street outside the shop.

  He had been born in a western suburb of Melbourne and had lived in that suburb with his parents and his younger brother until his thirteenth year. In that year, the family moved to a house that the father had bought in an outer south-eastern suburb of Melbourne. He, the chief character of this story, lived in the house just mentioned until his twenty-ninth year, when he married a young woman who will be mentioned later in this story and moved with her into a rented flat in an inner-northern suburb of Melbourne. In his thirty-third year, he and his wife moved to a house that he and she had bought in an outer northern suburb of Melbourne.

  The house where the picture hung on a wall belonged to one of his mother’s sisters and her husband. These two lived in the house with their three daughters and their son. The youngest of the daughters was five years older than the chief character of this story, but the boy, their brother, was nearly five years younger than the chief character. In the early years of his visiting the house, the girls would sometimes lend him some of their comics to look through, but in later years the girls seemed to be always out of the house, and the doors to their rooms were kept shut. He seldom played with his boy-cousin and in later years would bring a book with him to the house and would sit reading it in the front room. After he had turned fourteen and was allowed to choose not to accompany his mother on her visits, he no longer visited his aunt’s and his uncle’s house. On the day of his uncle’s funeral in the mid-1980s, he spent an hour in the house, which had been enlarged and redecorated. He did not see the picture on any wall.

  During the years when he no longer visited the house in the eastern suburb, whenever he remembered the picture he remembered one or more of the following details: a man is walking alone on a narrow road of red gravel or closely packed red soil; on either side of the road, tussocks of grass grow and long, narrow puddles of water lie and blackened stumps of trees stand; on either side of the tussocks and stumps, tall trees grow closely together with thick scrub between their trunks; the man is walking towards the background of the picture; ahead of the man, the road turns aside and out of his view, but no detail in the picture suggests that the man will see ahead of him, when he reaches the place where the road turns aside, a different sight from the sight he now sees ahead; the light is dull, as though the time is early evening and as though some of the upper branches of the trees meet above the road and the man walking.

  During the years when he sometimes remembered one or more of the details mentioned above, he would sometimes remember also one or more of the following.

  In the years when he lived in the western suburb and visited the house in the eastern suburb, the street where the house stood was the easternmost place he had ever visited. During those
years, the easternmost place he had ever seen was the summit of Mount Dandenong, which he saw against the sky whenever he looked eastwards from any of the hills in the eastern suburb. He had believed as a boy that the word Gippsland denoted all that part of Victoria east and south-east of Mount Dandenong. He had believed as a boy that the region of Gippsland had been from the time of the creation of the world until the year in the nineteenth century when the first persons from England or Ireland or Scotland arrived in the region wholly forest; that most of Gippsland had been turned from forest into green paddocks and towns and roads and railway lines during the hundred years between the year just mentioned and the year when he himself had been born; that the few patches of forest still standing in Gippsland had burned away during the week before his birth when, so his father had often told him, the worst bushfires in the history of their country had been burning and the suburbs all around Melbourne had been overhung by smoke; that one of the chief reasons for the picture’s having stayed in his mind was the article the in the title of the picture, which word caused him to think of the one forest that had formerly covered all of Gippsland as appearing still in the mind of the man who was walking between the puddles and the stumps and in the mind of the man who had painted the picture; that the man in the picture was walking in an easterly direction, with Mount Dandenong and much of Gippsland behind him; that the man walking from Mount Dandenong towards the far side of Gippsland had lived for most of his life alone.

  Sometimes, when he remembered the house where In the Gippsland Forest had hung, he supposed that he might never have noticed the picture if he had found during his early visits to the house one or another book of fiction that he could have read. His father had once told his mother in a mocking tone that her sister in the western suburb lived in a house without books. (The man who said this owned no books himself, although he borrowed and read three books of fiction each week from a circulating library.) He, the son, always believed his father’s dislike of his wife’s relatives was the result of their being Protestants. The son himself always preferred his father’s relatives and thought of his mother as being less than a true Catholic because she had only been converted shortly before her marriage. During most of his first visits to the house in the eastern suburb, the son had been left to stare at the plants in the garden or at the ornaments in the lounge-room, but he had once heard words from a book and had remembered them for long afterwards.

  The time had been late afternoon. He and his mother and his brother had been about to leave on their long trip by tram and suburban train to the western suburb where they lived. One of his female cousins had brought a girlfriend to the house, and the two girls were amusing the young boy-cousin of the chief character of this story. The girls would have been about thirteen years of age, and the boy about four. The girl-visitor was reading to the boy. The chief character of this story had been listening through a half-closed door but had heard only a few of the words being read. Then, while his mother was saying goodbye to her sister and while he was expecting to be urged at any moment out of the house, the girl who was reading began to raise her voice and to speak with overmuch expression. At the time, he had supposed that the story being read was approaching its climax. Whenever he remembered the voice of the girl during the forty and more years afterwards, he supposed that she had become aware that he was listening to her from behind the door. Before he left the house, he heard words that he remembered afterwards as “… and then he saw the river winding far away into the distance like a blue ribbon through the green hills…” Having spoken these words, the girl-reader paused as though she was showing to her boy-listener the picture that accompanied the words.

  In the firs by the lattice

  When he first read the book of fiction Wuthering Heights, he was in his eighteenth year and living with his parents and his younger brother in the house mentioned previously in the outer south-eastern suburb of Melbourne. At that time he had been travelling for four years and more in suburban electric trains on weekdays to and from an inner south-eastern suburb, where he attended a secondary school for boys on a hillside with a distant view of Mount Dandenong. On each afternoon when he travelled from his school towards his home, the train that he travelled in displayed at its front the word DANDENONG. When he first read Wuthering Heights, he had never travelled to the place denoted by the word on the front of the train. He understood, however, that the place was not the blue-black mountain that he looked at through the windows of his schoolroom but a town built on mostly level land ten miles south-west of the mountain.

  At some time ten years or more after he had first read Wuthering Heights, he understood that the place named Dandenong had become an outer south-eastern suburb of Melbourne, but during the year when he first read the book, he thought of Dandenong as the nearest to Melbourne of the towns of Gippsland. During that year, he had been no nearer to Gippsland than in the suburb where he then lived, but he was reminded of Gippsland every day whenever a country passenger train pulled by a blue and gold diesel-electric locomotive sped along the suburban line, running express through station after station on its way to Warragul or Sale or Bairnsdale. His father had told him more than once, and without smiling, that the people of Gippsland were inbred and degenerate and that the girls and women of Gippsland had goitres hanging out from under their chins because the soil of Gippsland was lacking in essential minerals. The man who said these things had been no nearer to Gippsland than his son had been. The man had been born in the south-west of Victoria, had moved to Melbourne during what he always called the Great Oppression, had married a young woman who was also from the south-west, had lived during the first fifteen years of his marriage in rented houses in the western suburbs of Melbourne, and had then moved to the house mentioned previously in an outer south-eastern suburb, having chosen that suburb only because a certain man who was a racecourse acquaintance and who was on his way to making a fortune from what was then called spec-building had offered to arrange for him a loan through what was called a private building society so that he could begin to buy, without having paid any deposit, a weatherboard house on an unfenced rectangle of scrub beside a street consisting of two wheel-ruts, often deep under water, winding among tussocks of grass and outcrops of scrub.

  Whenever the chief character of this story had begun to read any book of fiction in all the time before he had begun to read Wuthering Heights for the first time, he had hoped that the book he was beginning to read would be the last book of fiction that he would have to read. He had hoped of each book that it would cause to appear in his mind an image of a certain young woman and an image of a certain place, after which event in his mind he would need to read no more books of fiction. While he was reading the early chapters of Wuthering Heights, certain sentences caused him to suppose that he was reading the last book of fiction that he would have to read. The first of those sentences is this from Chapter 6: But it was one of their chief amusements to run away to the moors in the morning and remain there all day and the after punishment grew a mere thing to laugh at. Other such sentences are the following from Chapter 12. “This feather was picked up from the heath, the bird was not shot—we saw its nest in the winter, full of little skeletons. Heathcliff set a trap over it, and the old ones dare not come. I made him promise he’d never shoot a lapwing, after that, and he didn’t.” The remainder of the sentences are the following from Chapter 12: “Oh, if I were but in my own bed in the old house!” she went on bitterly, wringing her hands. “And that wind sounding in the firs by the lattice. Do let me feel it—it comes straight down the moor—do let me have one breath!”

  After he had finished reading Wuthering Heights for the first time, and while he was reading for the first time the next of the list of books that he was obliged to read as a student of the subject English Literature in the syllabus for the matriculation examination for the University of Melbourne, he began to notice often in his mind an image of the face of one of the young women in school uniform who tra
velled on weekday afternoons on the train that ran through the outer eastern suburbs to the place that he thought of as the nearest of the towns of Gippsland. He understood from this that he was about to go through once again a series of states of feeling such as he had gone through many times before.

  Whenever, as an adult, he heard people recalling their childhood or he read the first chapters of an autobiography or passages about childhood in a convincing piece of fiction, he supposed that he had been an extraordinary oddity as a child. Throughout his life, he could remember clearly occasions from as early as his fifth year when he saw in his mind an image of a woman or of a girl and felt for that image a feeling for which he knew no better name than love. The word occasions in the previous sentence applies only to the first two or three years of his falling in love. From about his eighth year, one or another image was continually in his mind for weeks at a time.

  At some time during the year in the late 1960s which was the last year before he became a married man, he read in the Times Literary Supplement, in a short review of a certain book of autobiography, that the author of the book had been an extraordinary oddity as a child in that he had felt, from his very early years, a passionate affection for numbers of girls and young women. He, the chief character of this story, believed he was about to learn at last that he was not the only man of his kind. He placed a special order with his bookseller for the book, which was Monsieur Nicolas, or The Human Heart Laid Bare, by Restif de la Bretonne, translated by Robert Baldick and published in London by Barrie and Rockliff, but when his copy had arrived he learned from the first chapter that the narrator and he had little in common and he went back to believing that he had grown up differently from all other men.

  The narrator of Monsieur Nicolas had been strongly attracted to girls and young women from about his tenth year, but they were persons from his neighbourhood, some of whom actually kissed and petted him, and he felt towards them a sexual desire that seemed to the chief character of this story undistinguished, especially after he had read of how the narrator of the book had been taught by a young woman how to satisfy that desire. This lesson had taken place when the narrator was still not twelve years of age and was reported on page 27 of the book. The remaining four hundred and more pages of the book contained mostly reports of the narrator’s first desiring and soon afterwards enjoying one after another girl or young woman or woman. The chief character of this story, from the age of four, would often find in his mind when he was alone, and especially when he was in sight of paddocks of grass or stands of trees or even a corner of a garden, an image of the face of a woman or a girl. Some of the faces were of images of persons in photographs or other illustrations; a few of the faces were of images of persons from films he had seen; and sometimes a face appeared to him, so far as he could surmise, from the same source that had given rise to the images of Helvetia.