Border Districts

by Gerald Murnane

  Many of the men and women in my fanciful image were husbands and wives, but these too sang softly the two lines of the old Shaker song. Rather, the women sang while the men merely mouthed the words. It was well known that male Catholic churchgoers could hardly ever be induced to sing. Nor did the men in my image seem to move their bodies, although the women swayed in time to their chanting and some even made as though to lean or to step towards the chest-high wooden wall that barred their way.

  The same small church was also the setting, many years ago, for the mental events that originated while I was reading one of a collection of short stories from a book that I long ago disposed of. I have forgotten the title of the book and I remember nothing of what was in my mind while I read the book except for a few mental scenes, so to call them. I bought and read the book because the author had been at one time a colleague of mine in an obscure department on an out-of-the-way campus of a lesser university. He was one of a not insignificant body of men to be met with in the last decades of the twentieth century: men who were pleased to have it known that they had formerly been Catholic priests or religious brothers. Some were teachers or librarians or public servants; a few worked as journalists or as radio or television producers; and a few were even published authors. Most of the books by these last-mentioned had a preachy tone; their authors were still driven to rectify, or at least to deplore, seeming wrongs in society, which last was one of their most frequently used words.

  In the unimaginable circumstance that I were writing a work of fiction with a representation of my one-time colleague as one of its characters, I would feel obliged to report to my putative readers his motives for having abandoned a calling that he had formally vowed to follow for life. Whatever crises of conscience I might attribute to the character, and however detailed and wordy might be my accounts of his purported thinking and feeling, I would report at some point in my narrative that the man did what he did for the reason that he had found he was able to do it.

  I have long subscribed to a simple explanation for the defection of so many priests and religious from what might be called my own generation. I can allow that the first daring few might have been pioneers of a sort, devisers of original moral issues, but those who came after them were mere followers of fashion. Once having learned from the example of their more daring fellows that so-called solemn vows could be set aside or broken at no great cost, they who had once sworn to be chaste and obedient set about indulging their restlessness or curiosity.

  I seem to remember that several of my former colleague’s short stories had a priest as chief character. The only story that has stayed in my mind seemed to have no other meaning than to point up the unseemly awe that many lay persons felt towards priests in the 1960s, when the story was set. The priest in the story may have been the first-person narrator – I forget. He was certainly the chief character and almost the only character apart from a middle-aged woman of a kind once common in Catholic parishes. Holy-water hens they were sometimes called. As I recall it, the priest was visiting the small country church for the first time to celebrate Sunday mass. When he arrived, his bladder happened to be uncomfortably full. Every country church has a men’s and a women’s toilet in separate rear corners of the churchyard. Why did the priest in the story not visit the men’s toilet as soon as he had arrived? I do not know, but if he had done so, my former colleague would have had no story to write. What happened, so to speak, was that the priest was met at the church door by the holy-water hen, who then accompanied him into the sacristy so that she could show him where things were stored. Instead of then leaving discreetly, the woman began prattling to the priest about parish matters or, perhaps, her own concerns. Again, questions arise: why did the priest not ask the woman politely to leave? Why did he not simply excuse himself and visit the toilet? The story probably depended on the young priest’s being too nervous to dismiss the older woman or to cause her to recall that although he was one of God’s anointed, he had still a body that functioned as did other men’s bodies. The woman went on talking; the priest went on listening politely while his bladder ached. At last, he was able by some or another means to get rid of the woman. Perhaps she left of her own accord. Even then, however, the priest’s misery was not over. He flung open one after another cupboard in search of something that he could urinate into. The last sentence of the story reported his immense relief as he filled with his urine a bottle containing a small quantity of so-called altar wine for use in the ceremony of the mass.

  Recalling the silly story today for the first time in nearly thirty years I see not some fictional priest but my colleague of long ago dressed as I had never seen him in a black suit with a white celluloid collar at his throat and holding above his head a bottle labelled Seven Hills Altar Wine. He holds the bottle between himself and a single east-facing window while he stares in through the brightly lit red-brown glass. Through the wall he hears the shuffling and the throat-clearing of the farmers and their wives and children as they file into the church and settle themselves – men and boys on the gospel side; women and girls on the epistle side. Through another wall, he hears the heaving in the wind of the gum trees that border the grassy churchyard or the clinking calls of rosellas.

  Why have I recalled today a piece of writing that I surely dismissed when I first read it: an embellished retelling of something that perhaps befell the author during his years as a priest? Why have I included in this report the tedious matter of the preceding paragraphs? One answer may be that I have learned to trust the promptings of my mind, which urges me sometimes to study in all seriousness matters that another person might dismiss as unworthy, trivial, childish. The discomfort of the fictional priest and the predictable motives of the pestering woman have long since settled among my own concerns, one of which might be called the life and death of mental entities. The author of the short story would have stood alone in many a sacristy in many a tiny church with parrots in the trees around and would have bowed his head and prayed that the ceremony he was about to perform and the sermon he was about to preach would bring nearer to God the persons coughing and shuffling just then on the far side of the sanctuary rails. Robed in his white or scarlet or green or violet chasuble, the young man would have sensed the presence of a personage that he took to be the creator of the universe and at the same time the friend and confidant of anyone who approached him from among the countless millions of the living but especially those who had been ordained as priests of the church founded by His only son. It should be clear from some of the earliest paragraphs of this report that I would very much like to know what the young priest saw in his mind at such a time. I intend to mention later an autobiography published after the death of the short-story writer and former priest. Much of the writing in the posthumous book is frank and candid, but nowhere in it does the author try to describe what interests me most about his sort of person; nowhere does he report his religious experiences.

  I strayed a little in the previous two sentences. I intended to remark on the great difference between the concerns of the young priest and those of the author of the short story, the one constantly aware of the presence of God and the other only wanting to make clumsy humour at the expense of his younger self. I intended to ask what had become of the imagined presence or personage who had ruled the life of the young man. I am not judging the writer but rather marvelling that a powerful image-in-the-mind could thus seem to have lapsed into irrelevance.

  Even while my sometime colleague, the former priest, was writing his fiction, the persons who had once respected him or been in awe of him would have been reading in newspapers the first of many accounts that they would read of priests found guilty at law of deeds incomparably graver than urinating into altar-wine bottles in sacristies. How many of those who read such reports decided at once, or after much reflection, that they no longer considered sacred some of the persons, places, and things that they had previously deemed so. I heard once from one such person, a woman who had gone t
o church every Sunday until she underwent the experiences reported below.

  The woman worked as the receptionist and secretary of a psychiatrist. One day, her employer had asked her to type into his computer the contents of several long statements by a young woman who was making some or another claim for reparation from her local diocese. The woman my informant was middle-aged, married, and a mother, but her employer told her that she need not finish typing the statements if she found the contents distressing. The woman told me that she found the contents most distressing, although she typed all of them. She told me about the statements only that they were reports of acts of sexual abuse perpetrated against the author of the statements by a priest during several years of her childhood. The woman told me this in a crowded lounge-bar of a hotel late during an evening when she and her husband and my wife and I and several other couples were drinking after a day at a race-meeting. I cannot be sure that I did not hear from the woman that the girl’s sister had also been sexually abused or that more than one priest was involved. Although the woman thought often about the contents of the statements during the months after she had typed them, her routine continued as before and she attended church every Sunday. She attended church also for the funeral of an elderly woman, a friend of her family. The funeral service was a so-called concelebrated mass, with three priests together at the altar. Such a ceremony is an honour reserved for priests themselves, close relatives of priests, or lay persons who have given long service to one or another parish or religious order, as my informant’s elderly friend had done. Several times during such a ceremony, the priests bow in unison towards the altar or towards each other. At one point in the ceremony, they take turns to swing towards the altar and then towards each other a brass thurible out of which rises the smoke from burning incense. The woman told me quietly in the noisy lounge-bar that she felt increasingly distressed as the concelebrated service went forward, and that a moment had arrived when she was driven to get up from her seat and to leave the church. At that moment, the chief celebrant had bowed low over the altar. His co-celebrants, standing on either side of him and with hands pressed together beneath their chins, had each made his own slight bow and had then looked on gravely while the celebrant kissed the white altar-cloth. The concelebrated mass had taken place several months ago, the woman told me. She had not stepped inside a church since then and she intended never again to do so.

  How many times since I first heard the woman’s story have I tried to appreciate the notable mental events that must have followed her walking away from the ceremonious gesturing of the priests? If only I had had the wit to ask the woman on that evening in the lounge-bar what she supposed had become of the imagery connected with her lifelong beliefs, would I then have glimpsed for myself a version of her seeming to see the colour draining from the tall glass windows in the church where she had prayed since childhood? the layers of vestments being stripped from the men who had vowed to be chaste? the withdrawal of the favourite image of her loving saviour into the mental regions where flitted or wavered the figures of myth or legend?

  Whenever I tried long ago to learn from books about the workings of minds, I was equally troubled whether I read fiction or non-fiction. In the same way that I struggled and failed to follow plots and to comprehend the motives of characters, so did I struggle to follow arguments and to understand concepts. I failed as a reader of fiction because I was constantly engaged not with the seeming subject-matter of the text but with the doings of personages who appeared to me while I tried to read and with the scenery that appeared around them. My image-world was 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. As a reader of texts intended to explain the mind, I failed because the words and phrases in front of my eyes gave rise only to the poorest sort of image. Reading about our minds or the mind, and about purported instincts or aptitudes or faculties, not to mention such phantasms as ego, id, and archetype, I supposed the endless-seeming landscapes of my own thoughts and feelings must have been a paradise by comparison with the drab sites where others located their selves or their personalities or whatever they called their mental territories. And so, I decided long ago to take no further interest in the theoretical and to study instead the actual, which was for me the seeming-scenery behind everything I did or thought or read.

  The previous sentence might seem to suggest that I began early in life to observe coolly whatever I took to be the contents of my mind. No, for much of my life I barely found time to observe, let alone reflect on, the teeming mental imagery that accumulated by the minute, even though I often supposed that some or another distinctive image-item might one day be the only evidence that I had not only lived at some or another time in some or another place but had known and felt as though I was doing so. Now, at last, in this quiet township near the border, I am free to record my own image-history, which includes, of course, my speculations about such image-events as unfolded while a little-known author of fiction seemed to recall from all the years when he had prayed and worshipped daily only a morning when he had urinated into some altar-wine, or such as had unfolded when a certain woman, a lifelong believer, saw, during a funeral service, not the admirable details of a solemn ritual but something that had caused her to turn away in disgust.

  I may not have gone far with the speculations mentioned just now, but I am able to report much about certain of my own experiences that came to mind while I was writing the previous paragraphs. At the age of twenty, while I was reading one or another of the novels of Thomas Hardy, I was startled to find that I had done quietly and calmly what I had often been warned I was likely to do if I read the works of atheists or agnostics or pantheists or almost any sort of writer of fiction apart from G.K.Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and Ethel Mannin and, perhaps, François Mauriac. Exactly what my teachers and pastors and parents had predicted had happened: I had read indiscriminately and, as a result, I had lost my religious faith. Why I should have suffered this loss while reading Thomas Hardy is no part of this report, although I cannot resist including here something that I read only a few years ago in some or another essay or article. According to G.K. Chesterton, so I read, to read the fiction of Thomas Hardy is to witness the village atheist’s brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot.

  The loss of my faith, to call it that, brought about many changes in my way of life, only one of which is relevant here. From the day when the loss took place (and it did indeed happen within a single day) I possessed a host of mental images that were no longer of use to me. I had previously considered these images the nearest available likenesses of personages by definition invisible to me. I could never have prayed if I had not been able to bring the images to mind. Now, they were of no account: mere images corresponding to nothing in any world of other-than-images. And yet, they survived, undiminished. Those that had always appeared to me as depictions in stained glass were still lit by the same glow from their further sides. Those that had seemed to well up from what I had formally called my immortal soul still floated, as it were, near the image of that now-non-existent item and were still able to confront me whenever I was baffled or afraid, as though I was about to pray as I had so often prayed in the past to the beings they denoted. Chief among these now-useless possessions was my image of the so-called Blessed Trinity, the creator and sustainer of the universe, who was one indivisible divinity but nevertheless comprised three persons. (No phrase or sentence hereabouts is intended to mock.) I had never succeeded in fixing in mind an image of this tripartite being: I had mostly to be satisfied with seeing each person as the occupant of his own seat on a throne designed for three. In the central seat was a white-bearded ancient. I struggled not to visualise him thus. I told myself often that God was a spirit and was therefore impossible to represent pictorially, but I had been too much influenced as a child by the line-drawings in my missal
or by reproductions of celebrated paintings of grandfatherly cloud-dwellers. (While I was writing the previous sentences, I was sorry to be reporting such a commonplace experience. I was ashamed to have been as a boy and as a youth so easily influenced by the details of trite illustrations. I believed I could have described a more interesting sort of mental imagery if only those sentences had been part of a work of fiction. I even tried to devise a means of including in this report the details of the image in my mind of an image reported in a book that I first read nearly forty years ago. The first-person narrator of that book, which is not a work of fiction, had seen as a boy, in the kitchen of a Hungarian peasant household during the first decade of the twentieth century, a framed illustration in which the First Person of the Trinity was depicted as a large eye enclosed within a triangle. I would have been pleased to have been the author of a work of fiction in which the chief character kept in mind, as a boy and as a youth, just such an image of the personage known to him as God the Father. As the author of such a work, I would have taken much time in deciding what might have been the colour of the iris of the image-eye: a rich orange-gold, perhaps, or an aloof, cool green. I might have included in the work at least one account of the chief character’s seeing in the eye the same rich colour that he had lately stared at in some or another sunlit pane of glass in some or another silent building.) My image of the Son was derived from some or another illustration of the Good Shepherd or the Light of the World, but even though he was much younger, the brown-bearded and pensive-eyed son-in-my-mind seemed hardly less forbidding than the father. According to the doctrine of the incarnation, the personage that I knew as Jesus or Christ was at the same time both man and god, and my speculating on this made me often resentful. He whose words and deeds were reported in the gospels seemed on too familiar a footing with his god to be truly human. Jesus the man ought to have been repelled by the images of stern old men that occurred to him whenever he tried to pray; he ought to have struggled continually to visualise more appropriate images of his god. (Seemingly, I overlooked as a boy the many complexities of the incarnation. I cannot recall wondering how Jesus visualised his own divine nature: what image he called to mind of the god that he himself was.)