Border Districts

by Gerald Murnane

  When I last travelled to the capital city, I took with me a camera with a roll of unexposed film inside. On the last morning of my stay in the weatherboard house mentioned earlier, I prepared to photograph each of the coloured panes in each of the windows and doors overlooking the driveway and the return veranda.

  Whenever I return from the capital city to this border district, I set out in the early morning. After I had eaten my breakfast and stored my luggage in my car on the last morning mentioned above, the sun had still not risen, although the few clouds in the pale sky were already pink. My friend and his wife were still in their own wing of the house, almost certainly still asleep. I stepped quietly along the veranda and the driveway, taking one shot of each pane from the outside. Then I crept through the lounge-room, my own room, the passage, and my friend’s study, taking one shot of each pane from the inside. In the last city along my homeward route, I left the film to be developed and printed. I have since collected two postcard-sized prints of each exposure. The prints are beside me as I write. During the days before I collected the prints, I hoped to learn from them something of value. I looked forward to inspecting the prints at my leisure. Not since my childhood had I felt free to look through coloured panes for as long as I might have wanted to look. In all my adult life, I had merely glanced or looked sideways at such things, partly from my belief, mentioned earlier, that a glance or a sideways look often reveals more than a direct gaze and partly from my reluctance to make any sort of show of my interests or motives. (My writing this report is no violation of my long-standing policy. These pages are intended only for my files.) In fact, my first inspection of the prints, after I had fetched them safely to my room yesterday, consisted of my first scattering them on the bare surface of this desk and then looking towards them from various points while I paced about the room. I tried to look at the prints as though unaware of what they might have depicted. Some of what I saw brought to mind drooping leaves, wing-cases of beetles, crucifixes bare of human figures but oozing coloured droplets, feathers fallen from birds in flight ... Later, after I had sat at the desk and had looked more closely, I was reminded of what I had surely learned long before, although I had seemed to note it for the first time while I was puzzling recently over the window in my neighbourhood church: that a coloured pane better reveals itself to a viewer on its darker side, so to call it; that the colours and designs in glass windows are truly apparent only to an observer shut off from what most of us would consider true light – the light best able to do away with mystery and uncertainty. This paradox, if such it is, can be otherwise expressed: anyone observing the true appearance of a coloured window is unable, for the time being, to observe through that window any more than a falsification of the so-called everyday world. I was reminded of this when I compared each pair of photographs of one and the same window: one photograph taken from outside in the early morning light and the other photograph taken from inside the dim house. These matters hardly surprised me, but I remain still puzzled by a second discovery. In the first minutes while I inspected the prints, I found myself several times about to lift one or the other print and to hold it between my face and the desk-lamp. At first, I supposed I was prompted by a sort of instinctive curiosity; I had in my hands accurate evidence of sights I had been eager to record, but then, quite unthinkingly, I made as though to learn more than was in my power to learn. And so, I caught myself several times preparing to look through, or more deeply into, what was hardly more than dyed paper. After I had several times almost given way to this child-like impulse, another explanation occurred to me. I had photographed my friends’ windows and doors hardly more than a week before. I could recall clearly not just my stepping along the return veranda and the driveway and in through the two doors leading from the return veranda into the house; I could recall clearly the colour of the sky and of the few clouds at the time; and I could certainly recall the sight of each area of coloured glass when I aimed my camera at it – not the sight of each of the many details in each pane but the degree of clarity and the intensity of the colour in the most noticeable of those details. I recalled these things, and at the same time I was aware that the image-panes on the desk before me seemed less colourful than the actual panes when I had photographed them. I might have decided that this discrepancy was caused by my lack of skill as a photographer, even though the camera had been switched to automatic at the time. Ignorant as I am in the fields of optics and physics, I might have decided that no photographic film is quite so sensitive to light as is the human retina. I might simply have decided that I imagined rather than recalled the sight of the actual windows: that this was one more example of the unreliability of memory. Instead, I chose to subscribe for the time being to a quaint-seeming theory of vision mentioned earlier in this report. I even modified or expanded this theory, or what little I had once read about it, when I decided that my seeing the panes of glass in the early morning had consisted of much more than my registering, as it were, certain shapes and colours; that a part of my seeing was my investing the glass with qualities not inherent in it – qualities probably not apparent to any other observer and certainly not detectable by any sort of camera; that what I missed when I looked at the photographic prints was the meaning that I had previously read into the glass. And if I could give credence to such an eccentric theory, then I might as well go further and assert that I saw in the glass part of the private spectrum that my eyes diffused from my own light as it travelled outwards: a refraction of my own essence, perhaps.

  This township is about half-way between the city where I formerly lived, which is the capital city of this state, and the capital city of the adjoining state, where I have still not yet been. I get my news from newspapers. I own no television set or computer, but I brought with me to this house a twenty-five-years-old radio that can be used to play audio cassettes. On several evenings each week, I listen to some or other of the fifty and more tapes, as I call them, that I recorded during the fourth and fifth decades of my life, when I still believed in the power of music to cause me to see what I had never seen with my eyes. The pieces of taped music, so to call it, were only some of many pieces of music that brought to my mind, whenever I heard them, unfolding images of mostly level grassy landscapes. As a young man, I chose to consider the landscapes an actual part of my mind that I might never have discovered had I not heard the pieces of music. (For most of my life, I have only pretended to acknowledge the claims of so-called common sense. I could never accept, for example, that my mind is a creation, much less a function, of my brain.) While I considered them thus, I enjoyed the landscapes as spectacles, which is to say that I seemed to view the landscapes as though they comprised a topographical map over which I passed as a low-flying bird might pass. Sometimes, I enjoyed as well the conviction that the seeming progression of the landscape across the range of my vision, or my seeming myself to be progressing across the landscapes, was a sort of a prefigurement of a future journey that I had first seemed likely to make on certain mornings during my schooldays when I translated into English one after another page of the book-length Latin poem recounting the journey of certain fugitives from Troy towards their destined homeland. (Few persons of my place and time can have travelled less often and less far than I. The only journey of mine that might seem the fulfilment of my youthful daydreams is the journey that I made last year to this township, unless the unthinkable happens and I find some agreeable last haven on the other side of the border.)

  I experienced as a reader of fiction much of what I experienced as a listener to music, but with the important difference that the fictional texts that I read contained many an explicit description of some or another landscape. Reading sentence after sentence containing detail after detail of some or another such landscape, I was able to value the resulting mental imagery for its uniqueness; to see it lying in the marches between the mental territories of reader and writer. I still look sometimes into works of fiction but I read few of them to the end. Among
the most recent works that I succeeded in reading is an English translation of a novel of three volumes first published in the Hungarian language in the decade before my birth and set, so to speak, in the region called in English Transylvania but in Hungarian Erdély. Until 1919, Transylvania had been not only part of the Kingdom of Hungary but the site of the purest form of Hungarian culture, the one region that had never been invaded during the two centuries when the Turks had ruled most of Hungary. The author had written his work of three volumes during the decade after 1919, in which year Transylvania had become part of Romania under the terms of the Treaty of Trianon, but the action of the novel took place, so to speak, in previous decades. The narrator of the novel was far from regarding the pre-war period as a Golden Age; he recognised the follies of the Hungarian rulers of what was soon to become their lost province. Only when he wrote about the landscapes of Transylvania did he seem to give way to regret. Many a chapter of his novel began with a page and more of lavish description of some or another river-valley between forested foothills of the Transylvanian Alps. So heartfelt were some of these descriptions that I had sometimes to remind myself that the scenery I was reading about was no long-lost country of dreams but had still been in place when the book had been written; had not been abolished by any treaty between nations; was still in existence even while I was reading. The same rivers flowed between the same forested hillsides with the same snowy peaks in the background, and yet the narrator described the scenery as though it was soon to pass from sight forever. And so it was, if I think of the sight of a landscape as inseparable from the person having sight of it. If I think thus, then what were reported in the lavish descriptions, as I called them, were no mere landscapes but semblances of river valleys and forests and folds of mountains illuminated by the regard of a man with translucent panes for eyes.

  This matter of the landscapes was not what first prompted me to write about the novel of three volumes. I intended to report a simple discovery that I made when I was reading an especially detailed description of a landscape in the fictional Transylvania where the novel is set. At one point when I was reading a long report of meadows, of fast-flowing streams, of forests, of mountains, and even of clouds and sky, I paused to observe what was taking place in my mind. I found that I was far from assembling there a detailed landscape, adding or adjusting this or that item as my eyes passed over this or that word or phrase or sentence. What seemed to have happened was that a certain image-landscape had appeared to me as soon as I had begun to read the long report and had learned from the first sentence or from my glancing at the text ahead what was the subject of the report. This image-landscape remained almost unchanged in my mind while I read the entire report. If I happened to read a reference to the rooftops of a distant village, then there appeared in my original landscape a few vague patches meant to suggest thatched roofs, and if I learned from my reading that a horse-drawn carriage was to be seen on a road near the village, then a simple image appeared of a toy-like coach on a stylised road. Otherwise, my original image, so to call it, persisted unaltered. In spite of all that I read, no far-reaching water-meadows, no beetling cliffs, and no hurtling streams found their way into my simple mental scenery, which, when I came to look at it closely, comprised a road in the foreground, a few green paddocks in the middle ground, and the abrupt slope of a forested mountain in the background. I knew, as I sometimes know things in dreams, that a fast-flowing creek or river lay out of sight where the last paddock ended and the forested slope began. Sometimes, the blurred details of a house with white walls and a red-brown roof appeared near the site of the unseen stream, although these details were sometimes replaced by details more in keeping with the text of the fiction.

  I soon discovered the approximate source of the incongruous mental scenery. Late in my eighteenth year, I acquired my first girlfriend. I had been attracted to her by nothing more than the appearance of her face, which seemed to tell me that she was a gentle, thoughtful person who would rather listen than chatter. Perhaps she was, in fact, such a person. Certainly she was obliged to behave as such a person whenever she and I were together during the short time while we were girlfriend and boyfriend. While we travelled several times to and from a Saturday football-match in an inner suburb of the capital city, while we were together at several Sunday evening dances in the church-hall in the outer south-eastern suburb where we both lived, and while I several times took afternoon tea with the girl and her younger sister and their mother in their lounge-room, I missed no opportunity to tell her what I had been waiting for many years to tell to a sympathetic listener.

  I forget almost all of the thousands of words that I spoke to the person who had seemed to me more a listener than a chatterer, but I recall some of what I felt while I spoke the words. Perhaps I should have written just then that I seem to recall not certain feelings but, rather, the fact of my having once felt these feelings. And while I was struggling to write the previous sentence, I recalled yet again the occasion that prompted me to begin writing this report: the occasion when I passed for the first time the window in the porch of my neighbourhood church and failed to identify from my vantage point in the sunshine the colours and shapes that would have been apparent to someone in the shaded porch on the other side of the glass.

  My girlfriend and I kept company, so to speak, for perhaps two months. Our last outing together was a picnic on a Sunday in early spring, in a park beside a reservoir in a range of mountains north-east of the capital city. We travelled to and from the picnic site in a bus. All around us in the bus were other young persons from our parish, some of them in pairs like my girlfriend and myself. We two sat in a seat that took two persons only, she against the window and I nearer the aisle. I had planned during the previous week to have us seated thus; I wanted her free to look out at river valleys or forested mountains while I went on talking to her. Apparently, I was not bereft of insight, since I remember my suspecting, late in the morning and while we were still travelling towards the picnic-site, that my girlfriend was no longer interested in what I was telling her. Even so, I was unable to check myself and was perhaps made even more eloquent by my foreseeing that my girlfriend would tell me before the end of the day that my company was no longer agreeable to her. Much that I told her had to do with books that I had read. My talking to her allowed me to put into words what I could otherwise have expressed only in a report such as this. But I talked to her sometimes also about a book that I might one day write, and I suspect that I understood, while the bus travelled further in among the mountains, that such a book was less likely to be written by a man with an ideal female confidant than by the solitary man that I was soon to become. As for the landscape that represented for me, fifty and more years later, one after another of the lost landscapes of the author of the novel in the Hungarian language, I have no recollection of my having seen the original landscape, so to call it, anywhere among the mountains north-east of the capital city, but whenever I try to recall some or another detail from the Sunday excursion mentioned I see always in the background my own image-Transylvania.

  When I turned on my old radio on the day mentioned earlier, I did so in order to listen to the broadcast of a certain horse-race. I saw from the dial that the radio was tuned, as always, to the station that broadcasts horse-races from all over the commonwealth of which this state is a part, but after I had turned on the radio the voices from the sporting station, as it was called, were continually overridden by other, louder voices. I supposed I was now so far from the capital city of my own state that my radio was receiving signals from across the border, perhaps even from the capital of the neighbouring state. I tried but could not tune the radio more closely to the sporting station. I turned up the volume. I heard, for the first time, the faint sounds of a broadcast of a horse-race but only during the brief pauses of the overriding voices, which were by now unbearably loud. They were the voices of two women, one of them apparently the presenter of a program and the other a guest being int
erviewed. I lowered the volume and listened, for the time being, to the two female voices.

  Almost the first thing that I learned from the overriding voices was that the person being interviewed was the author of several published works of fiction. I am still willing to look into some or another work of fiction if I believe I am likely to remember afterwards even a small part of the experience; if I believe I might seem to see afterwards among the places that I call my mind some or another scenery that first appeared to me while I was reading or even a scene in which an image of myself is reading what he may later forget and, later still, may regret having forgotten. However, I have never cared to listen to persons merely talking about a book of fiction or about any sort of book as though it consists of subject-matter or ideas or topics to be talked about rather than words and sentences waiting to be read. I would have turned off my radio promptly except that the woman-author had begun to talk about a certain house of yellow- or honey-coloured stone.

  The house did not exist or, rather, it existed but the author had not located it. I became strangely alert as soon as I had understood that the house might have stood at no great distance from where I sat beside my old radio in my cottage of white stone. I had earlier guessed that the author was speaking from the capital city of the adjoining state. (Her interviewer may have been questioning her from still another capital city in some further-off state, but this did not matter. For as long as the author went on talking I seemed to see her seated at a bare table in a so-called broadcasting studio, which appeared to me as a small room with tinted glass walls surrounded by many another such small room, each lit by globes obscurely placed among the many layers of tinted glass.)

  The woman, as I intend to call her, had not lived for long in the neighbouring state. She had been born and had spent her childhood in a south-western county of England, and she had lived in several countries before settling in the capital city where she now lived. For the sake of her husband and her teenaged children, she lived for the time being in an inner suburb but she spent much of her free time travelling in country districts far from the capital city. She was especially interested in what she called the far south-east of her state, which included, as I knew, the district adjoining the border on the far side of my own district. When she named some of the towns in her preferred region, I even heard the name of the place where was held the race-meeting that I had turned back from on the morning mentioned early in this report.