The Plains

by Gerald Murnane

  I and my companions of the moment got no lasting assurance from those few hours of threatened sunlight at those unremarkable places on the plains. Yet we put aside for a little while our puzzlement and uncertainty and conspired, some of us perhaps unwittingly, to seem in possession of a secret that resolved the mystery of those hours and that place at least. And in the eyes of people I would never know, my seeming hold on something became one more cause for puzzlement and uncertainty among those people of years to come.

  What could those people do but doubt even further their own grasp of things when they saw in some faded, ill-arranged photograph such signs that once, at a spot on the plains that could never be precisely identified, an oddly assorted group of people, never renowned for their insight into such matters, had shared a certainty, had whispered and smiled together over a discovery, or had even stared and pointed towards a sign that contented them for the time?

  It was not only groups of people who were posed as though within reach of one more of those certainties that anyone viewing them must lack. Many a man or woman who would readily have confessed to seeing nowhere but in old illustrations the weather or the landscape that persuaded them to look for no further skies or lands—many such had been photographed as though whatever they looked at just out of range of the camera yielded the sort of satisfaction that people long afterwards could only derive from old photographs.

  Some of the people who were posed in this way agreed to make some uncharacteristic gesture or to feign interest in what rarely attracted them. Others obliged the photographer by appearing as only rumour or raillery would have them. I myself had grown used to my patron’s thrusting an empty camera into my hand and urging me to stand as though aiming it at some figure or landscape in the middle distance.

  *

  Few of the crowds at those scenes would have recalled that my original appointment to the household had been as a writer of material suitable for filmscripts. Even fewer attended the annual revelations, as they were called, when I was expected to display or describe the best of my recent projects.

  It was so long since I myself had attended any such function arranged for another client of the house that I could not say whether mine had become the smallest of those gatherings. Those who did attend my own seemed not to care that empty spaces surrounded them in the reception room or that their voices, when they strolled out onto the long verandah, were overwhelmed by the din of crickets and frogs. In the first hours of the ceremony, between sunset and midnight, they huddled together as they ate and drank, and assumed the bearing of a privileged and discriminating elite: a little band who had not forgotten the retiring scholar from the rear rooms of the library and who might one day boast that they had sat through the first of his by then almost legendary revelations. At midnight, when the revelation proper began—when the women were farewelled and the traditional high-backed uncomfortable chairs were drawn up to the semicircle of tables densely set with decanters and stained at close intervals by the passage of light through massive cuboids of whisky enclosed in thicknesses of crystal—then the audience seemed more eager than mere politeness demanded. They waited expectantly while the servants locked the doors and drew together the double layers of violet drapes hung for the occasion and then mounted their ladders to seal the gaps between curtains and walls with the rolls of revelation-paper that gave off their unfailingly evocative crackling sound.

  I believed I had sometimes come near to fulfilling their expectations. I had kept them listening until even a man among them who had violated the spirit of the ceremony and hidden a watch in his pocket—even that man would have been pleasantly surprised when he glanced for the last time furtively at his timepiece. And when I tugged unobserved at the bell-pull and the servants crept into the room from the distant alcove where the muffled signal had reached them, and pulled back with startling suddenness the massive drapes, I had always found some reassurance in the mild cry that went up from my hearers. Watching them stumble towards the windows, dazzled by the unexpected intensity of the light, and perhaps genuinely surprised by the view of lawn and parkland receding towards a segment of plain, I knew I had effected a revelation of some sort. But I knew, too, that I had not achieved what was so clearly described in the literature that had given rise to the ceremony.

  My failing was that I could never arrange my subject matter—the arguments and narratives and expositions that kept me talking for never less than half a day—so that it culminated in a revelation that somehow emphasised or contrasted with or prefigured or even seemed to deny all likelihood of the lesser revelation of the land outside appearing suddenly in an unexpected light. I could not complain that I lacked the advantages of other salaried clients—the dramatists, toymakers, weavers, illusionists, curators of indoor gardens, musicians, metalworkers, keepers of aviaries and aquaria, poets, puppeteers, singers and reciters, designers and modellers of impractical costumes, historians of horseracing, clowns, collectors of mandalas and mantras, inventors of inconclusive board-games, and others who could use so much more than mere words to produce their effects. For I myself, in my first years at that house, had been provided with enough equipment to prepare and display any film that I might have devised. It was my own decision to stand before the spectators at my earliest revelations with only a blank screen behind me and an empty projector pointing at me from a corner of the partly darkened room and to talk for sixteen hours of landscapes that only I could interpret. I had thought then that one or two of my listeners, when the curtains were dragged back to reveal a land in the depths of an afternoon whose beginnings none of them had witnessed, saw in the plain before them a place they had always hoped to explore. But in later years, when I stood before my dwindling audience, still in a darkened room but with not even the blank screen to suggest that the landscapes and figures I argued for might soon be represented by scenes and people drawn from their own country, then I suspected that even my most attentive listeners took as their revelation only the appearance once more of the plains that my hours of speculative talk had made to seem just a little more promising.

  There were occasions throughout each year when I wondered why my following had not lapsed entirely. Even in the inmost rooms of the library, on the third storey of the north-east wing, I sometimes heard, across courtyards shaded from the late afternoon sunlight or swept by the flight of bats at dusk, the first, and then, after an interval almost exactly predictable, the second of the immoderate roars that marked the dual climax of some revelation by a client whose final achievement had been to suggest, through the difficult medium of his particular craft, some detail of a plain paradoxically apart from, and yet defining further, the land revealed moments afterwards between the ponderously parting curtains.

  There were so many clients with their studios and workshops in the several wings reserved for them, or even in the tree-shaded lodges in the parks between the furthest lawns and the nearest of the forested hills, that I heard almost weekly those cries of admiration for still another statement of the endlessly variable theme of plains returning, enhanced but still recognisable, to view. Even the most eager of the scholars and benefactors in those audiences had to forgo many a performance. I expected each year, when my own fell due again, to find that the whole household had retired early after some taxing day and night of drinking and watching, that not a single car had arrived from the neighbouring estates, and that I would have to emulate those few clients I sometimes heard of who emerged each year from their quiet quarters and presented their revelations in front of empty rooms and stoppered decanters. I had often anticipated the moment when the servants, with every show of decorum, drew back the curtains so that the presence of the plains filled the silent room while I myself tried to see them from the position that was the ideal centre of my absent audience. But each year a few remained of my previous year’s following, and a few others had arrived to hear me out, perhaps even preferring me to some celebrated client whose approaching revelation was already being tal
ked about at the very table where I presided in silence over the whisky.

  The reason for this lingering interest in me may have been nothing more than the common preference of plainsfolk for the concealed rather than the obvious—their weakness for expecting much from the unfavoured or the little-known. Although I asked no questions on my own behalf, I learned in time that I was considered by a small group to be a film-maker of exceptional promise. When I first heard this, I had been about to reply that my cabinets full of notes and preliminary drafts would probably never give rise to any image of any sort of plain. I had almost decided to call myself poet or novelist or landscaper or memorialist or scenesetter or some other of the many sorts of literary practitioner flourishing on the plains. Yet if I had announced such a change in my profession I might have lost the support of those few people who persisted in esteeming me. For although writing was generally considered by plainsmen the worthiest of all crafts and the one most nearly able to resolve the thousand uncertainties that hung about almost every mile of the plains, still, if I had claimed even a small part of the tribute paid to writers I would probably have fallen out of favour with even those who shared this view of prose and verse. For my most sincere admirers were aware also of the plainsman’s scant interest in films and of the often-heard claim that a camera merely multiplied the least significant qualities of the plains—their colour and shape as they appeared to the eye. These followers of mine almost certainly shared in this mistrust of the uses of film, for they never suggested to me that I might one day devise scenes that no one could have predicted. What they praised was my apparent reluctance to work with camera or projector and my years spent in writing and rewriting notes for introducing to a conjectured audience images still unseen. A few of these men argued even that the further my researches took me away from my announced aim and the less my notes seemed likely to result in any visible film, the more credit I deserved as the explorer of a distinctive landscape. And if this argument seemed to classify me as a writer rather than a film-maker, then my loyal followers were not perturbed. For their very denials justified their belief that I was practising the most demanding and praiseworthy of all the specialised forms of writing—that which came near to defining what was indefinable about the plains by attempting an altogether different task. It suited the purposes of these men that I should continue to call myself a film-maker; that I should sometimes appear at my annual revelation with a blank screen behind me and should talk of the images I might yet display. For these men were confident that the more I strove to depict even one distinctive landscape—one arrangement of light and surfaces to suggest a moment on some plain I was sure of—the more I would lose myself in the manifold ways of words with no known plains behind them.

  In the years when my work was most often interrupted by my patron’s fondness for scenes, there might have been a handful left of those supporters who talked knowingly sometimes of the neglected film-maker preparing his great work in the seclusion of the library. They would have been the least likely of anyone at a scene to be deceived by the sight of me pointing an empty camera towards some everyday sight. Perhaps they felt obliged to make some comment on the irrelevance of such things as lenses and light waves to the creation of those images of mine that no one had yet laid eyes on. But usually they joined unnoticed in the general amusement to see, posed as one eager to record the play of light at some moment of an uneventful afternoon, the very man who allowed whole seasons to pass while he sat behind drawn blinds in the least-visited rooms of a silent library.

  I seldom wondered what opinion of me predominated among the people who watched and smiled as I took my awkward grip on some antiquated camera and stared obligingly at some empty zone ahead of me. I was far more concerned with those who might one day examine the faulty prints in my patron’s jumbled collection and see me as a man with my eyes fixed on something that mattered. Even the few who had heard or read of my efforts to discover a fitting landscape— even they might have supposed that I sometimes looked no further than my surroundings. No one afterwards could point to a single feature of whatever place I stared at. It was still a place out of sight in a scene arranged by someone who was himself out of sight. But anyone might have decided that I recognised the meaning of what I saw.

  And so, on those darkening afternoons, at those scenes whose scenery seemed more often pointed at than observed, whenever the camera in my hand put me in mind of some young woman who might see me years afterwards as a man who saw further than others, I would always ask my patron at last to record the moment when I lifted my own camera to my face and stood with my eye pressed against the lens and my finger poised as if to expose to the film in its dark chamber the darkness that was the only visible sign of whatever I saw beyond myself.

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