A Body of Water

by Beverley Farmer

  A BODY OF WATER

  OTHER BOOKS BY BEVERLEY FARMER

  ALONE

  MILK

  HOME TIME

  PLACE OF BIRTH

  THE SEAL WOMAN

  THE HOUSE IN THE LIGHT

  COLLECTED STORIES

  THE BONE HOUSE

  THIS WATER

  BEVERLEY FARMER

  A BODY OF WATER

  A Year’s Notebook

  FIRST PUBLISHED 1990

  BY UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND PRESS

  THIS EDITION FIRST PUBLISHED IN 2020

  FROM THE WRITING AND SOCIETY RESEARCH CENTRE

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  © BEVERLEY FARMER 1990, 2020

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  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  February 1987

  March

  April

  A Drop of Water

  May

  Among Pigeons

  June

  Vase with Red Fishes

  July

  Black Genoa

  August

  September

  October

  November

  December

  January

  February

  Land of Snows

  Sources

  INTRODUCTION

  ANNA MACDONALD

  A BODY OF WATER signals a change of season in Beverley Farmer’s career. Chronicling one year from February 1987 to February 1988, this book emerged from the fallow period that followed the publication of her first novel, Alone (1980) and two collections of short stories, Milk (1983) and Home Time (1985). Writing against the ‘isolation’ and ‘sterility’ which threatened to overwhelm her after their completion, Farmer divined her distinctive voice in A Body of Water as a writer of poetic, fragmented, personal essays. I read this book, published in 1990, as a kind of homecoming.

  Farmer’s voice in A Body of Water is reminiscent of her fiction. The curious blend of poetry and prose, and her interweaving of short stories within the chronicle’s narrative arc, recall Alone. Her preoccupation with writers such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, with the sea, with light and shadow, with mirrors and other reflective surfaces, with art in all its forms, inflect her early as well as her later fiction – The Seal Woman (1992), The House in the Light (1995), This Water: Five Tales (2017) – and the essays collected within The Bone House (2005). All of her writing retains the quality of technique that Seamus Heaney described in his essay ‘Feeling into Words’, and which Farmer transcribed into the notebook that would later become A Body of Water, as ‘the watermarking of your essential patterns of perception, voice and thought into the touch and texture of your lines’.

  Farmer’s watermark is immediately recognisable to readers of her work. But despite the similarities that can be drawn between this book and her others, there remains something about A Body of Water that distinguishes it; something that sets it strangely apart. Here, Farmer offers the reader something more than the watermarking of her patterns of perception. She plumbs the depths of that perception, the touch and texture of her world, and she unpicks its pattern in order to examine it more closely. Reading A Body of Water, it is as if Farmer is showing us at once a smooth fabric – the short stories interspersed throughout – and its tangled underside – the experiences, memories and associations from which those stories are woven.

  We begin in February, the hottest month of an Australian summer, with stagnant water turned to ice. ‘Not one story’, Farmer writes, ‘has achieved its being in my hands for nearly two years now.’ For this reason, and others to which she alludes without further detail, ‘I’m a holed ship stuck in the pack ice: what is there to do but, somehow, repair the hole before the thaw? And then sail free. Where? How?’

  Farmer emphasises how, but where comes first for her. ‘To begin a story, for me,’ she writes in the chapter ‘September’, ‘always means to choose a place’. The where of A Body of Water, this account of repair and a year in thaw, is a house at Point Lonsdale, a small Victorian coastal town near the entrance to Port Phillip Bay. More specifically, this is a house with a garden, within sight of the sea, within sound of the lighthouse foghorn that resonates across the water (across ‘my bed, my body’) as ships pass through the treacherous Rip at night. There are other places in this book: some of memory, like Greece, where Farmer lived for many years and which colours so much of her work; some (at least superficially) outside the spacetime of this chronicled year, like the gompa at a Buddhist retreat; some more apparently mundane, like the attic room in the Carlton house outside the window of which cranes roar, cats sun themselves, a lemon-scented gum stretches its limbs. These places are different, separate to the central place of the house by the sea, but because they are all lived by Farmer, and because we live them through her, they read as satellites of the same geography: awash in the same honeyed light, haunted by the same shadows, rendered according to Farmer’s distinctive, painterly vision which captures, somehow and all at once, the place, what it feels like to live there, and how it is embodied on the page.

  How Farmer embodies the world is also how she might repair her hull and sail free after the thaw. In the pages of A Body of Water, Farmer lives and works according to a particular idea of practice indebted to the thought of writers like Gary Snyder and Octavio Paz, both of whom she reads repeatedly over the course of the year. In ‘April’, Farmer writes: ‘The Path is the Practice. Not theory. Practice.’ Then, in one of those painterly strokes with which she reveals her process – her practice of weaving personal observation with unadorned quotation, with memory, with reflection, with an idea for a story, with a poem that captures the original observation, with a completed short story that is itself a web (or a watery reflection) of observation, quotation, memory and so on – she steps straight from this Path to cite Snyder, thus:

  Practice simply is one intensification of what is natural and around us all the time. Practice is to life as poetry is to spoken language. So as poetry is the practice of language, ‘practice’ is the practice of life. But from the enlightened standpoint, all of language is poetry, all of life is practice.

  Farmer is fully attentive to the life around her: to the house by the sea and the reverberations of the foghorn; to the words of Snyder and Paz, as well as (among others) Maria Tsvetaeva, D.H. Lawrence, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Marjorie Barnard, Rainer Maria Rilke, Katherine Mansfield, John Berger, Sylvia Plath and the many echoes between them; to the creation of her own stories, which resonate in their turn with Barnard’s persimmon tree (and the Black Genoa fig Farmer plants in her garden, in memoriam), with Farmer’s low-tide walks (and the cuttlefish bones, the drowned penguin she encounters along the way), with the lighthouse foghorn and the fig tree. This is Farmer’s process: all her poetry (by which I also mean all her poetic prose) is the intensification of life via the prac
tice of observing, reading and writing. Observing, reading and writing are all ways of fully attending to the world.

  Farmer is a brilliantly attentive reader and reading for her is a potentially transformative encounter between one person and another, between a person and the world. In the best fiction, she writes in ‘October’,

  a transcendental moment of fusion…takes place, between one person and another, or a person and an object…and a surge of emotion knocks the reader off his or her feet…Perhaps the only factor that makes ‘real’ life different is the absence in it of a reader: there being no observer, no focus of attention, no witness.

  But in ‘real’ life, of course, it is the writer who observes, who focuses her attention, who reads the world and bears witness.

  Farmer’s acts of witnessing – her daily observations and reflections, her reading, her sacramental planting of a fig tree, her stories and poems – are composed of fragments from which she and her attentive readers weave a pattern. These fragments are the ‘severed parts’ to which Virginia Woolf refers in Moments of Being, and which Farmer notes down in ‘March’. ‘I make it real by putting it into words,’ Woolf writes. ‘It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole…it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together.’ Fragments, put into the words of, for instance, Farmer’s short story ‘Vase with Red Fishes’ – which is untangled over the course of the chronicled year and inserted, smooth, freshly watermarked, between ‘June’ and ‘July’ – subdue the pain and compose ‘a sufficient self ’.

  In ‘March’, Farmer writes that ‘[a] poem is a fountain, a novel a river – a story a pool, lake, billabong?’. Fountains gush, rivers run, billabongs – left behind by a change of course in a riverbed or creek – flood and then run dry according to season. Now I wonder, what body of water is this book with its fluid movement between sensual observations of the everyday, reflections upon reading and writing and living in place, and its inclusion alongside these of the short stories and poems into which they flow?

  In A Body of Water, Farmer writes herself out of isolation and two years’ creative sterility. She is a holed ship. She is a fig tree, barerooted and dormant. She is the pack ice and the withered shoot. But, by putting these fragments into words, she is also, the branches ‘laden with leaves now and…in bud’. Farmer cannot conceive a severed or stunted part without also giving it life. In ‘May’, she wrote: ‘An ear of wheat, or corn. (And the silk of hair.) A hand of bananas. A tooth (in Greek, not a clove – ena donti skordo) of garlic…(Plant some?)’ Plant some, water it in with the ice melt, and from the severed tooth, from the hand and the silky hair will grow a whole. This body of water is life-giving. Fed by it, stories like ‘Vase with Red Fishes’ take root and other novels, stories and essays begin to grow.

  ANNA MACDONALD is a writer and bookseller based in Melbourne. She is the author of a collection of essays, Between the Word and the World, and a novel, A Jealous Tide.

  A BODY OF WATER

  To the memory of Platon Talihmanidis, 1939–1988

  Ο λεβέντης μας

  Ο καρντάσης

  Conscience incurable

  convinces me I am not writing my life;

  life never assures which part of ourself is life.

  Robert Lowell, The Dolphin

  FEBRUARY 1987

  MY FORTY-SIXTH BIRTHDAY, and no end in sight to the long struggle to come to terms with this isolation, this sterility.

  Tide coming in, a stiff wind. A black ship out, a white ship in. A flash out on the grey water – a pilot boat catching the sun. The dunes have grown fine long green hairs all over – their skin shows through.

  By a path that, in its own way, is also negative, the poet comes to the brink of language. And that brink is called silence, blank page. A silence that is like a lake, a smooth and compact surface. Down below, submerged, the words are waiting. And one must descend, go to the bottom, be silent, wait. Sterility precedes inspiration, as emptiness precedes plenitude. The poetic word crops out after periods of drought.

  Octavio Paz: The Bow and the Lyre

  Words of hope – perhaps. Not one story has achieved its being in my hands for nearly two years now. What I have to do is find characters who involve and interest me enough for the process to happen of itself without self-consciousness. Assuming that I want to go on writing the conventional sort of fiction that I have been. Why do I assume that?

  Maybe an anxious rigidity about forms is part of the problem. Work on that assumption for the time being. Just write on without worrying what it is I’m writing. Trusting to instinct, letting it evolve.

  Another restless night of doing sums. Unless I find another source of income soon, I won’t have a cent left. Maybe I should try my hand at Mills & Boon, make my living that way? I thought of a pen name in the shower just now: Barbara Fox. Any good? Or Fay Bell, Frieda Bell, Claudine Bell. How about Colleen? Colleen Bell. If there isn’t already a Colleen Bell. Claire Bell? No – too much like Clarabell (Cow). I had a solid grounding in romantic fiction all through my adolescence. I could borrow some from the library and brush up on it. Exotic backgrounds are obligatory, or they used to be. I’d need to travel, and the costs could be written off for tax… The more I think, the better it looks!

  The last hill on the road is the first sight of the sea: the Rip, Point Nepean, Swan Bay spread shallow over sand and on its edge all the towers of Queenscliff; and far off to the right over the salt swamps, the tip of the Lonsdale Light. (A stumpy light, not like the redcapped White Queen at Aireys Inlet, but visible a long way away: Ocean Grove, Barwon Heads…Flying to Tasmania once I saw the whole silver map of the bay spread out and alone on the headland a white finger, or thumb – the Lonsdale Light.) From the hilltop today I saw a long black ship sliding slowly through as if on rails over the dry land. Five minutes later it was in the South Channel with only a white scut of stern showing.

  I should go across on the ferry to the other shore: not for Sorrento or Portsea, just the windy crossing is enough; and the long sidle home at sunset down the banned Army beaches. I never bother on my own. I should.

  A tourist brochure floating in a rock pool under the lighthouse – its tiny sunlit image of the great tower. I smoothed it on the sand and read that the first public telephone line in Victoria (1878) was put up between Point Lonsdale and Queenscliff for the sake of ships in the Rip.

  Yesterday afternoon H brought me a Matisse print of an interior with gold (red) fish on the sill by the balcony, which he’d framed. It’s utterly beautiful and I’m suddenly full of faith and joy in the visual again (having been long at war with this aspect of myself). I’m going to write a story – not a story as such, but I hate the term ‘a fiction’ – based on this print, by way of beginning my new phase of writing, my new departure.

  This new writing: I want it to be an interweaving of visual images – more open, loose and rich, and free of angst. And if I keep a notebook this time as I go, it will grow side by side with the stories, like the placenta and the baby in a womb.

  It should come as no surprise that the novel as a genre is devoted to leisure, and to a definition of individuality which depends upon leisure. The novel is, to all intents and purposes, a middle-class genre, written by and for people who had, at best, a distant connection to the prevailing modes of labor in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Novelistic individuality depends upon social relationships, upon talking, upon a thousand minute and novelistically recorded gestures. It requires the framework of the ordinary if it is to be expressed and activated. Outside that framework, the individual is lost and must live with the fear that there is nothing for him to become. The individual, as the novel portrays him, is essentially conservative. He can tolerate only small doses of change, gradual involvements of ‘action’, but not revolutions, and not the explosive energies of adventure. The conservatism of so many great novelists is not accidental: Balzac, Jane Austen,
Henry James. All needed to believe in the essentialness of ordinary life, and all needed for their individuals to move, not too energetically, in a solid world of relationships.

  Paul Zweig: The Adventurer (my italics)

  (Balzac, Jane Austen, Henry James, Proust, Tolstoy, Hardy, Dickens, Flaubert, Joyce…)

  Of the Arabs in the market in Marrakesh, Zweig writes:

  They are inside the story, having been transported inward on a journey so elusive and sudden that a man could search for that road everywhere over the earth and still not find it.

  That is a story I want to read now and to try to write. Of work where the form, not the plot, imparts the meaning, he writes:

  Recently, however, we have begun to expect another pleasure from the stories we read. The spectacle of life’s hidden form emerging from the vagaries of experience no longer warms our hearts. On the contrary, it chills us just a little, as if the form were a prison, and the novel’s end-informed story the evidence for a failure of spirit. What Singer, Burroughs and Borges express in their work are disruptive moments, flashes of illuminating intensity. It is not the end which is important, but the episode; not the form, of which the end is the final clarity, as when a sculptor unveils a statue, but the illumination itself, unruly and momentary, not casting a new light over what has been lived, but compressing life itself into its absoluteness, and bursting.

  The Adventurer (my italics)

  (Compare Octavio Paz:

  The word, free at last, shows all its entrails, all its meanings and allusions, like a ripe fruit or a rocket exploding in the sky. The poet sets his matter free. The prose writer imprisons his.

  Octavio Paz: The Bow and the Lyre)

  My first summer in this place. So hot and still a day, and I spent it on the sand, the cliff-shadow advancing over me, and now and then went to lie in one of the channels between the pale rocks and was washed cold.