Virginia Woolf: Moments of Being
Those hands in the photograph – in August last year T copied out as a PS something of Marjorie Barnard’s called ‘In Praise of Hands’, from The Australian Week-End Book, 1945:
…There are the infinite, delicate pleasures of hands – the shape of a fresh brown egg; the living weight of a peach in the perfection of ripeness; the delicate abrasion of fine, white sand; the softness of wood ash; ancient Chinese pottery that is like flesh; the soapstone bird; the fluting of Dutch linenfold; the fur of a healthy animal; the inside of a shell; the cool cleanness of fine linen; the smoothness of newly polished silver…
Hands are for making music and love.
Poets and lovers have held the world between their hands – very briefly.
My home was in the hands of my beloved.
So she was a romantic, and a sensualist; more to her than the bitterness of that ‘basic cruelty’ remark. Which I knew, from the story.
In misery, the heart closes like a fist.
A porcelain statue of the White Tara in a library book of Tibetan art had a long-lidded eye in each open palm and in the soles of her feet; seven in all (with the Third Eye). Imagine the caresses of those hands and feet! In one of his black-and-white films (Le sang d’un poète?), Cocteau made a drawing of a young man’s face on the easel suddenly speak to the artist: a knock on the door and the artist quickly covered the lips with his hand to keep the miracle a secret – only to find them later, still able to move, speak, embedded in his palm. In some images the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara has a thousand fanned arms – a thousand palms each with an eye, like a peacock’s tail, though these eyes are not round. A thousand slit, long-lashed half-closed eyes, eyes like lotus buds.
A cat was stretched stone-stiff this morning on the corner of Faraday and Drummond Streets. Its fur was dry grass, its teeth wet and red. Blood lay in the wrinkles of its earhole, and its one visible eye hung out from the socket, a ball cupped in black blood. It was one of the cats that liked lying in the sun on the metal roofing outside my attic window, on the other side of the bamboo blind. Waking, I would see its bulk and shadow against the blind and tap on the pane to see it wake and leap up and peer through the slats, and glare in bristling at me.
On Wednesday nights the Geshe lectures in the explosive gutturals of Tibetan on the Bodhisattvacharyavatara of Shantideva, A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, written at Nalanda Monastery in India in the eighth century: the lectures are based on the twelfth-century Tibetan interpretation by Lama T’og-me Zang-po, and our copies are a verse translation made at Dharamsala by a Western monk, Stephen Batchelor (Gelong Jhampa Thabkay). At intervals the Geshe’s translator, a young Tibetan ex-monk, stumbles through his version in English.
May I be protector for those without one,
A guide for all travellers on the way;
May I be a bridge, a boat and a ship
For all who wish to cross (the water).
May I be an island for those who seek one
And a lamp for those desiring light,
May I be a bed for all who wish to rest
And a slave for all who want a slave.
May I be a wishing jewel, a magic vase,
Powerful mantras and great medicine,
May I become a wish-fulfilling tree
And a cow of plenty for the world…
Tonight everyone was jubilant: at the auction today they were the highest bidders for the mansion in Brighton that they had their eye on. The new building, which belonged to the Catholic Church, is big enough for a lot of people to live in, and has a large hall. The Geshe didn’t mention this; only spoke on the text.
I like this old St Kilda building, its leafy trees, its grapevine over the courtyard. From the street, a vast Buddha-shadow looms on the blind, cast by the golden metal statue with the lamp in front of it. Then the Geshe’s shadow comes to sit at its side.
Two seated Buddhas
shadow the candlelit blind,
one brass, one of flesh.
From the street the attic rises out of grey-black shoulders green with lichen, and has a coolie hat on, and a fringe of a bamboo blind. (Going upstairs must be like climbing into your head, H said the first time he visited.) It has a front window and a back, a long old sash-window. An alcove under the sash-window just fits a bed in. Roars and whistles wake me at dawn, the great yellow cranes getting to work on storey after storey of the building growing outside this window. The lemon gum in my courtyard is stretching up like a white beanstalk; at this rate the branches will soon be out of sight, all I’ll see will be a section of the smooth white trunk. A flat tin ledge outside the window catches the gritty morning sun, a haven for sleepy cats; every few weeks new kittens pat the string of the blind and hang clawing, looped like caterpillars, from the rim of the guttering.
The cranes halt in the afternoon. They hang their spindles up high in the sun. (If one were to fall?)
A black cat comes now, young, with glossy tufts over her bones, and sleeps facing the kitchen window on an old coir mat on a bench just outside. If I rattle plates too loudly in the sink she turns her tail to the window and sleeps on. She leaps the fence when I go out to pour milk for her, but she slips back and drinks it.
Chestnuts are in at the Victoria Market: fifteen dollars a kilo! And cases of the long ruby peppers, Florina peppers – not bright like other long peppers but a deep strong red (madder carmine? crimson lake?) so intense it shimmers.
Pelion chestnuts we ate in the fog-closed leafy villages; and at home in the village, Païkos chestnuts, crackling on the iron hotplate on autumn nights. Driving up Païkos we skidded on chestnuts, the cold road was cobbled with glossy chestnuts. The potato villages up there in the cold, one after another – all were deserted except for the very old people, the young ones having left to work in mines and factories in Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Australia. No one dug the waxy yellow potatoes growing wild. The chestnuts lay rotting. On corners in the cities you sometimes saw men hunched over red braziers – charcoal smoke, husk-smoke blown in the wind from the mountains – selling paper horns of hot chestnuts. Dour, stony, frugal Greece – never a land of plenty, at least since Homeric times. Nor do all of those who leave go on mourning long for what Dimitris Tsaloumas has called ‘the humbler, severely economical Aegean world where the only extravagance is in the light.’
The rarer a thing is, the more fiercely, triumphantly, it has to be gloried in. This egg, and comb of honey, and pomegranate tree. Praise them. Hard-won, they are, against the odds; fit to be eked out, savoured. Sought out, as well: our village was in the plain, but Mount Païkos was in sight, and Mount Vermion not far away; we found a good red wine in Goumenissa and a better one on Vermion, at Naoussa: red wine hot and husky in the throat, the head, the nose; wine that inhabited you, turned you in no time into a hot white wineskin, fire-warmed inside and out. Sometimes we even had Cretan wine, which we bought from the barrel when we were down in Thessaloniki; we sat peeling slices of the hoarded apples, dropping them in our glasses of wine to soak and be veined red. We had Cretan oranges alight on the windowsill all through the winter.
In a letter last year T sent a steel propelling pen she found among someone’s things at the dump, with a very old black-and-white photo of the owner when young, her furry dark hair loose over her face as A’s was, and her hands round a struggling black hen. What was her name and what did she write with her strange pen? All of us women writing, reading, spinning out webs to reach each other and seldom if ever meeting. If I can buy a nib for it somewhere I can use it for ink-drawings.
I spent the summer after the second-year exams working at Mount Buffalo. (The summer before that we had worked together at a beach resort, sleeping in one single bed, and now where was she?) After work once, when the moon was full and the track clear, I walked along the path at the lip of the gorge and down to the creek in its cleft, sinking my feet on to the flat rocks where they quivered and spread, icy, bright in the
white light. A little further along out of sight the water rolled through a notch in the dark cliff face down to the valley spread out wide and pale. I fastened my cold hands round rocks at head height – not at the extreme edge, there was a still lower pool to go, rimmed with rocks, before the water plunged a thousand feet down in a ribbon of fall – I clung with both hands to the rock walls, my back to the edge, and sank naked under the surface. The hissing roar that battered me was the one thread of sound in all the luminous pit of silence. I felt, not heard, myself gasping in my frozen, stubborn terror – urgently wishing I could hurtle over the cliff and be a flung white shape flying, a moonburnt Icarus – as I whipped one hand from its rock for a moment to pass it throbbing, wave-cuffed, over my breasts and thighs: they were rock themselves now, white crystal in the black crystal, icy and rough. I loved them and found them beautiful, splashing moonlit there, because she had loved them, and I hated them at the same time because she (why? and how was it possible to stop loving?) no longer found anything in them to love.
Midnight, a high moon,
and here clinging naked to
rocks in the water-
fall at the gorge lip, my white
water flesh…Shall I let go?
Look, she’s fast asleep.
The old girl’s having a nap
this hot afternoon
with only the fine white sheet
of her skin thrown over her.
I drove back to the coast last night after some days away. At the back step this morning a starling was hunched, feathers lifting in a light wind. I avoided it all day, as with any sick animal, but coming up close to the sound of flies while I was watering the blue-saucer creeper I saw that it was dead: it was a tent of feathers. A tendril of the creeper wound around its claws was holding it down. I left it there.
Last night on the phone – awful, and none of it resolved, not even any common ground – just the two of us each talking to a bare wall until tiredness put an end to it. I sat, shivering on the rug then and afterwards, cold to the bone.
What will happen? If I’m forced out in the open? The ice around me will most likely break. But if it’s only the ice that’s been keeping my head above water…? 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?
What’s the use of loving? What good is it? Lawrence’s cry from the heart to Frieda’s mother, when Frieda had gone and left him in Mexico: ‘Frieda must always think and write and say and ponder how she loves me. It’s stupidity…’
Oh Schwiegermutter Schwiegermutter, you understand as my mother finally understood, that a man does not need, does not ask for love from his wife, but strength, strength, strength. It is fighting, fighting, fighting and still fighting…And one needs strength and courage and weapons. And the stupid woman always sings love! love! love! and the rights of love. The rights of woman’s love! To the devil with love! Give me strength, only battle-strength, weapon-strength, fighting-strength. Give me this, you woman.
DHL: Letters (10 November 1923)
Gib mir Kraft, nur Schlachtkraft, Waffenkraft, Kampfenkraft. Gib mir dies, du Frau.
‘The old gypsy dreamed something about you,’ he said, looking at her with curious, searching eyes.
‘Did she!’ cried Yvette, at once interested. ‘What was it?’
‘She said: “Be braver in your heart, or you lose your game.” She said it this way: “Be braver in your body, or your luck will leave you.” And she said as well: “Listen for the voice of water.”’
DHL: The Virgin and the Gypsy
Nietzsche: ‘What does your conscience say? “You shall become the person you are.”’
I haven’t been looking at our relationship as an I-you (thou) one, have I? More like an I-he one. And he? How does he look at it? An I-she relationship? Because there is so little to go on. This is seeing too rigidly something which (in real life) is fluid, all shifts and fluctuations. Perhaps the only interactions that are, that deserve the name, are the I-you ones. In the rest we are characters in stories we have made up, in our loneliness, to people the abyss.
These are the terms in which Daniel thinks of the lovemaking between him and Jane at the clammy hotel in the fog at Palmyra, in John Fowles’s Daniel Martin:
It came to him, immediately afterwards, when he was still lying half across her, that the failure could have been put in terms of grammatical person. It had happened in the third, when he had craved the first and second.
The lighthouse was hooting. Why? Walking on the beach – the pale water, a yacht, fishing boats, surfers twisting on the waves. March flies and a sultry silence, the tide turning and going out. Families sitting on the wet sand beside the pier.
No sleep till morning. Nausea and dragging pain. The cycle of lust, tears, sorrow, bitterness. Bound to the wheel.
At the step a bird
crouches, feathers the wind lifts,
cocking a gold eye –
no, a gold fly drones, leaving
socket and crouched bird, hollow.
From Robert Ely’s Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke:
His [Rilke’s] poems by 1906 had a marvellous solidity, but with Rodin’s help he was about to enter a new area. He was about to ask an object a question and then listen. As Antonio Machado said:
To talk with someone,
ask a question first…
then, listen.
(‘When a question is posed ceremoniously, the universe responds.’)
Bly quotes Francis Ponge, ‘the living master of the “seeing” poem’:
Nothing can prevent the meanings which have been locked into the simplest object or person from always striking the hour…In these terms, one will surely understand what I consider to be the function of poetry. It is to nourish the spirit of man by giving him the cosmos to suckle.
BUDDHA IN DER GLORIE
Mitte aller Mitten, Kern der Kerne,
Mandel, die sich einschliesst und versüsst
dieses alles bis an alle Sterne
ist dein Fruchtfleisch: Sei gegrüsst.
Sieh, du fühlst, wie nichts mehr an dir hängt;
im Unendlichen ist deine Schale,
und dort steht der starke Saft und drängt.
Und von aussen hilft ihm ein Gestrahle,
denn ganz oben werden deine Sonnen
voll und glühend umgedreht.
Doch in dir ist schon begonnen
was die Sonnen übersteht.
BUDDHA INSIDE THE LIGHT
The core of every core, the kernel of every kernel,
an almond! held in itself, deepening in sweetness:
all of this, everything, right up to the stars,
is the meat around your stone. Accept my bow.
Oh, yes, you feel it, how the weights on you are gone!
Your husk has reached into what has no end,
and that is where the great saps are brewing now.
On the outside a warmth is helping,
for, high, high above, your own suns are growing
immense and they glow as they wheel around.
Yet something has already started to live
in you that will live longer than the suns.
Rainer Maria Rilke (Robert Ely’s translation)
‘Rilke had adopted the discipline of seeing: he spent years on that road. It occurred to him now [with Orpheus] that listening might be a road in itself. It might be a great road…’
Gesang ist Dasein.
I collected the painting of the Ondine and have left it leaning against the wall until I decide what room it should go in. The retreat in Tasmania will be for ten days – at a farm in the mountains, overlooking a lake. A young Tibetan Rinpoche who lives and teaches in Canada is coming – one who speaks English.
At the Prahran Market I bought two nannygais for the story of ‘Vase with Red Fishes’. Nannygais (redfish!) are cheap – so cheap they won’t clean them for you at the Victoria Ma
rket, and the blunt knives I have, and clumsy hands, mutilate fish – and as beautiful as red mullet (rouget), clothed in white samite, red chainmail over it, and they taste very similar. What an extravagance red mullet was in Greece, when you could find any! Brought blistered from the grill to the table with a ticket stating the weight, and a sauceboat of olive oil and lemon juice to gild them. I stuffed the bellies of these red fish with parsley and Vietnamese mint from the garden and baked them, but I think they are better grilled, or floured and fried, crisp-skinned. Next time try that.
They are not red-skinned – they have silvery white skin tightly covered in a mesh, a red net with a sheen, denser at the peak of the back and more open and pale lower down. A rack of dorsal spines, fins clear red, finely braided. Blood has tarnished their eyes. The pupils are hollow – you can see into the dim caves in their skulls.
At the base of the great wound behind the head and in the skin along the slit at the edge of the belly – a bluish pearly gleam.
It doesn’t seem long ago (but it is, it’s fifteen years) since we served platters of barbounia at the restaurant we had in Greece, a psarotaverna that we named ‘O Kapetanios’ after the landlord, whose boats with their triple lamps were dragged up on the sand beside our tables, sometimes with a small octopus or two spreadeagled to dry, scarred by wasps. At daybreak when the boats came in, the crew knocked on the windscreen to wake Chris to make coffee. Then all morning they sorted and cleaned the catch in the icy spring that ran from under Mount Olympus to wash out on to the sand under one of our poplar saplings; a square of little poplars made an outdoor wall for the taverna, strung with fairy lights. They made a fish stew in our kitchen and shared it with us: we could sell for lunch – Today’s Special – what was left over. At the height of the summer we were often still frying prawns and washing dishes until two in the morning. Then three hours’ sleep in the car.
The season in that northern place was over after the Feast of the Virgin in mid-August. The sun had begun to have a chill in it; the sea filled with jellyfish – limpid medouses, Medusas; and tsouchtres whose lash marked you like hot iron. R and B came from London and stayed with us – R had a copy of The Pentagon Papers that we were all deep in, though how unimaginably far Vietnam and Australia and the war seemed then! – and swam and lay in the sun, B with her long hair in drifts all around her. They left on the Kapetanios’s caïque after a quick breakfast, floating east towards Nea Michaniona for the Feast of the Virgin (no fishing then, or on full-moon nights either, the lamps being no match for the moon): we waved at the caïque melting into the red-gold mist, stranded as we were among the watermelon rinds and seeds, wasps and crusts and coffee grounds, in a drift of sand.
A Body of Water Page 4
