If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed.
Wittgenstein
I want to expand and be looser. I want what I write to be ample, rich and generous, full of vigour. No more stripped and dry, clamped-down sentence-by-sentence stories – giving so little, so slowly, in such a low voice, painfully, is hardly giving at all.
‘Epitaphios’ is in print, my Easter miscarriage poem. A copy of the magazine arrived. But they’ve printed the first line – ‘Boiling eggs in red-dyed water’ – as ‘Boiled eggs in red-dyed water’. I haven’t read past the first line. If a dance has begun with such a misstep, stop the music! Don’t go on.
If it had lived – it was three months, six to go – that child would have turned twelve this month.
Names of seaweeds: seawrack, bladderwrack, kelp, sea lettuce. Stonewort, thongweed. Cystophora. Sargassum.
Rosellas in the apple tree.
Reading Alice Munro: The Progress of Love. The stories are so good that I’ve made notes on their structure. She has a way of dislocating the natural time sequence to emphasise a climactic event hinted at: the effect is at first to halo it in a sense of mystery, then in a sudden illumination.
She has a fine story, ‘Eskimo’, which I bet originated on a plane trip, just as my ‘Bread and Butter Custard’ did. (Or will have done, if I can do it…) The foreground story is an absurd and inconclusive encounter between two women, in the course of which the subservient life of the one whose eyes we see through – the doctor’s secretary – is revealed in flashes. Only that! A marvellous skill in the telling.
During the Spoleto Festival in Melbourne this week A.S. Byatt was interviewed on stage at the creaky Atheneum: a dusty half-light, red plush, a plump, creased, private face in a puff of short dark hair. She answered quite intrusive questions forthrightly, judiciously – yes, judicious is how she struck me altogether. Deliberate, scrupulous… Her voice is heavy and congested, effortful; she said that she had been an asthmatic child, and thought her intense response to the visual might come from having had so often to be still simply in order to breathe…The answers threw light on her books and the Sugar stories. Like the landlady in ‘The July Ghost’ she had a young son who was killed in an accident. ‘Racine and the Tablecloth’ is the only thing she has ever written out of hate…(Emily, the scholarly heroine enraptured with Racine, had to fight for her soul or be engulfed by the subtle serpentine headmistress who hated her, who ‘gathered herself, inclining her silver-green coils slightly…’)
I bought the two novels in stock, The Virgin in the Garden and The Game, to bring back and read when I have time. In The Game, on a first flick through, serpents seem to figure largely.
In a radio interview she spoke of having wanted to write ‘the kind of prose that Ford Madox Ford admired in Flaubert, a prose of very fine clear statement’:
Proust said of Flaubert that he wrote brilliantly despite having not one single good metaphor. What I discovered was that my imagination is essentially metaphoric, that I don’t think unless I’m connecting one thing to another thing, that the pleasure in describing is only pleasure for me when the description immediately moves on into connecting it to another idea, that a thing lights up because it’s related to something else…
(Compare Anthony Burgess on good prose in Flame Into Being: ‘Heaven knows what good prose is. If it is, as seems likely, an organisation of words that fits the subject so closely that we have the impression of living skin rather than a glove…’)
One of the epigraphs to The Game:
The principle of the imagination resembles the emblem of the serpent, by which the ancients typified wisdom and the universe, with undulating folds, for ever varying and for ever flowing into itself – circular, and without beginning or end.
Coleridge
(If there be a serpent of secret and shameful desire in my soul, let me not beat it out of my consciousness with sticks. Let me bring it to the fire to see what it is. For a serpent is a thing created. It has its own raison d’être. In its own being it has beauty and reality…Come then, brindled abhorrent one, you have your own being and your own righteousness, yes, and your own desirable beauty…
D.H. Lawrence, from ‘The Reality of Peace’, quoted in Harry T. Moore: The Priest of Love.)
R sat late insisting the other night that none of the reviews has pointed out that his novel is a ‘collage’: compare George Steiner (After Babel) – ‘In modernism collage has been the representative device…’
Also in After Babel, fragments of a translation by Francis Steegmuller of ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’: called – oh, the bliss of it! – ‘Le Hibou et la Poussiquette’:
O Minou chérie, ô Minou ma belle,
O Poussiquette, comme tu es rare,
Es rare,
Es rare!
O Poussiquette, comme tu es rare!
When the sun comes in on the Moon Chart on the wall – three hundred and sixty-five images of the moon on a dark blue sky, waxing and waning – there’s a flow like scales across belly and flanks, a strip of snakeskin or blue crocodile.
Picking heavy pink plumes of blossom at twilight I disturbed dark moths. What attracts them to this tree whose name I don’t know? (It has some old-fashioned name. I’ve looked up likely names and picked a sprig to give a friend as she was leaving, in case she could find out for me. Is it a laburnum? No. Verbena? Tamarisk? In summer its fronds are green, cypressy, and then tawny before they fall.) Like a single giant bird, moths flapped over me and the waving boughs.
Every wall in the house has helpless moths clinging. The first of them I collected in cupped hands and tossed out in the garden. Now with so many everywhere, I’ve given up. With the lamp on inside and the curtains open in the half-dark, dense shadows of them gather, flittering up and down the panes.
Instead of Bread and Butter Custard, does she cook Stuffed Baked Apples? Like the ones we had tonight, awash in gold sugar-butter, singed dates on top, leathery loose brown skin which were waxy green balls before they went into the oven, each with a grainy crown, a cockade of cinnamon and a leaf of lemon-rind. She spoons ice-cream on and the sauce stiffens under it to a sugary crust. Yes, and the story to be called ‘Baked Apples’.
The quarrel has to happen off-centre: the focus is on the girl cooking. If I were Olga Masters I could do it like the meal in ‘The Snake and Poor Tom’. That father – yes, he reminded me. If I had her insouciance! No one is like her: sly, garrulous, fussy, with that glow of sensuality, and an alertness. Carving a family life to the bare bone like a Sunday joint.
A moth flapped into the oil I was frying fish in, sizzled briefly and was impossible to find…I ate the crisp fish, and the moth no doubt. If these are Bogong moths – I think they are – the blacks ate them in millions in their season. All summer great hanks of them cling in crevices and caves all over the Alps (Bogong, Buffalo, Buller), having flown there from hundreds of miles away – from here, even – to take refuge in the cool dark.
H has lent me a new book of poems by Amy Clampitt (she has a quaint name): Archaic Figure, a beautiful Knopf book with the archaic figure herself on the cover, a girl named Ornithe, found in Samos, in fluted robes: no head – her braided hair only, down over her breasts. Ornithe, bird. This is a bold title, this echo of Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ (You must change your life). The epigraph is this from Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader: ‘The ancient consciousness of women, charged with suffering and sensibility, and for so many ages dumb, seems, in them, to have brimmed and overflowed…’ (On George Eliot’s heroines.) If it looks like a clarion manifesto, it is: this book lays claim to womanhood. The poems I’ve read so far – the ones about travelling in Greece, the Wordsworth and George Eliot ones – are marvellous, very charged and intense, elegant, rich pieces of work. She works together a summer visit and the winter harvest in ‘The Olive Groves of Thasos’, celebrating the trees ‘this time-gnarled / community of elders’ – in verses of four short lines, one rhyme: ABCB. A tumble
of hyphenated words one on top of the other makes a lovely flow and cross-flow of speech rhythms with no thump of feet. This is the last line: ‘the oil-steeped, black, half-bitter fruit…’ Half-bitter.
‘The Waterfall’ is marvellous too, the lines plunging down: in the foreground, the web of an orb-spider fixed among redwoods.
Four years ago in October I picked an olive off a dusty little tree and ate it in the ancient Agora of Athens. The unripe olives had a milky bloom on them like black grapes; the ripe ones were wrinkled and fell at a touch of the branch. Rich oil flowed when I bit this one, half-sweet; the slick stayed on my lips all day. The olive tree is female: i elia. All fruit trees are, in Greek. (But masculine in French and German! And sykia, fig tree, is slang in Greek for the passive male homosexual – how come?) Grey loose old-women’s hair, sun-tossing.
Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh.
Matthew 24: 32
H has a silvery young olive in his garden of trees. Silvery: I love that word. Somewhere I read that Colette wrote of an old man’s body as being ‘silvery all over, like a vanilla bean’: a remark startling and beautiful enough at first just on the surface, the visual plane; and then still more so underneath, in that a warm and wise sensual appreciation is comprehended in it. I wonder what her ‘silvery’ was in the French – argenté?
Then in the Agora Museum – cool, dark, full of shadows reflecting each other on glass cases – the two dark-faced girls in charge were exchanging recipes. One of the exhibits in there was a young girl’s grave, intact, her thin bones still clamped in earth along with jars of her cosmetics; the long pins over her shoulder-blades were, the girls said, the pins that had held up her robe. The robe and flesh eaten away, the translucent bone is left. (What was her name?) Glass cases of gold and terracotta rings, cooking ovens, pots and jars – a pair of earrings, three hanging pomegranates of pure gold; and the girls’ chatter about cooking, the only sound: the spirit there is female. A dry tomb, a female underworld. Eurydice and Kore…One step outside and you are dazed: out in the spinning sun, the wind.
In a stoa of sculptures I found one torso that glowed in subtle shapes of light as if it had formed naturally of some living or once-alive substance like bone, or cheese (cheese is ‘dead milk’, a French poet said), rather than been cut from marble. Something in the stance must have reminded me, because the proportions were not the same – anyway, out of longing for a touch of the beautiful man, I dared to reach my hand out to his breast (bone-cold he was, under my wrinkled brown hand): until a screech from the guardian Fury whipped it away.
Scaffolding and rubble obscured the Parthenon, that bone-cage hung over the fumes of the city. Narrow steps and streets in the Plaka burned through sun and shadows alive with cats. In Odos Adrianou I bought a paper bag of hard reddening green pears (Mount Pelion pears, I’d know them anywhere after our autumn under Mount Pelion) from a white-haired barrow man who, unsmiling, called me paidi mou: my child. The archaic courtesies.
I sat among lantanas! In full flower and with black beads of fruit, at the Odeon of Agrippa; black and white butterflies, harlequin bugs, a line of ants. A taverna near the Tower of the Winds still had empty bottles and stacked plates on its shady tables, dusty cats and kittens wreathing the legs, low wasps humming. At sunset at Agion Taxiarchon on the corner of Odos Epaminonda – whistles of birds in the yellow fig tree opposite, a black cat pouncing into the creepers on the iron fence – the Byzantine liturgy began (but I was wearing jeans). The candles were lit. Every column of the ruin had a dark cat on top.
The oil at the shabby elaiourgeion outside Patras, where I photographed the little girl proud of her red coat, was the deep green of water under bridges.
A Sydney artist I don’t know, who once spent a year with her husband and children on the island of Syros, painting, has sometimes sent me proof sheets of etchings over the years, with a friendly message. A couple of years ago she sent a photograph of a white torso of hers, posed alone on ribs of sand, against clouds. Its shape is that of a vase or urn, waisted, lightly engraved with lines – austere, in the archaic manner, except that for breasts it has two spiralled shells, fluted and frilly, pearly in that cloud-light; for a navel, a dented shell or stone; and at the base, a pointed whelk-shell with a rough ruffled edge, open into its rosy depths. Impossible to tell if they are real shells, or if the torso is life-size – it looks monumental – or what its substance might be…
Copying out ‘The Olive Groves of Thasos’. Copying a poem I can take it in at the right pace, more than reading it, even aloud. The copy won’t go to waste: I’ll send it to Gillian in Kalamata, in time for the olive harvest.
At the Eden, the vegetarian restaurant in the Plaka (the background music was the Rolling Stones), a shy young man with a bearded smile brought me water and a retsina. When I laid Memoirs of Hadrian face-down, and was looking on as the lights moved through wine and through water over the marble, he asked in English if I minded if we talked. His mother, he said, was Australian, his father Greek, his estranged wife and their small daughter, French. The next winter he was going to Australia, his ambition was to drive across the Simpson Desert…This is Taki or any one of Gillian’s boys, I thought – in ten or fifteen years’ time.
The old vine-hung tavernas on the paths and staircases of the Plaka are spoilt now: the waiters stand outside them wheedling and touting for customers like butchers at the markets; they even grab at passing elbows. Some of the foreign tourists go along with it.
SUNDAY (lunch time) – Chris’s brother’s third son is being baptised in Geelong’s only Greek Orthodox church. Taki and I have said we’ll be there. Not the old people, Kyria Domna and Barba Stratos: they flew back to Greece in the autumn. Three summers now they’ve come and gone, minding babies. To be free to come, they sold the cows; they even sold black Marko, the old horse they had had since he was a colt. He used, in his youth, in his salad days, to slip his rope and ravage the neighbours’ crops. He bucked. Through frost and dust he hauled the dung cart along the ruts from the stable to the river-field and the tobacco baskets from the Gyrizi to the front door.
And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares…
We fed Marko wizened apples on my first morning in the village, in April 1969. He curled his lip back. Feeding the last apples to a horse? Kyria Domna said. What do you feed to people? It was Lent, for lunch that day she cooked us spring dandelions, nettles and docks…She gathered them on the hill with dew on them and stewed them in rice, hortorizo, tender and rich, with lemon juice. Ach, Marko, they were delicious.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.
W.B. Yeats: ‘A Prayer For My Daughter’
OCTOBER
AFTER DINNER WHEN the children were in bed but not asleep H took his pair of Ladakhi bells into the windy garden and holding them by the thong swung them together and made them chime a rich, shrill note that expanded ring upon ring into the night. The pear tree shivered, heavy with new leaves. A dog in the distance gave a frantic bark. Again he swung and rang them, and the dog barked again. The bells are like small stones, like the cap of a stupa, flat-bottomed, and it was as if they were thrown, stones of sound, into a lake. A wide halo, white-rimmed, surrounded the moon.
I wished I had perfect pitch.
I wished I could make the sky sing.
If I had a go of the bells, would they ring the same note?
A line for a poem about this: You made the moon ring.
His pair of Burmese cats, shadow-licked, wind-flattened, their heads shaped like the bells – crouching at moths under the moon. Lustful devotees, they make prostrations. O great bowl of mi
lk which art in heaven!
The bells make bubbles of sound – they float to the mountains of the moon – the Himalayas of the moon.
They are small brass hats, wide-brimmed; the black patterns chased on them are starting to wear off.
They sit side by side in silence on the kitchen dresser.
(In Nine-Headed Dragon River, Matthiessen writes that the tenzo, the head-cook in a monastery, ranks second only to the abbot himself! The alchemy of food. Work. Silence.)
From Robert Gray’s poem ‘To the Master, Dogen Zenji’:
Dogen received, they say, his first insight
from an old cook at some monastery
over there,
who was hanging about on the jetty
where they docked – had come down
to buy mushrooms,
among the rolled-up straw sails,
the fish-nets, and those brocade litters,
geese in baskets…
(‘Over there’ meaning China; and the cook’s lesson, of which Dogen was to write in time, when he had taken it in: ‘All that’s important/ is the ordinary things.’)
A raw rainy Sunday and a chill coming out of cement walls – the only warmth the gold glow of the chandeliers and ikons. Domenico (a version of his grandmother’s name) had to be stripped, bathed and anointed, chanted over all the while by a bushy little papas in faded robes: and he cried throughout, his body blue-tinged, red outrage and supplication on his face.
Letters: Summer 1926 has in full Rilke’s ‘Elegy for Marina’ (Tsvetayeva), which she hoarded so jealously that not even Boris Pasternak, who had made her known to Rilke – or especially not Pasternak? – was allowed to read it. These last lines on the moon (but ‘versation’?) are lovely; the whole is a sky poem:
The gods learned early
To fabulate halves. But we, implied in the circling,
Filled ourselves out to be wholes like the disc of the moon.
Not in a waning phase, nor yet in the weeks of versation
A Body of Water Page 15
