A Body of Water

by Beverley Farmer

  Would there be ever one to help us to fullness again

  Save for our own lone walk over the sleepless land.

  (translated by Walter Arndt)

  Every tentatif I make in the direction of a new story brings me up face to face again with the mirror. The impulse withers. What is ahead lies beyond – that is, behind – the mirror, inaccessible, invisible, unknowable. Walking forward, all I see is myself loom larger, embedded in the vista of all that is behind me.

  How thick is the mirror? (is only the glass thick?) Is there anything behind it? Is the past all I am, or at least all I can know of what I am? If my new stories can’t reach into the new time, grow from the new self, better to be writing none.

  H lent me two books of essays by William Gass: Fiction and the Figures of Life and The World Within the Word. Both display (I think that word is not unjust, though it sounds censorious) a passion for writing and a virtuosity equal to it.

  The World Within the Word: (on Valéry):

  Unlike prose, poetry is not a kind of communication, but a construction in consciousness.

  (Elsewhere, though, he proves that a novel is also this, as in his essay on Proust. Isn’t any work of art ‘a construction in consciousness’ by definition?)

  It was this quality of maintaining itself in consciousness, of requiring continued repetition, of returning attention over and over again to itself like a mirror that will not allow reflections to escape its surface, that Valéry found most significant and valued most in every art.

  Fiction and the Figures of Life:

  Consciousness comes too easily. We did not learn it like a language. It leaps to its work like a mirror. Yet consciousness can close and open like an eye, its depths are not illusory, and its reflection on itself is not mechanical. It’s something won, retrieved, conserved, as love is, and as love should be…

  Imagine that a mirror, nothing falling into it, began reflecting itself: what a terrifying endlessness and mockery of light – merely to illuminate its own beams.

  So the relation of a work of art to its material, in Gass’s thought, is the relation of a fossil to the living creature; of opalised wood to the tree whose place it takes in the cosmos. (Walt Whitman has a patent on that word. Whenever I use it his voice intones, ‘Walt Whitman am I, a Kosmos…’)

  The World Within the Word:

  The snowman stands there, smiling into the wind, a lesson in ontology, an incredible confluence of contexts, a paradigm for poetry and the pure world of the word.

  (Compare my snowwoman in ‘Place of Birth’, where until she melts – and the moon wanes – she wields a power over the household, being an incarnation of the moon, a White Goddess. And in Nine-Headed Dragon River Peter Matthiessen writes of making a snow Buddha on his wife’s boulder gravestone, at the Dai Bosatsu – Great Bodhisattva – Zendo being built on Beecher Lake, in the Catskills.)

  In The World Within the Word:

  With language…Joyce transforms an actual Dublin – even Dublin, think of that – into an idle centrepiece of gleaming conception, yet for all its idleness and gleaming, an object with more realised human value, and a greater chance for immortality, than the city itself; because when, like Bloom, we enter a bar, what do we see there, what do we hear? words humming like a craftsman deep in his work; words folding in on one another like beaten eggs, like lovers mingling in the middle of their sleep; words sliding away into sentences never before imagined or discovered…words.

  This amounts to literary mysticism:

  High tricks are possible:…to carry the reader to the very edge of every word so that it seems he must be compelled to react as though to truth as told in life, and then to return him, like a philosopher liberated from the cave, to the clear and brilliant world of concept, to the realm of order, proportion, and dazzling construction…to fiction, where characters, unlike ourselves, freed from existence, can shine like essence, and purely Be.

  Fiction and the Figures of Life

  The other day Gerald Murnane wrote a piece in the Age about remembered books, comparing that to a remembered town, visited once a long time ago. What is remembered is not the book but ‘the experience of reading the book, or the experience of remembering having read the book, or the experience of imagining having remembered…’

  Memory as a mirror facing the past, or facing a mirror facing the past, or a mirror facing…It reminds me of Janet Frame and her ‘mirror city’, the city of the imagination, which began as the city on the other shore on Ibiza, reflected in the bay where she could see it as she sat writing. (Was Alice Through the Looking Glass a formative book for her? It was for me.) There she is islanded like the Lady of Shalott:

  But in her web she still delights

  To weave the mirror’s magic sights.

  Think of the jagged windows and crumbling masonry of any city barely remembered – the spaces that gape in the image of it. To reread, then, is carefully to rebuild and restore, in the course of which we may come across some old building tucked in among others, which we must often have walked right past before – a hairy little beehive basilica in the Plaka, ruins of the Jewish Market behind flower stalls in Thessaloniki, diagonally across from the markets. Oh, the markets in Thessaloniki! Bare lightbulbs burn over squandered spilling silver blood-smeared sardines, and dangling rabbits with their fluffy grey scuts left on and a cuff of fur on each paw, and barrels of smooth and wrinkled black olives and wheels of smoked cheese, dried Kalamata figs in blond wreaths that smell like tobacco, Florina peppers of that luminous deep scarlet, and the pears, the apples, the grapes…

  In the airless depths of the markets there was a rough-and-ready mageireion – a cookshop, you couldn’t call it a restaurant – that we loved, Chris and I. The market people ate there, crowding round the kitchen to choose from the pots and tapsia. Plain village fare they had, and rickety tables with old plastic cloths that the crumbs stuck to; the bread was coarse and yellow, the retsina came in copper beakers. We took our foreign friends there. When I went back alone to have lunch in 1983, seven years on, the owner remembered me from those days.

  Good bread was hard to find, you had to know where and get there early. On the waterfront along the cobbled road into the docks one small bakery jammed in among the barber shops and ouzo dens and kafeneia with dusty tables sold sumptuous black bread. MAYPO ΨΩMI SCHWARZES BROT BLACK BREAD, the sign read! Since in Greece the best, most expensive bread was pure white – psomi polyteleias, luxury bread – the procession of foreign women to this baker, some gorgeous ones stumbling there and back in high heels, caused a stir among the loungers. It could hardly be this cattle-fodder that the xenes were really after! Wolf-whistles and orgasmic groans followed us past the building sites and the strolling sailors.

  Like in the village, the bakeries all over the city accepted tapsia prepared at home – moussaka, stuffed peppers, a roast of meat and potatoes kokkinisto, in a red sauce – if you brought them for baking after the bread. (Your food, your housewifely worth, all on parade.) They only charged five drachmas psistika (baking fee) and hardly anyone had an oven at home. We charged the same, I remember, to cook the fish and the blood-sodden game birds that customers brought to ‘O Kapetanios’.

  Mirror cities of the mind. ΘΕΣΣAΛONIKH. Crumbling.

  In Fiction and the Figures of Life, the artist’s virtues as Gass lists them: Honesty, Presence, Unity (of being), Awareness, Sensuality, Totality…

  ‘Perception, Plato said, is a form of pain.’

  The great question as to a poet or a novelist is, How does he feel about life? What, in the last analysis, is his philosophy?

  Henry James

  Today a letter in the box, grains of dried blossom enclosed, like the flower letters I used to send as a schoolgirl: and yes, this is a TAMARISK, my friend writes: ‘Latin: TAMARIX. From the Mediterranean.’ The encyclopedia has a photo and describes it as a desert bush, tolerant of salt. No wonder they flourish here behind the dunes. They take up the salt and make their dusty
nectar. (In French: tamaris. Greek: tamarix…) The Tree of Life. A tamarisk grew from the corpse of the god Osiris.

  ‘A Drop of Water’ arrived the other day in Australian Short Stories. I’ll put a photocopy in with the letter I’m writing to P. I wonder how he’ll react to it? I feel sure he would not have tolerated the young couple in the gompa for one moment – he would have hurled them out like Jesus with the money-changers! He might hurl the story out as well.

  I wrote that each story at the moment of writing projects itself for me onto the void like a painting on glass; with me inside the story as if in a glass temple, and chaos outside. Je sais que ce que je me crée c’est une illusion de plus…

  In my first letter I wrote that, of the five Buddha families into which all humanity is divided in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, I belong to the Lotus, Padme, governed by love. Their colour is red, their element fire, their compass-point west, their Buddha, Amitabha; their saving grace is discrimination, their poison the lust for possession. When Amitabha appears in a fiery light in the Bardo on the fourth day of death, if the dead turn away in fear, they are reborn in the realm of the preta, the hungry ghosts, who gorge and gorge and are never satisfied…He answered that he was of the family of the thunderbolt, the Vajra, who are governed by the intellect, poisoned by anger. (So is H.)

  Half of love at least, in this world, is being a hungry ghost, greedy, vindictive, cruel. I’ve written this time: what if there’s a snake, not a jewel, at the heart of the Lotus: or if the jewel is there, but in the head of the serpent in the Lotus? The serpent wounds, it kills, it bestows wisdom. Rebirth. The legend of The Tibetan Book of the Dead has the text of it buried in a mountain cave guarded by the Nagas, the Serpent Kings, until its time was ripe. I expect him to be ruffled, though, he being a stickler for exactitude. As well I sent him this passage of Valéry:

  A kind of angel was seated upon the rim of a well. He looked for his reflection and found that he was a Man, and in tears, and he was dumbfounded at the appearance in the naked water of this prey to an infinite sorrow.

  (Or, if one wishes, it was a Sorrow in Man’s shape that lacked a cause in crystal heaven.)

  This face that was his, the grief that racked it, both seemed alien to him. So wretched an apparition aroused the interest of the fabulously pure spiritual matter of which he was composed; exercising it, asking questions that found no answers.

  ‘O my Evil,’ he said, ‘what are you to me?’

  He tried to smile: and wept. This infidelity of his features confounded his perfect intelligence; they had assumed an air of the particular and accidental, and their expression had become so unequal to the universality of his limpid knowing that he was mysteriously wounded in his unity.

  ‘I have nothing to beweep,’ he said, ‘nor could that be possible to me’…

  But in vain did these thoughts grow and multiply in all that amplitude of the sphere of thought, in vain did the similes chime, the contradictions announce themselves only to be resolved, in vain was the miracle of clarity incessantly achieved, with each idea sparkling in the glitter thrown off by every other, jewels as they are of the circlet of undivided knowing…

  ‘O my astonishment,’ he said, ‘charming and sorrowing Head, is there then something other than light?’…

  Paul Valéry: ‘The Angel’

  How to write something that embodies the nest-cage nexus of a couple? A static situation, so not a linear development: a sphere. In their domestic situation, the man is like someone who keeps an animal in a cage and enjoys poking a stick in through the bars to see it snarl and claw. The woman’s jealous rages excite him. He enters the cage…But that’s not where it ends. When he goes and she gets up she is still being eaten away; her wounds go on festering. Each time she has become more intensely and helplessly, inescapably, that cringing, vindictive creature howling after him.

  The cage is her obsessive love. He keeps it locked. How? By deception, evasion: he wants her caged; and she herself has come to love the cage. Part of her wants to get out; just as part of him finds it a burden to have a captive to look after. But she feels safe. She can’t get out and she can’t really hurt him. They are both free of the fear of having to be alone.

  She knows other women want her man. His handsomeness is only one reason. He has an air of dignity, plain speaking, openness. Most of all, of being free. Yes, he seems freer than he is – detached, unattached. Women fall for him and are amazed, when they get to know him better, to discover, in the attic of his life, this cage and its inhabitant.

  The jewel in the lotus: is it the lingam-yoni? The Vajra, the lightning-bolt, is a jewel: a diamond; and the male principle, the phallus.

  A guardian snake inside the lotus…Chris remembers his grandmother, his father’s mother Sophia (Wisdom!), secretly leaving milk for the house-snake, to spitofido, that lived in the roof of the first village house, the one burnt down in the Civil War – she fed it secretly, because his mother objected.

  His father will assert to this day that a cow with a sore udder has been milked by a snake.

  In Stratis Myrivilis’s Vasilis Arvanitis, set in Sykamnia (near Molyvos) on Lesbos in the first years of the century, the narrator remembers his terror as a child of the house-snake, the ‘rat snake’:

  …sweeping the coils of its body across the ceiling. That sound would turn our hearts to ice. It was a slow scraping sound as if someone were dragging a wet floor-cloth up there across the planks.

  Sometimes it was more rapid. Violent. We could hear the snake hissing like a goose and pouncing angrily. Small cries like those of a suffocating bird would scatter across the ceiling…

  They believed that when their goat in the cellar wailed in the night, this snake – they called it Mamouris – was milking her. But they never saw it until one day ‘an enormous snake began to emerge, raising the tiles with its head and slowly gliding out into the sunlight…’ The bold Vasilis leaped up and fought it with his wooden javelin like a young St George, flinging it down to die: eight feet long ‘with a head as big as a cat’s’. Worried, the mother brought the priest to bless the house. Even so, when the narrator’s little sister died that year the mother put her death down to the loss of the ‘guardian spirit’.

  In Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, the Serpent is gratifying the Devil by milking his penis.

  The serpent king Muchilinda spread his hood over the Buddha to shelter him from the rain where he was meditating in the sixth week after his enlightenment; Joseph Campbell’s wonderful book, The Mythic Image, has a photo of a twelfth-century statue in Cambodia showing the Buddha seated on those great opulent coils, instead of a lotus.

  I have always thought that household gods were animals.

  John Berger

  Andreas Loser on the ‘phenomenon of loneliness’:

  What made the word convincing was an image: outside a house in the early-morning light, I saw the shortest banister in the world, hardly the length of a hand, made for a single step; but it was curved and brightly polished and sparkled in the clear air.

  Peter Handke: Across

  The sun burning on the side window of a car parked across the street and striking through the old flawed panes of my window has covered the wall behind me with an interweaving flow of ripples. The back room is in full sun, all glitter and quivers of tree shadow. The tea-trees are still in full bloom, along my fences, along the street, all over the dense dunes. In the noon heat they simmer with insects, they breathe incense. Although dune-paths are among my oldest memories, until I was grown up (only having seen them in the summer) I never knew that these familiar old grey trees had blossom. They have a green cup, red-rimmed; five petals, bubble-round and not overlapping, like a child’s drawing of a flower; and a honey smell.

  Melissa, from Lawrence Durrell’s Justine, the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet:

  Pursewarden, who was gravely drunk, took her to the floor and, after a moment’s silence, addressed her in his sad yet masterful way: ‘Comment vou
s deféndez-vous contre la solitude?’ he asked her. Melissa turned upon him an eye replete with all the candour of experience and replied softly: ‘Monsieur je suis devenue la solitude même.’ Pursewarden was sufficiently struck to remember and repeat this passage later to his friends, adding: ‘I suddenly thought to myself that here was a woman one might very well love’.

  It was windy on the beach this afternoon. I took photos in the hollow light under the pier. Piers and bridges have always fascinated me. The first time I remember being smitten with ecstasy by a poem it was one in a Victorian Reader, I forget which grade, called I think ‘The Brook’ and illustrated with a line drawing: I coloured it in – dark green ripples under the bridge. I have memories of swimming as a child around barnacled piles, which was forbidden by notices; moving from the bright water into the dark underneath, lit by chinks, was like entering a hall.

  On the rock under the lighthouse was a pair of long birds, magpie-shaped, black-jacketed, white-breasted; another one, paddling, had a white head and orange bill. He was a Pacific gull. The sand is lower than I remember seeing it before, the rocks are standing high, gouged out by the spring tides. The pools have a sleek green pelt of iridescent velvet. Ripples scud in them, sunlines, and the fixed ripples in the rockshelf – they are sunlines too.

  Today, disconsolately watering the brown stalk of Black Genoa I saw a speck of green, and peered – a shoot close to the tip! And when I looked down there were three more, one almost open. So it is alive. Black Genoa (which stands for J) will come alive, the narrator says at the end of the story: and now it has come true. One day I must show J the story, not yet though – not until her nightmares stop.

  Quince blossoms are large white cups speckled with pink and enclosing purple stamens, each cup on the tip of a twig already heavy with leaves.

  The series on Colette’s life on SBS on Saturdays is visually marvellous, though maybe not accurate in every detail – surely Missy was bitter when they broke up, she didn’t bow out with quite so much noble renunciation? The actress playing Colette is warm and astringent à la fois, just right – that cocky cynicism, that tender dignity. The script has its awkwardnesses, but her presence redeems them all. As a girl I was as repelled as I was attracted by Colette’s maturity, the extent of her experience and the languorous grace with which she could deploy herself. Such a practised voluptuary seemed to me corrupt and cynical, and besides, I saw my raw, gauche and anxious self through those long eyes as disdainfully as if they could see me from the page. Not that the eyes have disappeared – no, it’s I who have, or seem to have.