A Body of Water

by Beverley Farmer

  William Gass’s tribute in ‘Three Photos of Colette’ in The World Within the Word, is eloquent, comprehensive, graceful. The sad photo with Willy is in my Belles Saisons, A Colette Scrapbook and so are some of the ones on the ‘raft’ of her divan in her old age, if not the same one: there she is, upholstered with cushions, her work propped on the table over her lap and her pen in hand, a consummate old Poussiquette, her eyes and lips quizzically narrowed under her grey frizz; and over her shoulder is the lamp-globe hooded with a sheet of her pale blue writing paper to make the fanal bleu that burned in her window. It looks out, the window, on winter branches, mist, a statue in the gardens of the Palais-Royal.

  Experience was her dictionary, and what we can observe, as we read through the Claudines, is the compiling of that dictionary, and how, out of that large scrawly book of girlish words, is finally shaped an art of grave maturity, subtlety, perception, grace; one which is at once so filled with Colette’s own presence and yet so open to the reader, so resolutely aimed, that it masters a mode: le style intime, one would be tempted to call it, if that didn’t suggest it was a naughty perfume.

  William Gass: The World Within the Word

  The back cover of Belles Saisons, A Colette Scrapbook quotes some comments – Truman Capote’s is: ‘She looked precisely as Colette ought to have looked. And that was astonishing indeed. Reddish, frizzly, rather African-looking hair; slanting, alley-cat eyes rimmed with kohl; a finely made face flexible as water…’

  The Queenscliff library had the book Gass was writing about: Yvonne Mitchell’s Colette: A Taste for Life. So the afternoon went on first the photos, then the text, in the sun in the garden…Her mother’s name for her was Minet-Chéri. She did indeed have a drop of African blood, trust a Southerner to pick it; and all her life kept her eyes circled with blue kohl. Janet Planner’s comment is: ‘Born with talent, she achieved style. She was a scrupulous worker who by a kind of fétiche wrote on pale blue paper as if writing indoors on a patch of sky’. Minet is Puss. Puss-Darling.

  (Her marriage to Willy, which at the time seemed to have been an overwhelming mistake, a disaster so total that she came close to dying of sorrow – she made a portal of discovery; compare Lawrence with Frieda. La génie est une révolte qui a créé sa propre mesure: Camus.)

  It must be years since I read Le blé en herbe: read it again now here. This coast is like the Breton coast – the dunes, the seawrack and rockpools. Curlews. Les courlis.

  Yesterday was a north-wind day with what the Greeks call a sullen sky, moundos, and a clear smell of rain from the sea. The storm broke during the night with thunder and wild rain.

  Fast-flickering ears above the windowsill, and there was a cat licking one sulphur haunch, propped on the slate slope above Faraday Street, its tail a flow-down of fur in the sun. When I tapped the pane, softly in case it got a fright and fell, it bent and gawped in at me with cavernous eyes.

  When they stop work at the construction site, and only if the wind is coming from the direction of the colleges, I can hear the Ormond bell chime in its delicately coroneted sandstone tower, like when I was at Women’s and used to count the chimes with which my dark room rang. Twenty eight, twenty-nine years ago.

  Yesterday squalls of rain and sun hit the outer sheds of the Victoria Market. Racks of clothes went flying. Water drops glittered on cases of red and dark green peppers, and on eggplants – great bulges of water, black on black. In the lane where the gutter runs out of the fishmarket, a sudden sharp sea smell and glint.

  One of the fish stalls had a sign: FRESH BAILER SHELLS – no price. I pushed my way up to the glass counter to see several large heavy shells, and shrinking inside the black and orange lip of each of them a glistening creature, a slug of bright orange-rose, brown-veined, crinkled, a brain. The shell was pale, patterned like the flesh intricately in browns, with here and there an overprinting, a faint smudge of black. Who eats these? What sort of barbarians are we, to be fetching such things from the sea floor and offering them for sale in stalls already spilling over with fish and shellfish – green-lipped mussels, mudcrabs and blue swimmers, their long frail delphinium-blue legs spread, and all that white and blue-grey and red flesh sprawling, and the gaping intact fish with their dappling and gloss of slime and scale encasing them, one bubble of shit at the anus. How the watery fish-flesh holds the light in! It glows at the surface like alabaster. I bought some small headless leatherjackets, silky-white with two gold or blue-green fringes – tough little fish but good, clean-boned.

  Cats and the Neapolitans,

  Sulphur sun-beasts,

  Thirst for fish as for more-than-water;

  Water-alive

  To quench their over-sulphureous lusts…

  D.H. Lawrence: ‘Fish’

  It was still raining in the afternoon (and rain is seen as auspicious) when the Geshe gave a Green Tara Initiation in the new gompa at Brighton: so, my second initiation. First we lined up outside to wash our hands and faces and mouths with water – not clear, but golden water (infused with saffron?) poured into our cupped hands. Candles and torma figures were taken outside and offered to the evil spirits to keep them from coming in. At one point rice grains were passed round, and a white flower each, to be balanced on the crown of the head; and three times the water was poured from teapots into our cupped hands: the body, speech and mind of Tara. The chanting was dirge slow. The commitment the Geshe has imposed is to go on a week-long retreat next January or say the Tara mantra ten thousand times. Om Tare Tuttare Ture Soha. A hundred times a day for a hundred days.

  The gompa at the new building is so ugly my heart sinks in dismay: fan-shaped, with a back wall of stained glass, but jagged, garish and crude. The stage is remote over a sea of carpet, the great red-and-gold man is lost on it, even his voice faint; and the gilded Buddha, which in the old gompa sat beside him in its glass case and glowed against its shadow on the blind, here has to sit like a museum piece somewhere in the clutter at the back.

  More cold rain most of the day these days, then a hollow light under cloud, a sea white to the horizon. More rain at night and my torch picks out all over the grass slow brown snail-domes moving.

  This morning the fig tree has seven shoots. Some are already opening to the sun and rain, unclasping pale-green veined leaves, like the leaves at the hollow hearts of Cos lettuces. The grapevine has thick clusters of tiny green seeds and leaves as large as my hands, but tender: any day now there’ll be enough to pick and stuff with rice and onion and mint – the mint I potted is growing strongly too – for yalantzi dolmades.

  I tried the leatherjackets several ways: plaki in the oven was the best, sliced onion and garlic and tomatoes on top and underneath them, with sweet potatoes (not Greek, that – that’s my légère gauchissure). The young Greek woman, Soula, in the first story I ever wrote, walked home at sunset and cooked fish plaki in her simmering house, in anguish at having to tell her husband that she was pregnant: how could they save enough to return home now? How hard I worked on that little story, how I loved it! Just before we left for Greece in 1969, I even translated it into Greek and sent it to a new women’s magazine, in Sydney I think it was, but never heard back. I had sent it to Overland and on the back of his rejection slip (which I still have, and others since as well) Stephen Murray-Smith – blessings on his kindliness! – wrote that it was ‘too much of a sketch’ for Overland but ‘definitely publishable’ and why not try Westerly? And Westerly accepted it!

  I showed Mum and Dad the story in print. We didn’t talk about it. This was just after Mum’s stroke. She was learning to speak again, with a speech therapist and a third-grade reader, and an exercise-book to practise writing in, which at her death had a dozen pages of neat grammar work and then only drafts of letters to me and columns of Scrabble scores. She never took up reading again: by the time she turned a page, she said, she had forgotten what she had just read – it was blank in her mind.

  Charmes has turned up, my old purple-and-white Classiques Larous
se copy folded into the Mallarmé volume, but, reading through it, I can’t find any remark about the légère gauchissure – have I remembered it wrongly for twenty-eight years? Was it someone else, I mean, not Valéry?

  Could it have been Baudelaire? Mon coeur mis à nu? What else was I reading then? Gauguin? Journaux intimes?

  Here in Charmes is the assimilated mutton I remember of old:

  Rien de plus original, rien de plus soi que de se nourrir des autres. Mais il faut les digérer. Le lion est fait de mouton assimilé.

  ‘Nothing more original, nothing more oneself than feeding on others. But you have to digest them. The lion is made of assimilated mutton.’ Rien de plus soi: soit. Mais – the vulture is made of assimilated lion, et ainsi de suite, n’est-ce pas?

  There are snake poems in Charmes! – ‘l’lnsinuant’, ‘Ebauche d’un serpent’ – something I’d forgotten when I wrote to P, though it might occur to him anyway. The note to ‘Les Pas’, a short poem on putting off the reality to prolong the joy of anticipation, is: ‘M. Duchesne-Guillemin commente ce poème par une jolie formule: Il ne faut pas lâcher l’ombre pour la proie.’ You shouldn’t give up the shadow for the substance. This is delightful; Valéry would smile. (It could be a comment on his work in general.) I don’t remember noticing it, thirty years ago. It was too soon for me. I was too young.

  ‘Le cimetière marin’ and ‘Fragments du “Narcisse”’ I must read properly again. Where Narcissus says the soul bends over this water in its longing to see Zeus in the form of a swan, there is this:

  L’âme, jusqu’à périr, s’y penche pour un Dieu

  Qu’elle demande à l’onde, onde déserte, et digne

  Sur son lustre, du lisse effacement d’un cygne…

  ‘Sur son lustre, du lisse effacement d’un cygne’. Ssssss…A ruffled surface of water sounds all along that line. And when Narcissus at last leans forward and kisses his image:

  L’insaisissable amour que tu me vins promettre

  Passe, et dans un frisson, brise Narcisse, et fuit…

  The ruffling of the waters in Greek is paflasma, paflasma.

  I owned a cardboard-covered book called Green Waters when I was a child; it was by a Sydney man, ‘John Mystery’, and told how the Woolley twins, Pearl and Plain, went with the good prince Oleron under the waves one night to his city in the Golden Bubble, outside which ceaselessly prowled the Selachian King and his hordes, or was it ‘Salachian’? Three evil witches, this book had: Malice, Avarice and Injustice, who had lured and at last destroyed the child Graciousness with a poisoned apple; and they were the twisted crags, the Three Sisters, in the Blue Mountains. The sea mourned for her, saying Graciousness, Graciousness…Passionately I loved Green Waters and played out scenes from it in my mind, and further adventures. I’ve only met one other person who read it as a child; this was at Women’s College, and she was addicted, she shyly confessed, she had known it off by heart too. There were several John Mystery Books: who was he, then, John Mystery? Under the mask?

  The Aboriginal Photographs of Baldwin Spencer: There are several of Kakadu, among sand palms and paperbarks, ledges of rock – one of a naked Kakadu man holding the head of a long white water snake in his mouth, the length of its body lying down his, against his thigh and his heavy penis and scrotum: the caption explains that one strong tug will snap the spine.

  (My father took some snaps like these here of a corroboree on Palm Island. Did Mum lose the old photo album when she moved out, did she in her anger – he had died first and left her alone! – throw it out?)

  One photo shows a shaggy nest in a tree, like a stork’s nest on a tower in a Greek village, but it holds the remains of a dead child whose spirit might hover there and so enter another womb and be born again. Young people were buried in a tree; when very old people died they, having lived a full life-span, were buried in the ground; their belongings were burnt.

  Women in mourning for a husband cut off their hair, covered themselves with white pipe clay, the colour of death, and scarred themselves with a yam stick or fire stick. They were forbidden to speak for months, a year, two years. One old Waramanga woman with a lumpy, surly profile had chosen not to speak a word for over twenty years! Did she listen when others spoke? Did she still have the power of thought in words, or would thought have decayed in her? Did she fall short of words, or had she gone beyond them? By what means could anyone find out the answer to that? Which philosopher said there can be no thoughts without words? Is it true? Some mental processes do seem to take place in images – without words, or apart from words.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:

  6.5 When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words…

  6.522 There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

  6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognises them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

  This is like the ‘familiar compound ghost’:

  And he: I am not eager to rehearse

  My thought and theory which you have forgotten.

  These things have served their purpose: let them be.

  So with your own, and pray they be forgiven

  By others, as I pray you to forgive

  Both bad and good. Last season’s fruit is eaten

  And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.

  For last year’s words belong to last year’s language

  And next year’s words await another voice.

  T.S. Eliot: ‘Little Gidding’: Four Quartets

  What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

  Blue weather today at last. How I hope for a hot summer and for this soft white dough-body, this clay, to be baked brown!

  Chris rang, regaling me with details of his new pâté made with the herbs he grew on his ledge of soil on the hillside, and a pasta dish with chicken and herbs in the sauce.

  Low tide, an ice wind. Tatters of jellyfish on the sand along the waveline caught the setting sun. A crab carapace light as a meringue, with painted brown eyes.

  Jacqueline du Pré died on Monday of multiple sclerosis. There was a newsclip of the last public performance she gave, scowling fiercely as she sawed at her cello, long hair tossing; Daniel Barenboim at the piano. She was forty-two.

  Swan Bay was half sun and air today, half water. Islands in mid-air. Boats lay on their sides. (Along the streets of Queenscliff they do too, in the grass outside houses.) Stones drying in the mud-sand, and on every post a cormorant. The silence. I gathered brushes of young gold-green glykanitho, sweet-aniseed weed, thick stalks as crisp as celery beside the railway line.

  Repotting tarragon, basil, cherry tomato seedlings I found in the bottom of an old pot a tiny frog the colour of earth. I lifted it on my finger where it clung, very cold, the thin translucent fingers of one hand outstretched and its fish-eyes globular, brilliant, until it dared to leap off into the grass.

  The sun rose in the sea; large splashes of rain hit and wet us and, turning, we found a rainbow.

  The crow that scrapes its claws down the iron roof and wakes me early with its cawing came to the birdbath this morning, dwarfing it, and I felt an impulse to chase it off. Offended. As if it was my water. And is a crow’s thirst less worthy than a blackbird’s? Error upon error.

  Half a small pale-blue egg shell lay on the lawn, eaten clean.

  I uprooted an oak seedling that there’s just no room for. The ribbed yellow nut, waxy like a chestnut, had split the husk off and was a bivalve linked by a curled white shoot: at the point where the clitoris would be, a straight little brown trunk rose up, crowned with leaves.

  Alain Robbe-Grillet in Scripsi: ‘The failure of the Revolution wa
s probably due to the simple fact that the artists were silenced.’

  Grace Cossington Smith: ‘My chief interest has always been colour, but not flat crude colour. It must be colour within colour, it has to shine, light must be in it.’

  (Compare A.S. Byatt saying in that radio interview that she admires Patrick White: ‘…because of the light. He can paint the world so you see through it and you see it at the same time.’)

  Marilyn French, in an interview by Paul Mansfield in the Age today. ‘Men as a class have to, if we’re going to save this world, start taking responsibility for the next generation. One of the terrible things that’s happened to this world is that men have been given power without responsibility and women responsibility without power.’

  My italics. A slogan or bon mot? The more I think, the truer it is.

  Feeling like a ghost from the future, I walked past the rented house in Glaneuse Road that I lived in two years ago, after I left Lorne and before I decided whether to find a house to buy down here. The bush garden in front is wild – banksias, bottlebrushes, tea-trees. You couldn’t see in. The sitting room was a gallery of glass with a tall green bush against each side, the east and the west, both bearing large red flowers when I moved in (June, at the solstice). The eastern tree was a camellia, the western a hibiscus – a winter and a summer tree in flower at once. I sat and wrote in the space between a winter and a summer. The sun in the leaves on one side or the other filled the room with green light for most of the day.

  The moon rising cast light on the grey trunks of apple trees, and their shadows fell in on my papers.