A Body of Water

by Beverley Farmer

  Skirting the full frog pond with a chilly scud across it, over the road and the dunes you go down on to the surf beach. The tea-trees up there in the dune-folds are whiskery knuckles, leafless and lichen-spattered, scraping the sand. Though the sea is so near, there’s not a whisper of it, as if this really were another time.

  I liked living back there, deep in the tea-tree. Glaneuse Road: after the French barque Glaneuse, wrecked off the surf beach in 1886 with her bottles of contraband cognac. (And Glaneuse, gleaner: what I was and am.) For those six months I was suspended out of time in a glass lantern, not swinging – still, somewhere between two seasons. An old life, a new.

  Nine-Headed Dragon River has this on the Basho haiku:

  Old pond

  A frog jumps in

  The sound of water.

  Basho was a Zen student, and his old pond is the vast emptiness, the eternal. The frog is the quick glinting of fleeting life. The splash is the instantaneous NOW! that makes them one.

  Heat and sun for the first day of daylight saving. J read a story in the ‘Readings with Readings’ program in the Lounge at Mietta’s, among the fringed lamps, clustered gold bubbles of light overhead, black statues bearing flowers – heat and smoke drifting. The dappled grey marble of the round tables, bright with the light cast by wineglasses.

  At seven o’clock tall buildings still reached up into the sun.

  In the livid night sky – never black in Carlton – a crescent moon lay on its back holding a smaller moon clasped, a dim full one. (On top of a stupa they have an orb in a cusp.)

  In summer sun this morning a handful of supporters assembled with banners and placards in the shade of the chained lawn beside St Paul’s for the rally in aid of the Tibetans, along the lines of the Dalai Lama’s speech to the US Congress. What a lost cause, against the monolith of China! Another Timor, another Afghanistan, another Terra Nullius, for that matter…(The Chinese have nuclear installations in the Tibetan Himalayas now.) A young Tibetan, baby-faced, in a grey robe and embroidered cap with furry flaps, addressed us earnestly, barely coherently, waving a loudhailer. Traleg Rinpoche spoke, and one or two others. No robed Tibetans were there, no Geshes. Their presence would have given the protest the dimension of moral authority it lacked. They feared for their visas if they meddled in politics, is one explanation (but Australia is not India). They feared reprisals against their relatives still in Tibet, against monks in general? (But the Dalai Lama dared to speak out against China to the United States Congress.) Two TV channels thrust cameras in faces and asked questions. A petition was passed round asking the Australian Government to speak up for the Tibetans imprisoned in Lhasa. Then we marched to the Chinese Consulate so that a deputation of three Tibetans could hand a letter over – at the end of Queens Road, all the way down to St Kilda Junction!

  When we got to the back street entrance at 12:10, police were standing on guard at the locked gates. The Chinese would be in conference for forty-five minutes, the loudhailer said. We squatted in the narrow shade to wait. Rather late in the day the one dubious banner, showing a black swastika inside a Star of David, equating the Chinese genocide in Tibet with that in Nazi Europe, was burnt…Whether in protest or in shame no one was saying – no statement on this was loudhailed. (Tibet is no Auschwitz.) Someone went to the supermarket and handed round cold drinks. When the stronghold stayed silent at one o’clock, a policeman went in to speak to the Chinese: the message was that they had decided not to receive the letter. Was anyone surprised? Cramped and sweaty we strayed to the tram stop.

  A yellow flat bay broken by rocks when I drove back at nightfall. Fossickers out under the cliff. The tide so far out it looked as if you could almost walk to the other shore.

  A thick letter in the box, from the Literary Arts Board: they have approved a year’s Fellowship. Which guarantees me a year’s writing time! If not more.

  I counted forty-five dead birds on the beach this afternoon before I turned back, all the same size and all intact (though some had no eyes), so they must have all been washed up in last night’s heavy sea. Most were in couples – so much so that with each new one I found I automatically looked for the other. They had small sooty heads. They were sooty all over to the feet and the straight beak hooked down at the tip. Maybe they were muttonbirds. Those lying spread open on their backs showed a white lining to the wing, a grey-white marbling of plumage over the hump of the breast.

  The mirrors are vibrating. A boat must be on its way through the Rip, perhaps the ferry to Tasmania: the engine-throb is clear, close: the mirrors always reflect it first. The ships dislodge them; I’m always having to straighten them. The pictures shift. Trickles of soot sift down the chimney onto the fireplace bricks.

  No. I won’t write about obsessive love, the keeper and the inhabitant of the cage. I’ve written all I want about that situation – all I know and all I want to know. Move on.

  Perception is a form of pain.

  The bedroom window is full of the apple tree suddenly, white flowers, deep leaves – from now until autumn I won’t see any sea through the branches, and only a flicker or two of morning sun on the wall.

  I’ve finished V.S. Naipaul’s new book, The Enigma of Arrival (part of the de Chirico painting is on the dustjacket) – a long, attentive study of change and stability over twenty or so years in a place (Wiltshire) and an identity (his – or the narrator’s – own). The subtitle is ‘A Novel’, perhaps as a safeguard for the other people he examines in it – though it occurs to me to wonder, isn’t he married? A wife is nowhere mentioned. If he has written such an intimate book leaving his wife out, then fiction it is. (If not, then what a solitude!) Maybe, though, I’m confusing him in this with his brother Shiva (whom I saw once, when he had lunch at the restaurant in Lorne). The Enigma of Arrival is dedicated to the memory of Shiva Naipaul, a gesture that deepens in meaning the further you read. The end recounts his return to Trinidad for the funeral of his sister Sita, and so the book is bracketed with two ends, two deaths holding it closed like a pair of hands.

  On his night in New York he stayed at the same hotel as I did later, the Wellington (near Carnegie Hall – where I went and heard Daniel Barenboim play Schubert). This and having seen his brother: these two small approaches to him please me very much: any chip in such a remoteness, any foothold.

  So persistently that you can’t help but be conscious of it, he repeats words, phrases, whole passages by way of reprise, each time with an accretion of depth, of subtext: like when you go up a spiral staircase, making the same twist over and over but seeing further every time, the higher you go. Yes, in this book spirals within spirals are spiralling, around a hollow centre, which is the narrator.

  Someone has stolen the pot of spilling evergreen ivy from my verandah in Carlton.

  At the market I bought two thick-fleshed purplish-green roses today to eat, two magnified asparagus tips – like the ones the women were picking armfuls of in the fields below the Dolomites, spring artichokes of 1970.

  I sat stewing in the attic tonight and read the chapter ‘The Causality of Form’, then the whole of Etienne Gilson’s Painting and Reality for the légère gauchissure, but no luck (though great pleasure.) There were all my underscorings and absurd emphatic scribblings in ink of 1960, and whoever did I think I was writing them for? This older self who would read them one night and smile? Then on a hunch I took L’homme révolté down and in the chapter Révolte et Art, there it was at last, the légère gauchissure! Of course it was Camus! It would have been out of character for a classicist like Valéry, whose ideal in Art was a rigorous, limpid – incandescent – absolute perfection.

  I took L’homme révolté with me to Tahiti in 1960, and read it on the ship and at Erena’s until I knew it by heart just about. That’s the connection with Gauguin – why I thought it might have been Gauguin who wrote about the gauchissure. And two other books I took: Four Quartets (which still goes everywhere) and a pocket-sized book of Gauguin prints, among them Otahi, Tah
itian for ‘alone’ – a long-haired woman seen in profile resting on her knees and elbows, her chin in her hands: this gave me the title for my first book.

  I remember walking into sun and dust in the Seminar Room one day in 1959 and seeing the giant chalk letters on the blackboard: CAMUS EST MORT.

  Delacroix, quoted in Painting and Reality: ‘Criticism follows the works of the mind as the shadow follows the body.’ And Gilson’s comment:

  If art criticism itself were aware of the fact, little harm would be done; unfortunately, it so happens that, in virtue of its own essence, art criticism considers itself the qualified judge of art. The root of most misunderstandings on this point is an illusion of perspective that induces the shadow to imagine itself preceding the body it follows.

  I love a masked book. Even before I could read, I thought lifting a dust-cover off only to find the same cover underneath – Scripsi is always like this – was as good as a magician’s trick, as if a mask pulled off in the theatre were to uncover a real face just the same. In those days, besides, books often had a frontispiece the same as the dustcover. Compare the scene in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame where Quasimodo is elected Roi des fous for the most hideous grimace, only for it to be revealed as his real, fixed face. And R the other night, popping open each doll in her set of Babushkas to give me surprises – that same pleasure.

  They had Speech Day at Taki’s school, and the clock tower was open: ladders, dismantled parts of the mechanism, the hot light at different stages: hollow behind the four white clockfaces, russet in the square room of louvres where the black bell hangs. Tapped with a fingernail, it rings from a distance inside it, like a great inverted goblet of black crystal.

  BELLS FROM LADAKH

  For H

  You hold two small hats of pale gold

  brocade, the black threads worn –

  old chased brass, hung on a thong –

  and swing them together, make them sound,

  clash, sing their high song

  that pleats with ripple

  on loud ripple the pool of the night

  sky: old bells from a moon-dry king-

  dom send ring on ring now

  round a full falling moon with a

  cold brass ring all its own – unless

  your bells themselves

  flung up its rim of paler light?

  NOVEMBER

  THE FIRST SUNDAY of the month, a hot north wind and low tide, the water icily washing inch by inch of me as I wade in; but once wet I buck and tumble, whirling in the channels against the waves and look, I have my white body green-glazed all over for the first time since February!

  Further out, over the rocks that make the sea dark blue, pads of kelp ride the waves like golden-furred seals.

  Whirs, clicks and ruffles of new-hatched insects, a dry hum in the dunes. The bushes along the hot paths have purple flowers like pea flowers.

  Six bottlebrush-heads have bristled out scarlet and are obscured with moths. Silver-eyes dive into them, and a wattle bird. The first blue agapanthus is opening. The white clump has raised one long-tipped green shaft. Agapanthos, love-flower: each one will shake out a great shock of seed. The green shaft is slender, silky, blood-warm.

  A dusty sky, a few slow large drops of rain and then all night a cold wind bellowed, the house staying warm as a body inside.

  The moon is filling. At nightfall the lighted rooms along the streets look smaller than life-size, more puppet-shows than stages.

  This time the damp stain in the plaster of the kitchen ceiling isn’t another threatened flood of rainwater: the whole roof ’s full of rats’ nests, the plumber says. He found their shit scattered all over the insulation material, and feather capes, hollowed-out birds, under the eaves. The stain is rat urine…He laid a lot of poison down.

  After sunset the sky filled with a surge of storm clouds and high black gulls.

  In Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Hofstadter quotes these passages from George Steiner’s After Babel:

  Hypotheticals, ‘imaginaries’, conditionals, the syntax of counter-factuality and contingency may well be the generative centres of human speech…[They] do more than occasion philosophical and grammatical perplexity. No less than future tenses to which they are, one feels, related, and with which they ought probably to be classed in the larger set of ‘suppositionals’ or ‘alternates’, these ‘if’ propositions are fundamental to the dynamics of human feeling…

  Ours is the ability, the need, to gainsay or ‘un-say’ the world, to image and speak it otherwise…We need a word which will designate the power, the compulsion of language to posit ‘otherness’…Perhaps ‘alternity’ will do: to define the ‘other than the case’, the counter-factual propositions, images, shapes of will and evasion with which we charge our mental being and by means of which we build the changing, largely fictive milieu of our somatic and our social existence…

  ‘We live by selected fictions’: Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet.

  ‘The Lie – and not the Truth – is divine!’: Nietzsche. And this: ‘We need lies to vanquish this reality, this “truth”, we need lies in order to live…’ (The Will to Power)

  No point in fiction which doesn’t in some way expand, at least redefine, the boundaries of what fiction has said and been (fiction is what it says). Fiction can make events take place convincingly in a dimension beyond or within the ordinary one we are accustomed to: as in all of DHL…And David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life, Peter Handke’s Across, Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach…(Compare Paul Éluard: ‘There is another world, but it is inside this one.’) In the hands of these writers, a transcendental moment of fusion characteristically takes place, between one person and another, or a person and an object – the moment when the boy talks to Vicki at the swimming pool in The Children’s Bach, for example – and a surge of emotion knocks the reader off his or her feet. From then on an aura surrounds Vicki, however trivial and crass and banal she goes on to be. (Compare Andreas Loser in Across, Ovid in An Imaginary Life. They are illuminated like the four ‘riders’ in White’s Riders in the Chariot.) 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.

  In Elizabeth Jolley’s story ‘My Father’s Moon’, Veronica says: ‘I read somewhere that it was said of Chekhov that he shows us life’s depths at the very moment when he seems to reflect its shimmering surface.’ Yes, that’s it, that’s the task; it has to be at the very moment. Simultaneity of the double image, the double exposure.

  ‘The intersection of the timeless moment with time…’

  Seamus Heaney on technique in the essay ‘Feeling into Words’:

  I think technique is different from craft. Craft is what you can learn from other verse. Craft is the skill of making. It wins competitions…It can be deployed without reference to the feelings or the self…Learning the craft is learning to turn the windlass at the well of poetry. Usually you begin by dropping the bucket halfway down the shaft and winding up a taking of air. You are miming the real thing until one day the chain draws unexpectedly tight and you have dipped into waters that will continue to entice you back. You’ll have broken the skin on the pool of yourself. Your praties will be ‘fit for digging’.

  At that point it becomes appropriate to speak of technique rather than craft. Technique, as I would define it, involves not only a poet’s way with words, his management of metre, rhythm and verbal texture; it involves also a definition of his stance towards life, a definition of his own reality. It involves the discovery of ways to go out of his normal cognitive bounds and raid the inarticulate: a dynamic alertness that mediates between the origins of feeling in memory and experience and the formal ploys that express these in a work of art. Technique entails the watermarking of your essential patterns of perception, voice and thought into the touch and texture of your lines; it is that whole creative effort of the mind’s and body’s resou
rces to bring the meaning of experience within the jurisdiction of form. Technique is what turns, in Yeats’s phrase, ‘the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast’ into ‘an idea, something intended, complete’.

  …And if I were asked for a figure who represents pure technique, I would say a water diviner…As Sir Philip Sidney notes in his Apologie for Poetry: ‘Among the Romans a Poet was called Vates, which is as much as a Diviner…’

  Seamus Heaney: Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978

  Here, in the earth, is a cistern rooted.

  George Seferis

  A day with a salt breeze flickering in the sun, a glitter out at the horizon as a wave rose. The Henry Handel Richardson house in Mercer Street was passed in. After the auction I bought a humped grey and pink sequinned schnapper to bake, and a slice of watermelon as rosily translucent as sashimi; though I’m out of feta to go with it. Chunks of watermelon and feta and bread, that was summer lunch in the village – a melon sawn open every day, two on some days. No one would think of buying one already cut, and they smiled in disbelief when I told them we do in Australia. Salty rich crumbling white feta and red melon…Some of the family turned down watermelon at night – ‘All very well if you don’t mind having to keep going out for a piss’ – while the rest of us made a meal of it again, enamelled yellow under the lightbulb in the kitchen with its crown of small black stinging flies forever slowly circling.

  Having lain on the grass in the sun for an hour, visibly darker I come into the house, groping – the house is dark as well. These old houses veiled with tin and fretted wood stay cold. I radiate heat in here. Only a second areola round each nipple is white now, and my pubic delta, as they say – but a delta is a reedy swamp, mudslime, crab-infested and swarming with corrupt life. (I wrote fretted word just then. And back in March I wrote: A deep pad of sand has settled over the rock self…)

  Low tide in the afternoon. Where I swam last week is all dry rock now and dry sand with fine wave-lines. The wind is as icy as the water was, a wind to numb the ears. Round the Point the ledges of rock have a thick pelt of fretty green and white weed (sea lettuce?) like cliffs of grass in a frost. (I must buy a black-and-white film for the faceted cut crystal of water backflowing between sandbanks pricked with bird feet; and the slanted shadows of the piles of the jetty where they zigzag across the pitted rocks.)