A Body of Water

by Beverley Farmer

  My long shadow follows me. A few grey-black dead birds lie flung up on the high-tide line. Fishing lines slant into the kelpy shallows at the far end of the pier.

  As soon as we finish our degrees in 1961, A said, let’s hire a boat and row and drift down the Ganges together all the way to the Delta. We went, two rough-haired very young women in torn jeans, to ask for maps and information at the Indian Tourist Office in the city, where a plump Indian natty in a dark suit slumped behind his desk and heard us out, politely scornful. He was very dubious: not at all a practical suggestion, no. I wonder if A has ever been? I never have. Soon though, some day soon.

  The wind dropped in the night. At four the foghorn woke me. I lay listening, knowing that it was worth getting up and going to the Point to see the mist under the full moon, belling and fraying at the edges like a manta ray; but drifting back into sleep before I could summon the resolution. In the morning under a mackerel sky isolated hoots sounded, and tentative replies and echoes from across the water. The air was radiant over Lonsdale Bay: a fishing boat caught the sun, a wave edge; the trees and the three towers on the grey outline of the bluff over at Queenscliff were no more than quivering spindles.

  Trickles of blood are coming again, another moon-month gone. In the Aboriginal ceremony of subincision the male is given a vagina, lips, a wound that bleeds, and fuses his identity thereby with the Female, the Kunapipi, Great Mother. He would then have no abhorrence…The Berndts’ Love Songs of Arnhem Land has long cycles of chants in celebration of the menstrual blood of the young girls, which, trickling like red snakes in the shrunken waters of this season when the Dry is about to end, attracts the Rainbow Serpent. He brings with him the thunderstorms and flooding rain. In place of this Earth-and-Sky myth, this song ritual in its grandeur and universality, what do we whites have? Our scattering of printed poems – ‘voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells’.

  In India, a name for the cobra is blood snake.

  The Cosmic Serpent on a Babylonian boundary stone:

  And as in the Indian image of the reclining world-dreamer Vishnu, above whose head the five cobra hoods of the cosmic serpent Ananta bend, so the reptile here is symbolic of the primal generative waters that surround the universe, support it from beneath, and rain down upon it from on high…

  Now the fluency of the serpent suggests water, and its continually flashing forked red tongue suggests flame, the life-giving fire inherent in fertilising waters…The moon is lord of the tides of the life, both the oceanic ebb and flow and the rhythms of the womb. Shedding its shadow, furthermore, as the serpent its skin, it is the high celestial sign of the same triumphant power of life as that represented in the serpent sloughing death.

  Joseph Campbell: The Mythic Image

  The fluency of the serpent!

  A sultry twilight, stillness. Out of nowhere growls of thunder are sounding over the bay – a sudden heavy scatter of rain in the dark. A while ago a bird fell scrabbling, crying pitifully, from above the ceiling into the space between the wooden walls. A wilder scrabbling followed it down, and the cries increased, shriller, more frequent and desperate, then stopped; one faint last cry, stopped. Now another one has started. Fledglings, mewing? Hasn’t the poison killed the rats? Or have new ones moved in?

  Looking over the notes I made on Alice Munro’s The Progress of Love, I can see the pattern more clearly now. Her focus is always intensely on the decisive moment in the life of her main character, the turning point when we – through another character whose point of view we share – see revealed in that person’s act, without at the time understanding it, the mainspring of his or her being. This moment is typically introduced out of chronological order: we sense that it will be the keystone straight away, without knowing why. The scenes of the rest of the story, laying bare the life before and after, build the arch: when the keystone takes its place in our impression of the story, its full meaning finally clear, the illusion is that we have seen it for ourselves.

  At such a moment the character – an ordinary person, like all her characters, just folks – acts ‘out of’ character. So it seems. The act has a quality of mystery, it strikes the onlooker as irrational, exaggerated, out-of-the-blue: the character stands revealed as other than we thought. We take his or her measure anew in the light of it. Light is the word: these are moments of epiphany. Often an object becomes an emblem of the mystery, like the photo in ‘Lichen’, the jet necklace in ‘Circle of Prayer’, the rope in ‘The Progress of Love’, Isabel’s ‘pure white mountain’ of candy in ‘White Dump’. (‘White Dump’ and A.S. Byatt’s ‘Sugar’! Both masterpieces, New Yorker stories – intricate, exploratory parent-and-child stories…)

  She is good on the bald intimate details of domestic lives – les détails qui les rongent (Camus). The blind spot in any relationship is her point of departure. The stories are ‘dramatic’ in technique in the way that Henry James’s are. Visual, constructed scene by scene, though not in a linear progression: the distortion in the chronology works like the planes of a Picasso face, drawing the shocked eye (when the time is ripe) to the flaw, the disruption of perspective: there the meaning has lain hidden.

  What are those times that stand out, clear patches in your life – what do they have to do with it? They aren’t exactly promises. Breathing spaces. Is that all?

  ‘Baked Apples’ is coming clear at last. Nola is her name, rather than Joanie. Her brother’s girlfriend can be Rosalie: a New Zealander from a good family (better off than Nola’s is) and half-Scottish, half-Lebanese, on a working holiday in Australia. (The father takes her for a Maori.) She and Nola meet by chance a couple of summers later, or some years later, waitressing at Mount Buffalo Chalet. Do they swim together in the moonlight, in the waterfall or lake? They share a stifling room. Walk along the bush tracks. The nexus is the friendship of these two: where’s the knot?

  Weeding around the pink pelargoniums sprawled in the sun near the front steps I heard a rustle and saw a surreptitious thick dappled tube of scales, black and brown and sand-coloured, very close to me and as still as death. It was a lizard – I made sure I could see a bent leg – and alive, because when I twitched a branch of the pelargonium it thrust itself deeper into the shadows, then lay waiting. I could see an eye scowling under its ledge of brow, but its mouth was clamped shut. It was certainly a blue-tongue, smaller than last year’s one. I hope it stays. If I avoid alarming it, it might. A blue-tongue in the garden! I want to see the sky-coloured tongue.

  It was not there, though, when I went back. Many of the flowers had a burden of bees, some with orange panniers; every stripe of bark and patch of shadow-print on the earth and dead twig was a lizard after-image.

  ‘Surreptitious’: there’s a word that rustles! And it comes from the same Latin root as ‘reptile’. The Greek is erpeto. ‘Lizard’ is savra, feminine.

  The lizard with the sky in its mouth: it’s like the god Krishna as a baby, opening his mouth and letting his mother see the truth of existence – all the worlds seething, engulfing and being engulfed over all the eons of time. But she thought she must be dreaming it: this was no god, only her baby.

  Carlton under a dust haze, and the yells and shrieks and the roar of car exhausts went on till two, a band wheeze thumped on. Cats wailed. At six the cranes and pneumatic drills started up on the one beat like an orchestra.

  My ferns and jasmine and grapevine are green: some sun reaches them. Today I planted Virginia creepers in three places to grow up over the high brick walls at the back, in the face of the construction site – that ever-rising grey cement wall.

  I bought a plush bear for C and R’s baby when it’s born, and a Greek mati, a blue-eyed bead on a pin, to guard against the evil eye.

  Some of the baby clothes I knitted for Taki at my parents’ place in the weeks before his birth I keep in a cupboard here – a cream jacket, the frothy white shawl – having held on to them at first for the next baby, and then as mementoes of the only one. Something my
mother made is there too: a small tight white singlet she worked on over weeks and months, on two pairs of needles, while it became grubbier and more misshapen and anyway Taki outgrew it – she not having knitted for over twenty years and unable ever since her stroke to read a pattern. The hours she spent peering down at it, her scowl of anxious concentration! She taught me to knit when I was eight and had to learn for school, her hands over mine in a slow-motion mime of the dance of the needles, hugging me in hilarious exasperation when I scowled and wailed and hurled the whole thing, wool and needles, across the room: I was left-handed and she was teaching me to knit back-to-front, couldn’t she understand that? You’ve learnt to write right-handed, haven’t you? she said. Well, keep trying and you’ll learn to knit…I dressed Taki in it once or twice. She saw him in it, didn’t she? (Or did I just tell her?) Even then it used to wring me with sorrow, the sight of it.

  The Encyclopaedia Britannica confirms that the pipal, the Bo or Bodhi tree, is a fig tree, Ficus religiosa; and even sycamores, rubber trees and banyans are of the family of figs. And of course, The Snow Leopard is where I read that before.

  From Buddha, by William MacQuitty:

  The most important mission of Ashoka’s reign was to Ceylon in about 250 BC and was led by Mahendra, said to have been the monarch’s son or younger brother…Following Mahendra came his sister, still remembered by her title, Sanghamitra, ‘Friend of the Order’. She brought with her a cutting from the great Bo tree under which Gautama found enlightenment. The original tree at Bodh Gaya is dead, though another has replaced it; but the cutting still survives in the spot where it was planted in Anuradhapura, the then capital of Ceylon. The tree, a type of fig, has been carefully tended, the branches supported by pillars and earth heaped round its base so that it has always been able to put forth fresh roots. Over twenty-two centuries old, it has almost spanned the short recorded history of mankind.

  Examining versions of the World Tree such as the Old Norse Yggdrasil, in The Mythic Image, Joseph Campbell quotes the Katha Upanishad:

  Root above, branches below: this primal fig-tree!

  Pure indeed is its root: it is brahman, known as the Immortal.

  In it rest all the worlds:

  No one soever goes beyond it.

  All this, verily, is that tree.

  (The translation is Campbell’s own. A Note adds: ‘The Sanscrit word for ‘fig tree’, asvattha, comes from the word asva, meaning ‘horse’. Compare Yggdrasil, ‘Othin’s Steed’.’)

  Also in the Bhagavad-Gita, Sri Krishna tells Arjuna:

  There is a fig tree

  In ancient story,

  The giant Aswattha,

  The everlasting,

  Rooted in heaven,

  Its branches earthward:

  Each of its leaves

  Is a song of the Vedas,

  And he who knows it

  Knows all the Vedas.

  Downward and upward

  Its branches bending

  Are fed by the gunas,

  The buds it puts forth

  Are the things of the senses,

  Roots it has also

  Reaching downward

  Into this world,

  The roots of man’s action.

  What its form is,

  Its end and beginning,

  Its very nature,

  Can never be known here.

  Therefore a man should contemplate Brahman until he has sharpened the axe of his non-attachment. With this axe, he must cut through the firmly-rooted Aswattha tree.

  (Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood’s translation: Arjuna addresses Krishna as ‘you whose eyes are like the lotus-flowers’ – compare the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, the Green and White Taras.)

  Palm fronds all along St Kilda beach were clacking and tossing in the noon sun. The sand is coarse yellow here, the sea corrugated steel – hard to believe this is the same bay whose throat I live alongside. Hard to remember I lived in a flat here once.

  A rat scampering in the wall behind my head woke me from a dream in which I was lying just as I was – on my back with my mouth open, hands clasped, in the attitude of a corpse, at the mercy of rats. I thought in horror of how it would be if one ever made a hole in the golden skin of wood that boxes them in. In the slums of Thessaloniki rats came in from the balcony and ate the noses of babies in their cots. In Messina after the earthquake, Axel Munthe wrote in The Story of San Michele, the mourners fought to keep the rats away from the corpses; when in desperation they propped the dead upright against the wall, immediately the rats crunched the feet off them.

  The walls were silent for a long time; then a quivering of mirrors and pictures began and a ship passed through. One soft bellow, of inquiry, of salute, came from out at sea: no reply. This was the second night of no sleep. To be as alone as this is like a death by frostbite. Leprosy. First the numbness, then whatever parts protrude are felt to loosen, rot and drop away.

  Sun and serenity return. These are tides too.

  Valéry in 1920, from Charmes:

  Nous traversons seulement l’idée de la perfection comme la main impunément tranche la flamme; mais la flamme est inhabitable et les demeures de la plus haute sérénité sont nécessairement désertes.

  We only cross through the idea of perfection as a hand slices with impunity through the flame; but the flame is not to be lived in and the dwelling-places of the highest serenity are of necessity deserted.

  Van Gogh, when the family refused to let him see the woman he loved (was it his cousin Kee?), held his hand in the candle flame, asking to see her only for as long as he could endure to keep his hand there. (Where did I read this, twenty or so years ago? Is it apocryphal?)

  And, writing to Theo in October 1885 (he was thirty-two) about Rembrandt:

  The Syndics is perfect, is the most beautiful Rembrandt; but The Jewish Bride – not ranked so high, what an intimate, what an infinitely sympathetic picture it is, painted ‘with a hand of fire’.

  H lent me the Valéry book with ‘The Angel’ in it: Poems in the Rough: Volume 2 (Valéry’s term is Poésie Brute.) Parts that I hadn’t seen before, I love:

  The Movement of his Reason within the light of his eternal expectancy found itself halted by a nameless query; for what would create pain in our own imperfect natures does no more than arouse questionings in essences that are absolute; – while indeed for us every question too is or will be a sorrow.

  ‘Then who is this,’ he said, ‘who loves himself to the point of self-torment? I am all-knowing; yet I see that I suffer…And am I not that power of clarity of which this face, these tears, their cause and what might eliminate that cause, are but the merest particles of its extent?’

  A section in ‘From the Notebooks’ titled ‘The Angel’ has this:

  ‘The Angel’, Degas called me.

  He was more right than he could believe.

  Angel = strange = stranger…strangely foreign to ‘what is’ and to what he is. I cannot believe either in the sub or the objective; that is, I feel that nothing, not even oneself, could be of interest except in crossing some strange threshold – itself an illusion, and moreover uncrossable…

  (Threshold: and that paragraph could have come from Andreas Loser’s mouth in Across.)

  In the ‘Notes’ it says that the revised version of ‘The Angel’ was his last poem.

  And in ‘Mixture’, there are two fragments on ‘Diamonds’, the first describing a ballerina’s pirouettes as brilliant as the facets of a diamond…The second is this:

  Diamond. Its beauty results, I am told, from the smallness of the critical angle of total reflection…The cutter polishes the facets in an arrangement such that a ray of light entering the stone by one of them can leave it again only by the same – whence the fire and brilliance.

  Fine image of what I believe of poetry: the reissuing of the spiritual ray through the same words by which it entered.

  And there is this fragment, which any Tibetan would know d
escribes an enlightened being in the Bardo!

  INTELLIGENCE

  I

  Intelligence is the power to bring to the act of the present the resources of the past and the energies of the future.

  II

  An intelligence perceived that his state was about to cease: he was to fall from eternity into Time, and become flesh.

  ‘You are going to live!’

  It was dying for him. What a horror! To fall into Time!

  The Introduction by Octave Nadal says:

  It was at the moment when he was writing his Fragments of the Narcissus that the beautiful idea of The Angel came to him, not to be finished for nearly twenty-five years…Narcissus’ image in the pool – the reflected self, stripped of the opaque body – points to the analogy of pure mind to be embodied later on in The Angel. By a moving conversion, the mind’s reflection is made incarnate in a Being of diaphanous body. But the mind as Angel, having full knowledge of itself and all things…looks into its own transparency and cannot understand how, always, it has been ‘a prey to infinite sadness.’ The tears of the mind flow at the very heart of light.

  Here we come to the root of the mystery, the drama of thought in Valéry – that extreme point of consciousness where the mind’s clarity still cannot understand its own ‘fatal cause.’ This tear-filled eye of the mind – the ineffable touchstone of all his work – penetrates like a secret and lustral water, even into the mind’s proudest reaches…

  I’ve had at the back of my mind always the cemetery at Sète as a place of possible pilgrimage one day – why I hardly know. Not to visit his grave and speechless bones…Valéry was never even a favourite of mine in those days, being, to my adolescent perception, glacially cerebral. Valéry’s drawing of the view of the sea from the cemetery is in Charmes – leaning sails, a boat harbour, two jetties, dark pines and I loved that, for itself and for the inkling it gave me of how art can fuse a place with a self, an ego, that of the artist. When Chris and I were in the Midi ten years later I remembered Sète, but we were speeding back to Greece, to the village, to be with his father who had been ill, close to death. Now I live five minutes’ walk past the shops along the bay from a marine cemetery, though the water in this bay is more often like smoke than fire, and anyway the land is low there, gently sloping, sheltered inside a barrier of dunes and tea-tree that keeps the sea mostly hidden. (On the rise, standing under the Moreton Bay fig, you can see the scythe of the bay, the black lighthouse.)