A Body of Water

by Beverley Farmer

  Why do people who live in marine places and love the sea not choose more often to be buried in it? A burial at sea, like in Chekhov’s wonderful ‘Gusev’ (Chekhov, who was coffined in an oyster-crate). To be stripped clean by the fish and birds, the bones tossed up on beaches and gathered up again, is best – why rot in the earth with worms, why waste good meat in a fire?

  The last two lines of the first verse of ‘Le cimetière marin’ are the epitaph on his grave stone:

  Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes,

  Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes;

  Midi le juste y compose de feux

  La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée!

  O récompense après une pensée

  Qu’un long regard sur le calme des dieux!

  The sea/fire image: the section ‘Mixture’ in Poems in the Rough has a piece called ‘A Haunted Room’:

  ‘This room,’ says the man with the key, ‘looks on to the sea.’

  Liar. It is not the sea. This room looks on to the infernal fire. The whole sun leaps up at it from that vast mirror that must be the bay, striking the looking glasses, burning anew in every scrap of crystal or metal, until one thirsts for shadows…

  The same idea, so involved and chiselled, so worked, in ‘Le cimetière marin’ that it seems abstract, here is immediate, simple, direct. This goes for many other fragments and jottings in the book: they open a less remote Valéry, an off-duty, casual Valéry – a window into the formal poems.

  ‘Mixture’ was first published in 1939 as Mélange de prose et de poésie, with etchings of his own. The last sentence of a note he made to the 1941 reissue is this (my italics): ‘The “I” is perhaps no more than a convenient symbol, as empty as the verb “to be” – both technical terms, the more convenient for being empty.’

  At the end of ‘Le cimetière marin’ the sea is a Hydra drunk on her own blue flesh, biting her glittering tail in a tumult similar to silence:

  Hydra absolue, ivre de ta chair bleue,

  Qui te remords l’étincelante queue

  Dans un tumulte au silence pareil…

  And at the end of Poems in the Rough is a sketch of a serpent! – wound around an erect key, its head through the head of the key. The emblem of the serpent…

  This colophon was chosen from a number of drawings by Paul Valéry of his favourite device, says a note.

  The calf-high wattle seedling that I found growing in the back garden and transplanted to the front one is much taller than me now and has branches, and branches of branches. It won’t block the window I work at: its feathery, sparse fronds let enough warmth and green light through.

  Is it a rat keeping me awake, or could it be a possum? It sounds too small…Last night it stirred behind my head and then came a soft steady hiss as it pissed in there. Was that a faint yeasty smell from inside the wall, or from under the covers, my own bed-smell? I hammered on the boards to scare whatever it was away, but no – it knows better by now, this patient animal; it can tolerate the odd outburst of noise from that irritable animal beyond its wall. It doesn’t turn a hair any more. It sits tight. At daybreak we both fall asleep.

  Swan Bay silent; more sand than sea. A still salt-sultry afternoon for lying in the sun before the storm, with now and then a darkening and a fall of cold drops of water, condensation rather than rain, the air is so burdened with salt and the perfumes of flowers. My skin tastes of both. My thighs have darkened to sand-colour, the stretch marks high on them show a silvery tracery of ripples and runnels at low water.

  No sign of the threatened storm, still the same warm salt breeze; salt has coated the plugs on the crossbars of the electric-light poles, making them sizzle like trapped wasps. The lighthouse, both its sets of green lamps on, is clear on a sky of brilliant black, white-speckled, only a wisp or two of cloud scattered, and the Milky Way low on the sea. The lantern has a miasma of whirling moths, all pale green – even the sand looks pale green, and the sharp-shadowed rearing scaly rocks as well, at the base of the cliff. Every stone in the large pool is clearer than by daylight. I peer forward, and only realise when a small green fish shoots away under a ledge that I’ve stepped into water and wet my shoes. To see how far the water reaches over the rocks the only way is to ruffle its surface as warm as the hand and make slow rings roll over it. All around the cliff a breeze stirs a star or the neon-green glitter of the lighthouse lamps, whatever is caught in each pool.

  C and R’s baby is safely born: a boy, Nicholas.

  Late in the afternoon one great flash came to empty vision of everything other than light. I staggered – Is this dying? there was time to think, before the thunder broke right over my head, a crash and a long rumbling roar. A wall of rain fell. I ran round closing windows, but have opened them again, though there are still flashes and thunder, bursts of rain. The earth smells of sweat and damp hair.

  At sunrise the cranes started beyond a turbulence of blurred boughs; the TV antenna was a gold cranefly clamped on the chimney pot. The Virginia creepers have sent tree-shapes of threads and small leaves up high on the bricks. (This square of garden will be a green-walled gully.) The lemon gum is dropping bare boughs and peeling, splitting its fawn skin open. I picked up the curls of bark to take back to the Point and spread on the sandy earth, for their lemon smell in the sun and rain there among the pine needles. The sleek new skin is white.

  The high lighthouse glittering, a red and grey container ship swung close in to the cliff, hesitant.

  What at first I took for a glassy trickle of gum at the tip of a branch of bottlebrush, just beyond the red bristles, was a motionless bull ant full of crimson light. Prunus leaves are like that – black, but they burn like glass with the sun in them.

  A bull ant ran up my bare arm today when I was weeding in the half dark: I shook it off, alarmed but no longer horrified (so I am learning).

  Pray for the grace of accuracy

  Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination

  stealing like the tide across a map

  to his girl solid with yearning…

  Robert Lowell: ‘Epilogue’

  We are estranged – definitely, definitively estranged – and yet I am not free of him. He is the north my needle swings to, as he has been from the day we met four years ago.

  Jung: ‘One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.’

  Rereading (in order to review it) Peter Handke’s The Left-Handed Woman, that parade of enigmatic, illuminated incidents – each object in it a jewelled artifact – it struck me that Valéry was wrong or that I had understood him wrongly, in an observation quoted in Charmes, that: ‘La musique [est] belle par transparence, et la poésie par réflexion.’ The beauty of Handke’s novels, those ones as dense as poetry that I’ve read, is a beauty of transparence.

  Or, if one wishes, it has at the same time the quality of transparence and that of reflection, like the surface of the water in M.C. Escher’s ‘Three Worlds’: the trees and clouds, the rising shadowy fish (a carp?), and the line between, leaf-scattered. That line of surface: that’s the writing; the writer, also.

  And then, think of Monet’s mind half-sunk in the waterlily pools.

  From William Hart-Smith’s ‘Storms’:

  I have a curious feeling

  peace may be to descend beneath the surface of oneself

  so that the troubled floor

  of the world becomes a remote

  and beautiful

  sun-bewildered ceiling.

  Today at sunset a woman in silhouette was perched on the bow of the cliff (the lighthouse buildings its focsle and funnel) looking out to sea: like a figurehead – no, a cormorant, alertly angular, attentive.

  Marguerite Duras, on the Mekong River, in The Lover:

  In the misty sun of the river, the sun of the hot season, the banks have faded away, the river seems to reach the horizon. It flows quietly, without a sound, like the blood in the body. No wind but that in the
water.

  The light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility. The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue. The sky was the continual throbbing of the brilliance of the light. The night lit up everything, all the country on either bank of the river as far as the eye could reach.

  Octavio Paz quotes ‘the most ancient Upanishad’:

  Thou art woman. Thou art man. Thou art the youth and also the maiden. Thou, like an old man, leanest on a staff…Thou art the dark blue bird and the green bird with red eyes…Thou art the seasons and the seas.

  The translation is by R.E. Hume, an Oxford edition. That passage of the Svetasvatara Upanishad in the translation by Swami Prabhavananda and Frederick Manchester in my Mentor Classics edition is:

  Thou art woman, thou art man,

  Thou art the youth, thou art the maiden,

  Thou art the old man tottering with his staff;

  Thou facest everywhere.

  Thou art the dark butterfly,

  Thou art the green parrot with red eyes,

  Thou art the thunder cloud, the seasons, the seas…

  Which one is right, I wonder? The dark blue bird, or the dark butterfly? R.E. Hume’s is more beautiful for the odd jolt the doubling of the bird gives the mind. (What would the sage say: They are the same. Haven’t you been listening?)

  The pale featherdown has blown off the tamarisks, leaving them green all over. The quince has little nuts of pale green plush. One agapanthus is in full blue flower. The lizard has shown up once, waddling under the back verandah (it must live in the pine needles under the house). Today is the last day of the spring.

  A SONG

  I thought no more was needed

  Youth to prolong

  Than dumb-bell and foil

  To keep the body young.

  O who could have foretold

  that the heart grows old?

  Though I have many words,

  What woman’s satisfied,

  I am no longer faint

  Because at her side?

  O who could have foretold

  that the heart grows old?

  I have not lost desire

  But the heart that I had;

  I thought ’twould burn my body

  Laid on the death-bed,

  For who could have foretold

  That the heart grows old?

  W.B. Yeats: The Wild Swans at Coole

  DECEMBER

  TODAY, WALKING ON THE BEACH, I said my five thousandth Tara mantra. Gesang ist Dasein.

  Rain all night and all day, and a green-grey water blur at rattling windows. The honey-gold wooden ceiling in here is leaking – drop after drop goes splashing behind me. One of the wooden struts supporting the gable just blew down past this window. The lowest branch of the huge sheoak next door has split off from the trunk – a great head of grey needles is bowed over their lawn. At the lighthouse they keep blowing the foghorn.

  The power having finally gone off for the afternoon – the lamps I had left on flickered on, off, on like a lighthouse lantern for an hour first – I read Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River again for the first time in years, and was thunderstruck, this time, at its brilliance. Its fearful symmetry and sureness of touch! (‘The shadow of the mango tree absorbs everything within its margin but the white iron seat, which stands glimmering all night, its arms held ready, like the ghost of a seat in a city park…’) Everything is interwoven (that city park bench is a significant one in London). By the last chapter, where Nora is old in Grace’s glass room, spinning her ‘globe of memory’ over and over until she recalls at last (after a blank lifetime of not recalling) why ‘the step of a horse, the nod of a plume’, her dreams of bold Sir Lancelot, had always been ‘accompanied for a second by a choking chaos of grief ’ – I was in tears of admiration.

  The first time I read ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (I remember it was in a classroom, idly reading ahead in the Eighth Book, when I was twelve) I recognised myself in her:

  Like some bold seër in a trance,

  Seeing all his own mischance…

  I was in love, for one thing: in love already in vain and from afar with a boy in another form, who was new to the school and had coal-black curls and was even from France the same as Sir Lancelot. I think I spoke to him once, a few choked words in rehearsed French in the fenced no-man’s-land between the girls’ playground and the boys’, or am I remembering a daydream? He gave a lordly shrug and turned away. (Abruptly with puberty I had become not a pretty girl. Now a greasy faceful of pimples cringed from behind round glasses.) We all left that school the following year; I saw him once again, I was almost sure, from a tram window. Even at that age, reading the poem, I knew that I lived and would always live a tangential, vicarious life: the web on her loom (for me) was fiction and disabling daydream. I was in thrall to the mirror between me and the real. Not that I could have spelt it out in those terms: just that I felt a shock, a clawing of dread; as if I had idly looked up mild symptoms I had in a medical book, only to find them identified with some fatal disease.

  Franziska disengaged herself, looked towards the woman, and said, ‘Loneliness is a source of loathsome ice-cold suffering, the suffering of unreality. At such times we need people to teach us that we’re not so far gone.’

  Peter Handke: The Left-Handed Woman

  Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,

  Wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben…

  Rainer Maria Rilke: ‘Herbstag’

  (Whoever is alone now will go on being alone,

  will stay up late, read, write long letters…)

  The sun is out today, but for sudden squalls. The southerly is still wild and the waves are high and white, crashing wave on wave. Storm clouds, wheeling, obscure now Queenscliff, now Point Nepean. A Lloyd Triestino container boat (the name painted in large letters) rounded the Point this afternoon, low in the water, close enough for me on the clifftop to have seen people on deck, had there been any; the little orange pilot boat came pitching along behind. With the tide out so far, there were bare rocks out past the end of the jetty. I walked along it into the ice of the wind. Some of the rocks were weedy rocks; others only rootless heaving clumps of golden weed.

  Rubbery chains of brown-podded weed grow thick on those rocks. I walked on raisins to the edge of the Rip.

  The last outcrop of rock looking west to the surf beach is bracketed by two narrow clear pools that must be good to lie in on a hot day: two cusps of deep water. I found cuttlefish bones on the sand, and by a pool with a white mantle of froth (‘and a froth, a lip of sea drift’ ) one dead black grey-breasted bird. (They are muttonbirds. I checked in What Bird is That?)

  On the first hot day of our first December at the restaurant in Lorne we took Taki to the rock pools at the end of the beach, stripped off his jumpsuit and nappy and each of us in turn immersed him in the sun-warm water. He lay lightly back on our arms, his head cupped, eyes closed – he had his first taste of the sea at six months old. His dome of belly was marbled blue-green and white under bubbles and leaning shadows.

  I too but signify at the utmost a little wash’d up drift,

  A few sands and dead leaves to gather,

  Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift.

  Walt Whitman: Sea-Drift

  Chris’s old red ship, the Nella Dan, has run aground on rocks off Macquarie Island. Everyone was saved, but not the ship, which is stuck fast and expected to wash off and sink at high tide. Twenty-two years since Chris sailed down on the Nella, to Macquarie and then to the three Antarctic bases: the first Greek, very likely, ever to set foot in Antarctica. And it was the first summer of our marriage, but the chance of a lifetime: if I couldn’t go myself, I wanted him to. He came home black-bearded, with slides of penguins and seals, shadows on icebergs from closer and closer up, the shadow of the crow’s nest; and midnight sunrises and sunsets, gold ice and water. To have seen the midnight sun in the s
outh! Even now not many people have.

  His job was to cook food that the Australian passengers would eat – scientists and other personnel bound for a year at the bases, and on the return voyage, the ones coming home. The only Greek in a crew of brawny roistering Danes, he must have stood up for himself well enough once he got over his seasickness: his Lauritzen Line papers have him classified Greek gangster kok.

  Such a burly little ship as the Nella, a battle-axe icebreaker, scarred and worn. After all these years, to have come to a bad end.

  In Carlton there were night shrieks that by daybreak were the whistles of the construction site. The cranes and the high walls have moved in closer. But the Virginia creepers have embraced their walls with great long green arms: the one against the warehouse has strung loops of itself up, seven-branched, like a menorah.

  I bought rum babas for H, who loves them, so spongy and glossy, oozing syrup, mushroom-headed: lacking only a grooved lip to be phallic. I thought the baba came from North Africa or Lebanon or even Greece into French cooking, but the dictionary says ‘Polish’. None of my old cookery books mentions them at all – Chris’s Pellaprat or Escoffier probably would. The pleasure of cookery books – Patience Gray has a new one just out with an irresistible name: Honey from a Weed: Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia. I still have her old Penguin Plats du Jour or Foreign Food from 1960, one of the first cookery books I ever bought, at least as much for its quaint virtuous names as for the recipes (too hard for me in those days): Patience Gray, Primrose Boyd, illustrations by David Gentleman…