A Body of Water

by Beverley Farmer

  Gingkos, someone told me in Tasmania, are archaic plants, relics of a once-great race; no wild ones survive, only the descendants of those that were planted round Buddhist temples in China and then in Japan.

  I took on yet another book review this week; even before the book arrived I regretted it. When will I write ‘The Black Ships’ at this rate? I wanted to have it at least in draft by the end of January, and with one week out for the Zen sesshins with Master Hogen (I have made up my mind), and a week with Taki here or in Melbourne, if he wants to visit the Tall Ships…The only way is to take a deep breath, lock myself in with a bottle of cold riesling and blitz ‘The Black Ships’ one day, one night.

  This is the day of the arrival of the Tall Ships. Hordes of people camped overnight to beat the roadblock, more have been pouring in all morning (J and the kids are due soon after midday); everywhere around the Point and the cliff someone is perched in the sun with a picnic basket. This is the first fine day for a couple of weeks: a low-tide warm blue and white morning, with the light breeze over the water not strong enough to stir the dunes: a few yachts hovering out in the Rip. No one seems sure how many ships will come now; the Indian barquentine, Varuna, for one, broke both masts in the Bight; and others have suffered damage. (Varuna is a Vedic god whose seed-syllable, according to Joseph Campbell, is ‘the water syllable vam’.) They will gather west of the lighthouse to take on a pilot each, and sail through between four and five o’clock.

  My old Oxford French dictionary has labelled diagrams of the parts of ships, which helped me a lot when reading Pierre Loti. (How odd, that Van Gogh loved Pierre Loti’s books! Is it odd? Which ones? The Japanese voyages? Madame Chrysanthème? About one of his self-portraits with his head shaven he wrote that he looked like a bonze, a Buddhist monk.) Some sails have bird names: petit cacatois, grand cacatois, petit perroquet, grand perroquet, perruche, cacatois de perruche…

  At 2:30 when we reached the lighthouse the crowds were assembled, on high points and in the rock pools all the way out to the edge of the rock shelf. A Russian tramp steamer chugged past first, through all the skidding yachts. Already two sailed ships shone white through the haze that had formed since the morning, and four others soon came into sight. One, riding in on a thick line of white water, seemed to be skimming above the haze. Their plump sails were like pillows tied on poles. Orange pilot-boats surged out. A smoky navy frigate came in, old biplanes flew in formation, helicopters dodged goggling. At about 5:30 the ships came through with yachts all around them, into a headwind, on the flood tide: the first one with its sails furled and the crew sitting on the yards; then four more, one with grey-smudged sails, and a small green-hulled one pulling a large flag behind, the Irish brigantine…With J’s father’s binoculars we could even see the creases and seams in their sails. (The binoculars are wonderful. I even saw the Cape Schanck lighthouse high on the last of the pale hills beyond Point Nepean.) The ships with their sails furled were skeletal, ghost ships, all shrouds and spars. Outside Queenscliff they merged together, dwindling on into the grey haze over towards Sorrento.

  From over the Rip near Sorrento tiny points of coloured light burst, fireworks, I suppose, in honour of the ships. Someone had lit a bonfire in the cliff-face here, wind-whipped – it must have been visible over there.

  To try with very fresh whole schnapper, nannygai, flathead, bream, mullet, red mullet:

  Daurade au gros sel (Provence): the fish – sea bream – is baked inside a thick paste of salt and flour, taking a kilo of salt and 180 ml flour to cover a fish weighing one kilo.

  Loup à la vapeur d’algues marines (Provence again): drizzle olive oil over the fish (sea bass) and steam it over well-washed seaweed, or you could use fennel stalks, and wine and double cream are added to the cooking juices for the sauce.

  Shioyaki (Japan): the fish is salted lightly on both sides, left thirty minutes at room temperature, then grilled golden. The salt melts the fat away under the crust of the skin.

  To think of the Nella Dan now. Chris’s little wooden cabin. Ashes on the sea floor.

  New Year’s Eve: sun and a strong cold wind along the sand, a good morning for lying in a rock pool with the tide on the way out; no one else on this beach where thousands were crowded yesterday – in all the bay, one windsurfer and a yacht. And silence except for the waves and the sizzles, clicks and twitches of insects in the cliff-face.

  All afternoon a storm was brewing, which broke soon after ten with clean drenching rain, and a power failure, so it looked for a while as though the year would be going out by candlelight. I knew I should be drafting ‘The Black Ships’ while I had the chance, and why not now, at least for as long as the candles lasted? For the whole of last year I have four stories to show, a meagre crop; two of them are in print; and there’s this one, still in embryo and at risk. But my heart wasn’t in it, not tonight. Instead I read Stories from the Warm Zone and Sydney Stories, Jessica Anderson’s new book, perfect for seeing a New Year in with; and, still by candlelight, put up the new calendars and the glossy 1988 Moon Chart – a new pattern of navy blue and white scales trickling down the wall.

  JANUARY

  IN THE FACE of the New Year I feel stronger than ever before, in some way empowered – reaching my roots down deep into this calm sand.

  Fteno sta podia sou to homa

  yia na min eheis pou n’aploseis riza

  kai na travas tou vathous oloena

  Let the soil at your feet be thin

  so that you will have nowhere to spread roots

  and have to delve in the depths continually

  Odysseus Elytis: ‘Genesis’: To Axion Esti

  The great Axion Esti, that hymn of praise of the eternal Greece! I heard it first in Theodorakis’s setting, and it still sings on the page though I lost the record long ago. Elytis is worthy of what Rilke wrote in The Sonnets to Orpheus:

  Rühmen, das ists! Ein zum Rühmen Bestellter,

  ging er hervor wie das Erz aus des Steins Schweigen. Sein Herz, o vergängliche Kelter

  eines den Menschen unendlichen Weins.

  Praising is what matters! He was summoned for that,

  and came to us like the ore from a stone’s

  silence. His mortal heart presses out

  a deathless, inexhaustible wine.

  (Stephen Mitchell’s translation)

  To praise is the whole thing! A man who can praise

  comes toward us like ore out of the silences

  of rock. His heart, that dies, presses out

  for others a wine that is fresh forever.

  (Robert Ely’s translation)

  (Which translation is the truer version? Perhaps Ely’s first two lines and Mitchell’s last two – Ely’s ‘fresh’ is a false note there; and ‘that dies’ sounds as if it’s in the process of dying. Ely’s diction is attractively looser, but the original is tight.)

  I met Taki in Lorne and brought him here for a few days. First we went to the new house of old friends on the hilltop at North Lorne – a wooden tower, platforms of space and light. (Their old house was one of the first to burn on Ash Wednesday.) From there the whole bay was globular, silent, full of a hollow light (this was after sunset, though Aireys Inlet was in full sun): a sphere, split in two by a film of water.

  (Dr Balthazar, in Lawrence Durrell’s Balthazar, the second volume of The Alexandria Quartet, says that Napoleon – of all people – described poetry as a science creuse. A hollow science, or branch of knowledge – more, that is, than others?)

  Swan Bay at eight tonight lay with all its hot sandbanks sprawled wide; sunlight flashed off the lantern of the black lighthouse. The shifting depths of the water.

  I’ve got a book called Centering: The Power of Meditation out of the Queenscliff library, having dipped into it while I was there and been hardly able to believe my eyes at such a cocktail of inspirational hokum, breathtakingly bold and bland, and esoteric lore from every time and place, all of which the authors present absolutely uncritically and w
ith not the slightest attempt at proof:

  Levitation, for example, does not break any universal law. Saints and certain mediums such as Daniel Douglas Home (1833–1886) have been known to levitate. St Bernard, St Dominic, and St Teresa of Avila were but a few of the clergy who were observed to rise from the ground without physical aid…If certain individuals can master the effect, then it must lie within the province of universal law…With a bit of effort you will be able to become one of them.

  With a bit of effort…Excuse me while I float through the library window and over the pier and back again…They’re no less encouraging when it comes to faith-healing, astral planes, psychokinesis and so on. A wide-eyed-wonder book. No bibliography is given, though they thank a list of people for ‘suggestions, recommendations, and the loan of books’!

  I wonder where they got this, on the seven chakras in Yoga:

  The seven…is an ancient concept, and the steps of the chakras and their colours can be traced back to the Tower of Babel where the seven levels of the ziggurat were assigned to specific planets and painted in the ‘colours’ of those planets. The first level represented Saturn and was black; the second, sacred to Jupiter, was white; the third, Mercury, a brick red; the fourth, Venus, blue; the fifth, Mars, yellow; the sixth, moon, grey or silver; and the seventh, sun, golden.

  And just as the ancients believed that the new soul must travel through each of the planets and assume its properties, so the mind and body must travel through each of the chakras in order to reach its full potential…

  Centering: The Power of Meditation

  The authors list the Chakras planet by planet, gland by gland (noting that some colours have changed). They admit that no scientific evidence of a ‘lyden’ gland has been found. (‘But scientists have been wrong in the past.’)

  gonads Saturn dark red, almost black

  lyden Jupiter orange red

  adrenals Mercury green

  thymus Venus yellow

  throat (thyroid) Mars blue

  pituitary Moon silver

  pineal (crown) Sun white tinged with gold

  Directions are given for a meditation on light, done under an overhead lamp, filling the chakras one by one with light of its right colour, until you become a vessel of ‘love, peace, understanding, and joy’. Then? ‘Conclude with a prayer of thanks for your newfound abilities.’ Indeed.

  (Stephen Dedalus:

  Lotus ladies tend them i’the eyes, their pineal glands aglow. Filled with his god he thrones, Buddh under plantain. Gulfer of souls, engulfer. Hesouls, shesouls, shoals of souls…)

  In The Mythic Image the Cosmic Serpent Ananta is said to have five cobra-heads, but in a print in the style of popular prints of the nineteenth century, showing Vishnu and Lakshmi afloat on Ananta, there are seven. (In the chapter on Yoga there’s a photo of an Egyptian stone statue from the nineteenth century BC, Portrait of Pharaoh Sesostris III, in which a hooded cobra is emerging from his forehead at the point of the Third Eye, the Sixth Chakra, or Lotus, in the ascent of the Kundalini – the one which Campbell refers to here as the ‘lotus of “Command”’.)

  The Tall Ships sailed out this afternoon on a cold wind for Hobart. Small planes like gulls flew up over them, and then a flock of alarmed gulls. Again the rocks and the beach were swarming with people.

  There are dozens of little white velvet quinces on the tree, though its leaves are dry, singed. The cassia has new flowers – gold cups, buttercups – and green and yellow leaves, as in midwinter. (At night the leaves, but not the flowers, close: they clench drooping from the little hinged branches, looking like bat-wings in tatters.) The tomatoes are holding out hairy branches, fingers full of green cherry tomatoes: sun-ripened in a day, they taste pungent, sweet – next year I’m buying many more seedlings – and I wish I wasn’t leaving them for a whole week. (This is like Marios Hakkas’s fervent Party man, the man with no ties, veteran of countless fierce demonstrations, who finds he can’t bring himself to go to the latest one because now he has a goldfish. What if they arrest him? Without him, his goldfish would die…)

  The Zen retreat is at Launching Place; Taki likes the idea of his mother’s being launched from there to Nirvana…Phra Khantipalo’s centre, Wat Buddha Dhamma, is at Wiseman’s Ferry! – on the Hawkesbury in New South Wales. There’s a tale of the Buddha’s meeting on a river bank with a yogi, a siddha who could levitate across the river, having spent whole decades in austerities to acquire the power (siddhi). Why bother, the Buddha said, when the ferryman will take you over for a few coins?

  After sunset the wind dropped. Until ten o’clock and after, a glow of daylight remains. As I arrived on the cliff-top a red-tipped line of lights on the horizon (but there’s no town there!) split suddenly in two and a white-tipped red one returned, chugging, a pilot boat. The white line veered into Bass Strait. With both sets of red tide-lamps on, the lighthouse shone full-length in water; the Pointers glittered, and the Southern Cross – a kite pitching seaward.

  On the rock shelf torches wavered, and one double red glow which was – when the walkers came past patched with light, talking softly, carrying shrimpnets – a plastic bucket of water. They sat along the seawall and the sand to watch as a squat pumpkin moon, one day past the full, rose up out of Queenscliff.

  Lunch at H’s today in the shade where the pear and walnut and nectarine branches overlap, sagging with heavy fruit: two other guests, S and R, and the children: six of us. H had bought fresh barracouta, which have been hurling themselves on the lures here lately (I remember that sudden great lunging in the wake of the cray boat one morning twenty years ago, the cork lure gulped, the deck banging, awash, under the great metallic lash of the fish), after twelve years of absence from these waters, no one is sure why. At S’s suggestion we baked the fillets in milk, with ground pepper and curls of lemon peel over them, on a bed of fennel which he picked down at the bay. I had never thought of cooking fish in milk, the Greeks having such an abhorrence of milk with fish at the same meal even; but it was very good, white and meaty, not tender – bristling with fine long needle-bones.

  I swam with the children in the morning and afternoon (when the thermometer reached 40.4°!) at the beach at Queenscliff from where the moon floats up – the beach below the Low Light, the white lighthouse on the Bluff. (From there the Lonsdale lighthouse over the bay seems to be leaning back on its base, like the Buddha on folded legs.) Green water, its weave of sand, and the pleasure of dowsing the head in and rising up with salt-stung eyes, dashing out water like a dog. The only shade was under the rusted pipeline that sinks into the sea bed; we were sitting there when along the line of darker water an explosion, black serrated fins were hooping, bounding – a dolphin, close in to shore, two dolphins, or three, was it?

  Later, out on the bar of rocks, H saw close to the surface a curling mantle, a large stingray.

  At the beach H is vigilant without letting the children feel that he is. My father, who never went in the water, was unable to hide his anxiety, pacing on the sand for as long as I stayed in alone, calling if I strayed out of my depth. I felt like a dog tugging a leash. When I grizzled, my mother explained that when he was a young boy his best friend had drowned in the river ‘before his very eyes’. That was all I ever knew. She said it had been a lasting wound, a nightmare he could never bring himself to talk about. I never dared break the ban and ask him how it had happened. My mother would always mediate between us. Dad and I, we were never to talk face to face.

  Sorting through old manila folders I came across the tongue-tied poems I wrote to H in our early days:

  She, thinking of him, remembers

  mornings with him were white. White

  walls, his room had, and

  stiff half-curtains on a white sky

  (this was winter). Gum trees poured

  waves of leaves. One

  wall mirrored

  fire while the sun rose

  while he slept on

  the white pillows, and awake
>
  made tea in a Chinese pot.

  Spots like glass spattered it, blue –

  raindrops on milk –

  held up to the sun. Cold mornings,

  late, each one white, and full

  like eggs on a plate…

  And then this:

  Safe on the sand he sheds

  glitters of water, and

  all the colours of him are deep. She thinks

  how water, thrown over rocks,

  makes their colours deep. Their flecks

  stand out. So it is with each

  freckle and mole…

  (That was summer.)

  The passing bell was ringing yesterday. I hardly ever hear it here; not like Polypetron, where the church was one street away and funerals would trail in the dust past our house, women wailing with their swathed heads flung back, while others held them up by their black arms. The cemetery there was on the track to the tobacco field; we passed it in the cart night and day. Here it’s in the main street, up from the beach. There are old graves and ones newly filled in, with withering flowers on them. One grave is a cold trench with a sheet of iron over it and white stones and sand heaped alongside. Some have thistles and rusted iron fences, the lettering on the stones too worn to read. One has grey-leaved yellow daisies, one a large rosemary bush; one has a dark fiery red-golden lantana. The pods of the one black cypress crack underfoot; the casuarinas around the fences are more funereal still. At the highest point, where salt winds have stripped the top branches of the Moreton Bay fig, the bay shows through the tea-trees, and the lighthouses, the black and the white.