I LOVE THESE little squat pyramid-bottles of Windsor & Newton inks, their jewel-glow against the light – I have six now. I bring home shells, cuttle bones, seaweed pods, a crab-case, to draw in black or brown ink, water-washed (blotted with a yellow sea sponge). One day I’ll dare to mix colours and draw the rocks, the lighthouse, the sea. But for now, this mussel; this fringed claw.
Six weeks in residence – though not literally, since I won’t be using the ‘old maid’s’ flat provided – at the Geelong College. I have the English Resource room to work in with a long window and shelves of old class sets, some of them textbooks I studied at high school in the fifties! A musty room, timeless, cold – a smell of radiator bars and apple cores. Many beautiful things here: a pair of woven wooden doors, mossy ferns and pines in courtyards, very old fine papered books in the library, pale stone lining the sand stone of the cloisters like icicles, small-paned windows deep in ivy leaves, the voices of pigeons in the silence…The Virginia creeper is turning papery yellow and glossy red: translucent leaves press against the window panes, dark veined, cobwebbed. Ivy and pigeons: they creep into the smallest space and are hard to dislodge; they’ve crept into a story while I’ve been working on it, huddled over the radiator munching apples – a story about a boy of six whose father has just left home. He lives with his mother. One day a visitor, a man, an enemy, decides to teach him a lesson about what life is like.
Just on thirty years ago I saw that boy fall. Impossible to forget his whooping sobs, his tears; and his mother’s face (which he didn’t see). The agony of others, nearly experienced…Has he forgotten it, I wonder – has he suppressed the knowledge of it? I won’t do it from the point of view of the au pair girl. She won’t even be there. The maimed man who was that boy – he has to tell the story.
Always a scene has arranged itself: representative; enduring. This confirms me in my instinctive notion: (it will not bear arguing about; it is irrational) the sensation that we are sealed vessels afloat on what it is convenient to call reality; and at some moments, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality; that is, these scenes – for why do they survive undamaged year after year unless they are made of something comparatively permanent?
Virginia Woolf: Moments of Being
At times when I was recovering from some illness, measles, mumps, chickenpox, and had slept most of the day away, I was allowed to get up at night and sit up with my parents, in my dressing-gown with a blanket round me in front of the hissing gas-fire until ten o’clock, even eleven. Details of the set were out of place, I noticed. The radio programs were not our ones. Once they had a Shakespeare play on, Othello, I think, in which someone called someone else a ‘hore’. I asked what a hore was, and my father muttered an irritable evasion, and glared at me and my mother. ‘Sssh,’ she said. ‘You can ask me tomorrow.’ I had read Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and knew that Shakespeare was approved. But hore wasn’t in our dictionary when I looked…Admitted to this sector of time that had never existed for me, the time of their intimacy beyond the stripe of light under the lounge-room door, I felt that I was the provisional one, the one lacking in substance: like a member of an audience suddenly brought on stage. I was politely unconvinced by these puppets playing my parents. Could this be all there was? Secretiveness was in the yellow air. Those nights: bubbles of memory, sealed in.
Deep red, the soft sun in the mist, sunk over Swan Bay. Harvest suns, harvest moons.
Rereading, not systematically, Sylvia Plath. Poems. Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, Ariel.
And while she was trying to free herself from the traumas of her past by discharging them into the forms of her art [in The Bell Jar], she and her husband ‘devised exercises of meditation and invocation,’ as he tells us, to help her ‘break down the tyranny, the fixed focus and the public persona which descriptive or discursive poems take as a norm’ and to help her ‘accept the invitation of her inner world.’
George Stade: ‘Afterword’ in A Closer Look at Ariel
That is the problem. The task. Sink in under the surface of the self, the mirror’s skin, weighted down enough and not too much. The Lorelei-woman, she went deep.
An ear of wheat, of corn. (And the silk hair.) A hand of bananas. A tooth (in Greek, not a clove – ena donti skordo) of garlic. The teeth of garlic under the papery shells on these bulbs are broad, brown-skinned, glossy, the size and shape of the best chestnuts. Yellowwaxy under the skin. (Plant some?)
In the wet grass I found a small white mushroom in the perfect shape of a phallus and picked it, and could eat it if I dared. The earth at its base is like soft hair.
This week the Victoria Market had boxes of new season’s olives for preserving, all of them that soft, full purple, with one black hole, and that dusky bloom on them, like plums, or black grapes – so that you bite expecting sweet juice to flow in your mouth, not oil.
I know why I wanted to write the story about this boy now, after all these years: being here among children has awakened the memory. This school, too, is like the one I used to take him to.
Last night was full moon. Two slabs of white marble stretched under the two bare windows. The wash of the sea was so quiet that I could hear the engines of passing ships. Some time in the middle of the night a rattle made me sit up and turn the lamp on. One of the mirrors was quivering aloud on the wooden wall, and as I watched the other mirror began and the sound reverberated in the space between that wall and the wall of the next room, then in the spaces of the rooms themselves, until the whole house was chugging, all the time it took the boat to edge through the Rip.
A night like that is wasted sleeping. My bed, my body, my house were all one resonance.
Waking in this room
to the lighthouse on the point
hooting through sun haze,
the sound of water moving,
is like waking on board ship.