RAINY SHEOAKS, bronzy all over now with pollen, shade these roads. The start of winter; and of my second year in this house.
The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present…But to feel the present sliding over the depths of the past, peace is necessary. The present must be smooth, habitual. For this reason – that it destroys the fullness of life – any break – like that of house moving – causes me extreme distress; it breaks; it shallows; it turns the depth into hard little splinters.
Virginia Woolf: Moments of Being
‘Among Pigeons’ is ready to send out: I’ll try the Australian Literary Supplement with it. My time in the ivy room at the College is nearly up now. I’ve fallen in love with ivy – Boston Ivy, Virginia Creeper, which loses its leaves in winter. How would the bare brick walls of the yard of the Carlton house look, ivy-covered?
John Updike, in his New Yorker review of The Left-Handed Woman, wrote of Peter Handke that his ‘exacerbated nerves cling like pained ivy in the landscape.’
I developed the habit of responding to everything that happened around me with language, and I noticed how during these moments of experience language momentarily came alive. In these moments of language, everything which happened seemed to be no longer merely private, but turned into something universal.
Peter Handke: The Weight of the World: A Journal – quoted in a review on ‘Radio Helicon’. (Where can I find it, is it in print?)
I think I’ve done all I can, for now at least, with the ‘Vase with Red Fishes’ story – called ‘Interior with Goldfish’ now (or not?) to emphasise its flat surface. I wanted to have the two characters alternately rising from the painted interior to move and be, then flattening back into the picture. Trompe-l’oeil. To have them behave like an M.C. Escher drawing, modulating from plane to plane, form to form, dovetailing…In his Reptiles, lizards rise off the page in the picture and crawl in single file over the items on the desk to re-enter the page; in Drawing Hands, two hands rise off opposite ends of a pinned sheet of paper, each holding a pen with which it is drawing the other’s cuff, having by implication just been drawing the other hand. In Dragon, a dragon has broken through his sheet of paper, his tail in his mouth, and with this in mind I’ve added a few lines that show the woman convulsed, lashing in some inner struggle which she wants to bring to the man’s attention. (I fear the story is clotted, clogged by this. And still, something is missing.) Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid quotes Escher on this picture:
However much this dragon tries to be spacial, he remains completely flat. Two incisions are made in the paper on which he is printed. Then it is folded in such a way as to leave two square openings. But this dragon is an obstinate beast, and in spite of his two dimensions he persists in assuming that he has three; so he sticks his head through one of the holes and his tail through the other.
The woman in the story insists on depth, on her own depth of being, where for the man she is part of the surface. She is this dragon biting its tail.
Rereading The Alexandria Quartet…A sentence from Justine keeps preying on my mind:
In love they give out nothing of themselves, having no self to give, but enclose themselves around you in an agonized reflection.
Lawrence Durrell: Justine
They are the Moslem women of Alexandria, ‘shut in a stall with the oxen, masked, circumcised’. (Compare the Sexologia Chris had when we met, which advised circumcision to cure women’s frigidity and stop them masturbating…) But those words: my heart sinks. Is this how I love? Do I enclose myself around a man in an agonized reflection?
In Paul Zweig’s Three Journeys, on a camping trip alone in the Sahara (by way of a footnote to ‘Red Fishes’):
Sometimes I take a walk at night, placing a light on the table to guide me back. At a distance of a few hundred yards, my island seems vulnerable and strange. Yet the feeling I have is not fear, but sumptuousness, luxury.
I don’t have to worry about the view. The desert is all view. I feel like a fish moving its tiny bowl from place to place in the middle of the sea.
14 June: Taki’s birthday. Fifteen years ago. How I cling. Clamped on the past like pained ivy.
On the phone to Chris I mentioned The Nets, Sheelagh Kanelli’s crystalline short novel about the twenty-one schoolgirls who drown when a fishing boat taking them for rides overturns, and all the nets spread and hold them under. She based it on a true story – it happened in Crete in the summer of 1971. Remember? I said. In the novel the young fisherman, who had left the drying nets in the boat, can’t swim; he takes refuge in insanity. Remember – he, Chris, said – the island we crossed to once in a storm? How they brought out a coffin no one had known was on board? And the relatives and the priest all waiting on the quay? I had forgotten. It was autumn, nearly winter in 1971, before the snowbound Christmas in the village. I wrote a poem about it this morning. Can I translate it?
CROSSING TO ZAKYNTHOS
For Chris
At the roaring quay, with the ferry tied
and still at last, we saw a commotion –
we saw men shouldering down a coffin
and jostling women in black robes who shrieked
and received their dead: a boy. Men in arm-
bands, a priest. A loud funeral wound off.
No one had known a coffin was on board.
Who would, on such a day of winter storm,
knowing have embarked on Charon’s ferry?
The gush and suck of froth, of the black wash
over hacked rocks to a sea wall: This could
be St Kilda, you or I smiled, cold, sick,
glancing out to sea. All day lay ahead,
and then a late-night ferry back. Coffins
had never frozen me with dread before.
Why? I was two months gone; and knew we had
too lightly borne this child I bore across
there to the black-robed shore of Zakynthos.
I ordered a fig tree at the garden shop in the hope that one will bear fruit here, even in this dry sand.
From A Book for the Hours of Prayer (Das Stundenbuch):
Feigenbaum, der auch im marmorharten
Grunde hundert Früchte trägt:
Duft geht aus aus deinen runden Zweigen.
Und du fragst nicht, ob ich wachsam sei;
furchtlos, aufgelöst in Säften, steigen
deine Tiefe still an mir vorbei.
figtree rooted in ground hard
as marble, yet carrying a hundred figs:
odor pours out from your heavy boughs,
and you never ask if I am keeping watch or not;
confident, dissolved by the juices, your depths
keep climbing past me silently.
Rainer Maria Rilke (Robert Ely’s translation)
Dogen instructed:
Students cannot gain enlightenment simply because they retain their preconceptions. Without knowing who taught them these things, they consider the mind to be thought and perceptions and do not believe it when they are told that the mind is plants and trees.
Dogen: Shobogenzo Zuimonki
Fog has been falling night after night this week. The horn starts before nightfall, two double blasts twenty seconds apart, and is still blasting half-through the morning into the sun haze. I walked to the lighthouse tonight to hear it up close. The avenue of tea-trees was black, dripping, in a luminous white mist so dense that I was on the steps to the lighthouse before I could see the great white rocket of it, the lantern revolving. I stood beside the shed containing the horn. Steam gushed out and a blast so loud that my eardrums, my whole body shuddered, filled with it – so loud it was no longer sound, only pain.
The tide was a long way out. I was walking along the pier when a great answering groan came out of the invisible water at the end of the pier – then a ship’s faint lights appeared, moved on and out of sight, but its horn sounded again. The lighthouse, the ship, and echoes from the rocks all around…I came back damp and salty at midnight, still resonating with the roar of it.
A story beginning: A banner of script, large characters on thin gold silk that wavers whenever the wind moves the trees at the window and slides along and down the wall on to the floor by midday. Script printed over the picture of the Buddha. As the morning passes the characters change in size, and also in shape, and so – it must be so – in meaning.
TRUE STORIES OF OUR VILLAGE
The man who was killed by a handful of walnuts
Let his name be Barba-Yanni. A patriarch, Barba-Yanni was too old to work and his heart was playing up, but he had sons who came with their families in summer and worked the fields. One day a scuffle broke out among the grandchildren in the avli, the courtyard where everyone was sitting in the cool of the evening threading the last of the day’s tobacco leaves one by one, ready to be hung in garlands in the sun next morning. One of the children had come home with a handful of ripe walnuts from Barba-Yanni’s magnificent tree, and the others all wanted some. An aunt shrieked at the boy: ‘Who told you you could help yourself to walnuts?’
‘Grandfather,’ whispered the boy.
‘Did you?’ She swung round to the old man, who had gone red.
‘What did you just say?’ he said.
‘Since they’re our walnuts…’ she yelled.
‘My walnuts, daughter-in-law.’
‘All right! They’re ours, yours and ours, we live here after all!’
‘They’re my walnuts. And my grandchildren will have any of my walnuts they want, while I live,’ roared Barba-Yanni.
She too was enraged. She was not backing down now. ‘That field’s going to be ours, with everything in it! With the walnut tree! Not theirs. You’ve willed it to us!’
‘I’m not dead yet!’ Barba-Yanni uttered, and he fell dead at her feet.
The boy whose mother came back
Let his name be Maki. Maki, who was three, lived with his widowed grandmother, Theodora; his father, whose marriage had broken up soon after Maki’s birth, boarded in Thessaloniki where he worked, and only came to the village for the harvest months. They were a poor family, whose land was not enough to support them. Maki was growing up a wild child, a loner. He threw stones if other children spoke to him, children who had mothers.
One spring day Theodora, greatly excited, announced to Maki that his mother, who had gone to work in Germany with her sister, was coming to get her household things, her proika. ‘You’ll see your mother, Maki! She’s coming here!’ He knew what his mother looked like from the wedding photo which they had kept hanging in the saloni.
The car stopped in a swirl of dust short of the house. Maki was waiting with Theodora beside the geranium tins in front, dressed in his best, his church clothes. A man in a suit stepped out and introduced himself to the open-mouthed Theodora as her daughter-in-law’s solicitor. The woman beside him was staring straight through the windscreen. He was here to supervise the loading of the proika, he said. ‘Yes, yes. Tell her,’ Theodora said, and wrung her hands… ‘Say that Maki – Ach Maria!’ she wailed. ‘This is Maki! Speak to the boy, evlogimeni!’ (Which means ‘blessed one’, and is a curse.)
A clod of mud and gravel exploded on the windscreen. Theodora was spattered. Maki was far away.
Daisies in a glass curled like dead yellow spiders.
Rocks raise their brown backs, scaled or furry, and go under. Weeds wallow in the channels.
A narrow strip of sand in the sun. The tide washes in and the shadow of the cliff flows down to meet it.
A twig cup in the fork of the bare prunus tree. The only shells in it are snail shells.
More hail this morning.
A stooped cow nuzzles a calf
that doesn’t wake up.
Idea for a dialogue:
Woman’s Voice: For him all I’ve been is a few notes, on a flute, say, in the long symphony of him-and-her…
Wife’s Voice: Oh? Have there been flute notes?
Woman’s Voice:…and for me those few notes have been the whole music. Now I’ve gone off symphonies, heard or unheard. Now I prefer my music made of a note here, a note there; flute-breath and koto-pluck out of the depths of a silence.
The lighthouse horn hooted all morning on two notes, while I dreamed of a wrecked ship sunk into a pit so deep no light could wake it. Now the fog has lifted. The air is creaking with crows.