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 with 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.
The Historical Society swelters in its new building. On the back wall they have a set of E’s shadowy sepia ink-and-wash drawings of the graves and the trees I was just walking among. The records show that Henry Handel Richardson spent thirteen months in Queenscliff in 1877–8, when she was seven; the house in Mercer Street has found a buyer, they said. There is a navigation map of the Rip entrance on show, dated 1870, with the shoals marked, and the various lights (the black lighthouse has a steady light, not flashing, the Lonsdale light a red and a green sector) and the beacons and hazardous rocks: Lonsdale Rock, Lightning Rocks, Corsair Rock, Beacon Rock…A real estate poster, no date, offers lots at Point Lonsdale, The Loveliest of Seaside Resorts, for £5 DEPOSIT, BALANCE £2 MONTHLY AT LOW INTEREST. The steamer fare to Melbourne: 2/6, return 4/-…They had the sea side of Glaneuse Road subdivided, the other side labelled ‘Potato Paddock’; a ‘Mr P. Synot’s Orchard’ was marked in. Also on display is a photocopy of the diary entry of William Todd, one of John Batman’s party at Indented Head for the July day in 1835 when the escaped convict William Buckley first met again with white men, after thirty-two years in the bush with the blacks: how he accepted bread, and spoke its English name; how he had seen two ships in all that time; how he spun them a fine yarn too:
After he had got his dinner he informed us that he was a Soldier in the Kings Own & a native of Macklesfield in Cheshire, & was wrecked off Port Phillip Heads…
He said he swam ashore with the Captain (‘who could not swim’) on his shoulders. ‘He was an entire day swimming before he could reach the shore.’ A sketch in the diary shows the tattoos on his arm. What did the black tribe make of this?
Diving in my dream, I found a pitted and barnacled amphora on the seabed. Lifting it free, I kicked my way to the swimming of light that was the surface. It was heavy out of the water. Eyes were graven on its side and I saw it was the head of a Buddha – not a lid, a topknot; the handles I held it by were the long hoops of earlobes.
The first day of the Sesshins began simmering and still (the giant fern under the lemon gum at Faraday Street is singed), until as I reached the hills a blue-black cloud hid them and a storm-wind whipped leaves, grey dust, branches over the road and lightning (white forked tongues of the serpent) stabbed the bush. A power pole was down, the line flat on the gravel; a farmer was cutting a fallen tree with a chainsaw to clear the way. The rain fell on other hills. The wind brought us the smell of it only.
We could talk over the evening soup, after which the silence began. We have to share rooms and tables, and not speak. We bow and enter the zendo, a plain room with a view over the hills: no candles, no Buddha images here but ourselves. Hogen sits in the lotus position against a black tree on a gold sky: a monk in stiff black robes, come straight from winter on Mount Fuji. Was there snow? Here – magpies, kookaburras, frogs and crickets; crows. Thunder. We face the hot wall for the first zazen.
At six the next morning the sky is gold as if no time has passed in sleep and we have spent all night sitting. Our legs ache as if we have. Cows are bellowing. In the valleys the lights have gone out; drifting mist.
Every day the bell is rung at 5:30. The first of the ten zazen periods is at 6:00. This is followed by ‘mantra-running’ forwards and backwards (with closed mouths, mentally chanting Bo-dhi Sva-ha) on the gravel track beside the aqueduct, then yoga, then chanting the Heart Sutra in Japanese four times, then another zazen, motionless sitting cross-legged facing the wall. Breakfast is at nine. Meals, an afternoon sleep, a talk given by Hogen-san, and zazen unbroken otherwise except by short periods of kinhin (walking meditation) and dokusan in private one by one, for those who wish to ask a question, when Hogen rings his bell in the room below, cooler, behind the low branches of the wattle that also shades this zendo. The day ends at 9:30 with the chanting in Japanese of the Great Vows:
Bon no mu jin sei gan dan
Ho mon mu ryo sei gan gaku
Butsu do mu jo sei gan jo.
The water in the aqueduct is cold, clear (brown because the bottom is brown); leaves and twigs twist, floating deep. Tonight I dipped a hand in, half-expecting an avid eel-mouth to take shape and snap it off. How simple it would be – just two side-steps and off you would go, whipped downstream past them all, carried by the current and mantra-swimming, not pounding along on gravel.
Outside the kitchen door they keep two unruly little goats chained to stakes, brown and white goats with a dark stripe along their spines, wagging whisks of tails, two dark teats, and large dark gold eyes, fishes’ eyes. They stand on their hind legs to nibble at any tree within reach, breaking off to scratch themselves with a hoof or a horn.
The deep voice of Hogen-san: ‘Are you living your own real life? We are bubbles…on the surface…of the water. The water is…death.’
Ma ka han nya ha ra mi ta shin gyo-o-o.
Both dokusan on the first day were for all ‘new participants’. We sat on our cushions in the lower room. ‘Now you will be my teachers,’ he said. ‘Tell me. Why have you come here?’
No one spoke. This was the moment (but I saw it only afterwards) for me to have asked about Mount Fuji! A response in the very spirit of Zen, and he would have taken it as such. But I thought he might misunderstand, see the question as rude, aggressive – I misjudged the man and therefore the moment, in fact, and it passed. So: I learned a lesson from that, at least – but not if there was snow on Fuji-san.
Someone asks about the efficacy of the mantra. ‘What’s the difference if instead of Bodhi Svaha I chant Sandal, Sandal?’
‘No difference.’
‘But the mantra, that means God, and a sandal –’
‘No difference. Sandal is God too.’
‘But a sandal’s just a sandal! And God’s –’ He points up, he spreads his arms.
‘You think: God is high, sandal low. This is wrong…’
Not the Zen way, he goes on. It’s like when you climb Mount Fuji. Following your path step by step, you reach the summit. From there you can see countless other ways, all leading there…‘This is the way of Zen.’
(There is another world, but it is in this one.)
Seeing us unwilling to come out with questions of our own, at his first talk (teisho) he reads aloud a long letter full of questions, sent to him by an Irishwoman, and his answers. They are questions about human evil and cruelty, the nature of the mind, reality.
Someone asks him about karma. ‘All the karma of all humankind is within each one of us…When we watch an animal which is living in this world by killing other beings, it is a karmic being. We are the same.
‘We can be free of it. We can die every time. We can die. Otherwise zazen is not so meaningful at all.’
The food is bland: hot unsalted vegetable broths at night, vegetables or beans with rice or pasta and fruit for lunch. The hot little bedrooms face the same view of the hills, across a balcony onto which the only doors are in other people’s rooms. Our three beds are crowded in together. The sheets are starched; every shift of a limb in the night rattles them like paper. Throughout the day as well, one or other of us is always to be found lying down to rest, while the others tiptoe in, out. We smile briefly if our eyes meet. All I know of the others is the names on the label on the door. Silence obliges us to ignore each other and this, I find, makes sharing easier: privacy is undisturbed.
Everyone sits. I squirm. We do zazen facing the wall. The green cover of the piano is inches from my face. My shadow is on it, and faintly superimposed, Hogen-san’s. Pain flares along one leg. I shift it. He pushes the small of my back straight. Sweat is trickling between my breasts.
‘Zazen: sitting. From the outside, look the same. But someone is doing it in the darkness, some other one in the light.’
He says we must die every moment, cut ourselves off and be born anew. The time of death is every moment…‘The present is all, all at once. This is what I wanted to tell you. This is it.’
A few drops of rain fall, the earth smells like a wet dog: the trees are alert. But no more rain falls.
‘If you have more questions, please come to me in dokusan. I will prepare a sharper sword.’ A grin splits his gravity. We gasp and laugh.
A copy of Hogen’s book was on the table tonight: The Other Shore. (Paramita – Well, this shore will do me, my mind murmurs rebelliously.) The book is a collection of short statements and koans like the talks he gives us. I stayed up late (10:30!) to copy some of them in my notebook, since it seems the book is out of print; he went past me to the kitchen to ask for fruit juice. Next day he asked us please not to read at the sesshin: this Way is found by discarding concepts, thoughts, words, ideas.
Again, gusts of wind, rattles of rain, no rain.
From The Other Shore:
The life of true emptiness takes the form of whatever is here now.
By doing yoga and zazen, we can begin to appreciate the real state of our body and mind, both of which are stiff and unpeaceful. We should not hate them. Please, let them be as they are. Taste their special, bitter taste. It is one’s intention, one’s mind, that obstructs the limitless light and freedom, though originally there is nothing but light and freedom.
You ask me how to get rid of expectations and intentions. In response to your question, I can sincerely say that there is no method, and that it is not a question of how to abandon them. It is your sitting itself that should be completely one with ‘it’. Your daily actions must become one with it. You cannot depend on anyone to lead you. From here on, you must just sit until you fall from the cliff of the self. I cannot say any more than that, and you cannot know any more than that.
The harder we try to clarify muddy water, the muddier it becomes. It is best to leave it alone.
Each of us is the whole cosmos.
If you do not investigate the living Zen of life’s actual struggle day and night, and if this living Zen doesn’t always die and come into being anew, then it is a false belief. All you have practised is of no use.
The formal disciplines (of sitting, posture, daily practice) are not ultimately disciplines at all. They are the fruits of human wisdom; the abyss, the infinite, the void.
Carried by the current of deep life, we are naturally led to sit. Here is the opening of a new encounter in sitting. This sitting is no longer your own.
The form of your zazen should be like a mountain.
Hogen Daido Yamahata: The Other Shore
I sit in my black clothes: their Indian-ink smell. He wears a brown bib over his black tunic and faded pants. The biographical note in The Other Shore says that he has a wife and children and disciples in his little monastery, and that he teaches in England, Ireland, Norway, Holland, France, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Australia, the United States and Israel…My mind makes collages of him in Athens, in Dublin – a little Buddha-figure of black and parchment paper pasted over whitewashed walls, fishing boats…
The wattle has dark, spare drifts of feathery leaves, and long red pods hanging from the ends of branches.
One of the women who share my room wears a brown bib like Hogen-san’s. She is reading Bruno Bettelheim’s Freud and Man’s Soul. Today she asked Hogen a question about the hidden part of the mind, the unknown, unknowable part that goes on being without our being conscious of it, in our sleep, for example. Can we fully know what we are? (And in memories of ill-treatment repressed for years and revived by therapy – as the Irishwoman’s letter mentioned.) I suggested it was like the eye which can see everything outside itself, everything but its own self.
‘Hidden? It is not hidden,’ he exclaimed. ‘You were blind maybe. It was not hidden…’
Ringing the metal bowl with his fingernail, he made it chime. ‘Do you really hear this? Just listen to it. That’s enough.’
‘This encounter. Only this.’
In conclusion he said: ‘Now I give you many koan, I think. Hidden koans. I will take responsibility for that. I do not like to leave things half? Half-way. That is why dokusan is important. Please, come to me in dokusan.’
(Saint Augustine said, and Wittgenstein quoted: ‘What is time? When I do not ask the question, I know the answer.’)
Facing the four walls, Hogen in the centre. ‘Exhale.’ His voice blares. ‘Ex-hale. One exhalation. Nothing else. Here now. This is it.’
We are supposed to be aware only of the breath, but again and again I discover that I am aware of the pulse in my body, in my joined legs and thumbs, and I tug my mind away to the breath – exhale – only to find that again…
The question I might ask: in writing, am I weaving a veil for my own eyes and those of others? Is writing my path or an obstacle on it?
‘An emptiness under the mask,’ as the poem of George Seferis says…‘Under the mask an emptiness.’
The meaning of the ‘other shore’:
Mahaprajnaparamita is a Sanscrit term of the western country; in the T’ang language it means: great-wisdom-other-shore-reached.…What is Maha? Maha is great.…What is Prajna? Prajna is wisdom.…What is Paramita? The other shore reached.…To be attached to the objective world is to be attached to the cycle of living and dying, which is like the waves that rise in the sea; this is called: this shore.…When we detach ourselves from the objective world, there is neither death nor life and one is like water flowing incessantly; this is called: the other shore.
Hui-neng, seventh-century Chinese patriarch, quoted – with ellipses – by Octavio Paz in The Bow and the Lyre from D.T. Suzuki’s Manual of Zen Buddhism: leaving out the elaborations has made the passage piercingly beautiful. Better than the original! Remember this.
Another day, the fifth in succession, of this sultry heat, though today is overcast at least. Is it raining on the coast, is there a cold sea wind? Here now and then a gust of wind makes the trees move like waves breaking. The giant ferns even up here are yellowing, scorched.
The Tibetan Geshe is opulent, a large flow of red-and-gold robes, an elm, a maple in autumn, a liquidambar. Hogen is dark, taut and grim; he sits like this wattle becalmed in heat.
Mantra-running this morning along the fast brown water while a rooster crowed I saw among the tree ferns in the gully below the track a pool of milk. It must be a bend in the river. There is a white bridge. Not safe to climb down and look – there are sure to be snakes.
‘I do not think of my home. I have no home. No past. Here Now is all there is.’
This afternoon five sticks of incense were burning, stuck in to the mesh of the fireguard. The air was sweaty, still, full of blowflies. The clock was a quarter of an hour slow: Hogen-san, who came in after this zazen began, in good faith kept us sitting on. Cows in the valley bellowed. Mu. Mu. The incense was ash-worms on the hearth. When he rang the bell we had been sitting for an hour. He was horrified when he was told – ‘And it is so hot here!’ – and had us lie down for his talk. Everything, he said, is Mu. Emptiness, Shunyata. We are empty bubbles on the water, forming, dissolving. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form: as in the Heart Sutra that we chant each day. The Prajnaparamita Sutra, the Wisdom of the Other Shore: Gate Gate… The mantra is the one that was engraved on the white stupa beside the gompa in Tasmania, but in Japanese the Sanscrit reads: Gya tei gya tei ha ra gya tei hara so gya tei bo ji sowa.
Aye on the shores of darkness there is light.
John Keats
Heat radiates through the half-dark. All along the tracks blackberries grow thickly (none ripe), and ragwort, bracken, thistles. Cows amble on the slopes: Mu echoes back from the hills. Mu echoes all through the Heart Sutra. Gen kai nai shi mu i shiki kai mu mu myo yaku mu mu…
The foghorn all night was the cows bellowing. Had their calves been taken away? I woke reminded of the night of the last day in the Captain’s house in Nea Rhoda in Halkidiki, when we thought war was about to be declared against Turkey – how in the evening cool, whimpering old women in black were trailing between the oleanders along the suddenly emptied, silent streets – silent but for the roars of cows swollen with milk, whose owners were too sunk in despair to care. My sister-in-law went knocking on doors for milk for her two-year-old son and mine: after an hour she came home with a small jugful. In the half-light the cows bellowed…The other women stirred, crackling sheets. I tried to avert my mind from past and future, other times, other places, as Hogen-san insists. But in three weeks I will be forty-seven years old. ‘Be your age,’ was one of my mother’s sayings; am I being? With my life leading into ever deeper solitude, what if I’m unable to bear it?
Be your age. Whenever she punished or scolded me I used to cry and threaten to do the same when she was a little girl and I was her mummy. Then you’ll laugh on the other side of your face! (Another of her sayings.) She laughed and said that would never happen, but I knew better. Wherever this idea came from, I persisted in it for a long time, only giving it up reluctantly and even then with a sort of lingering incredulity at the injustice of life. After her stroke in old age (she was sixty-three) she did turn into a child, a withered child – a parody of my real mother, and at the same time of the child that I had been. Truculent, hurt, hangdog: the quivering lower lip, the broken sentences, spurts of words and silences.
At daybreak when the bell rang they were still bellowing. I saw them through the trees, on yellow paddocks and folds of the valley, as I ran along the water.
I see myself as a fish in a stream; deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream.
Virginia Woolf: Moments of Being
No chance to say goodbye to Hogen before I drove away into the noon sun. I never went to dokusan, I left my questions unasked. I thought of writing a few words of thanks, perhaps on a postcard of the black lighthouse. What would he make of a ‘black lighthouse’? – ‘Black light’? – whose light (as marked on old charts) is F(ixed), not Fl(ashing)? This man of light in black clothes. Was there snow on Fuji-san? But no, I won’t write. There was the good encounter. Only that. Over now, it is complete as it is.
All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others…and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
My garden is dry under its mat of seaweed and a scatter of black pods like goat droppings. The cherry tomato branches are weighed down with clusters – gooseberry tomatoes – translucent, like green drops of water, with a dusting of gold round the navel; and there are even a few red ones. The grass I heaped round them in the pots as a mulch has dried and packed down so that the stalks look as if they grew out of birds’ nests. The basil has white flowers, the chives furry purple ones. The lantana is in flames. The apples on the boughs at my bedroom window have red streaks on one side. Even the spindly little tree strangled in the jasmine has seven dark nectarines! The agapanthus flowers are all shaggy now, shrivel-edged, purpling and shedding petals; green pods are left hanging, each with a wiry white whisker.
I had a dress that shade of agapanthus blue once, handed down by my cousin, a crêpe de Chine dress with a circular skirt that spun up like a hoop. It was my good dress, for changing into every day at 6:00 when the dinner gong rang – the flow of crêpe de Chine on my salt skin! – at the guesthouse where we stayed on Phillip Island. After dinner my mother played pingpong on the verandah while my father and I walked through the sunset onto the pier, where the mask of a drowned figurehead hung with a notice that it came from the wreck of the Speke; we went along the beach and then Lovers’ Walk, in the tea-tree and manna gums, looking for koalas and we found some up high.
Sunset on the pier.
A child whirls round in her dress
of sea blue, sky blue,
and she’s the day’s spindle, she
winds the silken stillness in.
Virginia Woolf on the influence of her mother:
It is perfectly true that she obsessed me, in spite of the fact that she died when I was thirteen, until I was forty-four. Then one day walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse; in a great, apparently involuntary, rush. One thing burst into another. Blowing bubbles out of a pipe gives the feeling of the rapid crowd of ideas and scenes which blew out of my mind, so that my lips seemed syllabling of their own accord as I walked. What blew the bubbles? Why then? I have no notion. But I wrote the book very quickly; and when it was written I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.
Virginia Woolf: Moments of Being
Moon and Star, N and R’s kittens, arrived this morning, to stay until the children and their mother have a house again; at the flat they moved into this week, no pets are allowed. Star has a pointed face, Moon’s is round. They’re tabbies, shadow-furred, creamy-bellied; two sturdy little toms with white-whiskery old men’s ears. Night kittens – they have moonstones for eyes. They ate, they drank milk and slept curled in each other on cushions and climbed in the garden to an outcry of wattle birds. In the tea-tree at the side of the kitchen, stretched out on a grey branch ridged with sun and shadow, they disappear. I bought meat and milk bowls and a litter tray; and this evening – an icy wind, winter wind! – brought sand from the beach to fill it, so that I can keep them inside at night, at least at first. The beach was all shadow and rising water; across the choppy grey-green waves, Point Nepean and Queenscliff shone in the full sun. I am back. Here. Now.
Someone asked a Zen master if he weren’t tired of being asked the same questions all the time. He replied that he had never been asked the same question twice. Every time a question was asked, it was asked by a different person.
Once in Europa, John Berger’s new book, is the sequel to Pig Earth (I must read that now), the second book of a trilogy called Into Their Labours. (The Author’s Note quotes John 4:38 – ‘Others have laboured and ye are entered into their labours.’) Pig Earth, the same Note says, ‘was a book of stories set against the traditional life of a mountain village…’ He lives in the French Alps.
The stories in Once in Europa are boldly claimed to be ‘love stories’ ‘set against the disappearance or “modernisation” of such village life.’) Love stories. Did this require as much bravado as it would have if Berger were a woman – or any bravado at all, coming from a man? The love is that of peasants: terse, subterranean, passionate. Each love is a cry of triumph, pride, defiance. Place, too, is rendered with that intense close detail which only ever springs from love. Each story is utterly finite. I read them one by one, large gaps between. A moat of silence surrounds each one in my mind.
Men aren’t beautiful. Nothing has to stay in them. Nothing has to be attracted by any peace they offer. So they’re not beautiful. Men have been given another power. They burn. They give off light and warmth. Sometimes they turn night into day. Often they destroy everything. Ashes are men’s stuff. Milk is ours.
John Berger: Once in Europa
Odile Blanc says this, telling her own (the title) story to her son Christian while he is flying her in a small plane above the farm where she grew up and the manganese factory that devoured the farm and also, one day, Christian’s father, who worked there; so that ‘Once in Europa’ is seen to be an overview in space as in time. She has good grounds for what she says: the whole story is her witness. Her ‘milk’ and ‘fire’ are not idle words; the nexus formed by their opposition resonates through the story – lives are bodied forth in them, the elemental, hieratic power they have. Still and all, a man put these words, this story, into her mouth. Odile is a man’s creation as surely as the Venus de Milo. Two points of view, two perspectives, crossing, meet in her. She is an object of love, not a subject only; her depth, her beauty and her solidity all stem from that.
Every era chooses its own definition of humanity. I believe this to be the definition of our time: a human being is an emitter of symbols. Among these symbols, two are the beginning and the end of human language, its plenitude and its dissolution: the embrace of bodies and the poetic metaphor. In the first are the union of sensation and image, the fragment apprehended as a cipher of the totality, and the totality shared out in caresses that transform bodies into a fount of instantaneous correspondences. In the second are the fusion of sound and meaning, the marriage of the intelligible and the sensible. The poetic metaphor and the erotic embrace are examples of that almost perfect coincidence between one symbol and another that we call analogy, though its true name is felicity. This moment is but an annunciation, a presentiment of other rarer, more total moments: contemplation, liberation, plenitude, emptiness.
Octavio Paz: Convergences (My italics)
At seven this evening, when the sun came out for the first time all day, the rain had left a rack of water-slats along the pier. I walked out on cloud reflections, and white rails where the fishing rods bristled, the lines sagging down among kelp trees. Sun blazing in the cliffs. In the motionless grey sky over Point Nepean, a rainbow.
The kittens, in disgrace for shitting in three places on the carpet last night, are spending the day out in the sun and whenever it rains, under the house. Crouched low, lying in wait for each other and staring up, they look like nothing so much as two rock flathead in shallow water. Moon is playing on, and Star under, the yellow canvas deckchair; which, like a buttercup, casting a gold reflection, makes a tiger cub of Moon. Hop – now of Star too.
Here are caged shadows,
here are gold tigers yawning,
blinking their striped eyes.
We picked a box of nectarines for H while he is away, and for the tree’s sake, to relieve it before the boughs break, we three women: J (up the ladder) and D and I, sipping D’s champagne as we picked. The princes of darkness stalked birds. The pear tree is burdened too, but with green fruit. Little plush almonds are pouting, erect. The walnut cases – so many – look like green apples.
Back here I baked barracouta fillets with silver thyme and Vietnamese mint; we ate them with a Greek salad, watching Bergman’s film Cries and Whispers, on SBS – the first time for J. (A family death – it was hard on her.) Four actresses in turn: it seems as stylised to me now as Rashomon.
Ten thousand Taras: Gesang ist gesungen.
Yesterday I drove along the coast to Lorne to Apollo Bay to pick Taki up from the restaurant, since he’s returning to school a week early for a rowing camp. On the way back we stopped at the mouth of Sheoak River, where I often left my bicycle years ago, having ridden round cliffs and past the rainbows out at sea; to walk into a ball of space, cracked by a waterfall. Yesterday the Sheoak was rain-swollen. We walked past the tall, hissing reeds and up along the rock ledge. Pools blocked by dead trees far below the track had speckled fans of froth in them like platypus tails. A slither in the bracken, a corded greenish-brown length of snake idly moving off; brown butterflies flitted. Wheels of spider thread spanned a dead tree limb from limb, sunlit. Here the blackberry brambles grow sprawled and rich, and they had ripe berries on them, but gritty as ants, and sour.
Above the waterfall is Swallow Cave. The water here is black, shallow: it pools in front of Swallow Cave, frilling and smoothing across the flat rocks. Swallow Cave is honeycombed, fretty like giant skullbones, all pitted vaults and groins of rock, swallow-inhabited and shaking with river light. Fingers of stone hold out great balls of stone, bubbles and eggs of stone; the shells of others lie burst on the cave floor. Yesterday the shadow darts of swallows swooped in pairs, low over the water. A day half-moon had risen over the rim of trees.
Reeds and brown water –
bearing away mirrored light,
a brown butterfly.
the sand and touches the sea
with a forked brown tongue.
We brought back with us the little tree that was one of my Christmas presents from Chris and Taki, the other being a home espresso machine, a Baby Gaggia! in memory of my years behind the big one at the restaurant. It’s a Tahitian lime tree with waxy flowers and little green nodules in clumps. I’ve dug up the lawn in a sunny place, planted it, watered it. To think of making poisson cru some day with my own limes! I remember how: you soak chunks of raw bonito, tuna or other dark fish (but you can use white fish) in lime-juice until it turns grey (or white) and opaque, then add onions, tomatoes, coconut milk. Like at Erena and Amine’s hut in the grove of palms and avocados at Mamao, en face de l’ancien musée – their actual postal address. Ducks, brown children all addressed as petit frère, hedges of tongued hibiscus, clothes spread to dry. When a fifteen-year-old cousin of Erena’s gave birth there, the baby turned out half-Indo-Chinese, to the girl’s surprise. Ça alors, c’était lui le père? I remember she lay, her hair wet, her face blue and sunken in the dark under the thatch, like the woman in Gauguin’s Maternité – Te Tamari No Atua, ‘The Son of God’ with the white cat by her side. This milky baby, he filled the house. Excited squabbles arose all around, so many aunts and cousins wanted him. I admired him so fervently that the mother said to take him home to Australia. It was my dream, no secret, to have a Tahitian child and live on there: but my own, born mine. I was wild with lust then, at twenty; mad to have a man and bear him a child. Erena, laughing, had once shown me a tiny ceramic cock with balls, I remember, delicately erect, pierced as if to be worn on a necklet or charm bracelet. I asked her for it; and I slept with it under my pillow from then on.
We sat on the floor sewing; in nothing but her gold skin, her little daughter staggered over, knelt and beat on Erena’s breast for the milk.
Now when I get up and meditate I light the candle and a stick of incense in their bowl of sand. (The bowl is the old, chased copper one I brought back from Greece for my mother. In Tasmania the incense bowls had rice in them, not sand. I venerate food too much.) I face the gold-flowing wall. The incense stick has a bud of sweet fire at the tip, a bloodspot; it rises out of the bright sand like a lotus stem from the mud.
The woman in the mirror
closes in, bows through the smoke-
strings’ ripple and roll at our
double approach and lift of the incense stick
to stub one fire-bud, bloodspot, each
and leave the deep room dark…
While I write the kittens sit on the flokati rug in the sun, chasing the blind-cord and its shadow, breaking off in confusion to squat and crossly lick themselves. Startled by the cat in the magnifying mirror, they creep up on it from behind. Moon spins round after his tail.
At night they have possums’ eyes. They sleep on the bed, vibrantly nestling into one hollow or other of me. Something wakes me – the moon on my face, a passing ship’s reverberation, a scuffle in the cavity between the walls – and I read and write by lamplight for a while until I feel sleepy again; the rustle of papers and sheets doesn’t disturb them. Le hibou et les poussiquettes.