THE SNAKE-HEADS of the belladonna lilies – how quickly the long crimson stalks come rearing up out of their withered clumps! – have split open to disgorge their sheaves of frilly pink horns, sickly-sweet-scented horns out of those gaping crimson snake-jaws.
I know this is wrong. I know I’m in error, finding them horrible. I never did before Ash Wednesday when they burst out of the burnt hills. The belladonna is as beautiful as the lotus, I’m just not ready to see it. Born water-fleshed and scented out of the dust and ash – it is the lotus.
Yesterday the kittens left two puddles of piss on the bean bag. I rubbed their noses and their little bearded chins in it and threw them outside. But this morning again when I came in – ugh, the ammoniac stench! And it dawned on me: the soft sift and rustle inside when they tread on the bag is so like the sand in the sandbox that they think it is! Nothing for it, then, but to hide the beanbag behind closed doors. I’ve washed and dried it out, but when will I get it filled again? I emptied it into every large container I had, and the rest overflowed on the floor, a snowstorm in the front room. But the beans float, they cling. They defy gravity. The soup ladle and paper bags are no use. The white balls just fly up and cover me – moonbubbles moonbeams.
At seven it was low tide and pedestals of matted rock lay far out in the sunny water. Ah, these last long nights of the summer, after the turning of the year. A squat blue ship was lumbering out past Queenscliff, a pilot boat fussing round it: on its bridge it had a whole white weatherboard house, red-roofed – a tall chimney poked up.
I lay in the sun and at last read The Ladybird and The Captain’s Doll (having just finished reading about them in Lawrence’s letters – how much even his letters leave out!); the kittens kept clawing at the straps of my old black bikini. Now the brown silk of me has two or three little threads of blood down it, red-knotted at the ends.
The characters in The Ladybird are infused with so much symbolic, mythological meaning that they can’t move for it: Daphne (at least not Diana) is the moon-woman and the Polish count is her night, whose ‘night-wife’ she becomes, who speaks to her of the dark sun – ‘It is only his jacket of dust that makes him visible…And the true sunbeams coming towards us flow darkly, a moving darkness of the genuine fire’ – and the dark blood; whose emblem is the ladybird on the thimble he gave her. A ladybird (‘a Marienkäfer – a Mary-beetle’) carved on a green stone. (‘“Ah, your eyes!” he said. “They are like jewels of stone.”’)
‘The true fire is invisible. Flame, and the red fire we see burning, has its back to us. It is running away from us…’
He has ‘sung’ her to his room one night; she wavers outside.
Impossible to go back:
As impossible as that the moon should go back on her tracks, once she has risen…
The darkness inside the room seemed alive like blood.
Written in 1921, how eerily this story foreshadows the Third Reich! Like The Plumed Serpent too, and Kangaroo…Count Dionys is a Führer at heart, a political as well as a sexual mystic. He wants men to:
‘…become vassals by choice…to the man whose soul is born single, able to be alone, to choose and to command. At last the masses will come to such men and say, “You are greater than we. Be our lords. Take our life and our death in your hands, and dispose of us according to your will. Because we see a light in your face, and a burning on your mouth.”’
Mysticism of moon and blood, okay; until one comes to craven and craving brutal singsong religiosity, to powerlust, devil-lust – ‘Strike! Strike!’ – and the stomach heaves. Lawrence’s version of Fascism (and loathing of Socialism) was founded on passionate idealism, yes – as was how many people’s Communism, and for that matter Christianity, before they knew of the Holocaust, the Gulag, the rack and the stake? And after they knew, often enough: Lawrence died before he could be put to the test. The ambiguities of worshipping blood…In hindsight, what can we do but shudder at his dark little Count? No Dionysos – this is Count Dracula.
The Captain’s Doll is (of course) another love story – a wiser and more temperate one than The Ladybird. And the landscapes in it!
It was like some great, deep-furred ice-bear lying spread upon the top heights, and reaching down terrible paws of ice into the valley: like some immense sky-bear fishing in the earth’s solid hollows from above.
The story splits in half. It begins as drawing-room comedy. Then I bet Lawrence left off halfway and came back inspired after the Tyrol to take it up again in midstream (mid-lake), and was impatient with loose ends. There’s that silly little nuisance of a wife, Mrs Hepburn, in the way? A shove out the window for her. Oh, let it be an accident. That useless Baroness Mitchka, what to do with her? Oh, well, kill her off in some riot. Let the loose ends unravel as they may: Hannele and Captain Hepburn are off to the lake and the glacier. Hannele stays the same woman throughout – Frieda herself, that immovable object – but the passive, glossy-eyed Captain undergoes an uneasy transformation into this terrier of a fellow who will be master of his woman. The plot creaks and clanks into place. Place, in fact, is the story’s salvation. Its validity outweighs all the slapdashness and the haranguing – none of it counts in the end. The whole sequence of the lake and the climb to the glacier is miraculous, it’s so immediate, so authentic, like all of Lawrence’s travel writing, with that hallucinatory vividness of his recall:
By the turfy road and under the rocks were many flowers: wonderful harebells, big and cold and dark, almost black, and seeming like purple-dark ice…and then monkshood, yellow, primrose yellow monkshood and sudden places full of dark monkshood. That dark-blue, black-blue, terrible colour of the strange rich monkshood made Hepburn look and look and look again. How did the ice come by that lustrous blue-purple intense darkness? – and by that royal poison? – that laughing-snake gorgeousness of much monkshood.
The miracle is not in any static images, wonderful as they are even in isolation, it’s in the way he sets it all in space and turbulent motion. There’s no one like Lawrence for this. Katharine Susannah Prichard was wrong to dismiss the ‘evanescent brilliance’ of his style. Evanescence he sought; there’s evanescence, and evanescence. And his piled-up adjectives more and more emphatically repeated – they roll like wave over wave, never mechanically, he rings such changes on them.
Particularly the dark harebells were large and almost black and ice-metallic: one could imagine they gave a dull ice-chink. And the grass of Parnassus stood erect, white-veined big cups held terribly naked and open to their ice air.
A passage in The Ladybird struck a memory in me, where the Count, a POW, complains to Daphne about England:
‘Fields then! Little fields with innumerable hedges. Like a net with an irregular mesh, pinned down over this island and everything under the net…’
So it is here in Australia too, a net of fences, only the mesh here is larger, and has great tears in it. The endless empty impersonal untrodden paddocks with wire slung from post to post to shut them in. In Greece, in our part at least, whether the roads were asphalt or dirt, they wound for mile after mile among cotton and tobacco plants with never a fence; there were stone walls in Ipiros, but they were sheepfolds. Where we were, they knew every animal and every inch of their own land by heart. The cattle were kept in the stable at night and in the morning the village cowherd – a Turk in those days – took them out to the common pasture; in winter they stayed in the stable day and night. Each family had a strip on the red hillside for a vineyard, t’ambellia. Each family had wheat, sesame, barley and tobacco fields in strips on the dry hills called the Gyrizi. And at the centre was the village – church, school, grocery, three kafeneia – where each house was set in its patch of vegetable-beds with apricots, shady mulberries and figs; the stable was beside the house, and plastic tobacco-tents, and a henhouse with a flat roof you could sit on (as Mama did) in your straw hat and spread the pasta you had made in your own hands out of your own flour and yoghurt – your own trahana – to dry on.
R and B came and stayed in the village for a week in our first spring. We bathed in a waterhole at the bend of the river – to remma, only a stream or a creek, really – that would be pumped dry within a few weeks to irrigate the fields but was full in May in the shadow of the plane trees, and had a lining of mud that frayed softly as our brown-lit bodies moved. R, an agricultural economist, spent hours on several days inspecting the soil of all my father-in-law’s fields. He totted up columns of figures, listed fertilisers and wrote down which crops should go where to make the best use of the land: this for the Gyrizi, this for the river-field where the lucerne is now, the cherry and pear saplings and the rabbit hut…We sat with the old man one afternoon in the dark sala which was like an icebox even in May, drinking muddy coffees; R shuffled papers while I translated. He heard us out, smoking the pink cigarettes he rolled from his own tobacco and smiling graciously; a ton of tobacco, the previous year’s crop, lay in bales against the back wall waiting for the buyers. At the end he thanked R for his trouble and promised to consider his advice. His two dark hands like mallee roots reached out to grasp R’s well-kept white ones; then they spread open on the table. After a moment he said: ‘Let’s have a look at your hands, R.’ No need to translate. Both faces were already twitched into that smile of fierce amusement you see on well-matched tavli-players in the kafeneion.
We have known our land grain by grain, those hands said; and grain by grain it has known us.
I dug and sweated hours in the garden today while the kittens chased spiders and butterflies. On the hibiscus ‘tree’ – it’s still only knee-high after a whole year – I found one large furled flower, too large (I fear for it), and close to the ground. It is made of red and yellow pleats, very fine, crushed like silk, and has gouts of blood at its mouth. Polynesian hibiscus! Slender hibiscus. Will it open or just wither? H and S came here for dinner. White wine and red. The sun and the moon and the shadows of the garden on the window: and our reflections, faint at first, intensifying steadily in the glass as if in a polaroid photo.
All summer the people next door have been clearing their cool overgrown garden of tea-trees and creepers through which the gold lantern on its post near the gate used to glow so weirdly at night, a Narnia-lantern in a wilderness. R whispered to me when I first came to live here (when she was five) that the Red Witch lived there. Where did she hear that? It was what people said about the old place at Green mount in Western Australia where Katharine Susannah Prichard lived and wrote.
By the time H and S left, the full moon was high, white and cold, small, at the apogee. I lit the stump of red candle and faced the wall. The Buddha on the wall was a hole of dark in the heart of the flame. And the side wall had a fire under its golden skin.
A morning washed blue and clean, brilliant, mild. I have come through so far. Yes. I know now. Never will I have another autumn and winter like the last one. Alone or not, I must have the rooms of my autumn and winter full of warm light.
All our troubles, says somebody wise, come upon us because we cannot be alone. And that is all very well. We must all be able to be alone, otherwise we are just victims. But when we are able to be alone, then we realise that the only thing to do is to start a new relationship with another – or even the same – human being. That people should all be stuck up apart, like so many telegraph-poles, is nonsense.
D.H. Lawrence: The Captain’s Doll
At about nine, just after sunset, the two red tide-lanterns on the lighthouse came on. A low-slung black ship slid out past the pier, followed by a cruise ship white as a wedding cake – strings of glitter along all its decks – which gave one drawn-out hoot, passing the lighthouse. Meanwhile a dim grey ship slunk in behind, long-nosed, silent, a grey rat of a tramp steamer.
The horizon was still bright orange-lemon, with a green rim, and the dome of the sky all a dim blue; three stars, no more. Walkers were out on the rock-ledges in the Rip, out to where the waves were breaking. Bladderwrack and rockfret among the long pools. Whiffs of diesel fumes. Gull-squalls, flakes of light falling, gulls falling.
By the time the cruise ship was through, it was black and blazing; the match-flare of its pilot boat scraped the full length of its flank and then went tossing alone back across the bay.
Through J’s binoculars, which she has left here, the lantern of the black lighthouse is a moonsliver cut by glass. And the moon itself, the flat brilliant moon, is chipped on its surface, flakes lifting off it have left grey patches, like a disc of snow half-thawed and then refrozen. All the stars that are just a haze of light to the naked eye – they glitter out singly, millions on millions of stars. My hands can’t hold perfectly still; the stars stretch and sway and slither as if in a round pool of water.
A bad morning dream, out of which the clock radio, or the scuffling creature in the wall behind my head, must have woken me: Chris’s father had just died in the village; his mother was already dead, in the dream. I saw him laid out, sallow – his pale eyes drawn aslant, as they are, by gashed wrinkles. Chris and I, though no longer a couple, were walking hand in hand together in evening dress between tall wet houses that smelled coldly of mud, manure, cement. I knew in the dream that this was not the village I remembered. The white fortress-wall of the church hummed aloud with music. We stopped to listen, since it was Chris’s father’s funeral service: no Byzantine plain chant, though, but a choir – high sweet voices were singing ‘Jerusalem’. Then we walked on. And I was not with Chris now, this was H. We stared at each other in a long mirror lit by bare bulbs in some dark dressing-room. We went knocking on door after door in the streets of the village. Women I had known came to their doors wiping their hands on aprons: came and stared. Who were these strangers out in the street? No one remembered, no one had ever heard of me.
I woke so burdened with sorrow, estrangement, blame, that driving to the city hours later I was still haunted.
Dromoi palioi p’agapisa kai misisa ateleiota…An exquisitely sorrowful Theodorakis song begins with that slow line of words: Old roads that I loved and hated endlessly…It could also mean: Old roads where I loved and hated endlessly…The refrain is in a dance rhythm:
Kai prohorousa mesa sti nyhta
Horis na gnorizo kanena.
Ki’oute kanenas
Ki’oute kanenas
Me gnorize
Me gnorize-e-e-e.
And I advanced through the night
Without knowing anyone.
And no one
And no one
Knew me
Knew me.
So hot in the city. It simmered all day, with a gritty hot wind flicking under the roofs at the Victoria Market. Even the Rialto building, a tower clad in water, was leaden. Rain fell at last on the road home, rain and the night air turned suddenly sweet, cool, resinous, and the road was black satin. There was no moon yet. Instead of a shadow, each tree had its own dry shape spread under it.
The house was a hot box. I walked along the clifftop between showers of night rain; whirs and bird-pipings and the sea-roar.
The wood of the staggy old pelargoniums that I pulled out was white inside, with red stains, like raw stock-bones.
The new biography of Sylvia Plath was in the bookshop round the corner. The last photo in it is one of her grave in Heptonstall cemetery. The inscription on the stone:
IN MEMORY
SYLVIA PLATH HUGHES
1932–1963
EVEN AMIDST FIERCE FLAMES
THE GOLDEN LOTUS CAN BE PLANTED
J, my good dear friend, came down to the coast for the weekend since it was my birthday, and with two other friends we had dinner at the hotel on the Saturday, sitting in the glass room at the back finishing the wine while the garden went dark around the white lamps strung over branches.
J came here on Sunday too. I baked flathead fillets with lemon this time. The card she gave me showed three sand pipers pecking at stars in the water, and seven stars overhead. She had written:
Seven stars – a secret –
Three birds – a wish! – !!
And her present was a pair of folding binoculars!
It’s dusk or full night now by the time the Tasmanian ferry passes. It was late tonight. So clear – the white beacons on Point Nepean looked like stupas; the Cape Schanck lighthouse flared. Two little fishing trawlers bucketed through into the Strait ahead of the ferry, one with such a brilliant light on the mast (like an Aegean caïque) that it was wallowing in white loops and bubbles in a milk-pool.
E dropped in and over a cup of tea and a lapful of kittens told me how the Chinese make the rice-pattern crockery. (She saw it being made on her trip to China.) With the clay at the ‘biscuit’ stage, she said, they press the rice grains in and fire it. The rice is charred to ash, leaving a lacework of holes. When they glaze the piece and fire it again, the glaze fills in the holes. (And that, you might say, is how fiction is made, out of the true material and the gaps left in it, substance and absence sealed with a glaze.) I love rice pattern crockery. I have a set of bowls and spoons and a teapot that Taki and Chris gave me years ago for a birthday. I used to wonder if they made it with drops of water or glass. Spots like glass spatter it – bluish spots, when you hold the bowl up to the light – like raindrops scarring the surface of a bowl of milk.
E has taken up Tai Chi, having wanted to ever since her mornings in China. (E’s face looks Chinese, at least now that she’s old: a flat-planed face with fine cracks over a brown glaze.) She demonstrated some of the movements. But the kittens mewed in consternation at this, and clawed at our legs. She paused and stroked them, exclaiming over their charcoal marblings, saying she must draw them one day, saying how beautiful tabby cats are – ‘real Egyptians’. I said ‘tabby’ came from an Arabic word meaning ‘watered silk’, like ‘damask’ – so they’re Damascus cats too, they’re Baghdad cats… How they do love hands! They shut their eyes and thrust their heads into any open palm.
The small Tibetan head that E has sculpted in soapstone has a cat face that you feel you should stroke and rub behind the ears.
She told me how her old friend F made herself die last year. F was a Theosophist who had worked tirelessly all her life for causes, the Tibetan refugees in India especially. She had a passion for brilliant colours and would never wear black, E said, she had a total abhorrence of black. Yet one day E found her at home wearing a long black necklace, one single long strand of irregular glossy black stones interspersed with rock crystals cut so that they glittered. ‘You’re wearing black!’ E said. The Dalai Lama had given her this, F answered – was it a mala? – to help her when her time came to die. She gave a length of it to E for her to feel the vibration, but no, it lay warm and inert in E’s hand. Day after day from then on, F quietly refused to eat. A few days after her funeral her husband died also, of a heart attack.
The Tibetan new Year, Losar, will be on the eighteenth, two days after the fifth anniversary of Ash Wednesday. This in their sixty-year cycle is the year of the Earth-Dragon. (Next year will be the Earth-Serpent.)
A traditional Noh company from Japan is coming to Melbourne for a week in March. I’m missing the Mahabharata, but at least (at last) I will see the Noh!
My birthday has come and gone: my forty-eighth year, here now. I might go to Kathmandu this year, stay for a week or two at the monastery on the hill. Or I could go to Bali and visit my foster child there, go on to Java, see Borobudur…I write in the mornings; two windows let long white slabs of the sun in here. Today I started bleeding. I’m still a woman who bleeds.
(But they have appealed at the monastery for thousands of dollars for a silver Dharmachakra, Wheel of the Law, to be studded with ‘many precious and semi-precious gems’ for their child tulku, Lama Ösel, the incarnation of Lama Yeshe; and for a life-size copper image, ‘decorated with gold and precious stones’, of Lama Yeshe… I’ll write to them and protest. How can they? Like the cave-dragons of old, hunching over a hoard of treasure. Out in the city the sick and the hungry live in filth and despair. What is precious in the eyes of the Buddha? Stones? The human incarnation.)
I dig in the garden and walk under the cliff – midges whirl, and savage bronze march flies – on the line between the sky and the reflected sky. The kittens stare up while I chop them an ox-heart that bleeds in my hand as if alive. The scroll of the hibiscus flower is loosening and I’ve bought another one to plant: a white one, so the label says, named ‘Madonna’. Apples and tennis-ball quinces are hanging over the fence. The tamarisks have yellow wisps. (Tamarisks grow in Tibet: The Life of Milarepa mentions them. They are firewood. And consecrated towers are crowned with a frieze of the branches.) The thorny red-and-green berry tree is burdened again: close up, the berries are like miniature pomegranates, hung in clusters on red threads, as if on earrings. Blackbirds sit pecking them. The Black Genoa fig tree has five branches, laden with leaves now and more are in bud; all the green palms of them held out variously open to the sun – up like the left hand of a Bodhisattva, down like the right hand.
Moon has disappeared. I keep calling and calling him. I’ve put notices in the shop windows, but no response. I know in my heart that he’s dead. He’s N’s kitten, what do I tell N? Star has no appetite. He’ll only play in the garden as long as I’m out there too, digging or watering. (They love attacking the hose, the throb of water in it must make it seem alive; and they dash under the arch of spray.) What does Star know? Having followed me forlornly all day at a loss, he has finally curled up asleep at my writing table, on the blue cushion. Peace now, in the house.
Awash with dreams, a backwash of dreams, all these late mornings…I went to his new restaurant, an outsider; none of the waitresses hurrying up and down the wooden stairs knew me. A great olive tree spread roof-high by the door, dripping black olives, luminous black and as large as plums. I broke off sprigs from three branches and took them inside; there I put them in a glass bowl which immediately brimmed green with oil, the leaves and the olives floating up, magnified. Oh, you had no right to do that! someone said. I planted this tree, I answered, waking.
Smoke on the strong wind, and red wisps, fire-red passing across the two tide-lanterns: and a fire was alight down there in the cave of the arch-rock under the lighthouse, flaring around shadows, sinking to embers and flaring up.
Low tide, the pier straddling rocks and sand pools. The group of people fishing off the end had rigged up a blue plastic windbreak. As I walked, a long hum, a sonorous horn-hoot sounded all along the pier, sweet and remote, like an oboe: it was coming from one of the pier lamp-posts, a metal pipe perforated with little holes. I hummed the note, loud, soft, as the wind fluctuated; though I stopped first this hole and then that with a fingertip, the note went on unchanged. A woman’s squawk of laughter came on the wind, at the sight of me gazing enamoured as I fingered this pole, I suppose…If I had perfect pitch, I thought, I’d know what note this was.
The hibiscus opened out a large bell of blood-colour, satin but with a darker velvet magnificence in the grooves out of which its slender rod lances; and left it open through the night, so that at midnight when I came out to look for Moon I saw it there hanging to the earth, the colour of dry blood in the moonlight; and in the morning, with all its red richness restored, it was bowing, moving in the wind, black-frilled at the rim. The black frill widened; the wind was icy. By sunset the petals were dark like an ox-heart, as thickly dark in the grooves as sliced lobes of ox-heart. And it was a shrivelled scroll by the next morning. Then it fell.
I walked into the wind along the low boat-jetty into Swan Bay. Winds in the water too – the long grass waving. Isn’t this where we used to come twenty years ago to hire a rowing boat for the day? To get an early start we slept in the car on the shore, or rather we were kept awake, by a cat’s demented yowls. Against the red of dawn it was on the shed roof, still yowling – it was a great peacock. The household god. Sun-blinded, we pulled grass whitings into the boat all the next day and they shimmered, iridescent under our feet, tinged with electric green and blue.
Star beside me, I fell asleep in the middle of a scene in my head in which my role was to explain why I would never consider love with him again, not even if he…No, no, I said, no more banging my head against his door…
I woke at three out of a dream in which he did come and tell me that he had been mistaken and it was me he loved now. Would I… His form was twisted and faint:
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat…
I accepted him with no more words. I too was insubstantial, as I saw when I enfolded him; or rather we were swathes, wraiths, of the same substance. It was altogether like a Noh play, my dream being the second part where the denied spirit returns from the other world to play out its reality. This, then, the night truth, is the deep truth of it, of me, for me; or – ‘The deep truth is imageless’ – this is some deeper truth.
I gave what other women gave
That stepped out of their clothes,
But when this soul, its body off,
Naked to naked goes,
He it has found shall find therein
What none other knows…
These lines rose in my mind as the dream faded. (Yeats, the dreamer, spreader of dreams underfoot.) I switched on the lamp and scribbled them down. I’ve loved them for most of my life. Once I copied the whole of ‘A Last Confession’ into A’s secret book of poems, too distraught to care then what an invasion I was committing, spoiling her book.
And give his own and take his own
And rule in his own right;
And though it loved in misery
Close and cling so tight,
There’s not a bird of day that dare
Extinguish that delight.
W.B. Yeats: A Woman Young and Old
Now a ‘Madonna’ hibiscus has opened, huge, its creamy edges ruffled out: white-linen petals soaked deep plum-red at the centre, with a lighter areola, redcurrant jelly, watery, trickling in veins; and a twisted slender rod, dotted gold.
Waking early, my lamplight the single yolk in a whole universe of white. These last mornings have been dim with a crisp edge of autumn to them, though they still open into summer afternoons. The poplars down the road have turned yellow. Dew at nightfall and all night; then a white sun-haze and shimmer on the sea until late in the day.
‘The Black Ships’ is ready in my mind now. I must get down to drafting it now or lose it, let it go. I think there are vistas opening in it. This might have been the trouble before: that it wanted to grow and be longer, looser, and I was baulking it. Or: this might be a last shallow spreading-out because the story was never rooted deep enough.
No moon tonight (and no Moon). Just a dark relentless wind-roar and the wheel of stars – behind the lighthouse’s reared hulk in the distance they poured in a long frozen spill of white, the milk-spray of the stars into the sea. The glare of the four pier lamps spattered over the waves and was swallowed in all the black surge and seethe up around the cliff.
I thought at first that I was imagining this, or seeing an optical illusion. Standing under the platforms where the red bars of the tide-lanterns were lit up, I saw paleness cover the black of the sky and sea as the great lantern opened – one two – like an umbrella of white gauze pushed open and closed: but one that had black ribs, because fine black rays in it reached over to the other shore. Time and time again; whenever the wash of light came, so did they; wherever I stood, I saw them stretch and touch the same places. They were the shadows of the bars that cage the lantern.
As if called up out of the Strait, a cluster of lights, many golden and one red, appeared on the lip of the sea and came moving in closer and closer.
At three, waking from a dream of having the two cats on the bed, I heard a mewing outside and so I got up and stood in the wind-tugged shadows on the front verandah calling for Moon. Puss. Pussy. Over the sizzle of crickets and the ocean-surge a growl of engines came loud, and a reek of diesel fumes. All the boards of the house – a pulse in the wind.