Inland

by Gerald Murnane

  Let me tell you, reader, what I consider you to be.

  Your body – whether or not the belly of it protrudes or the hair on the head of it is turning grey, and whether the hand in front of the belly is writing or at rest or busy at something else – your body is the least part of you. Your body is a sign of you, perhaps: a sign marking the place where the true part of you begins.

  The true part of you is far too far-reaching and much too many-layered for you or me, reader, to read about or to write about. A map of the true part of you, reader, would show every place where you have been from your birthplace to the place where you sit now reading this page. And, reader, even if you tell me you have lived all your life in a place of books and colour-plates and hand-written texts deep in the Calvin O. Dahlberg Institute – as well you may have lived it – even then, reader, you know and I know that every morning when you first turned your eyes on that place it was a different place. And when every place where you have ever been on every day of your life has been marked on the map of the true part of you, why then, reader, the map has been barely marked. There are still to mark all those places you have dreamed about and all those places you have dreamed of yourself seeing or remembering or dreaming about. Then, reader, you know as well as I know that when you have not been dreaming you have been looking at pages of books or standing in front of bookshelves and dreaming of yourself looking at pages of books. Whatever places you saw at such times, along with all the places you dreamed of yourself seeing, must all appear on the map of the true part of you. And by now, you suppose, the map must be almost filled with places.

  Do not merely suppose, reader. Look with your eyes at what is in front of you. All the places you have so far marked have only sprinkled the wide spaces of the map with a few dots of towns and hairlines of streams. The map shows many hundreds of places for every hour of your life; but look, reader, at all the bare spaces on the map, and see how few the marked places still seem. You have looked at places and dreamed of places and dreamed of yourself looking at places or remembering places or dreaming of places during every hour of your life, reader, but still your map is mostly empty spaces. And my map, reader, is hardly different from yours.

  All those empty spaces, reader, are our grasslands. In all those grassy places see and dream and remember and dream of themselves having seen and dreamed and remembered all the men you have dreamed you might have been and all the men you dream you may yet become. And if you are like me, reader, those are very many men, and each of those men has seen many places and dreamed of many places and has turned many pages and stood in front of many bookshelves; and all the places or the dream-places in the lives of all those men are marked on the same map that you and I are keeping in mind, reader. And yet that map is still mostly grasslands or, as they are called in America, prairies. The towns and the streams and the mountain ranges are still few, reader, compared with the prairie-grasslands where you and I dream of coming into our own.

  I am writing in a room of a house. All over the table in front of me and all around on the floor behind me are pages. On the walls around me are shelves of books. Around the walls of the house are grasslands.

  Sometimes I stare out through my window and I suppose that if I set out walking I would never reach the end of grasslands. Sometimes I stare at the bookshelves and I suppose that if I began to read the books I would never read to the end of books. Sometimes I stare at these pages; and pardon me, reader, but what I suppose would place a heavy burden on you.

  Luckily for you, reader, you know I was wrong in some of my supposing. You have these pages in your hand and you can see to the end of them. You are reading these pages now because at a certain time in the past (as you see it) and in the future (as I see it) I came and I will come to the end of these pages.

  It is easier for you than for me, reader. While you read you are sure of coming to the end of the pages. But while I write I cannot be sure of coming to the end. I may go on with my endless writing here among the endless grasslands and the books that can never be read to the end.

  You are a reader of books, reader. You can suppose what a reader would feel in front of a book that is endless. Myself, I do not read books, as you well know. I do hardly more than stare at covers and spines, or I dream of pages drifting. But I am in danger of writing on endless pages.

  Read on, reader. I am about to write about myself living on grasslands in your part of the world and a long way from Szolnok County. You may well suspect me of having changed the names of streams only to confuse you. You may suspect me again of writing about the district between the Sio and the Sarviz. But if I do not write what I am about to write, reader, these pages will be endless.

  I was born where the Moonee Ponds Creek, trickling from Greenvale Reservoir, finds an unexpected partner in the Merri Creek from the north. They do not join forces. Their wandering journeys across the stony plains and among the low, bare hills might sometimes suggest a coming marriage, or at least a friendly meeting, but they follow their separate ways to the end – the Merri through ever-deeper gorges to mingle with the Yarra above its falls, and the Moonee Ponds through a widening valley into the same swamp where the Maribyrnong and the Yarra also lose themselves just short of the sea. This is my part of the world.

  I became in time, and I am still today, a scientist of grasslands, but I have been a scientist of many things. I was once a scientist of soils. I wanted to know why I had walked with ease as a child on the soil between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri but afterwards I had stepped warily wherever I lived or travelled in other districts of Melbourne County.

  As a scientist of soils I first read the words of other soil-scientists. I learned that the thing I had called simply soil was in fact hundreds of things – or many more than hundreds of things, according to the scientists of things. I read about the hundreds of things that I had once called soil, and I learned what I had been hoping to learn: when I had walked as a child between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri, my feet had pressed against an assortment of things a little different from the assortments of things in other districts of Melbourne County.

  I had hoped to learn that this difference came from perhaps ten things: that perhaps ten of the hundreds of things in the soil of my native district were in no other soil of Melbourne County. If I could have read about ten such things I would have gone no further in my studies as a scientist of soils. I would have become a scientist of particular things. I would have called the ten things found only in my native soil my own particular things, and I would have studied nothing but them. I would have tried to learn the peculiar qualities that distinguished my own particular things from other things of other districts. I would have tried to learn from these peculiar qualities how a native of the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri ought to live his life. This would have been the hardest part of my studies. I might have had to learn, for example, how a man ought to live if one of the peculiar qualities of one of the particular things in the soil of his native district was that it seemed its rightful shape in darkness equal to the darkness of underground, but that it seemed less truly shaped in daylight or even in the light of a dim room. Or I might have had to learn what a man ought to do as a result of his learning that the smoothest to touch of the same particular things kept its smoothness only while it was damp from the water of underground – the invisible streams flowing through dry-seeming soils.

  Or I might have become a scientist of names. Each of the ten particular things would have had to be named, and so would each of its peculiar qualities. I would have given to the things and their qualities solid names that would sound well if I spoke them aloud on the plains of my native district. Of all the sciences I might have studied, the science of names would most have absorbed me. Even before I knew whether or not my ten things existed, I had chosen names that might have suited them.

  Here for you to read aloud, reader, are my names for the ten things I had hoped as a scientist to find in the soil of the district bet
ween the Moonee Ponds and the Merri. And if you wonder, reader, how the names have come to be in the American language and not in some more heavy-hearted language, then perhaps you are not quite the reader you think you are.

  Stainer-of-skin; sourer-of-tongues; yielder-to-rains; resister-of-unseen-streams; shrinker-from-light; mirror-of-nothing; boulder-crumb; tough-in-the-fire; cling-to-all; remembrancer-of-green-leaves.

  I used to walk across my native district murmuring these and other such names. I felt the soil of the land between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri sticking to the soles of my shoes, and I supposed I was going to become soon the only man who had names for what mattered most in his native soil.

  But my native soil had no things peculiar to it. I learned that the things in soil are only patterns of other things. My native soil was a little different from other soils, but only because the hundreds of things in it were arranged in patterns a little different from the patterns of the same hundreds of things in the soils of other districts.

  I thought of becoming a scientist of patterns. I might have studied some of the thousands of patterns that might have appeared among the hundreds of things in the soils in all the districts between all the streams in Melbourne County. Then I might have studied those patterns that appeared only among the things in my native soil. And if I had not learned enough from those patterns, I might have studied the likenesses between them. I might have tried to learn from the likenesses between the patterns of my native district as distinct from the likenesses between the patterns among the things in the soils of other districts.

  By now I foresaw myself studying in time even the patterns in the likenesses between patterns. Yet I could not think of walking on the soil between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri and thinking that that soil was that soil and no other soil only because of something in the pattern of certain likenesses between patterns of the hundreds of things in soil.

  I remembered how I had been cheered a little by my study of names, and I thought of becoming a scientist of words or even of languages. In the twilight of summer evenings, when the people were resting in their gardens, I used to walk in every part of my native district. I walked past the sprawling villas on the high slopes overlooking the Moonee Ponds; I walked deep in among the walled courtyards of the Old Town; I even crept around the spiked fences of outlying manor-houses by the headwaters of the Merlynston. Whenever I heard the sounds of quiet speech from the other side of a fence or a courtyard wall, I stopped to listen and to make notes. I noted words oddly pronounced or syllables unexpectedly stressed; sometimes I heard a whole phrase that might have been part of a separate dialect of my native language. With all my notes, I might have become a scientist of the depths of languages. I might have learned that a language grows from roots and soil just as grass grows. I might have followed the dialect of my native district down to its roots. I might have studied the soil and even the rock under the language of my homeland.

  I should have listened for longer to the murmurings from gardens and courtyards. Behind the hedges of cypress and the avenues of agapanthus in the grounds of the villas facing west across the valley of the Moonee Ponds, behind the rows of iron spikes reaching far back and out of sight around the last remaining manor-houses where the shallow Merlynston begins to trickle from the uplands, and behind the walls of pale brick in the Old Town with moss in their crevices and with scarlet flowers spilling down from urns on their corner-posts – deep in the privacy of their homes, the people of my district spoke in particular ways because the soil-of-speech where the roots of their speech were outspread was a particular soil-of-speech.

  I should have studied that particular soil-of-speech, but I became impatient with listening from the shadows of hedges and from behind stone walls and rows of iron spikes. One Sunday afternoon in a certain winter, when the people between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri were indoors in their libraries and when the only figures visible in the bare gardens of villas under the grey sky were stone statues of trolls, I strode away from the houses and into the public gardens and the common lands of my native district. I had become tired of speculating about places deep out of sight: about the roots and the soil of speech and every other sort of root and soil. I had decided that the look and the feel of my native place would be enough for me. I would look with my eyes and listen with my ears and touch with my hands and press with the soles of my feet, and afterwards I would go back to my table to write. I would write what I had seen and heard and touched and felt; and whatever words I wrote I would recognise as being in my native language. Then I would read and study my own words. I would become at last a scientist of my own writing.

  On that wintry Sunday afternoon before I turned to go back to my table, I stood on a mound overgrown with spear-grass and marshmallow beside a deserted sports-field. From there I looked west over the clay-lands speckled with the roofs of villages and over the gentle hollows short of the valley of the Moonee Ponds; I looked east over the variegated roofs of the Old Town and then over the moorland towards the Merri; then I looked north where houses and villages became fewer and the grasslands came into view, spotted with reddish stones and with dark-green clumps of boxthorn. I saw on the far side of the grasslands the blue-black ridge of Mount Macedon, which has given me my bearings all my life and which I have looked at from vantage places in many parts of Melbourne County but which I have never visited, so that whenever I see a coloured photograph of one of the mansions of Mount Macedon surrounded by groves of trees with leaves of gold and flame-colour and by thickets of rhododendrons with bunches of pink and purplish flowers, I fail to see how those huge houses and all those coloured leaves and flowers could be arranged inside what has always seemed to me a dark-blue mass of trees native to Melbourne County and adjoining counties, unless the dark-blue is only a cloud that has drifted between me and a district of Europe or Asia.

  I looked across my native district towards Mount Macedon. I had thought of becoming many kinds of scientist so that I could think and speak as a man from between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri. But on that Sunday afternoon I only hoped to hear from out of my own mouth a few words sounding distinctively.

  I braced my feet among the weeds. I turned my face north-west, and I opened my mouth and waited for the air that had come from counties whose names I did not know and had poured down through the cold, dark-blue hills known as the Central Highlands and had then been shaped into a particular wind on the downward slopes around Jackson’s Creek and in the winding valley of the Maribyrnong and at last on the grasslands of my own district. I opened my mouth and waited for the wind to blow my tongue around.

  I am not writing by hand on these pages. I am sitting at a typewriter and using the index finger of my right hand to press all keys except the large unlabelled key in the lower left-hand corner for raising the roller to receive uppercase letters or quotation marks, ampersands, and other rare marks.

  I do not claim that my way of typing on pages is any sort of distinction, but the only other person I have read of who typed as I do is a character in Life Stories, by A.L. Barker, which was published in London in 1981 by the Hogarth Press.

  The photograph of A.L. Barker on the dust-jacket of Life Stories shows the author to be a woman, although her first names are never used. The book is presented as a collection of pieces of fiction, but between these pieces are passages narrated in the first person by a female narrator; these passages seem to be autobiography. In one of the passages between stories the narrator describes one of her first jobs as a young woman in the late 1930s. She worked for a publishing house in London, in an office where writers wrote and edited pages of magazines meant for what I call elsewhere in these pages girl-women. The magazines were mostly filled with short stories. The narrator of Life Stories was surprised to find that the writers of these stories, which were read eagerly by thousands of girl-women in many countries, were mostly men. The writers used female pen-names but they were mostly men and mostly middle-aged, and one of the men composed the fi
nal draft of every one of his stories by tapping for hour after hour at his typewriter with one nicotine-stained index finger.

  I type slowly and carefully. I stare at the keyboard and I try to see in the air between my face and the keys the words I am about to type. I make mistakes, but I am nearly always aware of a mistake in the instant before I make it. I see the correct letter in the air and then I see the wrong letter in the path of my index finger, but too late for me to stop my finger from pressing on it. The metal hammer flies up and strikes the paper, but I know beforehand that the wrong letter will appear on the page. Yet I do not know at once what the misspelled word will be. My index finger goes on leaping to the last letter of the word before I can pause to read the misspelled word.

  I study each misspelled word. I am interested in my mistakes, and I wonder how I came to make them. Sometimes I trace through the air over the keyboard the path that my finger took and then the path that it should have taken, and I wonder why my finger veered onto the wrong path. At other times I read the sentence with the misspelled word as though I am reading a message written by some other man.

  Two hours ago, while I was typing a page about my studies as a scientist in Melbourne County, my finger made its usual long diagonal leap from the first to the second letter of the word soils. The pad of the finger landed safely on the second letter, but then, perhaps remembering its soaring leap from the s to the o, my index finger travelled exactly twice the distance needed from the o. The finger then made one short and one long hop to finish the word so that the sentence when I looked at it was: I was once a scientist of souls.

  When I think of a soul I think of a ghostly shape of a body. I think of my own soul as a ghostly shape of my own body. When that event takes place which will cause other people to begin to say of me that I have died, my ghostly shape will have drifted away from my body. Where my soul will have drifted to, I do not know as yet. But perhaps the ghost of me knows a little more than I know. Perhaps, two hours ago, the ghost of my index finger nudged aside the finger that I saw hopping and leaping across the keyboard of my typewriter. Perhaps the ghost of me tapped with its index finger at one letter rather than another to tell me that my native district has a soul.