Border Districts

by Gerald Murnane

  I wrote the two previous paragraphs while the book mentioned was in its usual place on my shelves. After I had written the phrase essences of personages just now, I was prompted to retrieve the book and to place it here beside me with the rear of the dust-jacket uppermost. My eye was then led on its usual route from the rectangular zone of light towards the source of light outside the boundaries of the illustration, then back towards the highlighted features of the young woman staring ahead of her, and finally to the surface of her nearer eye. Now, however, and for whatever reason, that seeming-object of my vision seems other than a representation of a human eye. Now, I am able to disregard for an instant the surrounding zones of darkness and light – the representations of part of a human face – and to make out of three mere blotches and stripes, two of white surrounding one of dark grey, an image of a whole and perfectly formed glass marble. When the instant has passed, the surrounding zones, as I called them, come back into my view but the seeming–glass marble remains at their centre. What I seem then to see is no grotesquerie – a young woman with a globe of coloured glass for an eye – but what is surely an anatomical impossibility: a young woman holding a glass marble firmly between upper and lower eyelid at the front of a normal eye. The presence there of the glass marble might well explain the peculiar intensity of the young woman’s stare. Before I first saw, as it were, the glass marble resting against the eye, I was at a loss to explain why the young woman had often the look of someone staring intently at something visible only to her: something that seemed to hang in the middle distance before her although it existed nowhere but in her mind. How, I wondered, was the young woman able to keep her attention fixed thus while she posed in front of a camera and among bright sources of light? If she held a sphere of coloured glass against her eyeball, all is explained.

  While I could never bear to have a glass marble, or any other object, resting against the surface of my eye, I held often, as a child, one after another marble as near as I dared to my open left eye while I peered into the glass. I looked always towards a source of strong light – an electric globe or a sunlit sky – and the sort of marble I looked into was always translucent. The marble that I envisage as resting against the eyeball of the biographer of George Gissing – that marble is not of the kind that I looked into as a child. The marble that the young woman looks into or through is of a kind containing a dense, richly coloured core surrounded by transparent glass. The core is usually of one or another primary colour. When I began to collect glass marbles in the 1940s, this kind of marble was one of the least-valued of the many kinds passed from hand to hand among my schoolfellows. We collectors of marbles hoarded older kinds passed on to us by fathers or uncles and no longer sold in shops. I preferred the older kinds not only for their scarcity but for their being mostly of translucent or murky glass with skeins or whorls of a second colour deep inside the predominant colour. Marbles of these kinds did not readily give their contents away.

  I was at first disappointed after I had seemed to see resting against the young woman’s eye a glass marble that I valued little as a child: a sort sold cheaply in Coles stores and having nothing more mysterious for its contents than a simple core of white or red or blue or yellow or green. Later, I looked for the first time in many years at the hundred and more glass marbles that I have kept by me during six decades and despite my having lived at nearly twenty addresses. I tumbled the marbles out from the glass jars their containers and on to the carpet near my desk. I wanted to find among the pebs and agates and catseyes and pearlies and realies and others the few of the kind that I now thought of as eyeballs. I hoped to learn that I had been wrong to dismiss their kind: that the simple appearance of the eyeballs had been deceptive. The glass jars contained not only glass marbles. There lay on the carpet among my former playthings a silver-coloured tube as long as a cigarette but somewhat thicker. I had forgotten my having acquired, perhaps twenty years before, the first kaleidoscope that I had seen. For much of my life, I had read references to kaleidoscopes. I may even sometimes have used the words kaleidoscope or kaleidoscopic in speech or writing. I understood a kaleidoscope to be a toy that produced constantly changing patterns. But I had never seen or handled a kaleidoscope until the wife of a certain friend of mine presented me with the silver-coloured tube mentioned earlier. She and her husband had been travelling in the United States of America and had noticed in the city of Roanoke, Virginia, a shop selling only kaleidoscopes, the largest being of the size of a small tree-trunk. My friend’s wife, in whose company I had always felt less than comfortable, told me while she handed me the small kaleidoscope that she had thought of me as soon as she had seen the window-display in Roanoke. I was puzzled by her statement, but she did not elaborate and I did not want to give her the satisfaction of believing that she knew something about me that I myself was unaware of.

  Even before I had taken the kaleidoscope from the woman, I got a mild pleasure from knowing that the thing, whatever its uses and its benefits might have been, had come from the state of Virginia. The word Virginia denotes a small coloured area in the widespread terrain of my mind. In the foreground of this area is an expanse of pale green; in the background is a line or ridge of dark blue. The pale green is intersected by dark-green stripes and studded by dark-green blotches. In a few of the pale-green areas are roughly elliptical shapes outlined in white and marked in places by bars of dark green. My image, so to call it, of the state of Virginia derives from my happening to have read, many years ago, that the residents of some or another district of the state affected some of the ways of the English upper classes: planting hedgerows between their fields, riding to hounds, and conducting steeplechases on their racecourses. Nothing else that I might have read about Virginia has altered this image.

  Surely my image-Virginia appeared to me for a moment while my friend’s wife was presenting me with my kaleidoscope and while I was putting on a show of gratitude and preparing to look through the instrument, but surely I also failed at the time to notice that my mental scenery, so to call it, was not an integral landscape but an assortment of image-fragments not unlike those brought into view by means of a kaleidoscope. (While I was writing the previous sentence, I wondered how soon after the events there reported did I discover how much of what I was used to calling thinking or remembering or imagining was no more than my bringing into the range of my mental vision such coloured shapes and fragments as those behind the place-name Virginia?) The thing presented to me in the west-facing room that was my family’s and my lounge-room and also the room where many of my books were shelved – the thing was not merely a tube for looking into. At one end, a sickle-shaped piece of wire was attached to the metal casing of the tube. The purpose of the wire was to hold a glass marble in place at the end of the tube, and just such a marble was in place when I took possession of the instrument. (I have since learned that some kaleidoscopes consist of a tube that is rotated by the person using it and contains the pieces of coloured glass that form the various patterns appearing to the user. The tube that I was given remained fixed while the user turned this way and that the glass marble resting against the further end of the tube.)

  When I first saw the glass marble at the end of my kaleidoscope, I had been for at least ten years the owner of the above-mentioned biography of George Gissing. I had read the book once through and had sometimes afterwards looked into it. On the afternoon when I took possession of the kaleidoscope, the book would have been standing among rows of other books on one or another of the shelves of books on the east wall of the west-facing room. When I first held my kaleidoscope up to my left eye and turned my face towards the window, certain rays of the same sunlight that passed through the glass marble and then through the metal tube towards my eye would have travelled past my face and then across the room and would then have reached the book mentioned. The rear of the dust-jacket of the book would have been out of view and resting against the front of the dust-jacket of the neighbouring book, which was probably o
ne or another work of fiction by George Gissing. During the moments while I turned the glass marble in its sickle-shaped holder and while I held the other end of the metal tube to my eye, I would have been aware only of what reached my eye and unaware of the presence behind me of the rows of books on their shelves. Today, however, while I write these words, I am unable to recall, let alone to report, what I saw while I looked down the tube and through the glass marble and into the afternoon sunlight. This is a result of my having recalled a few days ago, while I was reporting on a previous page the details of the illustration on the rear of the dust-jacket mentioned often, the precise colour of the translucent core of the mostly transparent glass marble resting against the end of the kaleidoscope.

  Until I began writing the previous paragraph, I had never considered strange the fact that I had looked during my lifetime at many thousands of so-called black and white illustrations or photographic prints or the like without seeming to observe, let alone regret, that the persons or places or things represented were without colour. (I can call to mind at present only one instance of my seeming to see coloured details in an illustration lacking them. This instance was reported earlier in these pages.) While I was writing the previous paragraph, however, I seemed to see, in a zone of colourless space adjoining a black and white representation of a human eye, a coloured representation of a glass marble consisting of several whorled membranes of translucent green at the centre of an otherwise transparent globe. A few moments afterwards, I became aware that I had given the name ice-green to the colour of the vanes in the glass marble mentioned, which colour was also the colour of the vanes in the glass marble resting against the end of the kaleidoscope that I first looked into on an afternoon of bright sunlight while a certain illustration rested behind me and out of sight on some or another shelf of books. While I was writing the previous sentence, the term ice-maiden occurred to me as though it had lain out of sight in my mind since I read it long ago in some or another text of little consequence but as though it now denotes something of relevance to this report.

  I consider myself a student of colours and shades and hues and tints. Crimson lake, burnt umber, ultramarine ... I was too clumsy as a child to paint with my moistened brush the scenery that I would have liked to bring into being. I preferred to leave untouched in their white metallic surroundings my rows of powdery rectangles of water-colours, to read aloud one after another of the tiny printed names of the coloured rectangles, and to let each colour seem to soak into each word of its name or even into each syllable of each word of each name so that I could afterwards call to mind an exact shade or hue from an image of no more than black letters on a white ground.

  Deep cadmium, geranium lake, imperial purple, parchment ... after the last of our children had found employment and had moved out of our home, my wife and I were able to buy for ourselves things that had previously been beyond our means. I bought my first such luxury, as I called it, in a shop selling artists’ supplies. I bought there a complete set of coloured pencils made by a famous maker of pencils in England: a hundred and twenty pencils, each stamped with gold lettering along its side and having at its end a perfectly tapered wick. The collection of pencils is behind me as I write these words. It rests near the jars of glass marbles and the kaleidoscope mentioned earlier. None of the pencils has ever been used in the way that most pencils are used, but I have sometimes used the many-striped collection in order to confirm my suspicion as a child that each of what I called my long-lost moods might be recollected and, perhaps, preserved if only I could look again at the precise shade or hue that had become connected with the mood – that had absorbed, as it were, or had been permeated with, one or more of the indefinable qualities that constitute what is called a mood or a state of feeling. During the weeks since I first wrote in the earlier pages of this report about the windows in the church of white stone, I have spent every day an increasing amount of time in moving my pencils to and fro among the hollow spaces allotted to them in their container. I seem to recall that I tried sometimes, many years ago, to move my glass marbles from place to place on the carpet near my desk with the vague hope that some or another chance arrangement of them would restore to me some previously irretrievable mood. The marbles, however, were too variously coloured, and each differed too markedly from the other. Their colours seemed to vie, to compete. Or, a single marble might suggest more than I was in search of: a whole afternoon in my childhood or a row of trees in a backyard when I had wanted back only a certain few moments when my face was brushed by a certain few leaves. Among the pencils are many differing only subtly from their neighbours. Six at least I might have called simply red if I had not learned long ago their true names. With these six, and with still others from each side of them, I often arrange one after another of many possible sequences, hoping to see in the conjectured space between some or another unlikely pair a certain tint that I have wanted for long to see.

  On a certain morning nearly sixty years ago, when the sun was shining through the window of the kitchen where my mother had set me to wash and dry the breakfast dishes, I heard from the radio on the mantelpiece above the fireplace the distinctive, harsh-sounding voice of a man who seemed sometimes to sing and sometimes to narrate, all the while accompanying himself on a piano. What he sang about or narrated was his having once, long before, caused by chance a certain chord to sound while he sat at the piano fingering the keys; his having been strangely affected by the sound of the chord; and his having tried in vain during many years since to find again the combination of notes that had caused the chord to sound. I knew hardly more then than I know now about popular music and those who perform it, but I understood that the man with the harsh voice was a comic and I was even aware that his song was a humorous version of a song performed in music halls and parlours long before my birth. (I happened to have read a reference to this song in a book of comic strips with the title RADIO FUN ANNUAL, which had been a Christmas present ten years before from my mother, who could not have known that the characters and the settings in the comic strips all derived from radio programs in England, so that the references in the comic strips mostly baffled me.)

  I readily understood, on that morning nearly sixty years ago, that a person might lament the loss of some or another musical sound last heard many years before. I myself valued certain passages of popular music, not for themselves but as a means of restoring to me certain combinations of feelings. If only I were resourceful enough to find and to play some or another electronic recording of a certain recitative by a long-dead American performer and of his dissonant thumpings on a piano, then I might discover again, after nearly sixty years, what seems today one of my own lost mental chords but would have seemed at the time a mere longing for something soon to be recovered. While I stood at the kitchen sink in my parents’ house in the 1950s, I was likely to have been trying not to hear a lost chord but to see such as the precise shade of red that I had seen ten years before on the leaves of an ornamental grapevine near the panels of frosted glass in the wall of the garage at one side of a certain large house. The garage and the house were of brick or of stone covered with cream-coloured stucco. They stood in a spacious garden in a suburb of a provincial city in the north of the state the western border of which lies fifty kilometres from where I sit writing about the leaves of the grapevine that I last saw sixty-five years ago on the first evening after my parents and my younger brother and I had travelled by train from the capital city and across the Great Dividing Range to the provincial city where we were going to live thenceforth.

  I had never previously travelled north of the capital city, and I was surprised by the heat of the air beyond the Great Divide and by the glare of the sunlight in the footpaths of the suburbs of the provincial city, which footpaths were of gravel that was mostly white with strands of a shade of orange-yellow that I supposed at first were traces of the gold that had made the city famous. Our furniture would not arrive until the following day. We were to spend the nig
ht in spare rooms in the cream-coloured house with the spacious garden. In the early evening, when the air was still hot, I walked alone into the garden. I was not a timid child but I was scrupulously obedient. I wanted to impress adults so that they would see me as more than a mere child: as someone worthy to converse with them and even, perhaps, worthy to be instructed in some of the secret lore of adults. I kept to the paths in the garden. I would have liked to inspect the clearings between the shrubs on the lawn or the summer-house with walls of dark-green lattice and pots of ferns visible through the doorway, but I chose to consider those places out of bounds, and I hoped my avoiding them would persuade anyone secretly observing me that I was mature and trustworthy.

  On the shaded side of the house, I stopped when a cement path gave way to flagstones set at intervals in soil where tufts of moss survived even in summer. The place ahead of me was bounded on one side by part of the cream-coloured southern wall of the house. The one window overlooking the place was almost filled with the satiny flounces of a certain curtain or blind that I would recall in later years whenever I came across such phrases as luxurious mansion or sumptuous furnishings. On the opposite boundary, which was the southern boundary of the property, the leaves of an ornamental grape-vine were beginning to redden. Much of the space ahead of me was overgrown with irises and ferns, but I could see among the greenery areas of murky water where broad floating leaves surely concealed red-gold fish. Opposite where I stood, the far boundary of the place was a many-paned wall of frosted glass that I learned long afterwards was the rear wall of the garage, although it seemed to me at first sight part of an enclosed veranda where one or another female occupant of the house would lie on a cane lounge with a book in her hands during the hottest hours of many an afternoon.