Border Districts

by Gerald Murnane

  The woman had recently acquired a sum of money large enough for her to fulfil what she called a lifelong dream. I assumed that the money was an inheritance, although some of what was said in the interview allowed me to suppose that the woman’s most recent book had won a lucrative literary prize. The lifelong dream, as she called it, was of her acquiring a certain sort of house in a certain sort of landscape and of being able to retreat to the house whenever she was in need of what she called spiritual renewal. The landscape around the house should comprise what she called long views of open country with what she called hints of forests at the margins. Her choice of such a landscape, so she explained, was the result of her childhood experiences. She had grown up in a small township near an expanse of the sort of landscape called in her native country downs. She had read widely from an early age and had discovered, while still a child, the works of Richard Jefferies, who had been born more than a century before her own birth and had spent his childhood on the opposite side of the downs from her own birthplace. I myself had read one of Jefferies’s books during my childhood and parts of another book of his as a young man.

  My father’s parents had died while I was too young to be aware of them. For many years after their death, three of their daughters and one of their sons had gone on living in the family home. These four, who were, of course, aunts and an uncle of mine, were all unmarried. The house where they lived was of pale-grey stone quarried from a nearby hill. The house had a return veranda, but this had been closed off at the side of the house so as to form a sleeping-place for my uncle. In the room that my aunts called the parlour was a tall piece of furniture with its upper half comprising three shelves of books behind glass doors. During the first years when I visited the house of pale-grey stone, I was not yet capable of reading any of the books on the shelves behind the glass, or so my aunts told me. Then, on a certain afternoon while I was visiting the house during a later year, my youngest aunt took down a certain book and led me to the front veranda. We sat there together on a cane couch while she read me the first page of the book. After this, she handed me the book and asked me to read the second page. When I had read the page without stumbling, she encouraged me to go on reading and then left me alone on the veranda. I read for most of that afternoon and for most of the following two afternoons until I had finished the book, which was the longest book that I had yet read.

  I remembered for long afterwards much of what I had experienced while I read the book recommended by my aunt. I still remembered some of that experience a few weeks ago, when the author from across the border first mentioned during a radio program that she had lived as a child at the opposite end of a grassy landscape from the place where the author of the book had lived as a child. However, from the moment when the author from across the border began to speak about the book as she understood it and about the author as she imagined him – from that moment, I was unable to recall any but a few persistent memories. I was no longer able, for example, to call to mind any image of the kindly, if sometimes condescending middle-aged male author who had seemed sometimes to stand at the far side of my field of vision while I read. The woman his compatriot referred to him as a young man and spoke sometimes as though she might have been in love with him even though he had died nearly a century before she had been born. I still recalled that the boy who is the chief character of the book was addressed on separate occasions in English words by a swallow, a spider, a toad, and other such living things but I no longer remembered anything of what they had told him. I still remembered that the boy had sometimes been addressed by the wind, that I had sometimes had in mind while I read the purported words of the wind a translucent face against a background of leaning grass. The face had been a kindly female face, but after I had listened to the radio broadcast I could no longer call the face to mind. And yet I still recalled one item from all that the boy had heard from the wind. She had assured him that no yesterday had ever been and that no tomorrow would ever arrive.

  A wind would have been blowing for much of the time while I was reading on the cane couch, but I would have taken no special note of it. The house where my aunts and uncle lived was within sight of an ocean. On the other side of the wire fence that bounded their farm to the south, the land sloped upwards towards cliff-tops above steep coves. On almost every day, a breeze or a wind blew inland across the bare paddocks. The front section of the veranda where I read was sheltered, and the sunshine was warm on my bare legs. I would have been oblivious of passing breezes, but while I was reading the reports of the speeches of the fictional wind to the fictional boy, I may well have been bothered by a continual flapping and thudding from around the corner of the return veranda. Two huge striped canvas blinds, as we called them, formed the outer walls of my uncle’s sleeping-place. Each blind enclosed at its lower end a long wooden pole. At each end of each pole, a metal ring was connected by a leather strap to a similar metal ring in the wooden floor of the veranda. When the wind blew hard from the south, the canvas blinds heaved and shuddered while the metal rings rattled and tinkled. Mere noises would not have interrupted my reading, but these noises may well have reminded me that the house of pale-grey stone was not as it should have been: that the blinds and my uncle’s makeshift bedroom closed off what should have been a cloister-like space for walking or for looking far outwards or even for reading in one or another of two quite different settings, one with a view inland across first a lawn of buffalo-grass and then mostly level grassy countryside and the other with a view past a low hedge of silver-grey wormwood, then a single bare paddock, and then the ocean-cliffs.

  Perhaps I would also have been bothered while I read by the same incongruity that arose from much of my reading as a child: the book in front of me had been written on the far side of the world; the wind that spoke to the boy was the warm south wind that had wafted across several counties before it reached his native downlands. The wind that thumped the canvas on the southern side of the grey house was fresh from the ocean. If the return veranda had been empty and spacious as I would have preferred it, then I could have borne sometimes to feel the wind on the southern side of the house before I turned back to the calmer side overlooking the inland, but I would never have expected any sort of message to reach me from all that turbulent air.

  I once read parts of an autobiographical book by Richard Jefferies. I gave up reading the book because long sections conveyed little of meaning to me. Those sections purported to describe the author’s state of mind during periods of intense feeling or awareness, but they described nothing of what I call mental imagery. I learned early in my life that I am unable to comprehend the language of abstractions; for me a state of mind is incomprehensible without reference to images. The author being interviewed not only professed to admire the autobiographical book but called Richard Jefferies a profound mystic, even though he seemed to have been an atheist or, at least, to have had no belief in a personal god or even a benign creator. When she was discussing these matters the author spoke rapidly and somewhat elliptically, so that I afterward struggled to recall all that she had said, let alone to comprehend it. One thing I recall is her claim to have found much significance in the frequent references by Richard Jefferies to a certain hill near his boyhood home. His earliest mystical experiences, as she called them, had occurred to him at the age of seventeen, on one of the many mornings when he used to stand in a certain place out of doors and to watch the sun rising over the hill mentioned. Exactly a hundred years later, so the woman claimed, she herself looked on many an evening at sunset towards the same hill from the opposite direction. She may have been bending the facts a little, so she told her interviewer, but her childhood home stood in distant view of the same downs where the writer-mystic often walked or lay on certain hillsides and stared into the sky and felt the wind from the south. As for the writer’s mysticism, or nature-mysticism, as she variously called it, she believed that a certain sort of insight or knowledge was incapable of being communicated from one pers
on to another. She had read several times the author’s short autobiography but she was still far from grasping what she called the inner truth of the writing. And yet, this was as it should be, she said. Her own quest was not unlike that of her admired writer, but it was her own. Apart from her love of the open countryside where she had spent her childhood, the chief influence of her life had been what she called her Quaker spirituality. Her parents had been members of the Society of Friends and had taken her often as a child to their meeting house. She was still grateful, so she said, for the tranquillity of soul that she had experienced there, and she had never ceased to believe what she had first come to believe in the silence of the meeting house while the Friends waited to be moved by the divine presence within them. Either because she neglected to explain this belief or because I failed to grasp her explanation, I can report only that the author has faith in the existence of some or another divinity or divine principle whose presence is discernible in the human soul.

  I had felt warmly towards the woman while she was talking about Richard Jefferies and his and her native landscapes, but I became wary of her after she had begun to talk about her religious beliefs. While I was still a young man, it became fashionable among some of my contemporaries to practise what they called meditation and to read books about a variety of subjects that might have been called collectively Eastern spirituality. I could never have brought myself to read any of that sort of book, but I was sometimes curious about the practice of meditation. On several mornings while my wife and children were still asleep, I sat cross-legged on a patio at the rear of my house in an outer northern suburb of the capital city. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe deeply and evenly. I then tried to perform what I believed was the next part of the process of meditation: I tried to empty my mind of the pictorial imagery and the snatches of songs or melodies that comprised its usual contents. If I could perform this task, so I supposed, then I would find myself in the presence of my mind alone, and I was curious to learn what would be the appearance of a mind devoid of contents: what my mind would prove ultimately to be composed of.

  I never succeeded in emptying my mind. Several times I seemed likely to do so, but always behind my closed eyes some or another last image would disclose itself, even if it was nothing more surprising than my memory, so to call it, of the hill to the east of my house, behind which hill the sun had been about to rise when my eyes had last been open. And if, after much effort or as a result of mere chance, I had a glimpse of a seeming vacancy, of nothing but a yellowish lambency from some or another conjectured source of other than sunlight behind some or another remote inner pane, then I became again aware that the time was early morning, that the place was a suburb of my native city, and that one after another racehorse was exercising just then on each of the several racecourses in the suburbs of the same city; on racecourse after racecourse further off but still within the range of my mental vision in country district after country district in the state of which my native city was the capital; in districts where I had never been in the states adjoining my native state and in the suburbs of the capital cities of those states and of the capital cities of states further off still, not forgetting the island-state south of my own state. I forgot, or I chose to ignore, the differing time-zones of the world, and I saw horses walking or cantering or galloping on green racecourses with snow-topped mountains in the background in the country far out in the ocean south-east of my own country and on racecourse after racecourse that I knew only from illustrations in books, which racecourses were in far country after far country that I knew only from maps. I had never travelled outside my native state and seldom even outside my native city, and yet the utmost region of my mind was a vast district of image-racecourses derived mostly from images of places I had never seen.

  After I had written the previous paragraph, I took out a detailed atlas of the country in which the woman and her admired Richard Jefferies had been born. A whole page was given over to the county where lay the native district of the two. Even if the woman had not mentioned during her interview certain place-names, I could have found easily enough the district I was looking for. On a page mostly crowded with networks of lines representing roads and with dots variously coloured to represent villages, townships, and every sort of larger town or city was a noticeable zone relatively unmarked. And even if I had not found on this zone the faint, widely spaced letters of the words DOWNS preceded by another word, I would not have failed to see the few thin, pale-blue lines representing streams that originated in the zone and led by roundabout routes away from it. Even though I had in front of my eyes only printed paper, I was able to call on some or other memories of coloured illustrations in books or magazines and so to see in mind a few stylised images of bare, domed hills and grassy uplands. I believe I intended to keep those images in mind while I tried to feel what a nature-mystic who was also an atheist might have felt in sight of the originals of such images or even what a girl or a young woman might have felt while she sat with similar images in mind in a meeting-house of the Society of Friends on a morning of bright sunshine. Whatever were my intentions, I was unable to fulfil them after I had noticed a certain place-name at the eastern margin of the zone that had brought to my mind the stylised images mentioned above. I had seen the place-name in the captions beneath several memorable illustrations in one of my most prized volumes from what I call my horse-racing library. Some of the domed hills and grassy uplands that I had wanted to ponder on were places where numerous racehorses exercised, especially in the early morning. One of the districts adjoining the downlands had been, since the nineteenth century, the site of several famous racing stables.

  I supposed that meditation and other such practices had fallen out of fashion many years ago, and if the woman-author had seemed only some latter-day believer in the mumbo-jumbo of an earlier generation I would have turned off the radio and silenced her. What kept me listening was her frequent references to the house mentioned earlier. I seemed to understand clearly enough the appearance of the house, even though the author herself had not yet seen it. What she had had for long in mind was a house of the amber-coloured sandstone that underlies a certain district in the far south-east of her state: the nearest part of her state to this far western district where I sit writing in my own state. She made no mention of such details, but I saw the house from the first as having a return veranda, panes of coloured glass at each side of the front door, and leadlight windows in the main rooms.

  After the woman has found a house that meets her requirements, and after she has renovated it to her liking, she intends to make it available as a retreat for writers – but by no means all writers. Anyone wanting to spend time in the retreat will first have to be interviewed by the woman and to give an account of his or her motives and aims. I remain unclear as to what sorts of writer she would most likely approve of, but I have no doubt as to her dislikes and prejudices. Playwrights and writers of film scripts she considers an inferior sub-class of writer too easily attracted by the visible and able to suggest the invisible by no other means than the gestures and grimaces of pretend-persons. She mistrusts biography, and autobiography even more so. The sort of writing that makes up this report she would surely not deign to look at, unless it could be somehow presented to her as an esoteric variety of fiction. Even in the field of fiction, she intends to exclude from the retreat all writers of romance fiction, science fiction, crime fiction, and historical fiction. If I remember rightly, several sorts of poet will not be admitted.

  I understood from what I heard that the woman from across the border wants to learn how a certain sort of work of poetry or prose fiction comes into being. She hopes that some at least of the writers ensconced for the time being behind the honey-coloured stone and the coloured glass of her retreat, whether as a result of arduous self-scrutiny or following a sudden insight into his or her thoughts and feelings, will be able to explain to her what has never yet been explained, even if it may at some time have been dis
covered and kept secret. I gather that she will not be satisfied with any account of the creative process, so to call it, that relies on some or another fashionable theory of the mind. She claims not to understand how the term unconscious can be applied to any part of the mind, which she says she more readily conceives of as a luminance or glow than as any sort of organ or faculty. Given that the woman herself is an author of fiction, she surely hopes not only that some or another guest in the stone house will discover the source of his or her creativity, so to call it, but that she herself, impelled by the feeling of quiet intensity within the stone walls in the remote countryside, might discover what has been hitherto beyond her.

  The interview with the author was broadcast several weeks ago. I have been able since then to observe several developments in my own thinking. Before I report these, I should point out that I have never learned to use any sort of electronic device. I am aware that the owner of a computer could have learned soon after the end of the radio broadcast the contents of the entire interview. Not owning a computer, I have to rely on my memory alone. While I was listening, the woman made no mention of the number of rooms in the stone house, and yet I saw in my mind just now a place where six or eight or even ten persons might have been comfortably accommodated. Admittedly, I have still not crossed the border, but I cannot believe that even a large farmhouse in the neighbouring state would contain more than four or five bedrooms. How then can I think, as I constantly do, of the woman’s retreat as housing as many as ten writers or self-scrutineers?