I practised just now the sort of introspection that I suppose will be required of the residents of the stone house. I learned that my mental image of the house has expanded since I last inspected it or, rather, has accumulated around itself a set of satellite-images. Now, when I think of the house, I see at intervals around it where I formerly saw only lawns and flower-beds and an orchard, cabins or cottages of the same yellowish stone that the house consists of. The cabins are too small to have return verandas, but even without looking closely at the windows I know that at least one window in every cabin contains one or more coloured panes. The cabins are arranged as I supposed the cells were arranged in a certain community of monks that I read about perhaps forty years ago. The monks belonged to the Carthusian order, and their monastery was in a southern county of the country where fifteen of my sixteen great-great-grandparents were born, the same country in which was born the female proprietor of the stone house around the image of which are the stone cabins that are the subject of the previous sentence. The monks considered themselves a community but they met together on only one afternoon each week for a period of communal recreation: a few hours of strolling together or playing quoits or bowls. At all other times, each monk lived in solitude, praying or reading or writing or cultivating the vegetable garden that provided most of his food. The stone house, as it appears in my mind, has only four or five main rooms – far too few for the numbers of writers that I envisage as taking up residence there. The spacious rooms in the house, many of them with leadlight panes in their windows, are used for dining, for meetings, or for social gatherings. One such room is surely used as a library. Each inmate of the house studies, reads, writes, and sleeps alone in one or another of the outlying cabins.
The woman had no need to mention during her interview what all of her listeners surely understood: that the persons spending time in the stone house would be both men and women free, of course, from any restrictions arising from gender. I too understood this while I listened. In the presence of others, even if they be conjectured persons whose voices reach me only by way of my radio or my telephone, I think and feel in mostly conventional ways. Alone at my desk, however, and especially while writing a report such as this, I become what many would describe as an eccentric or a misfit. I had hardly begun to speculate about the stone house before I found myself devising the strict rules intended to keep mostly apart the men and women who would lodge there. Of course, mere rules could not prevent a man and a woman from meeting in private in his or her cabin if they so wished. In my version of things, however, any person who was attracted to the stone house and who was urged to investigate there the origins of his or her private imagery – any such person would be relieved to be free for the time being from close contact with another.
Still other details of the stone house owed nothing to what I had heard from the radio. The woman, as I now recall, had spoken of meetings and deep discussions. She would probably have had in mind a group of men and women seated informally around a table. I saw, from the first, a large room in which the light had been altered by its having passed through windows out of view of my mind’s eye. The room was furnished with nothing resembling a table or chairs. The end of the room further from me was occupied by an organ loft. At the left and the right of my mental vantage-point were several rows of choir stalls, things that I had seen only in illustrations. The room was obviously a disused chapel of some kind, although I, its seeming architect or designer, was unable to see behind me the fourth of its sides, where was surely a bare altar.
Into the stalls mentioned step decorously the residents for the time being of the stone house, females to one side and males to the other. What happens next I am so far unable to visualise. Perhaps when the founder of the stone house has replied to my letter I will be better able to realise, in the original sense of that word, some of the impassioned yet decorous debates that might take place in that quaint but formal setting. Until then, the two groupings face one another silently and uneasily.
I mentioned a letter just now. For several days after I had heard the broadcast interview, I worked at composing a long letter to the author, the subject of the interview. When the letter was ready for sending, I called at the newsagency in this township, intending to have a copy made of the letter, but I was told by the newsagent that his copier, or the computer attached to it, was out of order. Perhaps rashly, I posted the letter there and then, after having addressed it in care of the radio station concerned. I reminded myself that I had on my desk several drafts of the letter. Those drafts are beside me now but they differ greatly. Even the latest few of the many scribbled pages seem far from explaining what I had set out to explain, and I hope that I omitted from my final draft certain passages that I cannot read nowadays without cringing.
In the meanwhile, no answer has reached me. If I assume that my letter was actually delivered to the addressee, then I am able to propose four possible explanations for my lacking a reply. The woman is perhaps like some of my former friends who transact all their business by electronic means and disdain to answer letters through the post. She may be one of those persons who claim always to be frantically busy and whose desk is always in disorder. In gloomy moments, I suppose that the woman has already decided not to reply to my letter because she found it vague or confused or even unseemly: she may even suspect its sender to be a tiresome eccentric or mentally unbalanced. In hopeful moments, I suppose her to be still composing one after another draft of her reply to a letter that she found thought-provoking and even engaging.
While I continue to wait for a reply, I sometimes resolve to consult my racing calendar and to choose a day when I might set out for some or another race-meeting in the adjoining state and might pass through district after district, seeing from the sides of my eyes one after another house likely to have attracted by now the notice of a person who spent her childhood on the edge of grasslands and who wonders about the sources of a certain sort of writing.
Sometimes I decide to wait for much longer before setting out across the border; to wait until the woman might well have bought and fitted out her chosen house and I am therefore free to think of her as waiting for insight on the far side of one after another wall of amber-coloured stone behind one after another return veranda of one after another house that I see from the sides of my eyes in one after another border district.
Sometimes I decide on what would be a bold move indeed from a person of my sort: I decide to turn these pages of handwriting into a neat typescript and to send the whole of this report, as I call it, to the woman mentioned often in its later pages – not in care of any radio station but to the postal address that I believe to be hers, which address I found recently in the telephone directory for the capital city of the adjoining state. I would send only a brief cover-note, carefully worded so as to suggest that the typescript is a work of fiction. And in case I should receive no reply even to that missive, I would have previously taken a copy of the whole so that I could have it by me whenever I travelled afterwards to one or another race-meeting in the adjoining state, watching from the sides of my eyes for a certain house; and so that I could turn in from the road if I saw the house and could stop my car on the sweeping driveway and could walk up the steps of amber-coloured stone onto the return veranda and could then stand in front of the door with a pane of coloured glass at either side, waiting to deliver my pretend-fiction to the person often mentioned in its later pages.
If ever I were to take the bold step mentioned above, I would first have to add several passages to the text as it now stands. While I was writing the previous pages, I sometimes left off writing about some or another matter in order to begin writing about some or another separate matter that had appeared just then at the side of my mind and might have disappeared if I had not begun at once to write about it, or so I thought at the time.
In connection with the single-volume history of English literature mentioned earlier, I would go on to report that I made no effort to
read the book but looked often through it for the biographical details of a certain writer: not some or another writer known to me already but a male writer whose name I had not even discovered. As a young man, I was often driven to search thus not only for writers but for painters, sculptors, and composers of music who lived in isolation from their kind, far from the putative centres of culture. Even in my youth, I seem to have been seeking evidence that the mind is a place best viewed from borderlands. My school-prize yielded me three names of interest: John Clare, Richard Jefferies, and George Gissing.
In connection with the phrase ice-green that appears earlier in the report, I would go on to write about a certain evening when I was a small child and staying with my family as guests of three unmarried aunts and an unmarried uncle of mine in a house of pale-grey sandstone mentioned in the report. During that evening, the youngest of my aunts took me into the garden on the southern side of the house in order to have me view what she called the southern lights, which I remember as a roughly rectangular zone of green in the dark sky above the distant ocean and which my aunt explained as having been caused by the refraction of light from the midnight sun through numerous icebergs. My aunt and I might have watched the lights, so to call them, from the side of the return veranda if that place had not been blocked off by canvas blinds to form a sleeping-place for my uncle. Instead, she lifted me onto one of the blocks of pale-grey sandstone that formed a base beneath a tall rainwater tank. Later during my childhood, the tankstand, as it was called, became my preferred place for reading. The tank itself sheltered me from the wind off the ocean, and I was able while I read to touch the petals of the nasturtium plants that grew in crevices between the crumbling blocks of stone and were mostly of a colour between orange and red.
In connection with the phrase ice-maiden that appears earlier in the report, I would go on to write about the earliest instance that I can recall of my embracing a female person. The event took place during the last month of my twenty-first year. The weather at the time was hot, and the female person was lightly dressed, and what I recall most clearly is my shock at discovering that her bare flesh was warm to the touch whereas I had for long supposed that the flesh of female persons would have the feel of marble.
In connection with my one-time colleague, the author of a piece of short fiction about a priest obliged to mingle his urine with altar-wine, I would go on to write the following. After we had ceased to be colleagues, he and I rarely met. I did not even learn that he had died until a year after the event, when I received a circular letter inviting me to buy a copy of a book that had recently been published by a group of his friends and admirers. According to the circular letter, the author had been working on the book at the time of his death, and his widow had later finished the book as he had wanted to. I read also from the circular letter that the book was an utterly frank and candid account of the spiritual crisis that had caused the author to leave the priesthood.
I found the book tedious and self-serving, if not dishonest. I formed the impression that the author had finished writing the work long before his death but had not wanted to have it published in his lifetime lest certain passages should cause embarrassment to some of his elderly relatives, if not the author himself. These passages were an account of the author’s having begun to masturbate for the first time after he had been an ordained priest for some years and while he was experiencing what the writer of the circular letter had described as a spiritual crisis. I had hoped that the book might reveal something of what I might have called the inner life of the author. I was curious to know what had taken place in the author’s mind when he prayed or when he celebrated mass and later when he began to question whether he was called to be a priest and even, perhaps, to doubt the tenets of his faith. The book told me nothing about these matters. The author seemed unable to report anything but dreary debates between himself and his superiors, the architecture of the various religious houses where he worked as a priest, and the petty circumstances of his finally taking off his Roman collar and trying to dress and behave as a layman. I found it strange that a priest could write about his having masturbated but not about his having been in love with some or another image of his god.
In connection with the place-name that I have never been able to find in any gazetteer of the British Isles, perhaps I would go on to report something of what I learned during my most recent visit to the house mentioned often in these pages: the house where my bed stands beneath a bow window bordered by coloured panes. The man who owns the house owns also a computer. During my most recent visit, and without my asking him to do so, the man typed into his computer, to use his own words, the place-name mentioned and then invited me to read a number of seeming pages that had appeared just then on the screen of the computer. The man offered to print out, as he put it, the seeming pages so that I could take them away with me afterwards, but I chose merely to read them on the screen, confident that I would later recall whatever deserved to be recalled. I learned from my reading that the place-name mentioned is a much earlier version of the present-day name of a small town in a border district of Scotland. I learned further that the small town was supposed to have been the birthplace, some centuries ago, of a man known as Thomas the Rhymer, who was supposed to have once visited Elfland in the company of the queen of that country or region and after his return to have sought continually to find his way back. I learned further still that the place denoted by the signpost that I have often passed was formerly one of the largest grazing properties in this state and that the double-storey homestead, which still stands, has in one of its walls a stone from the ruins of a tower that once stood in the place that bore long ago the name of the homestead and the surrounding property. I learned yet further that a more recent owner of the property with the double-storey homestead owned many racehorses, one of which, in the decade before my birth, won a famous steeplechase in the capital city where I was born.
If I were to report the items mentioned in the previous paragraph, then I would almost certainly go on to report the images that appeared to me while I was writing that paragraph, which images appeared as details in one after another pane of coloured glass in one after another window of a huge homestead on a vast grazing property, which panes were illustrations of dealings supposed to have taken place long ago between a man and a female personage in a district near a border.
In connection with the chapel that was the place of worship of the religious brothers who taught me at secondary school and was also the place where I sometimes paid a visit to a personage that I knew mostly as the Blessed Sacrament, I would go on to write that I looked several times into one or another of the bulky missals and prayer-books that rested all day on the seats of the chapel. Each of the brothers would have kneeled in his appointed place in the chapel during morning mass and whenever he and his fellows assembled during the day for prayers and would have left his books near by. Sometimes, if I was the only person in the chapel, I picked up the nearest book and looked at some of the many so-called holy cards poking out from between the pages of the book. (Sixty years ago, and for some years afterwards, priests and religious and pious lay persons amassed collections of such cards, being presented with them on birthdays, notable feast days, and anniversaries of ordinations, weddings and such other events. A holy card had an illustration on its obverse side and a prayer or a pious invocation on its reverse.) I was curious to learn which so-called special devotions my teachers might have cultivated: what images they might have kept in mind while they prayed. I had little respect for the brothers who taught me. I considered most of them ignorant and incompetent teachers. And yet, I was sometimes sorry for them on account of the drab lives they seemed to lead, and I would have liked to learn from my looking through their prayer-books that many a one of them was able to call up a rich and varied mental landscape whenever he prayed.
I remember only one of the cards that I looked at furtively. It belonged to one of the youngest of the brothers. I knew the man b
y name but he had never taught me. On the obverse of the card was a picture of the Virgin Mary. The pictured face was that of a young woman, hardly more than a girl, seemingly of Anglo-Celtic extraction and rather more fetching than the many similar illustrations that I had previously seen on holy cards. The reverse had been originally blank, but the owner of the card had written on it in pencil several resolutions of the sort that a zealous young religious of that era must often have written on the reverse of a holy card after having uttered the resolution in his mind as though in the presence of the personage depicted on the card. I long ago forgot all but one of the resolutions. That memorable item reads as follows. Guard eyes while in town.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, religious orders of priests or brothers or nuns mostly trained their postulants, novices, and professed students at some distance from the capital cities. The superiors of the religious orders seemed to have thought of the countryside as the best surroundings for young persons who might have been tempted to lapse from their religious zeal if they had been constantly exposed to the so-called distractions of city life. Some orders erected buildings of their own design on the outskirts of provincial cities or towns. Smaller orders bought and converted for their own use mansions built long before by wealthy pastoralists. The order of brothers under mention had as their training house several newer buildings arranged around a mansion formerly owned by a leading family, so to call them, in a western district of the state adjoining the northern boundary of this state. Pupils of the brothers were sometimes shown photographs of their training house. I can hardly recall the newer buildings that served as classrooms and dormitories, but I can see in mind still the building that comprised the brothers’ residence and also the chapel: the two-storey building of stone surrounded on at least three sides by verandas on two levels. The verandas were bare in the photographs that I saw sixty years ago, but I see them now as shaded by many a vine-covered trellis and furnished in places with chairs and couches of cane. At one such place, a group of female persons is gathered as though to pose for a photograph. Some of the persons are elderly; others are hardly more than girls. Most are in white or pale-coloured dresses of a length long since unfashionable. A few wear wide-brimmed straw hats; others shade their eyes with their hands while they look towards the glaring paddocks in the mostly level grassy countryside.
Border Districts Page 11