For some months after this epiphany, without giving much thought to the forces that were active inside her, she immersed herself in a private study of early bark paintings and their collectors. She made trips to Paris and to Basel, and almost succeeded in convincing herself that her destiny lay in compiling a systematic account of the art forms of tropical Australia and their distinctive appeal to Western eyes, or in recording the lives of the first anthropologists in Arnhem Land – and she even began work on both these projects.
“Soon, though,” she said, “I understood that I’d been fooling myself. It wasn’t only the bark paintings that had been calling to me: it was the country. I was pining away for north Australia, which I’d always thought held nothing for me. There were other things in my life in Europe that weren’t working out just then: I booked myself a ticket home. It was one of those interminable f lights, when you go through a universe of realisations and regrets: I was dying for it to end. When we began our descent into Darwin, it was already late afternoon, and it was the middle of the burning season: all along the peninsula there were thick black smoke plumes rising: through the aircraft window it looked as if the city had been under fire. The plane came gliding in, and made its turn above the far shoreline. We banked sharply; I gazed down, and picked out the familiar landmarks – the railway bridge, the highway running off into the bush, the power station, all spread out in the haze below – then, as we were levelling out, almost above East Point, my eyes caught something – a swirl, a movement; and now, of course, when I think back, I can tell myself there must have been sand patterns in the water, caught in the current, just beneath the surface – but in that faint light, they looked to me exactly like the crowns of trees – a forest of submerged trees, with their autumnal leaves gleaming, yellow and russet in the sun – and beneath them, staring up from the shadows, I could see a parade of medieval knights in armour, mounted on horseback. They had shields and banners in their hands; their faces were clear, and their eyes were cold.”
“And what were they?” I broke in. “An army of fate and death?”
“No, I don’t think so. I prefer to think of that moment as some kind of special glimpse of a prophetic world, lying always just out of sight of our own, beyond it, nearby. I’ve never glimpsed them again; but I feel very close to them, those shining knights. I see them in my mind as my protectors. Whenever things fall out of key in my life, I come out here, to where I imagine I could find them – and somehow it makes me happier simply to be on this shoreline, looking at the storm fronts across the harbour dancing in.”
We had come back to our starting point. “Wait for me,” she said. “Wait just a second.” She darted round to the far side of her car, stretched her hand down beside the passenger seat, then reached over to me. She was holding a book, which she thrust into my hands. “Here: I’d like you to have this. To help you with your return. It helped me: it brought me back. But I’ve had it long enough. It’s time for me to hand it on.”
I glanced down. It was an old book: there was dust and moisture beneath its laminated jacket. Dawn of Art, announced the title, in white block letters and nothing more, except, in much smaller print, the author’s name: “Karel Kupka.” I turned it over. On the back cover there was a picture of winding, twisting snakes with staring eyes.
“Why are you giving me this?” I said.
“It’s just the luck of the draw,” she said. “Sometimes, in our frozen lives, we get something for nothing. Maybe you need it. Maybe giving is its own gift.”
“Do you always talk in riddles?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll return it to you,” I said. “I’m sure I’ll see you again soon.”
“I’m sure you won’t! If you really had the hang of Darwin, you’d see the city’s like an interlocking set of mazes. You can be in one world all your life and not even know about the other ones lying right next door, within arm’s reach. There’s no need to give it back. Don’t say anything. Just take it. If you read it, and follow where it leads, and listen to its hints and grace-notes, it will reward you – it will repay you well.”
She jumped into the car and, with a sudden flow of movements, each of her actions leading smoothly to the next, she reversed, turned, waved over her shoulder and drove off, at speed, past the gun turrets, into the murk of the advancing storm.
*
Over the next few days, still playing over inside myself the different stages of this encounter, and what each of us might have divined or known about the other, I edged through the first chapters of Dawn of Art, reading slowly, touched by the book’s prevailing tone of nostalgia and regret; intrigued, too, by its resistant structure, which seems somehow to lure the reader in, so that to open the book at all is to begin a quest. For Kupka’s overarching ideas and theories are pursued fitfully, dropping at times below the textual surface, only to rise up again in almost arbitrary fashion, like some winding desert watercourse. It is in his final sentences, which are dusted with a despairing grandeur, that he at last turns to face his secret subject: he declares that art’s simple, noble function, indispensable to man, is to communicate experience directly; and that the trappings of Western existence serve merely to obscure this drive. This is the lesson he extracts from the questing lives of Cézanne and Gauguin, from Picasso and Derain: it is nothing other than the search for purity and immediacy that entices creative artists to make such frequent pilgrimages back to the origins of art, and it is this yearning, too, that has lured Kupka himself into the depths of Arnhem Land: for artists, he announces with a kind of wild dismay, search for every world except the one which is forced on them.
I let Kupka’s claims, and all his contradictions, sit with me; they cast their shadow on my thoughts. My curiosity about him and his life began to grow. It stayed in my mind even on long journeys to the Kimberley and the Centre – and one passage above all struck a chord inside me: those few, vivid lines in the envoi, written for Kupka by Breton, in which he speaks of the similarity between bark paintings and the design of shells. That passage was with me weeks later, when I met the scientist Richard Willan, an expert on molluscs and harbour infestations, and something of a celebrity in the research circles of the North. I told him of my childhood fascination with shells and their patterning – and though Richard must have heard of such remembered enthusiasms a thousand times, he agreed to give me a quick tutorial on the marine life of the Top End. I called in at the museum the next day to see him, with an expectation and a sense of looming adventure that seemed to have come straight from the days of childhood. I had tracked him down there with some difficulty and after persistent inquiries, for he was secreted away in his cramped office cubicle – much, I could not help thinking to myself, like a shelled creature – and was sitting behind screens and room divi ders, hunched over at a small desk dominated by a binocular microscope. Every available flat surface within his reach was strewn with specimen boxes and piles of technical journals: the shelves were filled with monographs and reference volumes devoted to sea creatures, and almost all of these encyclopedias and field guides were bound in canvas of deep blue, as if to emphasise their provenance from the oceanic depths. We spoke for a while of phyla and phenotypes. Eventually, with an air of gentle patience, Richard offered to show me through a small part of the sample collection, which was housed in the museum’s storage vaults. At one point in our passage down the corridors, he waved a hand towards a set of sliding drawers.
“Cone shells,” he said, in a beatific voice, as though these two syllables were enough to summon up for him a vision of some underwater paradise. “I have thirty drawers of different species of cone shell here – I could find any one of them for you at any time.”
“Aren’t they poisonous? I thought a sting from a cone shell was fatal.”
“That’s right – and I’ve actually got a purple cone shell here that was used for venom research.”
He gestured to me to look more closely at a neat row of the shells: each one had
a distinct tracery of lines upon it, much like the links in a suit of chain-mail.
“Pattern in nature!” Richard left a little silence, as if for me to express some philosophical prejudice, before hurrying on. “We understand the basic mechanisms – how, in a chemical sense, these markings come about. But the why! The ‘why’ questions in biology are the hardest ones to answer. Why should this particular shell have a wavy pattern, and this one a pattern of triangles?
As humans, we can only speculate. We think we’re superior – but of course we’re not … Surely, though, you’re here to ask me about nudibranchs.”
“About what?”
“Nudibranchs. I may be the keeper of molluscs and echinoderms, but they’re my specialty,” said Richard, a touch crestfallen. “Don’t you know anything about them? Many people find them quite addictive. They belong among the sea slugs, and without any doubt, in their shapes, and their colouration, and their body forms, they’re the most wonderful of all the molluscs. You must have heard of the Spanish Dancer, at least – it’s a beautiful creature. It takes its name from its similarity to women dancing the flamenco. They’re actually quite easy to see: they can be as much as 600 millimetres long. Perhaps I should give you some background reading material?”
A few days later, I felt myself somewhat better informed about the lovely, savage world of nudibranchs, creatures both short-lived and rare, which, despite their seductive appearance, are little more than mobile poison sacs and devote large parts of their lives to concentrating within their bodies the toxins of nature. Their distribution and their feeding habits remain unclear, though a suspicion of cannibalism hangs over some members of the family, and in one of Richard’s more accessible surveys of the field, where he hints at the difficulties faced by underwater photographers in search of nudibranchs, he describes sightings of a predatory species devouring another as “the Holy Grail.” The emotional attachments of these elusive molluscs are predictably baroque: loneliness is their pre-ordained fate, so thinly are they distributed through the reef shallows of the southern seas: indeed, marine scientists are amazed that individual nudibranchs, sifting through the perfumed chemical attractants of their watery environment, ever succeed in finding suitable candidates with whom to mate – and it seems very probable that many adults die without once having experienced the entanglements of love. All nudibranchs, though, are hermaphrodites, so on the rare occasions when company comes along, they are well adapted to seize the moment: copulation can last for a few seconds, or as long as a whole day. Both partners leave fertilised, and both soon produce a large spawn mass, shaped much like a coiled watch spring, which yields, within ten days, a freight of tiny larvae quite unsuspecting of the rigours that lie ahead.
Late one afternoon, the details of this fraught life cycle newly committed to memory, I drove out, past the defence communication masts and the Casuarina swamplands, to a rendezvous with Richard near the sand beach at Lee Point, a place where he collected samples often, and where he hoped he might make clearer to me the subtleties and the appeal of the molluscan domain. He was waiting beside an ancient blue hatchback: “No money or valuables inside,” proclaimed a stencilled notice on the dashboard – but there was not one passer-by in sight to absorb this helpful piece of information. We strolled along, discussing his role in the eradication of the black-striped mussel from Darwin Harbour, an achievement which he regarded as one of the summits of his professional life; we touched on the charms of side-gilled sea slugs, the cunning adaptations of cowrie shells, and the excellence of the fresh scallop pies that could still be had near Stanley, on the northwest Tasmanian coast.
Then, abruptly, in mid-sentence, Richard’s manner changed; we had been walking slowly down the beach, towards the waves.
“We’ve just reached the zone of bioturbation,” he said in a hushed voice, almost whispering into my ear. “We’re going to do a vertical transect now.” Forward we went, in tandem, Richard waving at the tell-tale traces of activity all around us: there were the sand bubbles thrown up by foraging crabs, there the footprints of Siberian wading birds.
“And look what I’ve found here!” He was bent over, sieving out a scoop of sand, struggling with his glasses in the hatband of his Akubra. “Do you see? What looks like sterile sand is full of bivalves: full of life. Hundreds, thousands of specimens in each square metre.” I peered down obediently beside him, and saw nothing. “Bivalves, of course, are eternal compromises – between the adductor muscle holding the creature together and the ligament causing them to spring apart in death. And here’s a murex. How beautiful it is – that single spine is enough to tell me that it’s MacGillivray’s murex: the notched aperture just there draws in water over the osphradium.”
“The what?”
“The osphradium: it’s a highly enervated organ that locates the direction of its prey.”
“These beautiful things are carnivorous?”
“The murex,” said Richard gravely, “is an extreme carnivore. What we see as beauty often tends to be associated with danger. But its beauty hasn’t helped this one, in the greater scheme of things. You see that hole in its shell – just above where the liver would have been? It’s been drilled – by a moon snail. In fact, you’d rarely find a mollusc shell on the beach that hasn’t been drilled like this.”
“So I imagine that means you don’t care for moon snails very much?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say I anthropomorphise my feelings towards them. You always have to be careful not to be carried away by your own preferences – although if I was being strictly honest, I’d have to admit I would love to have evolved from something like an octopus. But I suppose I can’t hide the truth from myself” – this with a little sigh of resignation – “no matter how hard it is to take: it’s very clear that there’s something much more like a starfish in the distant reaches of our ancestry.”
We walked on. I let the crushing scale of this genealogical perspective wash over me, and felt my thoughts drifting, until it occurred to me that I was completely without mooring at that moment, and lost in life, and ever since I came back from my time in the Middle East I had been without a solid thing to hold on to. Richard, meanwhile, would stop, oblivious to these dark intimations, and helpfully point out little finds.
“Here’s a sand dollar: Peronella orbicularis – after the French naturalist. And here’s a lovely thing – it’s Hanley’s top snail.”
“Do you have any special favourites,” I asked him, almost unable to bring out the words. “Do you keep special shells, in your private collection?”
“I’m the custodian of a scientific collection. I don’t feel any desire to build one of my own. I just have certain shells, very few, at home – shells that have had their walls worn away, that are segmented, and that disclose their architecture.”
“Because you like the ruin and destruction?”
“No – the beauty and the order.”
Richard spoke on. I felt the stillness that had been invading me take hold. I stared up at the diffused light and the far shore of the harbour, where the green strip of the mangroves and the coastal forests shimmered in the haze. The horizon’s line was indistinct: light gathered there, glinted, and fell away – then, as I watched, I began to make out a shadow, moving with great slowness, still half-hidden by the curvature of the earth. It was a vessel, in silhouette. I followed it, transfixed by the gradual, dreamlike quality of its approach: it drew nearer; it took on definition, and in the humid air, where everything seemed linked by a common exhalation, its look became somehow caught up with the stories I had just been listening to. Its sides were black: it had an array of masts, and spars, and funnels, like some floating factory or industrial plant. How sombre it was: how charged with fatality! Was it a new kind of barge, returning from the islands of Arnhem Land, or a laden deep-sea trawler coming in? After a brief interval, rain veils swept back across the outer harbour, hiding the ship from view. I dragged my gaze away, both relieved and disappointed, and the idea
occurred to me that I would never be able to expunge that image from the surface of my eyes.
“What is it, actually, that you’re trying to find out, in this conversation?” I heard Richard saying to me at that moment, from some endless distance.
“If I could tell you that!”
There was another silence, as if a void was opening before me. I struggled to keep my bearings.
“Go on,” said Richard. “Try.”
“Would you think,” I said, “that I’d gone completely mad, if I told you I wanted to see you purely because I came across a book that traces the designs in the bark paintings of Arnhem Land back to the forms of shells – or if I said that idea had some kind of strength for me, and that the moment I encountered it, it seemed like something true?”
“It wouldn’t seem like madness at all,” said Richard, in an even, serious voice, as we walked up from the beachfront. “In fact I see things that way myself. The creation of each single shell is a miracle. It’s just one part of the mollusc’s body that’s responsible for making the shell – and yet they create marvels of architecture, more splendid than anything man can make: no wonder if the Aborigines borrow their examples, and use those patterns. The Japanese have, for millennia. Much of the art of Japan is inspired by sea-shell design. I’ve known for a long time that humans have a natural affinity with shells. But it’s a good idea not to get lost in their patterns. There are many authorities who have something very like a fear of them: shells can take you too far into yourself. You need to make sure they lead you back, in the end, to other people.” At this, he made a slight, formal gesture with his hand, as though he were drawing a veil across a vault of treasures. “And certainly,” he said, “I wish that for you.”
The Red Highway Page 4