Barley Patch

by Gerald Murnane

  I looked back just now at the previous few pages of this work of fiction and found that I have begun to write about the chief character as though he were the chief character of this present work. I have even begun to write as though I were still writing the work that I left off writing more than fifteen years ago on the bustling afternoon mentioned earlier. I have fallen into somewhat the same confusion that the chief character himself fell into when he sat down to write one or another piece of writing but began instead to write about a building that had already been abandoned by the persons who had first imagined it.

  I ought to report one last detail from the chief character’s speculating about the upper rooms in the building of several storeys. As a small child, he had heard from the radio on Saturday afternoons many names of racehorses before he had seen even a photograph of a racecourse and long before he had seen any sort of representation of a set of racing colours. While he listened to the radio he knew, of course, that a number of horses far away were contesting a race, but there appeared in his mind a sequence of images derived only from the sounds of the names. He was listening to broadcasts of horse-races when he was still barely able to read simple words, so that names such as Hiatus, Latani, Icene, and Aggressor had for him no meaning. He learned in due course what most such words denoted, but he never forgot how the words had affected him. The name Hiatus, for example, brought to his mind an image of a grey-black bird struggling against winds high in the sky. The name Latani caused him to see a mole like a small black bead on the chin of an olive-skinned young woman. The name Icene gave rise in his mind both to a sight and to a sound: the sight of a long gown of silvery material and the sound of the gown’s trailing across a floor of white marble. When he heard the name Aggressor, he saw the grey-brown side of a steep railway-cutting wet with rain. Later, as a young man who went often to the races, he maintained his interest in the names of horses and took pleasure in the success of horses with names that sounded well or connoted rich imagery. Later again, he could never see in his mind an expanse of green cloth on a floor beneath a dormer window without hearing in his mind one or more name suitable for a racehorse. His hearing the names thus would often persuade him against having the model-makers build their white fences and set in motion their gliding horses and doll-jockeys. The sound in his mind of one or another name would often seem to denote not a mere painted toy and not even an actual straining, staring racehorse but a knot of what he might have called compressed mental imagery or, using the word in a sense particularly his own, meaning. And when he sensed the presence in his mind of this sort of meaning he wanted not to watch model horses gliding across green cloth but to go in what seemed the opposite direction: to search, if possible, behind the scenery in his mind for the further scenery that must have lain there: for the further racecourses and the horses that raced there with names that he had heard already in his mind. But for this sort of searching he would need paper, pens, the means for writing. In his thoughts, he went back to his desk among the bookshelves. The attic rooms, for the time being, were empty. If, for the time being, a young man or a high-class call-girl were to visit him, he might feel again the embarrassment that he sometimes felt when he had to confess that he spent most of his free time sitting at a desk and writing about the lives of invisible personages in invisible places, but he would be spared the task of explaining why he had lately turned to writing about contests between invisible horses and jockeys on invisible racecourses.

  If the chief character had had his favourites among the invisible racehorses, one such would have been named King-in-the-Lake. The name would have brought to mind an image of a man lying on the bed of a lake of clear water. The man might have been dead or merely asleep.

  Ten years before the image-man in the image-lake had first appeared to the chief character, he had read often the poem “The Forsaken Merman,” by Matthew Arnold. Afterwards, whenever he recalled his having read the poem, he recalled the seeming sound of bells travelling downwards through water and the seeming sight of a certain building in the neighbourhood of the lake. The building was of white weatherboards with a tower where orange-gold bells swung. While he seemed to hear under water the sound of the seeming bells, the chief character saw an image of the view that might have appeared to a man lying on the bed of a lake of clear water. At the centre of the view was a zone of pale-blue sky. On either side of this zone was a narrow band of dark green. Each band was a part of the bank of the lake, where grass and clumps of rushes grew. If ever the chief character had wanted to design a set of invisible racing colours for the horse named King-in-the-Lake, then the colours pale blue and dark green would surely have occurred to him.

  An invisible racecourse, no less than a visible, could be no more than a detail in the foreground of a far-reaching invisible landscape. The chief character might have supposed himself unable to comprehend the true extent of such a landscape or the intricacy of its details if he had not understood from the first that the landscape existed only in potential; was encoded in what he had yet to read or to write in his upstairs suite in the building of several storeys.

  The chief character, then, had no need of any special faculty for bringing to mind such a detail as the name of the personage who was the owner of the racehorse that would carry the colours pale blue and dark green in one or more races that would be run in due course in a building of several storeys in his, the chief character’s mind. The chief character simply came by the information that the surname of the personage mentioned was Glass and that the initials preceding his name in racebooks and form-guides should be G. G. for the given names Gervase Graham or, perhaps, Gary Grenfell. If I could think of the chief character as having deliberately chosen the surname for his own chief character, then I might admire the chief character for his perceptiveness; for his seeming to be aware of the pattern of imagery, so to call it, in the work of fiction in which he himself is no more than a personage. But the personage with the surname Glass has the same sort of existence in the mind of the chief character as that personage has in my own mind. Like the hundreds of owners and trainers and jockeys who frequent one or another invisible racecourse, the personage named G. G. Glass has always existed in potentiality awaiting the appearance of his name in a text such as this.

  In the place where I sit writing these words, a racecourse is often described as a place where persons of every rank compete as equals: where the magnate may have to watch his costly horse overtaken in the straight by an animal of unfashionable breeding owned by a syndicate of bar-attendants. While I was writing the previous paragraph, I was led to postulate a contest at one or another invisible racecourse between an invisible racehorse carrying the pale blue and dark green colours of G. G. Glass and an invisible racehorse carrying my own colours, as though a writer of a work of fiction might sometimes exist in potentiality awaiting the appearance of his or her name in a text such as might be written by an invisible personage mentioned in an invisible text. The appearance of my own racehorse on the other seeming side of my own fictional text might have shown me something of what I had hoped for as a child when I had wanted to see outwards from the coloured glass that I often looked into.

  A certain brief section of my unfinished book was set, as it were, in an old timber building at the rear of a house of grey sandstone surrounded on three sides by mostly level and treeless grassy countryside. On the other side of the house were a few bare paddocks. Beyond these paddocks were cliff-tops overgrown by scrub. Beyond the cliff-tops was the Southern Ocean. The old timber building was all that remained of the timber house that had been replaced by the house of grey sandstone more than twenty years before the birth of the chief character. The persons who lived in the house of grey sandstone were the parents and the four unmarried siblings of the father of the chief character. When the chief character first visited the house, in the summer of his seventh year, the persons who lived in the house had for long been using the old timber building as a storage-place or dumping-place for unused or
unwanted furniture and belongings.

  The chief character visited the house of grey sandstone several times during the summer of each year until his tenth year, when his father’s father died and the house and the surrounding paddocks were sold. At some time during each of his visits to the house, his mother would tell the chief character to go outside and play. The chief character would then go in search of his father’s youngest sister, who was almost always at work in the kitchen or the laundry. He would ask his father’s sister, who was his youngest aunt, for permission to go into the old timber building and to play the gramophone that was kept there. His youngest aunt would always give her permission but would remind him to be careful of the gramophone and the records, which had belonged to her when she was a young thing, as she expressed the matter. (The chief character thought of his aunt as middle-aged or old, although she was in her mid-thirties.)

  The gramophone, as it was called, was little more than a turntable and an amplifier in a portable case. In a box near by were twenty and more records made from some or another glossy black material. The records were brittle and some of them had been cracked or chipped before the chief character had first handled them. At one side of the gramophone was a handle that had to be turned many times before each record was played. Seemingly, the turntable was set in motion by a concealed spring, although the chief character was never curious about such matters.

  The chief character took care when handling the gramophone and the records although he could not believe that his aunt valued them or would ever use them again. He supposed that she had lost interest in them as she had grown older. In later years, when he had learned more about his youngest aunt, the chief character supposed that she had discarded the gramophone and the records during the year before he had been conceived, which was the year when his aunt had been preparing to become a postulant in an order of nuns; that she had stowed away in the old timber building not only the gramophone and the records but perhaps other items that seemed to her frivolous and distracting after she had decided to lead a simple regulated life in a building of two or more storeys.

  All of the records were of songs popular in the USA in the late 1920s. Only a few appealed to the chief character, and these he played repeatedly. The sound was what he called scratchy and many of the words were inaudible, but he heard enough to be able to feel what he hoped to feel whenever he listened to a piece of music: to feel as though a person unknown to him in a desirable place far away from him desired to be in a place still further away. The song that he played most often had the title “O, Dem Golden Slippers” and was sung by three or four male persons.

  The chief character was never able to make out the words of the song. The only words that he recognised were the words of the title, which words were sung often as part of a refrain. He supposed the singers to be unhappy men and their song to be a lament of some kind. Even in bright sunshine, the old timber building was only dimly lit, with much discarded furniture having been stored in front of the two small windows. The record that the chief character played most often had a bright yellow label at its centre. The words on the label were printed in black. Even when the mostly level grassy countryside all around was in bright sunshine, the chief character was able to think of himself as sitting in darkness while he listened to the gramophone. He liked to stare first at the spinning black record and then at the yellow central circle and then at the dark blur of words on the inner yellow.

  Among the images that appeared to the chief character while he stared at the dark blur that had formerly been printed words—among those images were some that arranged themselves as though to illustrate for his benefit the meaning of the incomprehensible words of the song that sounded from the spinning record. The most notable of these images was of a pair of slippers made from translucent glass of a colour between orange and gold. The slippers, so he came to understand, belonged to a young female personage whose home was a building of two or more storeys. The unhappy men might have been former servants of the father of the young female personage. The men had been sent away from the house of two or more storeys after the father of the young female personage had suspected that they had fallen in love with his daughter.

  On days when the sunlight was especially bright outside the old timber building, the chief character would sometimes look away from the black and the yellow blurs while he listened to the incomprehensible words of the song the title of which was intended at one time to be the title of a long and complicated book of fiction. At such times on such days, the chief character would look in the direction of one of the two small windows of the old timber building. He would look in the hope of seeing there the crowd of dust-motes that he sometimes saw swirling or drifting in a shaft of sunlight. Sometimes while the record was spinning on the turntable of the gramophone and while the wavering music and voices were sounding in the old timber building, the crowd of dust-motes seemed to portend something. The song sounded always as a lament. Nothing in the words or in the music gave rise to hope. Whatever was lost or far away would always be so. The young woman, the owner of the slippers of orange-gold glass, would keep to her room in the building of two or more storeys. But the specks of yellow went on swirling or drifting in the shaft of light for long after the song had ended. The movement of the specks caused the chief character to think of energy held in check or of meaning waiting to be expressed. At any moment, the yellow motes might break out of their aimless-seeming formation and might arrange themselves far otherwise; might even comprise a set of signs requiring to be read.

  The parents of the chief character would not allow him as a child to attend race-meetings with his father. The parents hoped to keep the boy from following the ways of his father, who had lost large sums of money to bookmakers during year after year. When, finally, the chief character attended a race-meeting for the first time, he was in his sixteenth year and in the company of his father’s youngest brother. While the horses were circling behind the barrier before being called forward by the starter for the first race at the first meeting that the chief character had attended, the movement of the horses recalled to him the swirling and drifting of the dust motes in the old timber building where he had listened as a child to the gramophone belonging to his youngest aunt.

  One or another section of the book that I failed to complete would have included a report of certain details that appeared to the chief character after he had been injected with a measured amount of a substance that he knew by the name of psilocybin. The section would have begun with a report of the chief character’s consulting a medical specialist in the hope of learning why he, the chief character, seemed unable to write poetry or prose fiction or to persuade some or another young woman to be his girlfriend. The following is a summary of the other matters that would have been reported in the section.

  The chief character consulted the medical specialist for several months, after which the specialist proposed that the chief character should stay overnight in a certain private hospital while the psilocybin affected him. It so happened that the chief character, during one of the months mentioned, first met up with a young woman who later became his girlfriend, who later still lived in a room in the same house of two storeys in which the chief character and two other persons lived, and who later again became the wife of the chief character. It so happened also during another of the months mentioned that the chief character wrote the first notes for a poem that became, several years later, his first published poem. Despite what had happened during the months mentioned, the chief character went on consulting the medical specialist so that he, the chief character, could experience the effects of a substance that was said to alter a person’s perception.

  The private hospital mentioned in the previous paragraph was a building of two storeys in an eastern suburb of Melbourne. The chief character was shown into a small room on the upper storey. The room contained only a single bed and a bedside table and a wardrobe and a chair. The window-blind had been drawn against the lat
e-afternoon sunlight. On the blind were shadows from the upper branches of a tree in the walled garden beside the building. The chief character had to change into pyjamas and to lie in the bed before the medical specialist injected into his, the chief character’s, bloodstream a measured dose of the substance mentioned previously. Soon after the injection of the substance, the chief character saw in his mind the first of a series of richly coloured images that appeared to him during several hours.

  The first of the images mentioned above were of zones of red and of blue and of yellow and of green forming intricate patterns or designs. If the chief character had recognised outlines of persons or of objects among the patterns or designs, he might have supposed that he was looking at window after window of stained glass in some or another gigantic cathedral. Instead, he supposed that the images were of unfamiliar details of the entity that he was accustomed to think of as his self, as though he had stood in front of a source of light so powerful that it caused to be projected on to some or another surface near by much-enlarged images of his brain or of his nerves. (Some days later, he recalled certain patches of colour that had appeared on the dark surface of the rug where he had played as a child with his collection of glass marbles. He had often placed one after another translucent marble so that the sunlight would cause a patch of faint colour to appear in the shade of the marble. After he had learned from his reading the word essence, he thought of the patch of colour as revealing the essence of the marble.)

  Later, the chief character seemed to himself to be standing in a corner of a walled garden beside the hospital of two storeys, except that the plants and the pathways were those that he had seen whenever he had visited as a child the stone house where his father’s unmarried siblings lived with their parents. From beneath a certain bush in an opposite corner of the garden, some or another small creature seemed to be signalling to him. What he saw was a series of tiny flashes, and yet afterwards he used the word winking to describe the sight. He understood, in the way that he seemed to understand certain matters in his dreams, that the creature under the bush was one of a sort of beetle that had infested the garden around the stone house mentioned above. He had learned from his father’s sisters to call the beetles soldier beetles. He admired the beetles’ wing-cases, which were dark-brown with orange-yellow markings, but after he had heard from his aunts that the beetles damaged many of the plants in their garden he killed any beetle that he saw and afterwards earned praise from his aunts when he told them how many he had killed. The beetles were easy to kill, especially the many pairs that moved less nimbly because they were joined rear-to-rear. These he sought out so as to boost his tally. He did not learn until some years later that the joined pairs had been copulating. For as long as he saw the signals that he later described as winking, the chief character understood that the sender of the signals shared with him certain secret knowledge although he, the chief character, could not have said what this knowledge consisted of; for as long as he saw the signals mentioned, the chief character understood also that the sender of the signals was well disposed towards him; and soon after he had first observed the signals, the chief character understood further that the sender of the signals was God—not a symbol of God or a manifestation of God but the almighty being that he, the chief character, had addressed in his prayers during earlier years and had tried often to see in his mind. God was no more and no less than an image of a beetle with orange-yellow markings on a dark-brown wing-case in an image-corner of an image-garden in his, the chief character’s, mind.