Barley Patch

by Gerald Murnane

  The chief character was hardly more than a boy when he set out for the Riverina district but he intended to become a writer of poetry or, perhaps, prose fiction, and also a mystic. He had come across the word mystic in his reading and had interpreted the word in his own way. He did not understand until a few years afterwards that his notion of prayer and meditation was hardly different from his notion of writing. The writer struggled to discover, in some far part of his mind, subject-matter fit for poetry; the mystic struggled to glimpse God or heaven. (The chief character would not have conceded, when he set out for the Riverina district, that what the mystic saw, or hoped to see, was an image or images in his mind.)

  The daily doings of the chief character while he lived in the building of two storeys in the Riverina district would have been no part of my abandoned work of fiction. He lived in the building for twelve weeks before returning to Melbourne and becoming employed as a clerical officer, so called, in a building of many storeys. While he lived in the building of two storeys, he had seemed to be accepted by the seven young men who were his fellow-novices and by the priests who were his instructors and his spiritual director. This last-mentioned man had even seemed disappointed when the chief character had announced that he wanted to leave the building of two storeys, although the man had not pressed him to stay.

  The chief character wrote only a few notes for a poem while he lived in the building of two storeys. The novices followed strictly the Rule of the religious order; the daily time-table allowed him no time for poetry. Several times during his stay, the chief character wondered whether it would have been better for him as a writer of poetry if he had applied to join the Cistercian order, even though their monastery was in hilly country not far from Melbourne. As for his striving to be a mystic, he had only to close his eyes in the choir stalls in the chapel and numerous images would appear to him, but he was disappointed by their simplicity and by their seeming to be derived from the illustrations on the holy-cards that he had owned as a child or from the subject-matter of the stained-glass windows that he had stared at as a child. Once only, towards the end of his stay in the building of two storeys, he seemed to see certain images the origins of which he could not readily have explained. He had undertaken an ambitious task. He had understood from an early age that the ceremony of the Mass was a sacrifice which pleased God and made that Being better disposed towards the persons who had taken part in the ceremony. But he had never understood the technical details, so to call them, of the sacrifice: who or what was offered and by what means; why the offering was likely to appease God. During the periods set aside for so-called spiritual reading, the chief character searched through books of theology for answers but found only vagueness. Even Thomas Aquinas, reputedly the greatest of theologians, had had to concede that the exact workings of the sacrifice of the Mass were a mystery.

  One morning during his last week in the building of two storeys, the chief character was straining to see in his mind some or another visual equivalent of the mystery mentioned in the previous paragraph when he lost sight of the usual images of crucifixes and chalices and wafers of unleavened bread and bearded deities looking down from on high. In place of these predictable images, he saw in his mind while he knelt with his colleagues in the chapel certain details of the image of a mounting-yard at a crowded and well-appointed racecourse. Perhaps twenty handsome horses were being led around the perimeter of the yard by their strappers. On the rectangular lawn at the centre of the yard, the owners and trainers conferred in small groups. At any moment, the glass doors of the nearest building would be flung open and the jockeys would step out and would stride onto the rectangular lawn where each jockey would join one or another of the conferring groups.

  At this point in the work of fiction that had never been finished, the narrator would have reported that the chief character had attended several race-meetings before he had arrived in the Riverina district and that he had been much affected at those meetings by the sight of the horses parading in the mounting yard. While the horses paraded and while the owners and the trainers and the jockeys conferred, the chief character had been able to foresee many possible outcomes of the race about to be run. Almost every conferring group might have had grounds for hoping to win. Almost every owner might have looked with pride at the jacket worn by his jockey. The colours of the jacket would have been chosen to suggest the achievements or the distinctive qualities or tastes of the owner. Perhaps a few sets of colours hinted also at the distinctive landscapes of the region from which the horse and its owner and trainer had arrived. For as long as the horses merely paraded, it was possible to foresee almost any one of the coloured jackets returning ahead of all the others; almost any owner and trainer having their hopes fulfilled. The race was still to be run. Each contestant still deserved admiration.

  On the morning during his last week in the building of two storeys when the image-horses paraded in the mounting-yard in his mind, the chief character understood, in the way that he understood certain matters in his dreams, that one of the horses was owned by no less a personage than God. From this, of course, the chief character understood further that one of the many men standing on the rectangular lawn, each wearing a suit and a tie and a grey felt hat and each listening impassively or speaking guardedly or glancing about anxiously, must have been God incarnate, the second Person of the Holy Trinity.

  For weeks past, the chief character had been straining often to see in his mind images explaining some of the so-called mysteries of his religion. None of what he had seen had been half so clear and so eloquent as the image of the mounting-yard. The image was no more stable than any other image in his mind, but whenever he was able afterwards to see it wholly or even partly, he tried in all seriousness to interpret it. He decided that a thoughtful racegoer could probably give a clearer account of such matters as the mystery of the incarnation and the sacrifice inherent in the Mass than could a theologian. If God were to take his chance as an owner of racehorses, He would experience the gamut of human emotions. And what sacrifice could bring a person closer to God than that a person should risk a large sum of his or her hard-earned money by betting on God’s horse at its every start?

  In one respect, the chief character was left dissatisfied by his mounting-yard imagery. He had no way of knowing which of the owners was the Son of God. He, the chief character, supposed his best means of identifying God was through His racing colours. Not all the jockeys were clearly visible among the knots of conferring owners and trainers and the parading horses, but the chief character was somewhat persuaded that Almighty God was represented by a purplish blur of jacket and sleeves on the far side of the rectangular lawn.

  The building of two storeys in the Riverina district was to have been the setting, as it were, of at least two sections of my unfinished book. One of those two, if ever I had written it, would have differed little from the following seven paragraphs.

  On every day except Sunday, each of the novices in the building of two storeys dusted the parlour or the library or polished the parquetry in one or another corridor or otherwise helped with the upkeep of the building. On a certain Saturday afternoon in April, when the chief character was already thinking of leaving the building and returning home, and when he was at the handle of an electric floor-polisher in the upper-storey corridor where the priests had their rooms, he heard a familiar sound. The sound came from behind the closed door of one of the old, retired priests of the order.

  The chief character had been pleased to learn, soon after his arrival in the building of two storeys, that the building where he and his fellow-novices were to study and to perfect themselves for a year was also the building where the priests of the order spent their retirement. The chief character thought it fitting that men who had worn themselves out with preaching and with praying and meditating should be able to spend their last years looking out over mostly level grassy countryside while they brought to mind some of the images that had sustained them during their l
ives as priests. On the Saturday afternoon mentioned in the previous paragraph, the familiar sound heard by the chief character was the sound of a radio broadcast of a racing-commentator describing a horse-race in Sydney.

  The chief character had not heard any sort of radio broadcast since he had arrived at the building of two storeys ten weeks before. Nor had he seen any sort of newspaper during that time. During their year in the novitiate, the novices were meant to be free from the so-called distractions of the everyday world while they were formed into exemplary religious, and so they were denied access to radios and newspapers. Strictly speaking, the chief character should have turned away and ceased to listen to the race-broadcast, but he excused himself on the grounds that he was unable to make out any words; all he could hear was the muffled voice of the commentator and the steady rise in pitch as the race neared its climax.

  Later on the same day, the chief character found a pretence for passing again by the old priest’s door. Again, the chief character heard the sound of a race-broadcast. This time, so the chief character thought, the race being described was being run in Melbourne. On the following Saturday afternoon, when he was again polishing the floor of the corridor, the chief character heard again the same sounds that he had previously heard. He had never yet seen the old priest. He saw in his mind a frail, white-haired man sitting at the table in his room and looking through the window and across the mostly level grassy countryside while he saw sometimes in his mind an image of one or another divine or canonised personage and at other times an image of one or another horse-race being run far beyond the farthest line of trees in the distance.

  On the Monday afternoon after the second of the Saturday afternoons mentioned above, the chief character had to pass along the priests’ corridor on his way to perform his latest rostered task, which was to clean the priests’ bathroom and toilets. Outside the door of the retired priest who listened to race-broadcasts was a newspaper. (The chief character understood that newspapers were delivered to the building every day and were then set out in the priests’ recreation room. Only the novices, trying to live by the strict rule of the order, were shut away from the world.) The chief character looked up and down the priests’ corridor and saw that it was deserted. Then he picked up the newspaper, which was some or another tabloid published in Sydney. Then he put the newspaper on the floor again but with its rear page facing upwards. Then he leaned over the page and tried to read it, watching at the same time for any priest who might step into the corridor.

  Much of the rear page was occupied by an image of a racehorse winning a race by a wide margin. The chief character learned that the horse was the two-years-old colt Todman and that the race was the inaugural Golden Slipper Stakes at Rosehill racecourse in the suburbs of Sydney. The chief character might have learned more if he had not seemed to hear from around a corner of the corridor the clattering sound of a pair of sandals such as every priest and novice wore as part of his habit.

  The chief character had heard already about the colt Todman, which had won several races in Sydney during the last months before he, the chief character, had left home for the building of two storeys, but he could not recall having previously heard about the inauguration of the Golden Slipper Stakes. At some time after he had left the building of two storeys and had returned to his parents’ house in a suburb of Melbourne and had begun to work by day as a clerk in a building of many storeys near the centre of Melbourne and to try to write poetry and prose fiction of an evening and to attend one or another race-meeting every Saturday, the chief character learned that the Golden Slipper Stakes was the richest race for two-years-olds in the world. He learned further that the phrase golden slipper was meant to denote a horseshoe. The winner of the race came back to the scales area through a horseshoe-shaped wreath of yellow flowers, and the trophy presented to the winning owner or owners included in its design a golden horseshoe. And yet, during his last two weeks in the building of two storeys and for some weeks after he had arrived home from the building, whenever he heard the phrase golden slipper in his mind the chief character saw a moment afterwards an image of a slipper such as might have been worn by one or another young female personage in one or another story purporting to be a story for children. The image-slipper was of translucent yellow glass and rested on an image-cushion of black image-velvet until the young female personage, the owner of the image-slipper should appear.

  During the first year after I had given up writing fiction, as was reported in the first paragraph of this work of fiction, I read for the first time the book Bestseller, by Claud Cockburn, which had first been published in London by Sidgwick and Jackson in 1972. I have since forgotten all but five of the many thousands of words that I read in that book. The five words were reported as having been spoken by a so-called progressive Protestant clergyman who had been asked, during the first decade of the twentieth century, how he thought about God. The clergyman had replied that he had for long supposed that God was a sort of oblong blur.

  Later during the first year after I had given up writing fiction, I received a letter from a lay-brother of the Cistercian Order, whose monastery stood among mostly hilly country no more than thirty kilometres from the suburb where I had lived with my wife and our children for more than twenty years. I intend to refer to the lay-brother from here on as the monk.

  I was pleased to have been addressed in writing by a member of a religious order that I had mentioned in my latest work of fiction, even if that work had since been abandoned. And yet, I was puzzled by the letter. The monk had written that he would like to meet me and, perhaps, to discuss some of my published books of fiction, which he admired, so he wrote, for their skilful depictions of relationships between men and women. I was puzzled because I could recall from my six published books of fiction hardly any passage reporting a relationship, as that word was commonly used. The monk invited me to visit him at his monastery. If I was not eager to discuss my fiction with him, so he wrote, then I might like to talk with him about horse-racing. As a young man, he had been much interested in horse-racing, and one of his brothers was a race-caller who could be heard every day on radio describing races in country districts of New South Wales.

  I visited the monk in his monastery a few weeks later. I was surprised that I, a stranger, could visit him so easily. From my reading, I had learned that the Cistercians observed strict silence and received only occasional visits from close relatives. The traditional Cistercian monastery had a guest-house, but the only monk who spoke with the guests was the guest-master, who had been released from his vow of silence by the abbot. The monk, however, spoke freely with me when we met. He explained later that many of the rules of the Order had been relaxed in recent years. A monk was free to receive guests, even female guests, in the parlour of the guest-house whenever he wished.

  Later, while we were talking, a bell sounded, and I understood that the monk was required to go to the chapel and to chant there with the rest of the Cistercian community part of the so-called Divine Office for that day. I expected the monk to leave me in the parlour for the time being, but he invited me to go with him to the chapel. Here was another rule that had been relaxed. As a guest of the monk, I was welcome to stand beside him in the choir stalls and to join in the chanting of the Office. I was thus able, as a married man in his fifties and a non-believer, to walk unchallenged into a place that had been during my youth utterly remote from me: a place where devout and ascetic men closed their eyes in prayer and glimpsed inwardly, perhaps, images of personages or of places or of processes such as I myself might have glimpsed only if I had undertaken several years of study and of prayer. Even the Divine Office was no longer in sonorous and difficult Latin but in English. Much of what I read from the monk’s book and tried to chant was in praise of a god who put to flight his people’s enemies and scattered their encampments.

  Afterwards, in the parlour, I asked the monk what sort of mental images the average Cistercian might have seen while he was recitin
g part of the Office that we had come from reciting. I expected to hear from him that the average monk would see in his mind a series of images seeming to illustrate the passages from Scripture that made up the Office and that a more disciplined or more devout monk might also feel himself closer than usual to one or another divine or canonised personage. The monk replied, however, that the average Cistercian was unlikely to have paid any attention to the words that he chanted and was likely to have used the time in the chapel as an opportunity to meditate in the way that a Buddhist monk might have meditated. The monk then said that he himself had learned a different way of meditating, although he neglected to tell me whence he had learned it. He said that he used his time in the chapel as an opportunity for calling to mind images of what he most desired; of what was most needed to round-out or to complete his mind or his soul; of the missing part of himself. He even said that he had heard or had read somewhere that God might be defined as the object of a person’s most intense longings. And then he described for me the images that most occupied his mind in the chapel. They were images of young female personages. Each personage had blonde hair and wore a tight-fitting evening gown of scarlet or orange or yellow satin that rested low on her breasts. The monk insisted that the images were neither of persons that he had seen in the past nor of persons that he hoped to meet in future; rather, they were images from what he called his spiritual homeland. The monk insisted also that he did not feel towards the personages any sort of sexual desire; instead, he felt towards the personages as though they were his soul-mates.