The Plains

by Gerald Murnane

  I checked that the young woman had gone into her own wing of the building. Then I walked downstairs and along the paths to the spot where she had stood looking up. I stood there myself and stared at the library window.

  I was surprised at the seeming darkness inside the library. I had always kept the blinds drawn in every window but that one. Yet at my desk I still felt in contact with the intense light of the plains. Now the window, enclosing only a sort of twilight, showed nothing of the room behind it—only an image of the sky above me.

  I allowed myself to stand there for as long as she had stood. I saw that the far sheen of the reflected sky was not the uniform steely colour it had first seemed, but faintly streaked and mottled. I would have taken all the pale markings for remote shreds of cloud, except that as I walked away one of them remained fixed in the glass while the image of the sky around it changed with every step I took.

  I had been watching the blurred whiteness that stood for my own face—the blank paper I had fastened to the dummy of myself. But the young woman who had come in from the plains that afternoon had seen my actual face, unless it had been obscured by the wisps of cloud in a reflected sky.

  *

  I returned to the library and dismantled the crude likeness of myself. The sheets of paper that had passed for my face were wrinkled and creased, but I carried them to the great central table where I had worked since midsummer. I sat down and tried to smooth the paper a little with my hands. And I stared for a long time at the pages, as though they were anything but blank. I even wrote on them—a few hesitant sentences—before I swept them to the floor and went on with my work.

  {two}

  PRELIMINARY NOTE: After more than ten years on the plains I must still ask myself whether I can exclude from my life’s work every appearance of the country whose most common name in this district is the Other Australia. My difficulty is not that the place is unknown or unfamiliar to the people around me. If that were so, I might practise a variety of deceits on a young woman who has lived all her life on the plains. I might present myself as a man distinguished by the strangeness of all he had seen in his time. (And yet surely this would be impossible. Have I forgotten one of the commonest qualities of plainsmen—their stubborn refusal to allow that the unfamiliar has any claim on their imagination simply because it is unfamiliar? How many afternoons have I spent in this very library, unrolling the great maps of the regions of plains so far discovered and admiring the work of the most respected of the schools of mapmakers—those who locate their improbable tribes and preposterous beasts in the regions assumed to be best known, and who fill the places left blank by other schools with features meant to seem distressingly familiar?)

  My difficulty is not that I must persuade an audience of plainsfolk that a man such as myself might once have entertained or studied in all seriousness or even tried to sustain himself with the false notions, the absurd distortions, that I once took for descriptions of plains. Again, this library includes the usual obscure alcove devoted to the works of those little-read scholars who have seldom been adequately rewarded for their pains—the men who forwent the satisfaction of studying the genuine disciplines or the countless unsolved questions arising out of the plains and instead took as their province the illusory or spurious plains depicted and even esteemed by people who never had sight of anything approaching a plain.

  I might consider it a difficulty that a few of the scenes from The Interior could be understood as a sequence of events in the life of a man who can still recall places far from the plains. But surely not even the least perceptive plainsman could take my patterns of images for an account of any kind of progress. I have to remind myself that I am far from the country whose people suppose that the story of a human heart can be no different from the story of the body that it informs. In this library I have come across whole rooms of works speculating freely on the nature of the plainsman. Many of the authors inhabit systems of thought that are bizarre, bewilderingly unfamiliar, perhaps even wilfully removed from common comprehension. But no writer I have yet found has tried to describe a plainsman as bound by the vicissitudes of his flesh—and certainly not those misfortunes that afflict each body in the years before the heart can properly sustain it.

  Of course, the literature of the plains abounds in accounts of childhood. Whole volumes have expounded in profuse detail the topography of countries or continents as they were descried under faltering sunlight in the only hour when they were said to exist—some fortunate interval between almost identical days before they were engulfed by events too trivial even to be remembered. And one of the disciplines that most nearly resembles what is called philosophy in far parts of Australia is known to have originated in the comparative study of scenes recalled by one observer alone and accounts of those same scenes by the same observer after he had acquired the skill to attempt a fitting description of them.

  The same discipline, in recent years, has shifted its emphasis. It was perhaps inevitable that commentators should feel a certain frustration with a subject whose data remained forever the property of a solitary observer. And the new branch of the subject undoubtedly produced a more satisfying body of speculation. It is not surprising that almost every cultivated plainsman reserves a shelf of his library for some of the many studies in this now-fashionable discipline. There is even a satisfaction in seeing so many of those volumes in a uniform edition with their striking black and lilac jackets. Where else but on the plains could a new publishing house establish in a few years a substantial prosperity and a widespread reputation by issuing almost exclusively long treatises investigating the choice of images used by the authors of those provoking essays known as remembrances of the misremembered?

  I too have admired the tortuous arguments and detailed elaborations, the pointing-up of tenuous links and faint reverberations, and the final triumphant demonstrations that something of a motif has persisted through an immense body of digressive and even imprecise prose. And like the thousands of readers of those works, I have wondered at the speculations that lie at the heart of the subject they expound—the conclusions vehemently defended by men who admit them to be indefensible. Like most plainsmen I have no urge to adopt any of them. To claim that these delicately poised suppositions are somehow proven or compelling would seem to debase them. And anyone who did so would appear as some acquisitive hoarder of certainties or, worse still, as a fool trying to use words for the least appropriate of purposes—to justify an effect wrought by words.

  One of the chief attractions of these remarkable conjectures is that no one is able to use them to alter his understanding of his own life. And it is this which adds immensely to the pleasure of plainsmen as they apply one after another of the newest theories to their own circumstances. What might not follow, they ask themselves, if there should be nothing more substantial in all our experience than those discoveries that seem too slight to signify anything apart from their own brief occurrence? How might a man reorder his conduct if he could be assured that the worth of a perception, a memory, a supposition, was enhanced rather than diminished by its being inexplicable to others? And what could a man not accomplish, freed from any obligation to search for so-called truths apart from those demonstrated by his search for a truth peculiar to him?

  These are only a few of the implications of the science that seems, by a happy chance, the most practised and discussed on the plains at the very time when I am preparing a work of art to show what I and no other could have seen. I must remember, though, that more than a few landowners (and who knows how many among the shop assistants and primary school teachers and racehorse trainers whose reading and writing are done in private?) have already abandoned the new discipline. They are far from decrying it. On the contrary, they insist that they have been more thoroughly converted to it than those who argue its finer points in the correspondence columns of the weekly magazines and take pride in being photographed with the author of some lilac-and-black volume at a quailshooting weekend o
r a woolshed ball. But these reluctant students believe that the subject, by its very nature, cannot be pursued so long as there are opportunities for people to compare their assessments of it or to reach even tentative agreement as to its claims.

  These people are prepared to wait for some year or other in the far future. In that year, so they say, when the climate of ideas on the plains is half-way through one of its gradual but inevitable cycles, even though plainsmen might still prefer those prose-poems or sonatas or masques for marionettes or bas-reliefs that seem to emerge from the abyss between a man and his past, the great questions of the present day will seem distant and strange to anyone who still haunts the ruins of our present sciences.

  None of the scholars I mention can even guess how many successive encroachments of afternoon sunlight on the shadowy corners of libraries will have bleached the glossy inks on the books that they open at last. These men talk instead of the peculiar pleasure of knowing, when they finally chance on some unforeseen correspondence between metaphors in the confessions of a forgotten writer, that their prized discovery is of no value to others. They may count as one of their choicest tokens of that private vision sought by all plainsmen something that was discarded or even discredited years earlier. And the most rewarding of all projects, they say, is to restore to its earlier lustre some relic from the history of ideas. No matter what uses you find for it, or what coruscations you bring to light in its long-obscured surface, you may always enjoy a pleasant mistrust of your estimation of it. The insights you would like to cherish for their completeness may one day be newly enlarged by the merest footnote found in some outdated text. And even though you delight in your possession of neglected notions and discarded ideas, you must acknowledge that someone before your time has considered them in a different light.

  And I remind myself again—in all the arts and sciences that spring from the plainsman’s awareness of loss and change no thinker has seriously entertained the possibility that the state of a man at some moment in his life may be illuminated by a study of the same man at some moment said, for convenience, to have preceded the moment in question. For all their preoccupation with childhood and youth, plainsmen have never considered, except as illustrations of self-evident falsehoods, the theory that the flaws in a man result from some primal mishap, or its corollaries, that a man’s life is a decline from a state of original satisfaction and that our joys and pleasures are only a compromise between our wants and our circumstances.

  Not only my years of reading but my long conversations with plainsmen—even the head of this house, my unpredictable patron, who only visits the library nowadays to search for colour plates in histories of certain ceramic styles—assure me that people here conceive of a lifetime as one more sort of plain. They have no use for banal talk of journeys through the years or the like. (I am surprised almost daily to learn how few plainsmen have actually travelled. Even in their Golden Age, the Century of Exploration, for every pioneer who found a way to some new region there were scores of men who earned equal fame by describing their own narrow districts as though they lay still beyond the farthest of the newly discovered lands.) But in their speech and song they allude constantly to a Time that converges on them or recedes from them like some familiar but formidable plain.

  When a man considers his youth, his language seems to refer more often to a place than to its absence, and to a place unobscured by any notion of Time as a veil or barrier. The place is inhabited by people privileged to search for its particularity (that quality which obsesses plainsmen as the idea of God or of infinity has obsessed other peoples) as readily as the man of the present might try to divine the special identity of his own place. Much is made, of course, of the failure of each—the man and the young man—to comprehend his unique situation. The two are often compared with dwellers in neighbouring regions who try to map all the plains they might find necessary or all they would be content to know, and who agree that each may include parts of the other’s borders in his own map, but who find at last that their two charts cannot be brought together neatly—that each has argued for the existence of an ill-defined zone between the last places that he could wish for and the first of those that he has no claim to. (Luckily my present task excuses me from concerning myself with that sizable school of thinkers who insist that all learning—and even, some have said, all art— should be derived from those shadowy areas that no one properly occupies. I must one day satisfy my curiosity, though, about their theory of the Interstitial Plain: the subject of an eccentric branch of geography; a plain that by definition can never be visited but adjoins and offers access to every possible plain.)

  So, when my patron broods over the uneven translucence and the manifold intensities of green and gold in the glaze of tiles that resemble only slightly a kind that he saw and handled years ago, he is not in any crude sense trying to ‘recapture’ some experience from the past. If he thought in that fashion he might stroll to some of the porticos and courtyards in the southeast wing where the very tints that he strives to visualise, reflecting the afternoon sunlight or the reflected remnants of that light, allow even me to admire a conjectural greenness that may never appear again among those scrupulously preserved pillars and pavements and pools. And his hours of silent study are no proof that he repudiates the appearances and sensations arising from any plain of the moment. If I know him, he thinks quite dispassionately of some other afternoon in courtyards where even the great silences of the plains are walled out for the sake of a more provoking silence still and where the perhaps inimitable lustre of glazed clays enhances a green and a gold more remote from common preferences than even the rarely seen hues of the empty grasslands on their farther side. He wants of all that is irretrievable only that it should seem to be bounded on all sides by familiar terrain. He wants the schematic arrangement of his own affairs to equal that pattern so favoured by plainsmen—a zone of mystery enclosed by the known and the all-too-accessible. And being the man he is, he almost certainly intends these quiet afternoons to demonstrate a further refinement of the famous pattern. The man calmly studying the tints and textures of his simply decorated tiles allows that the full meaning of what lies seemingly within reach of his hands or within range of his eyes rests with another man who runs his fingers over the surfaces of tiled walls warm from the afternoon sun and whose sensations include an awareness of still another man who comes near to interpreting a conjunction of fading sunlight and glowing colours but suspects that the truth of such a moment must lie with a man beyond him who sees and feels and wonders further.

  I sometimes doubt whether my patron conceives of Time in the orthodox fashion of the school of opinion he claims to adhere to. In his occasional discussions with me he defends ‘Time, the Opposite Plain’ against the other four theories currently propounded. But I notice in some of his arguments an excess of neatness. I know enough of the habits of thought of plainsmen to expect them usually to prefer those theories that fall short of a complete explanation for the problem at hand. My patron’s show of delight in the symmetry and completeness of what he perceives as Time may indicate that he is privately investigating one of the other popular theories or, more likely, that he has been compelled to become one of those doctrinal solitaries aware of a Time whose true configurations only they perceive. Until recently they were regarded as highly as the followers of the five schools. But since some of the more zealous have made their private labyrinths of Time the settings for their poetry and prose and for those newer works (some hopelessly fragmented, others almost unbearably repetitive) that still await acceptable names, critics—and even the usually tolerant reading public—have become impatient.

  This may not be because ordinary plainsmen find such practices confusing or destructive of the scope and variety of their own favoured methods for elaborating on the theme of Time. Still, the subject seems one of the few in which plainsmen prefer not to trust to the insights of the solitary seer. Perhaps, as some commentators have asserted only recent
ly, the five major theories are still so incomplete, so fraught with areas of vagueness, that even the most original thinker ought to locate his paradoxical landscapes and ambiguous cosmologies within their ample voids. Or perhaps those who most protest—although they include almost equal numbers of followers of the five schools—are secret believers in another theory that has never yet been clearly expressed. This is the self-defeating proposition that Time can have no agreed meaning for any two people; that nothing can be predicated of it; that all our statements about it are designed to fill up an awesome nullity in our plains and an absence from our memories of the one dimension that would allow us to travel beyond them. In that case, the opponents of the wayward investigators are only guarding against the likelihood that one of those heretics might find the means of suggesting this proposition to others. (It would almost certainly be achieved through poetry or some abstruse fictional narrative. Plainsmen are seldom won over by logic. They are too easily distracted by the neatness of its workings, which they use for devising ingenious parlour games.) And the fear of these opponents would be that the new view of Time might do away with those elaborate conceits employed by plainsmen in their countless investigations of the mutability of all things. They might find themselves all dwellers on plains of such permanence that only those men survived who could deceive themselves with hours of their own making or feign a belief in years that no one else guessed at.