The Plains

by Gerald Murnane

  Some years ago I was tempted to visit that corner of the library where the great works on Time spilled out from the ranks of shelves once thought ample to accommodate them in what was then the foreseeable future. I noticed that the same corner attracted the wife of my patron on her daily visits to the library. She was a woman no older than myself and still beautiful according to the conventions of the plains. She rarely examined a book from the towering stacks around her—only stared at an assortment of titles and handled an occasional coloured jacket. She paid much attention to the curtains along the western wall of the room. Sometimes she drew the massive honey-coloured hangings closer together so that the light surrounding her seemed suddenly richer but perhaps no less transitory. Or else she parted those same curtains, and the glare from the declining sun and the inevitable bare grasslands effaced the complex radiance from the hundreds of works devoted to Time.

  I knew almost nothing about her. In all my private interviews with her husband (once a month in the suite of rooms that he calls his studio) he had never mentioned the wife who has spent so many afternoons in this house that she might have seen by now the refracted sunlight from three thousand separate plains through each of its countless windows.

  I knew that my patron followed the custom, common to all eminent plainsmen, of paying an oblique tribute to a nameless wife in every work of the art that he privately practised. In my patron’s case, however, the references may have been more than usually obscure. If he had spent his silent days at the verses of a ballad, I might have been a little nearer to knowing something of the woman’s story. For each ballad of the plains returns and returns from its interminable paraphrasings and irrelevancies to a few unmistakable motifs. Or if he had frequented those neglected rooms where the immense looms stand as his grandfather left them, I might have seen how his wife should have appeared in a setting he envisaged for the two of them. For the weavers of the plains make only a pretence of hiding their female subjects among scenes they can never have witnessed. But the only man who might have interpreted this woman’s reveries, as she stood between the uniform glow from the plains and the many-coloured sheen on the commentaries on Time, produced nothing more eloquent than murals of green glaze and figurines posed ambiguously. I knew from chance remarks of his late at night what an expanse of meaning he hoped to suggest with those reticent and cryptic works. And I knew that plainsmen commonly consider all art to be the scant visible evidence of immense processes in a landscape that even the artist scarcely perceives, so that they confront the most obdurate or the most ingenuous work utterly receptive and willing to be led into bewildering vistas of vistas. Yet I stood in quiet courtyards between far wings of this house, with no view of plains to distract me, and watched how each thickness of variable cloud at my back effected, in the greenish wall before me, now an illusion of boundless depths and now the absence of anything approaching an horizon. And I traced all the while whatever had the appearance of a theme in that uncertain region: following as far as its seeming source some flaw or fingermark that could have suggested this or that human propensity wavering but persisting in a landscape which itself came and went; discerning a play of powerful opposites in the alternate predominance of differing textures; or deciding that whatever seemed to point to some unique perception of a private terrain might suggest in another light that the artist had failed to see the scattered vestiges of what passed for another country with another observer.

  And so I could do no more than speculate about the years when the man and his wife went on standing at their separate stations (she near the western windows of the library between a wall patterned intricately with colours of books she rarely opened and a plain that turned ponderously yet again away from the sun with its import still far from obvious, and he in a walled courtyard with his back all day to the few windows where cobwebs dangled before aspects of plains and his face close to the coloured clays where he claimed to see what only his years had disclosed) and each behaved as though there was yet time to hear from the other a form of words acknowledging some of those possibilities that had never been realised for as long as each had despaired of arranging such things in a form of words. There were days, though, when the woman walked even further off among the rooms given over to Time and sat reading in one of the smaller bays facing south among the works of lesser philosophers. (Even at this distance from the Other Australia, I sometimes recall what was described as philosophy there. And almost daily, as I pace some unfamiliar path from my table here, I am pleasantly surprised to see, in the rooms and bays reserved for philosophy, works that would have been given any name but that in my native district.) The books she read most often would perhaps be called novels in another Australia, although I cannot believe they would find publishers or readers in such a place. But on the plains they make up a well-respected branch of moral philosophy. The authors concern themselves with what they call, for convenience, the soul of the plainsman. They say nothing of the nature of any entity corresponding to this term, leaving the matter to the acknowledged experts—the commentators on the most arcane of poetry. But they describe minutely some of its undoubted effects. These scholars isolate from their own experience (and from each other’s—for they remain a closely knit, almost exclusive, group, marrying the sisters and daughters of colleagues and rivals, and inducting their own children into their demanding profession) certain states of regretfulness, unfulfilment or deprivation. They then examine these states for evidence of some earlier state which seemed to promise what was never subsequently realised. In almost every case the vindicators of the evanescent, as they are sometimes called, establish that the earlier experience did not in fact portend any increase in satisfaction or any state of contentment in an unspecified future. The writers do not go on to argue that the later experiences are of no value or that a plainsman ought to avoid all expectation of future consolation, and certainly not that no lasting pleasures are available. Instead they draw attention to a recurrent pattern in human affairs—the fleeting perception of a promise of boundless good followed by the arrival of that good in the affairs of someone who neither foresaw it nor recognises it as a good. They claim that the proper response to this is to yield to the intensity of all seeming disappointments, not with a sense of having been deprived of some rightful happiness but because the continued absence of a conjectured enjoyment defines it more clearly.

  I surmised, then, that the woman who sat each afternoon wondering what had become of a husband and wife she had once caught sight of on a singular plain persuaded herself that she had erred in supposing she might one day approach them or their peculiar landscape. Whenever she made her way, through empty corridors and past silent rooms where she had once expected to utter or to hear the phrases that would link the plains all around her with a plain she had only divined, to the windowless corner and the astringent consolation of the so-called philosophers of the lost, I assumed that she had already been won over by their doctrines. In that case, she dwelt, while I watched her furtively, not on the uncertain distance between her present circumstances and whatever mansion and farflung estates a certain other woman had come to occupy, but on ample unspecified plains she might still not have entered. For the thinkers of that school disregard the question whether a possibility, once entertained, may seem one day to correspond to some meagre arrangement of events. They give all their attention to the possibility itself and esteem it according to its amplitude and to the length of time for which it survives just beyond reach of the haphazard disposition of sights and sounds which is called, in careless speech, actuality, and has been considered, perhaps even by a few plainsmen, to represent the extinction of all possibilities.

  The woman might therefore have considered the chief advantage of so many years spent among unlooked-for plains, with a man who had still not explained himself, to be that it had once allowed her to postulate the existence of a woman whose future included even the unlikely prospect of half a lifetime spent among unlooked-for plains with a man
who would never explain himself.

  But the philosophy of the plains includes so much of what I once thought the subject-matter of fiction that my patron’s wife might have read long before certain treatises that I had glanced at in the years when I allowed myself to follow ramified ways leading from footnote to footnote in bulky but marginal studies of Time, the Plain Beyond Reach. (These are diffuse accounts of events that could have occupied only moments in the lives of those concerned but are described as the chief happenings in their histories.) She would surely have read, I thought, at least one of those accounts of a man and a woman who met only once and accepted that so much was promised to them by the decorous looks and words they exchanged that they should not meet again. And, as she followed the accounts of the later lives of those couples, she must have understood how her own years in this house were little part of her own story. The afternoons of unbroken silence, the briefly lambent twilights, and even the mornings that seemed about to restore to the plains something that she had not quite despaired of—these were the merest hints of a life that might have been: of the countless landscapes brought into being years before by a wordless exchange between herself and a young man who might have led her anywhere but to these plains where he had promised to lead her. Such a sympathy seemed to grow between us (although we never spoke, and even when one of us looked across the library the other’s eyes were always turned to some page of a text or some page awaiting its text) that I hoped she might even believe her years in this district had a worth such as her favourite authors awarded to all lives that seemed to arrive at nothing. For some of those writers she seemed to prefer look on much of what is called history as a hollow show of gestures and illconsidered utterances maintained partly to fulfil the petty expectations of those preoccupied with what can be safely predicted, but chiefly to provide scope for the perceptive to foresee what they know can never come about. A few of those same philosophers would even argue that the woman’s years of disquiet were, of all conceivable eventualities, the only sequel appropriate to the moment when a young woman saw as he might never appear again a man who saw her as she might never appear again. For them (their works are obscurely placed on a remote shelf, but it was at least possible that she had come across them once in all the years she had spent in this library) a lifetime is no more and no less than an opportunity for proving such a moment utterly unconnected with all those that follow it and is the more to be valued for every uneventful year which emphasises that proof.

  We met, of course, and exchanged polite words in other rooms at other hours. But seeing her in distant corners of the library I felt myself barred from approaching. For a long time I was constrained by the slightness of my own ideas as they would have seemed if I had uttered them in those surroundings. I believed I had no right to speak unless it was to address myself to some proposition contained in one of the volumes around me. The silence that persisted in those rooms I heard as the pause that a speaker allows when his argument has unrolled to its end and he waits defiantly for the first of his questioners, except that the tension in this case was compounded by the hugeness of the throng of speakers and by the scores of years in which the silence had still not been broken.

  But as months passed and she came almost every afternoon to sit between me and the shelves labelled TIME, I was more and more compelled to declare something to her. I sensed between us the mass of all the words we might have spoken as a stack of unopened volumes as daunting as any of the actual shelves that stood above each of us. It was probably this that suggested to me the scheme I decided on. As soon as I had finished my preliminary notes for The Interior, and before I began work on the filmscript itself, I would write a short work—probably a collection of essays— which would settle things between the woman and myself. I would have it published privately under one of the seldom-used imprints that my patron reserves for his clients’ work in progress or marginalia. And I would so arrange the ostensible subject-matter of the work that the librarians here would insert a copy among the shelves where she spends her afternoons.

  I foresaw this much of my scheme happening as I had planned it. The only uncertain item was the last— I had no way of ensuring that the woman would open my book during her lifetime. I might have observed her every afternoon during the five or ten years that I planned to spend in this house and never have seen her come remotely near the words that could have explained my silence.

  But I was not bothered for long by the likelihood of her never reading my words. If everything that passed between us existed only as a set of possibilities, my aim should have been to broaden the scope of her speculations about me. She ought to acquire not specific information but facts barely sufficient to distinguish me. In short, she should not read a word of mine, although she should know that I had written something she might have read.

  I intended for a short time, therefore, to write the book and to have it published but to release only a handful of copies to reviewers (and only after receiving a written undertaking from each that the book should not be circulated) and one copy to this library. On the day when that copy was first shelved I would remove it quietly into my own safekeeping after making certain that it had been fully described in the catalogue.

  Not even this scheme satisfied me for long. So long as a single copy of my book remained extant, our sympathy for one another was circumscribed. Worse still (since I wanted our relationship to be unrestricted by common notions of time and place), no one after our deaths could be sure that she had not found and opened the book during her lifetime. I thought of issuing only one copy—to the librarians here—and of then removing and destroying it as soon as the catalogue entry was completed. But someone in the future could still surmise that a copy existed (or had once existed) and that the woman it was meant for had at least glanced at it.

  I amended my scheme once again. Somewhere in the catalogue here is a list of notable books never acquired by this library but held in other private collections in great houses of the plains. I would keep to myself every copy of my book and insert in that list an entry stating that a copy was housed in a fictitious library in a non-existent district.

  By this time I had begun to ask myself why the woman herself might not have devised a book to explain her position to me. It was my own reluctance to search for this book that finally persuaded me to do what I did, which was to write no book and to put abroad no suggestion that I had ever written a book or intended to write a book.

  Having reached this decision I hoped that both the woman and I would be able to leave one another undisturbed in our separate zones of the library, sure of the possibility that we might have met as young man and woman and married and learned of each other what two such people would have learned in half a lifetime. But I soon discovered a source of discontent in this (as, perhaps, in all possibilities). When I entertained even the vaguest thoughts of the two of us as man and wife I had to allow that even such people could not have existed without a possible world to counterbalance what was for them the actual. And in that possible world were a couple who sat silently in separate bays of a library. We knew almost nothing of one another and we could not conceive of things happening otherwise without violating the poise of the worlds that surrounded us. To think of ourselves in any other circumstances would betray the people who might have been ourselves.

  I arrived at this understanding some time ago. Since then I have tried to avoid those rooms that grow steadily more crowded with works to explain away Time. Sometimes, however, on my way past that region of the library, some rearrangement of the newest stacks leads me through circuitous ways past a room where I formerly watched the woman. She sits further off than I seem to remember her, and already the changed scheme of shelves and partitions has separated her from me by the first of what will become, inevitably, a maze of pathways among walls of books as this wing of the library becomes the visible embodiment of one or another of those patterns attributed to Time in the volumes standing quietly at the heart of
it.

  I may take pleasure occasionally in the sight of her so close to the crowded shelves that the pallor of her face is momentarily tinted by a faint multiple glow from the more hectic of the jacketed volumes around her. But I prefer myself not to be seen in the places given over to Time, no matter how nearly I might seem to approach the plainsman’s view of all that might have happened to me. I have a fear, perhaps unreasonable, of finding myself beguiled by images of what almost came to pass. Unlike a true plainsman, I do not care to inspect too closely those other lives lived by men who might almost have been myself. (It was surely this fear that first brought me to the plains: to the one place where I need not concern myself with such possibilities.) The countless volumes of this library are close-set with so much speculative prose; so many chapters after chapters appear in parentheses; such glosses and footnotes surround the trickles of actual text that I fear to discover in some unexceptional essay by a plainsman of no great reputation a tentative paragraph describing a man not unlike myself speculating endlessly about the plains but never setting foot on them.

  So I keep away nowadays from the volumes in which Time itself is made to appear as one more sort of plain. I have no wish to be seen, even by that silent woman among those lengthening vistas of provocative titles, as a man in sight of Time, the Invisible Plain, or approaching Time, the Plain Beyond Reach, or finding his way back from Time, the Pathless Plain, or even surrounded by Time, the Boundless Plain. When I explain myself at last to plainsfolk I must appear as a man secure in his own view of Time. The light around me will be dim. Perhaps the place will be some chamber from among the many I have yet to visit in this very library. For all my audience knows of the plains outside, long afternoons may have come and gone. All that concerns them are images from the film that tells of a man seeing the plains from an unheard-of vantage point. And even if they glance from those images to the man who composed them, they will see only my face faintly lit by the wavering colours of scenes from a Time vaguely familiar to all of them.