The Plains

by Gerald Murnane

  Now, no longer obliged to explain myself to my patron’s wife, I have to overcome the doubts that sometimes occur to me at the monthly dusks, as they are called. I do not believe that anyone at those brief, amicable gatherings intends to unsettle me. We sit, so often in silence, in the main drawing room—the only such room with no view of the plains but instead a prospect of tall hedges and dense, clipped trees meant to encourage freer, more speculative thought by its suggestion that the unimaginable has happened after all and we are separated from our plains by uncongenial forests of uncertain extent or by the distractions of contrived landscapes. And as soon as my patron has determined that the room is quite in darkness (having failed to identify the small framed landscape placed by a servant, according to custom, in the hands of the nearest guest) we leave—entirely without ceremony, but thinking, as the spirit of the occasion requires, of what we might have learned if someone had declared himself during that hour of fading twilight.

  How could I be disturbed by the few words that are spoken at those dusks? Each man present is careful to say only what is most predictable—to make the briefest and most banal of comments—and to maintain the impression that he has accepted his formal invitation and travelled for perhaps half a day to say and to hear nothing of consequence. My doubts arise instead during the long silences when I compare myself, still intent on composing a work of art that will startle, with the more celebrated of the guests.

  My patron invites to his dusks some of the famous recluses of the plains. What can I say of them, when their aim is to say and do nothing that can be described as an achievement? Even the term ‘recluse’ is hardly apt, since most of them will accept an invitation or receive a guest rather than attract notice by untoward aloofness. They affect no shabbiness in their dress and no uncouthness in their manners. Of those I have met, the only one known for eccentric behaviour is the man who travels every year at the beginning of spring with a servant on a weeks-long journey across the plains and back again, never parting the dark curtains around him in the rear compartment of his car and never leaving his hotel room in any town where he breaks his journey.

  Since none of these men has ever spoken or written a word to explain his preferring to live unobserved and untroubled by ambition in some modestly furnished rear suite of his unremarkable house, I can only say that I sense about each of them a quiet dedication to proving that the plains are not what many plainsmen take them for. They are not, that is, a vast theatre that adds significance to the events enacted within it. Nor are they an immense field for explorers of every kind. They are simply a convenient source of metaphors for those who know that men invent their own meanings.

  Sitting among those men at twilight, I understand their silence to assert that the world is something other than a landscape. I wonder whether anything I have seen is a fit subject for art. And the truly perceptive seem to me those who turn their faces away from the plains. Yet the next morning’s sunrise dispels these doubts, and at the moment when I can no longer look at the dazzling horizon I decide that the invisible is only what is too brightly lit.

  No, (to return to the subject of this note) there is little chance of plainsmen mistaking what I have to show them for some sort of history. Even if I presented them with what I considered a narrative of exploration—a story of how I first surmised the existence of the plains, how I made my way here, how I learned the ways of the region where I announced myself as the maker of a film, and how I travelled further still to this region that once seemed impossibly remote—even then my audience, accustomed to seeing the true connections between apparently consecutive happenings, would see my true meaning.

  No, absurd as it may seem, my chief difficulty— and what may well be the subject of further notes before my work itself begins—is that the young woman whose image should have meant more than a thousand miles of plains might never understand what I want from her.

  From just one of all the windows in all the rooms of this library, I sometimes see my patron’s eldest daughter on some pathway amongst the nearest of the conservatories. (I must examine before long the matter of her preference for the humid avenues of those glazed pavilions rather than the windy clearings in the park among trees native to every district of the plains.) She is little more than a child, which is why I take care not to be seen observing her, even from such a distance. (There is one glasshouse in which she stands for long intervals. If I could find some window in some part of the library still unknown to me, I could stare down on her for as long as I chose. Even if she turned away from looking at some flower unsuited to the plains and glanced upwards, she would surely see nothing of me among whatever reflections of exotic foliage and her own pale face hung in the air beyond the tinted glass of her own enclosure and short of the panes before my own shadowy station.) Even so, I have tried to persuade her father to offer to her tutors some of my studies of aspects of the plains. I hope to make her curious about the man she sees only from a distance on the few formal occasions when an eldest child is admitted to the drawing rooms, and about the means he is reputed to have devised for rendering the most obscure of plains. But my patron has allowed me only once to submit to her principal tutor some of my findings and a brief description of the project I am still preparing.

  In all the months since then, I have been shown in return only a short extract from a series of commentaries written by the girl on the work of a compiler of sketchbooks of regions of the plains. I could not miss the brief reference to myself (in her faultless handwriting) but it gave me no encouragement. If she had misunderstood only the more particular of my aims, I might have prepared for her a clearer exposition of them. But she seems blind even to the reason for my presence in her house. This is not the place to examine the fanciful image she entertains of me. I will note only that even the least of her expectations would barely be fulfilled if I disregarded the long story of my stay on the plains and presented myself simply as a curious traveller from outermost Australia.

  {three}

  I kept to the library, although it wasn’t always the secure refuge I needed. Admittedly my patron rarely bothered me in the evenings. I might have set the clusters of lamps blazing in all the chambers and passageways of the place and wandered all night undisturbed among rooms of books I hadn’t yet examined. But I preferred to work by daylight when the tall windows on one side, and the ranks of variegated volumes on the other, allowed me to think of myself as still poised between two enormities.

  The two that then confronted me seemed more forbidding than in earlier years. Through many of the windows I saw, when the blinds and drapes were not drawn, what I could only describe as hills—a range of slopes and folds with close-set tufts of treetops filling the deepest valleys between them. The people of the house had been puzzled by my interest in those hills. No one regarded them as any sort of landmark. Their whole expanse was named for the five creeks that rose among them, and when I had suggested that the landscape was unusual for the plains I was reminded that I was now in a district where people often lost sight of intervening features in their concern for the larger plains as they understood them. What I would have called a distinctive region inviting study was only a detail of the plains properly considered. And in the other direction, among the rooms of books, I found much to confuse me. I had thought I knew enough of the writing of the plains to follow in any library the subjects nearest to my own life’s work. But in those mazes of rooms and annexes, the categories I had at last become familiar with were apparently disregarded. The owner of the huge collections and his resident librarians and keepers of manuscripts seemed to have agreed on a system of classification that intermingled works never linked by any conventions of the plains as I knew them. Sometimes of an afternoon, aware on the one hand of the disconcerting ridges between my windows and a reputed horizon and, on the other, of the continual blurring of distinctions among the unpredictable sequences of titles, I wondered whether all my investigations so far had been mere glances at the deceptive
surfaces of plains.

  Sometimes this doubt bothered me for so long that I began to hope my patron would invite me soon to another of his ‘scenes’, although these had seemed tiresome distractions in my early years on that estate.

  There were weeks when I spoke to no one in the great house. I sat and read and tried to write and waited for a clear sign of what I could only call the invisible event that was bound to involve me. Then, on the last morning of a spell of fine weather, when the sky was edged with the haze of a storm that would be all day in coming, and I might have looked forward to an afternoon when my revelation would hang poised about me like the promise of change in the oppressive air, then the message would come that I was required at a scene.

  The word had once seemed to me the least felicitous of the many usages peculiar to the family and the retinue of my patron of those days. I took it at first to be no more than a capricious substitute for the several common terms describing the elaborate day-long expeditions of families to nameless sites in far corners of their lands. I had taken part in such outings with other great families and enjoyed especially their habit of retiring for most of the day inside their huge windowless tents, drinking quietly but relentlessly, hearing the sweep of grass against the outer sides of their translucent walls, and affecting not to know where among miles of such ruffled grasses they might have been. (For some of them it was no affectation. They had begun drinking at breakfast, while the cars and vans were being loaded and the women were far away behind closed door dressing in the formal style that was always observed on those days. And there were others who perhaps guessed which of a thousand similar places they had settled in, but fell into a drunken sleep, still sitting upright and correctly dressed, on the long journey home and remembered nothing next day.)

  But I had learned in time that my patron’s talk of scenes was more than an earnest attempt to establish the word as part of the dialect of his region. The man spent much of the afternoon assembling men and women from the throng of guests in poses and attitudes of his own choosing and then taking photographs. His camera was a simple outdated model picked in haste from a half-dozen that he carried always in the cavernous luggage compartment of his car. The film was from a stock of black-and-white rolls bought in a distant town from some shopkeeper used to accommodating the unprofitable whims of the great landowners. The prints that resulted from these tedious tableaux were afterwards described without enthusiasm by the few people who troubled to inspect them.

  The man who strode among the reluctant subjects of these photographs, pausing to gulp from the glass still in his hand or to consult the sheaf of scribbled notes poking from his jacket, had confided to me that he cared nothing for the so-called art of photography. He was prepared to argue, against those who made pretentious claims for the output from cameras, that the apparent similarities in structure between their ingenious toys and the human eye had led them into an absurd error. They supposed that their tinted papers showed something of what a man saw apart from himself—something they called the visible world. But they had never considered where that world must lie. They fondled their scraps of paper and admired the stains and blotches seemingly fixed there. But did they know that all the while the great tide of daylight was ebbing away from all they looked at and pouring through the holes in their faces into a profound darkness? If the visible world was anywhere, it was somewhere in that darkness—an island lapped by the boundless ocean of the invisible.

  The man had told me this in a sober moment. But at his scenes, drinking himself steadily towards unconsciousness and snaring great cones of light from the plains in his shabby cameras, he seemed to mock himself. I had noticed from the first that scenes were never arranged on days of unfailing brightness. Always, when the numerous parties assembled on the leafy verandahs and broad driveways, the sky further inland was uncommonly hazy. The sunlight might persist until late afternoon, but the turbulent clouds filled more and more of the sky. The man who had chosen that day for his scene went on urging his family and guests to enjoy themselves in the still-languid air. But then he would take me aside as though only I could understand his secret purpose.

  ‘The encroaching darkness,’ he might say, gesturing towards the half of the sky that was already occupied by cloud. ‘Even a place as huge and bright as the plains can be blotted out from any direction. I stare at this land now, and every glowing acre of it sinks into my same old private darkness. But others may be looking at the plains too. That weather—it’s only a sign of all the invisible territory around us all at this very moment. Someone has been looking at us and our precious land. We’re disappearing through the dark hole of an eye that we’re not even aware of. But more than one can play at that game. I’ve still got my toy—my camera that renders things invisible.’ And he might point the box awkwardly at me and ask did I fancy an expedition into the unseen world.

  In the early evening, while the storm was overhead and the people around the replenished tables stared silently out from their tents towards the nearest horizons (brought absurdly nearer by the screen of rain), my patron would discard his camera and recline in his chair with his back to the fading daylight. He knew that the storm, like all those that crossed the plains, would be brief, and that most of the clouds would have passed before night, leaving the sky clear and faintly lighted. But he would reach an arm towards me and speak as though the plains as he knew them were lost to sight forever.

  ‘This head,’ he had once murmured. ‘This subject of so many portraits—scrutinise it, but not for anything suggested by the oddities of its surface. No. Inspect it. Search it to disprove the worst theories of these false plainsmen around us. You have always credited them with too much subtlety. You suppose that because they have spent lives on the plains they are privy to signs you are still searching for. And yet the most perceptive of them—those you might almost have taken for visionaries—have never asked precisely where their plains are.

  ‘I grant you that to see even those plains we revelled in all afternoon—even that is some kind of distinction. But don’t be deceived. Nothing that we saw today exists apart from the darkness.

  ‘Look. My eyes are closed. I am about to sleep. When you see me insensible, trepan me. Carve my skull neatly open. No blade can trouble me after all this alcohol. Peer into the pale brain you find pulsating there. Prise apart its dull-coloured lobes. Examine them with powerful lenses. You’ll see nothing to suggest plains. They disappeared long ago—the lands I claimed to see.

  ‘The Great Darkness. Isn’t that where all our plains lie? But they’re safe, quite safe. And on their far side—too far away for you and me to visit—over there the weather is changing. The skies above us all are growing lighter. Another plain altogether is drifting towards our own. We’re travelling somewhere in a world the shape of an eye. And we still haven’t seen what other countries that eye looks out on.’

  The man always ended his speeches abruptly. I would sit with him, drinking, and listening for more. But my patron would keep his eyes closed and only ask to be kept upright after he lost consciousness.

  Earlier in the day, the man used his camera as though he looked for no more than the imprint on film of a certain darkening afternoon. But I, and perhaps a few of the others, knew that our host never intended his photographs to register what anyone present might have wanted to recall of their scene.

  The party always settled by the sheltered bank of a stream. During the afternoon they stationed themselves in separate groups at places overlooking the water. Even the couples who strolled some distance from the main gathering were never out of sight of the clustered trees and the greener grass beside the stream. Yet no one was ever posed against any view of pools or stony shallows. Looking at the photographs weeks later, I found no recognisable landmarks in their backgrounds. A stranger might have supposed they showed any of a dozen places miles apart.

  And the people depicted were seldom as they would have remembered themselves on a given afternoon. A man who for m
uch of the day had engaged with a young woman in some of the protracted rituals that comprised a courtship on the plains—such a man might see afterwards an image of himself conspicuously alone, with his gaze drawn towards a distant group of women and even the one he had never approached.

  There was no gross falsification of the events of a day. But all the collections of prints seemed meant to confuse, if not the few people who asked to ‘look at themselves’ afterwards, then perhaps the people who might come across the photographs years later, in their search for the earliest evidence that certain lives would proceed as they had in fact proceeded.

  If any such people turned the pages of the unadorned albums where the prints had been hastily mounted, they might see eyes averted from what should have attracted them, even so long ago; a certain man anxious not to be considered one of the only group that would ever include him; another man huddled with those he would claim long afterwards never to have approached. As for the settings of those unlikely events—so few would seem part of any landscape preferred in earlier years that students of such matters might at least respect the strangeness of what was perceived in the past if they did not conclude that certain favoured sites on the plains had long since disappeared.

  I often wondered myself what might be supposed years later of the scant signs of my own presence at those scenes. There were afternoons when I watched little else but the passage of changing moods across the face of my patron’s eldest grand-daughter while she listened politely to the chatter of her friends and yet watched little else but the passage of breezes and shadows of clouds across the middle distance of the plain. But her grandfather always motioned me towards some group of women known as the subjects of famous portraits or as models for certain characters in fiction but apparently unaware, for the moment, of any change worth observing in the plains about them. I looked wherever my patron pointed, or I contrived with the women to seem wholly occupied with some wordless conversation or some unspoken secret and so became one of those little groups whose appearance might trouble anyone speculating in later years about such conversations and such secrets.