This pitiful sound, which sometimes, goodness knows how, reaches into the remotest prison cell, is a concentrated expression of the last vestige of human dignity. It is a man’s way of leaving a trace, of telling people how he lived and died. By his screams he asserts his right to live, sends a message to the outside world demanding help and calling for resistance. If nothing else is left, one must scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.
Nadezhda Mandelstam: Hope Against Hope
Terrence Des Pres refutes the ‘survivors’ guilt’ theory of the psychology of the camps. Not guilt, he says, but conscience: the duty, the task of bearing witness, screaming for those who were silenced. We, ‘living safe and at ease’, are the ones who need to deny and so we transfer our sense of guilt to the survivors…‘The psychoanalytic approach is misleading because it is essentially a theory of culture and of man in the civilised state…To be of use, the psychoanalytic method, which is that of interpretation, must be applied to actions which have more than one meaning on the level of meaning. But that is not the case with extremity.’ (His italics.)
(Further on he writes: ‘Historically, psychoanalysis originated just as the symboliste movement was occurring in the arts, and it is tempting to see in both a common pursuit…’)
He quotes compelling witnesses – Solzhenitsyn, Primo Levi, Anna Akhmatova, Elie Wiesel…In the preface is his conclusion: ‘Their testimony reveals a world ruled by death, but also a world of actual living conditions, of ways of life which are the basis and achievement of life in extremity. It turns out that survival is an experience with a definite structure, neither random nor regressive nor amoral.’
He quotes Octavio Paz: ‘Facing death the spirit is life, and facing the latter, death.’ And he concludes:
A biological wisdom exists, prompting us to know that in life’s own needs the spirit can find a home…And also this; that in birth and growth and fruitfulness there is meaning enough to quiet our hunger for high cause – concrete significance, perpetually renewed in the striving and sorrow and brief accomplishment which living demands from day to day. The sun is here, as survivors and condemned men know. Life, the earth in its silence, is all there is…
The realm of ideas and symbols will have to be lived closer to the bone, real unmetaphorical bone, bone frail as grass and easily crushed.
The last words are those a survivor said to new prisoners in Sachsenhausen: ‘I have not told you of our experiences to harrow you, but to strengthen you…Now you may decide if you are justified in despairing.’ And the epigraph is this, from Camus:
The writer’s role is not free of difficult duties. By definition he cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it.
My Tasmanian poems have arrived in Island Magazine: the one about the old graves near Margaret’s place, above the shallow beach of coloured pebbles (the marbles at Platamona!) that I waded over in a net of sun; and the one in my mothy room above the river, the Casino as a honeycomb candle. (I have a honeycomb candle – a thin sheet of comb tightly rolled around the wick.)
A MOTH
The table lamp is already on, a dome
of tight silk, a still sun
that has started to patter. Shadows
hurtle from one side to the other
and the pool of light wavering
underneath blurs – there must be a moth
in the shade – as if a swimmer’s feet
were stirring sand up.
Once I switch off the lamp
to keep it quiet and the pool disappears
– where did the moth go? – I see
in the window panes a water city come
to slow light. On the far bank those dun
brown hills, hot as coals all day, have gone
cool, have gone black as coals. A honeycomb
candle tower lights Sandy Bay.
With the overhead lamp on
the room floats, a box kite with a giant
inside, to wedge itself in hills.
And the moth has appeared, clamped
on the pane with her wings wide
now she has half Hobart to brood over –
everywhere her eggs have started to hatch
and scatter moth darkness, a moth wind.
HEADLAND, TASMANIA
Armchairs turned to the view –
the quiet bay, one long ripple
of black swans, one splash of the sun –
or tall bedsteads, old bones cased in them,
bracken for a rug, a leaf curtain:
these old grave stones rear up and tumble,
crack, lean, and hide and sink in
sword grass, bracken, bramble. Rough
sandstone blocks trip you up, hot broken
ship’s biscuits tossed from a noonday oven,
their graven surfaces almost eaten off,
crumbling away. One has a cherub embossed,
a doll’s head given wings. Another here,
more here. Sacred to the Memory of – Who
were they all? Children: so many of them.
Children: and they made old bones.
When the sun is low, shadows ink in
their names, so stay, if you like, read
the shadows. As if anyone knew or cared
now whose bones the trees took root in
that tilting, hang leaves and shade
over grey trunks, yellow stones
and bracken stiff green
and red, iron-red.
In After Babel, George Steiner: ‘Or in Sir Thomas Browne’s magnificent phrase, the speech of a community is for its members “a hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world”.’
An Hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson. Grave stones. (Earlier on Steiner refers to a lyric in which Celan speaks of ‘netting shadows written by stones’…écriture d’ombres.)
In midwinter grass,
sun-full, browse, you black and white
calves and ibises.
A walk on the surf beach after sunset with H before dinner and a bottle of red in a room of the glassy restaurant down the road. He disliked my ‘Red Fishes’ story in its first short form, and he still does now that I’ve added to it: ‘It’s the dialogue. It’s precious. Maybe there are people who speak to each other like that,’ he said, ‘but if so, I’m not interested in knowing about them…’ (Alas. No help for it.) He regretted having to tell me. We drank our wine then, and he read me a new passage of his novel, a dream sequence, symphonic, fiery, all surge and shimmer.
A rainbow rising from the sea to the west, cut off by a low cloud, is suffused with rose-gold through the whole spectrum.
I wave and from nowhere gulls come grabbing at my crusts and garfish heads. The snap of red scissors on my fingers. Wild wings.
The rainbow is vanishing. Pale green, the string of lights on the deck of a far freighter.
J came to Barwon Heads for the weekend, to the family bungalow that her father built himself. Again, dinner at the local restaurant, in the front room with the fire in one corner and a mirror wall facing south through the window wall into the whole bay and the sky: the planes of glass flatten the shapes that pass between them with such a weight of air and water that, standing there reflected, you look as little solid as a paper shape across the light.
She still has the same bad dreams about her father: a skeleton in a wheelchair he is wildly urging her to push him to safety. Sobbing, they trundle through the streets…The night I saw – viewed – my other father in his coffin, Chris and I took my mother (who had not wanted to come) back to the house and slept on the divan there, across from the room he had died in. Taki must have been with us – he was fourteen months old – but I have no memory of him there. What I remember is the savage, malevolent ghost of my father coming across the passage: how it kept waking me: how Chris woke and tried to soothe me. The cold stone of his forehead.
I bought her Sugar for her birthda
y, A.S. Byatt’s book of wonderful short stories, which by chance – never having read her work – I was given to review. The last story, ‘Sugar’, is a long, rich meditation, occasioned by the death of her father, on the fabric of facts and fictions that make up a human personality, fact no longer distinguishable from fiction, if it ever was. The narrator’s grandfather owned a boiled sweets factory: she remembers seeing as a child how the humbugs were made, the hot skeins of dark and light sugar spun and twisted together. There are vistas in this wonderful story, which must have inspired the choice of the cover painting, a deep, formal, expansive Dutch interior with, deep inside, a calm street. It might be too soon after her father’s death for J to bear to read this, but when she does…
At least one other story (again, one about death) is a masterpiece – ‘The Dried Witch’, where the accused woman at the end of her three-day ordeal by sun explodes in a fury of fire: the story itself is like an earthenware pot still baking from the kiln. ‘Long sores snapped open in her arms and legs, peeled back blackly and darkened. She saw dark, dark, and round it like beads in dark hair, blue flashes of the uniform but splintering sky…’
Many stories are of people caught in a web – of time, of circumstance – that they see too late. The reader sees it before them. One of these, ‘The July Ghost’, is a wrenching story where the ghost is a ‘gravely smiling’ boy of eleven, intent on trying, by way of the tenant who alone can see him, to get back to his mother. He keeps the tenant in thrall.
Open your hand
and see the darkness nursed there; see how
your shadow blossoms,
your body’s very own black flower.
It is a gift, a birth-right, your baby-shawl
now growing into a shroud…
Kevin Hart: ‘Your Shadow’
I wonder was the seed of the shadow poems in Your Shadow – the scattered four all called ‘Your Shadow’ and also the set of six called ‘Your Shadow’s Songs’ – was the seed of them found in The Waste Land? In ‘The Burial of the Dead’, in the passage addressed to the ‘Son of Man’?
Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land
Chris’s birthday, Saint Panteleimon’s day. On impulse I picked up J (her father was a headmaster in the Otways when she was little) and drove along the Great Ocean Road to the restaurant to surprise Chris. Stormy, the cliffs black, deep in wet shadow. When you stand on his verandah looking out over the surf of Bass Strait from that height above the green beacon a faint steady oceanic roar rises, free of the pulse and surge hiding it at sea level. Blue night to black night. The logs burned higher under the copper hood and in the panes. We all drank our wine, then his, and ate squid, as cosy in our box of light as fishes in a vase.
A long, long night-drive back east. Soaring on the last hill – there above the lake of lit houses, the dunes: one flash. Two. The lighthouse.
Reading Sylvia Plath’s Diary again, and Letters Home yet again. This time through Letters Home it’s the tangential things that have struck chords. On the Boxing Day before she died, she wrote to her mother, from Yeats’s house in London, that it was snowing and Frieda had said: ‘Like Tomten book’. Taki and I loved the Tomten book so much in Lorne. We had it out from the Mobile Library on almost permanent loan. The Tomten is a guardian dwarf for whom the farm families in Scandinavia – at least if they are wise – leave a nightly bowl of porridge out in the snow. He meets a marauding fox one night…I translated it into Greek for Taki as I went through turning the quiet pages, silently promising him a snowbound village of his own one day.
I have had this copied down for a long time. Years:
I need no sorrow to write; I have had, and, no doubt, will have enough. My poems and stories I want to be the strongest female paean yet for the creative forces of nature, the joy of being a loved and loving woman; that is my song.
Sylvia Plath: Letters Home
O nobly-born, when thy body and mind were separating, thou must have experienced a glimpse of the Pure Truth, subtle, sparkling, bright, dazzling, glorious, and radiantly awesome, in appearance like a mirage moving across a landscape in spring-time in one continuous stream of vibrations. Be not daunted thereby, nor terrified, nor awed. That is the radiance of thine own true nature. Recognise it.
From the midst of that radiance, the natural sound of Reality, reverberating like a thousand thunders simultaneously sounding, will come. That is the natural sound of thine own real self. Be not daunted thereby, nor terrified, nor awed…
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
Grey ships at a standstill far out in the sea lanes. A rusty blue aerosol can in the sand. Rugbee. Made in Buenos Aires. LIMPIA Y PROTEGE LAS FIBRAS DE ALFOMBRAS Y TAPIZADOS…
Invited to dinner in the formal dining room at the hotel over in Queenscliff! Vases of white flowers, white candles and tablecloths, under a ribbed ceiling of wood as sleek as leather. Two friends asked H and me: and after the meal we went to have coffee among fishbowls spilling over with opulent flowers in one of the salons. The fire in the antique grate was reflected in all the long sweeps of rippled window-glass. Glimpses out to sea: the dark water. H had the idea of meeting here once a month by the fire and all four reading in turn something new that we’d written. Yes, we all said. Will we, I wonder? Will we risk it?
Sometimes snakes can’t slough. They can’t burst their old skin. Then they go sick and die inside the old skin, and nobody ever sees the new pattern.
It needs a real desperate recklessness to burst your old skin at last…
It also needs a real belief in the new skin. Otherwise you are likely never to make the effort…
D.H. Lawrence: Studies in Classic American Literature
Storms and heavy swells, and they say two whales have stayed for a whole week close in to shore near Aireys Inlet.
Black Genoa
In Memoriam: Marjorie Barnard
SHE HAD MOVED to the south coast in autumn to live in the house she had bought, an old weatherboard with long windows and old trees growing against them into the sun. One room in particular, the one behind the apple tree next door, glowed all day as if there were a lamp on inside as the sunlight moved over one wooden wall after another. The walls smelled of incense and quivered in the light wind; on every sunny day a banner with large characters on thin gold silk went wavering in the wind on one wall or another with every flicker in the branches at the window. The characters changed in size and shape and so, no doubt, in meaning. She put her bed in here, and hung a dark blue paper blind with white gulls stencilled on it over the window, though as often as not, and without fail when there was a moon, she would roll it up again once her bedlamp was out. Day by day more apple leaves fell until, with all but the last few stained leaves gone, the whole beach showed at this window when she woke, opaque and still on some mornings, glittering on others, or turbulent, white and dark blue.
She wrote a poem about the window and on impulse sent it in a note to an old friend, Joanna, who lived in the city but had grown up on this coast. There’s a spare bed if you’d like to come down and stay, she added. All these clear cold beaches – that’s if you can get away, of course. (Joanna had three children still at school.)
WINDOW
Branches at this pane
turn it into gold lead light
in the winter sun,
they spread a large butterfly
on each wooden wall in turn,
who comes in early,
settling where she’s supposed to,
poising each black-veined
wing at the right slant, only
twitching in a wind, or when
birds happen to perc
h
on a vein – all are black birds,
turned wingpatches. Black,
all the new buds. She’ll be blocked
in, blocked out, when the leaves grow.
On full moon nights, two slabs of white marble stretched under her two bare front windows; and the bedroom window was white marble, watered with shadows. So quiet was the wash of the sea that she heard the engines of boats in the Rip. Sometimes in the middle of the night a loud rattling made her sit up and switch the bedlamp on. It was one of the mirrors quivering on the wooden wall, and as she watched the other mirror began and the double sound shuddered in the hollow space between that wall and the wall of the next room, then in the spaces of the rooms themselves until the whole house was throbbing aloud for as long as it took for the ship to edge through the passage.
She slept lightly in the house and had more dreams than usual. In one, her friend Joanna wrote back that she had cancer. Soon afterwards they met by chance and stood talking, so weighed down with intense sorrow that Joanna had to lie down in the grass. She was impossible to lift; trying only made the bones come away out of her like a baked fish’s, leaving the flesh, a soft mess of pink and pearly white. Seeds, she thought, but they had a black speck and began to move. Maggots, she spoke aloud. Joanna said nothing more. Dumbfounded, she woke and was herself lying stretched out, but in the gold box that was her room on a bright morning.
In one of the half-read borrowed books that she was always leaving lying round she read an extract of a letter from Marina Tsvetaeva to Boris Pasternak, written in November 1922, an autumn letter, and copied it into her notebook:
My favourite form of communication is in the beyond: in dreams. To dream of someone. The second choice is correspondence. Letters are a form of communicating in the beyond, less perfect than dreams, but subject to the same laws.
A Body of Water Page 12