Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
My garden is dry under its mat of seaweed and a scatter of black pods like goat droppings. The cherry tomato branches are weighed down with clusters – gooseberry tomatoes – translucent, like green drops of water, with a dusting of gold round the navel; and there are even a few red ones. The grass I heaped round them in the pots as a mulch has dried and packed down so that the stalks look as if they grew out of birds’ nests. The basil has white flowers, the chives furry purple ones. The lantana is in flames. The apples on the boughs at my bedroom window have red streaks on one side. Even the spindly little tree strangled in the jasmine has seven dark nectarines! The agapanthus flowers are all shaggy now, shrivel-edged, purpling and shedding petals; green pods are left hanging, each with a wiry white whisker.
I had a dress that shade of agapanthus blue once, handed down by my cousin, a crêpe de Chine dress with a circular skirt that spun up like a hoop. It was my good dress, for changing into every day at 6:00 when the dinner gong rang – the flow of crêpe de Chine on my salt skin! – at the guesthouse where we stayed on Phillip Island. After dinner my mother played pingpong on the verandah while my father and I walked through the sunset onto the pier, where the mask of a drowned figurehead hung with a notice that it came from the wreck of the Speke; we went along the beach and then Lovers’ Walk, in the tea-tree and manna gums, looking for koalas and we found some up high.
Sunset on the pier.
A child whirls round in her dress
of sea blue, sky blue,
and she’s the day’s spindle, she
winds the silken stillness in.
Virginia Woolf on the influence of her mother:
It is perfectly true that she obsessed me, in spite of the fact that she died when I was thirteen, until I was forty-four. Then one day walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse; in a great, apparently involuntary, rush. One thing burst into another. Blowing bubbles out of a pipe gives the feeling of the rapid crowd of ideas and scenes which blew out of my mind, so that my lips seemed syllabling of their own accord as I walked. What blew the bubbles? Why then? I have no notion. But I wrote the book very quickly; and when it was written I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.
Virginia Woolf: Moments of Being
Moon and Star, N and R’s kittens, arrived this morning, to stay until the children and their mother have a house again; at the flat they moved into this week, no pets are allowed. Star has a pointed face, Moon’s is round. They’re tabbies, shadow-furred, creamy-bellied; two sturdy little toms with white-whiskery old men’s ears. Night kittens – they have moonstones for eyes. They ate, they drank milk and slept curled in each other on cushions and climbed in the garden to an outcry of wattle birds. In the tea-tree at the side of the kitchen, stretched out on a grey branch ridged with sun and shadow, they disappear. I bought meat and milk bowls and a litter tray; and this evening – an icy wind, winter wind! – brought sand from the beach to fill it, so that I can keep them inside at night, at least at first. The beach was all shadow and rising water; across the choppy grey-green waves, Point Nepean and Queenscliff shone in the full sun. I am back. Here. Now.
Someone asked a Zen master if he weren’t tired of being asked the same questions all the time. He replied that he had never been asked the same question twice. Every time a question was asked, it was asked by a different person.
Once in Europa, John Berger’s new book, is the sequel to Pig Earth (I must read that now), the second book of a trilogy called Into Their Labours. (The Author’s Note quotes John 4:38 – ‘Others have laboured and ye are entered into their labours.’) Pig Earth, the same Note says, ‘was a book of stories set against the traditional life of a mountain village…’ He lives in the French Alps.
The stories in Once in Europa are boldly claimed to be ‘love stories’ ‘set against the disappearance or “modernisation” of such village life.’) Love stories. Did this require as much bravado as it would have if Berger were a woman – or any bravado at all, coming from a man? The love is that of peasants: terse, subterranean, passionate. Each love is a cry of triumph, pride, defiance. Place, too, is rendered with that intense close detail which only ever springs from love. Each story is utterly finite. I read them one by one, large gaps between. A moat of silence surrounds each one in my mind.
Men aren’t beautiful. Nothing has to stay in them. Nothing has to be attracted by any peace they offer. So they’re not beautiful. Men have been given another power. They burn. They give off light and warmth. Sometimes they turn night into day. Often they destroy everything. Ashes are men’s stuff. Milk is ours.
John Berger: Once in Europa
Odile Blanc says this, telling her own (the title) story to her son Christian while he is flying her in a small plane above the farm where she grew up and the manganese factory that devoured the farm and also, one day, Christian’s father, who worked there; so that ‘Once in Europa’ is seen to be an overview in space as in time. She has good grounds for what she says: the whole story is her witness. Her ‘milk’ and ‘fire’ are not idle words; the nexus formed by their opposition resonates through the story – lives are bodied forth in them, the elemental, hieratic power they have. Still and all, a man put these words, this story, into her mouth. Odile is a man’s creation as surely as the Venus de Milo. Two points of view, two perspectives, crossing, meet in her. She is an object of love, not a subject only; her depth, her beauty and her solidity all stem from that.
Every era chooses its own definition of humanity. I believe this to be the definition of our time: a human being is an emitter of symbols. Among these symbols, two are the beginning and the end of human language, its plenitude and its dissolution: the embrace of bodies and the poetic metaphor. In the first are the union of sensation and image, the fragment apprehended as a cipher of the totality, and the totality shared out in caresses that transform bodies into a fount of instantaneous correspondences. In the second are the fusion of sound and meaning, the marriage of the intelligible and the sensible. The poetic metaphor and the erotic embrace are examples of that almost perfect coincidence between one symbol and another that we call analogy, though its true name is felicity. This moment is but an annunciation, a presentiment of other rarer, more total moments: contemplation, liberation, plenitude, emptiness.
Octavio Paz: Convergences (My italics)
At seven this evening, when the sun came out for the first time all day, the rain had left a rack of water-slats along the pier. I walked out on cloud reflections, and white rails where the fishing rods bristled, the lines sagging down among kelp trees. Sun blazing in the cliffs. In the motionless grey sky over Point Nepean, a rainbow.
The kittens, in disgrace for shitting in three places on the carpet last night, are spending the day out in the sun and whenever it rains, under the house. Crouched low, lying in wait for each other and staring up, they look like nothing so much as two rock flathead in shallow water. Moon is playing on, and Star under, the yellow canvas deckchair; which, like a buttercup, casting a gold reflection, makes a tiger cub of Moon. Hop – now of Star too.
Here are caged shadows,
here are gold tigers yawning,
blinking their striped eyes.
We picked a box of nectarines for H while he is away, and for the tree’s sake, to relieve it before the boughs break, we three women: J (up the ladder) and D and I, sipping D’s champagne as we picked. The princes of darkness stalked birds. The pear tree is burdened too, but with green fruit. Little plush almonds are pouting, erect. The walnut cases – so many – look like green apples.
Back here I baked barracouta fillets with silver thyme and Vietnamese mint; we ate them with a Greek salad, watching Bergman’s film Cries and Whispers, on SBS – the first time for J. (A family death – it was hard on her.) Four actresses in turn: it seems as stylised to me now as Rashomon.
Ten thousand Taras: Gesang
ist gesungen.
Yesterday I drove along the coast to Lorne to Apollo Bay to pick Taki up from the restaurant, since he’s returning to school a week early for a rowing camp. On the way back we stopped at the mouth of Sheoak River, where I often left my bicycle years ago, having ridden round cliffs and past the rainbows out at sea; to walk into a ball of space, cracked by a waterfall. Yesterday the Sheoak was rain-swollen. We walked past the tall, hissing reeds and up along the rock ledge. Pools blocked by dead trees far below the track had speckled fans of froth in them like platypus tails. A slither in the bracken, a corded greenish-brown length of snake idly moving off; brown butterflies flitted. Wheels of spider thread spanned a dead tree limb from limb, sunlit. Here the blackberry brambles grow sprawled and rich, and they had ripe berries on them, but gritty as ants, and sour.
Above the waterfall is Swallow Cave. The water here is black, shallow: it pools in front of Swallow Cave, frilling and smoothing across the flat rocks. Swallow Cave is honeycombed, fretty like giant skullbones, all pitted vaults and groins of rock, swallow-inhabited and shaking with river light. Fingers of stone hold out great balls of stone, bubbles and eggs of stone; the shells of others lie burst on the cave floor. Yesterday the shadow darts of swallows swooped in pairs, low over the water. A day half-moon had risen over the rim of trees.
Reeds and brown water –
bearing away mirrored light,
a brown butterfly.
The creek flickers down
the sand and touches the sea
with a forked brown tongue.
We brought back with us the little tree that was one of my Christmas presents from Chris and Taki, the other being a home espresso machine, a Baby Gaggia! in memory of my years behind the big one at the restaurant. It’s a Tahitian lime tree with waxy flowers and little green nodules in clumps. I’ve dug up the lawn in a sunny place, planted it, watered it. To think of making poisson cru some day with my own limes! I remember how: you soak chunks of raw bonito, tuna or other dark fish (but you can use white fish) in lime-juice until it turns grey (or white) and opaque, then add onions, tomatoes, coconut milk. Like at Erena and Amine’s hut in the grove of palms and avocados at Mamao, en face de l’ancien musée – their actual postal address. Ducks, brown children all addressed as petit frère, hedges of tongued hibiscus, clothes spread to dry. When a fifteen-year-old cousin of Erena’s gave birth there, the baby turned out half-Indo-Chinese, to the girl’s surprise. Ça alors, c’était lui le père? I remember she lay, her hair wet, her face blue and sunken in the dark under the thatch, like the woman in Gauguin’s Maternité – Te Tamari No Atua, ‘The Son of God’ with the white cat by her side. This milky baby, he filled the house. Excited squabbles arose all around, so many aunts and cousins wanted him. I admired him so fervently that the mother said to take him home to Australia. It was my dream, no secret, to have a Tahitian child and live on there: but my own, born mine. I was wild with lust then, at twenty; mad to have a man and bear him a child. Erena, laughing, had once shown me a tiny ceramic cock with balls, I remember, delicately erect, pierced as if to be worn on a necklet or charm bracelet. I asked her for it; and I slept with it under my pillow from then on.
We sat on the floor sewing; in nothing but her gold skin, her little daughter staggered over, knelt and beat on Erena’s breast for the milk.
Now when I get up and meditate I light the candle and a stick of incense in their bowl of sand. (The bowl is the old, chased copper one I brought back from Greece for my mother. In Tasmania the incense bowls had rice in them, not sand. I venerate food too much.) I face the gold-flowing wall. The incense stick has a bud of sweet fire at the tip, a bloodspot; it rises out of the bright sand like a lotus stem from the mud.
The woman in the mirror
closes in, bows through the smoke-
strings’ ripple and roll at our
double approach and lift of the incense stick
to stub one fire-bud, bloodspot, each
and leave the deep room dark…
While I write the kittens sit on the flokati rug in the sun, chasing the blind-cord and its shadow, breaking off in confusion to squat and crossly lick themselves. Startled by the cat in the magnifying mirror, they creep up on it from behind. Moon spins round after his tail.
At night they have possums’ eyes. They sleep on the bed, vibrantly nestling into one hollow or other of me. Something wakes me – the moon on my face, a passing ship’s reverberation, a scuffle in the cavity between the walls – and I read and write by lamplight for a while until I feel sleepy again; the rustle of papers and sheets doesn’t disturb them. Le hibou et les poussiquettes.
FEBRUARY
THE SNAKE-HEADS of the belladonna lilies – how quickly the long crimson stalks come rearing up out of their withered clumps! – have split open to disgorge their sheaves of frilly pink horns, sickly-sweet-scented horns out of those gaping crimson snake-jaws.
I know this is wrong. I know I’m in error, finding them horrible. I never did before Ash Wednesday when they burst out of the burnt hills. The belladonna is as beautiful as the lotus, I’m just not ready to see it. Born water-fleshed and scented out of the dust and ash – it is the lotus.
Yesterday the kittens left two puddles of piss on the bean bag. I rubbed their noses and their little bearded chins in it and threw them outside. But this morning again when I came in – ugh, the ammoniac stench! And it dawned on me: the soft sift and rustle inside when they tread on the bag is so like the sand in the sandbox that they think it is! Nothing for it, then, but to hide the beanbag behind closed doors. I’ve washed and dried it out, but when will I get it filled again? I emptied it into every large container I had, and the rest overflowed on the floor, a snowstorm in the front room. But the beans float, they cling. They defy gravity. The soup ladle and paper bags are no use. The white balls just fly up and cover me – moonbubbles moonbeams.
At seven it was low tide and pedestals of matted rock lay far out in the sunny water. Ah, these last long nights of the summer, after the turning of the year. A squat blue ship was lumbering out past Queenscliff, a pilot boat fussing round it: on its bridge it had a whole white weatherboard house, red-roofed – a tall chimney poked up.
I lay in the sun and at last read The Ladybird and The Captain’s Doll (having just finished reading about them in Lawrence’s letters – how much even his letters leave out!); the kittens kept clawing at the straps of my old black bikini. Now the brown silk of me has two or three little threads of blood down it, red-knotted at the ends.
The characters in The Ladybird are infused with so much symbolic, mythological meaning that they can’t move for it: Daphne (at least not Diana) is the moon-woman and the Polish count is her night, whose ‘night-wife’ she becomes, who speaks to her of the dark sun – ‘It is only his jacket of dust that makes him visible…And the true sunbeams coming towards us flow darkly, a moving darkness of the genuine fire’ – and the dark blood; whose emblem is the ladybird on the thimble he gave her. A ladybird (‘a Marienkäfer – a Mary-beetle’) carved on a green stone. (‘“Ah, your eyes!” he said. “They are like jewels of stone.”’)
‘The true fire is invisible. Flame, and the red fire we see burning, has its back to us. It is running away from us…’
He has ‘sung’ her to his room one night; she wavers outside.
Impossible to go back:
As impossible as that the moon should go back on her tracks, once she has risen…
The darkness inside the room seemed alive like blood.
Written in 1921, how eerily this story foreshadows the Third Reich! Like The Plumed Serpent too, and Kangaroo…Count Dionys is a Führer at heart, a political as well as a sexual mystic. He wants men to:
‘…become vassals by choice…to the man whose soul is born single, able to be alone, to choose and to command. At last the masses will come to such men and say, “You are greater than we. Be our lords. Take our life and our death in your hands, and dispose of us according to your
will. Because we see a light in your face, and a burning on your mouth.”’
Mysticism of moon and blood, okay; until one comes to craven and craving brutal singsong religiosity, to powerlust, devil-lust – ‘Strike! Strike!’ – and the stomach heaves. Lawrence’s version of Fascism (and loathing of Socialism) was founded on passionate idealism, yes – as was how many people’s Communism, and for that matter Christianity, before they knew of the Holocaust, the Gulag, the rack and the stake? And after they knew, often enough: Lawrence died before he could be put to the test. The ambiguities of worshipping blood…In hindsight, what can we do but shudder at his dark little Count? No Dionysos – this is Count Dracula.
The Captain’s Doll is (of course) another love story – a wiser and more temperate one than The Ladybird. And the landscapes in it!
It was like some great, deep-furred ice-bear lying spread upon the top heights, and reaching down terrible paws of ice into the valley: like some immense sky-bear fishing in the earth’s solid hollows from above.
The story splits in half. It begins as drawing-room comedy. Then I bet Lawrence left off halfway and came back inspired after the Tyrol to take it up again in midstream (mid-lake), and was impatient with loose ends. There’s that silly little nuisance of a wife, Mrs Hepburn, in the way? A shove out the window for her. Oh, let it be an accident. That useless Baroness Mitchka, what to do with her? Oh, well, kill her off in some riot. Let the loose ends unravel as they may: Hannele and Captain Hepburn are off to the lake and the glacier. Hannele stays the same woman throughout – Frieda herself, that immovable object – but the passive, glossy-eyed Captain undergoes an uneasy transformation into this terrier of a fellow who will be master of his woman. The plot creaks and clanks into place. Place, in fact, is the story’s salvation. Its validity outweighs all the slapdashness and the haranguing – none of it counts in the end. The whole sequence of the lake and the climb to the glacier is miraculous, it’s so immediate, so authentic, like all of Lawrence’s travel writing, with that hallucinatory vividness of his recall:
A Body of Water Page 24