A Body of Water

by Beverley Farmer

  I walked into the wind along the low boat-jetty into Swan Bay. Winds in the water too – the long grass waving. Isn’t this where we used to come twenty years ago to hire a rowing boat for the day? To get an early start we slept in the car on the shore, or rather we were kept awake, by a cat’s demented yowls. Against the red of dawn it was on the shed roof, still yowling – it was a great peacock. The household god. Sun-blinded, we pulled grass whitings into the boat all the next day and they shimmered, iridescent under our feet, tinged with electric green and blue.

  Star beside me, I fell asleep in the middle of a scene in my head in which my role was to explain why I would never consider love with him again, not even if he…No, no, I said, no more banging my head against his door…

  I woke at three out of a dream in which he did come and tell me that he had been mistaken and it was me he loved now. Would I… His form was twisted and faint:

  Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind

  And took a mess of shadows for its meat…

  I accepted him with no more words. I too was insubstantial, as I saw when I enfolded him; or rather we were swathes, wraiths, of the same substance. It was altogether like a Noh play, my dream being the second part where the denied spirit returns from the other world to play out its reality. This, then, the night truth, is the deep truth of it, of me, for me; or – ‘The deep truth is imageless’ – this is some deeper truth.

  I gave what other women gave

  That stepped out of their clothes,

  But when this soul, its body off,

  Naked to naked goes,

  He it has found shall find therein

  What none other knows…

  These lines rose in my mind as the dream faded. (Yeats, the dreamer, spreader of dreams underfoot.) I switched on the lamp and scribbled them down. I’ve loved them for most of my life. Once I copied the whole of ‘A Last Confession’ into A’s secret book of poems, too distraught to care then what an invasion I was committing, spoiling her book.

  And give his own and take his own

  And rule in his own right;

  And though it loved in misery

  Close and cling so tight,

  There’s not a bird of day that dare

  Extinguish that delight.

  W.B. Yeats: A Woman Young and Old

  Now a ‘Madonna’ hibiscus has opened, huge, its creamy edges ruffled out: white-linen petals soaked deep plum-red at the centre, with a lighter areola, redcurrant jelly, watery, trickling in veins; and a twisted slender rod, dotted gold.

  Waking early, my lamplight the single yolk in a whole universe of white. These last mornings have been dim with a crisp edge of autumn to them, though they still open into summer afternoons. The poplars down the road have turned yellow. Dew at nightfall and all night; then a white sun-haze and shimmer on the sea until late in the day.

  ‘The Black Ships’ is ready in my mind now. I must get down to drafting it now or lose it, let it go. I think there are vistas opening in it. This might have been the trouble before: that it wanted to grow and be longer, looser, and I was baulking it. Or: this might be a last shallow spreading-out because the story was never rooted deep enough.

  No moon tonight (and no Moon). Just a dark relentless wind-roar and the wheel of stars – behind the lighthouse’s reared hulk in the distance they poured in a long frozen spill of white, the milk-spray of the stars into the sea. The glare of the four pier lamps spattered over the waves and was swallowed in all the black surge and seethe up around the cliff.

  I thought at first that I was imagining this, or seeing an optical illusion. Standing under the platforms where the red bars of the tide-lanterns were lit up, I saw paleness cover the black of the sky and sea as the great lantern opened – one two – like an umbrella of white gauze pushed open and closed: but one that had black ribs, because fine black rays in it reached over to the other shore. Time and time again; whenever the wash of light came, so did they; wherever I stood, I saw them stretch and touch the same places. They were the shadows of the bars that cage the lantern.

  As if called up out of the Strait, a cluster of lights, many golden and one red, appeared on the lip of the sea and came moving in closer and closer.

  At three, waking from a dream of having the two cats on the bed, I heard a mewing outside and so I got up and stood in the wind-tugged shadows on the front verandah calling for Moon. Puss. Pussy. Over the sizzle of crickets and the ocean-surge a growl of engines came loud, and a reek of diesel fumes. All the boards of the house – a pulse in the wind.

  Land of Snows

  IN THE CENTRE of the Land of Snows surrounded by great spires of rock stands a mountain with a crystal dome and two brilliant lakes at its base, Sun Lake to the east and Moon Lake to the west. Sun Lake is round, Moon Lake a crescent, its luminous surface slippery, evanescent. Sun Lake belongs to the deities of light, Moon Lake to the demons, any of whom might come striding towards you along the moon path cloaked in darkness, two stars for its eyes. While the lakes and the fish that live in them are sacred, you may drink the water and eat any fish that you happen to find cast by the storms or the tides onto their jewelled shores. This mountain is the centre of the world and also the point of intersection of this world with other worlds. Seven rings of oceans and seven rings of mountains of gold surround it. Beyond them are continents.

  The seven offering-bowls of water on an altar are the size of a cupped hand. When the monk fills them in the morning with fresh water, the first bowl is frozen before the monk comes with his jug to fill the last one. A cup of tea there, buttered and salty, freezes solid before you can drink half of it. A glass of water becomes all glass as you watch; its surface, burning, clamps the skin of your fingers.

  There are ice stairs and walls and towers in the Land of Snows and ice tables that stand twenty and thirty feet high. There are gorges that you can pass only when the river is frozen over, and then only on foot, carrying all your belongings on your back because no pack-animal can be brought down the cliff-face or walk the river. Mirror-smooth, the surface is nonetheless flawed, choppy, woven with runnels, and through its glass, which is as fine as a shell in some places, you see that hollows of air are glowing in those split and shattered cloudy depths. The great surge of the river under the ice continues invisible, unheard. The journey might take you several days of walking and of pitching your tent on the bank at sunset by a river of frozen stars.

  By way of preparing myself for a winter in the Land of Snows, yesterday I took out a glass left in a cupboard by the previous owner of this house. Small, with a rounded base, it once had a lid and a label: Vegemite, or Velveeta, or Lemon Butter. All the old houses in this land have a stock of these relics. I filled it to the brim with water and set it in the freezer, careful not to spill a drop. Not being crystal, if it should break in the ice, no matter.

  High above a monastery, locked like a hermit in a sanctuary on top of a plateau with sheer walls, is a statue with the body of a man and several heads, the main one that of a bellowing horned bull black as Death. Glaring demonheads surround the bull’s head; the whole is crowned with a calm Buddha. Around its black neck hangs a rosary of human skulls and its penis is up ready to shoot seed. Yamantaka, the God of Death: death-in-generation, generation-in-death. The sanctuary is accessible only through a maze of passages cut in the rock walls.

  Temples here have roofs of gold. Statues are seated in them, made of gold or copper, jewel-studded, or carved of rock, or yak butter. Some contain the embalmed remains of great lamas. As in the deserts at the centre of our own land, on certain days ceremonial sand images are made on temple floors: the monks funnel brightly dyed sands into their place in the pattern, which serves as a cage to hold whichever deity is to be invoked. Demons of terror and evil have been known to come uninvoked. These possess the Oracle, and speak through him. They can be appeased by offerings. The hermits live in frosty solitudes, having no dealings with temple or monastery. Each hermit is walled in a cell with one
small opening in the rock through which his bowls are passed in and out. He also has offering cups for water and grain; sacred pictures and scrolls; sticks of incense; a little cabinet in which he keeps a demon prisoner.

  Because the Hermit of Tsang, a revered ascetic lama, is known to remain all day and all night in the lotus position, the villagers, some of whom clamber up the rock wall and in strict silence leave tea and barley-meal at his cave mouth, believe that he never sleeps. He sleeps, as still as stone in the lotus position; having reached that point where sleeping and waking become one and the same.

  Only the hollow earth speaks to him. A rumble, a sough, a screech: the sky speaks. Through the gap, curtained with ice, in his rock wall he looks out over plaits of mountains. The domed days and nights of the Land of Snows go by, made by his immense meditation into no more than beads of a rosary, black, turquoise, white, red, black, to be passed through indifferent hands.

  One night of hard frost he knows himself to be come to a Pure Land, even the Happy Western Land of Amitabha, the Buddha of Boundless Light. There the grass in the meadow is as tall as he is, shafts of deep golden-green, spires of shadow. Globes of fire grow high above, held out in clusters among frets of fading leaf; some lie fallen and out of their skins seeps sour scarlet blood and golden seed. A few great fruits like yak-butter statues of the Buddhas hang higher still among black leaves each the size of a vulture and over them as the Hermit cranes his neck great white and silver birds drift like snow clouds, their wings spread flat; their sword-beaks and the talons clenched to their bellies and even their circled eyes are a brilliant coral-red. Crouched staring up into the sky long after the birds have vanished, he conceives out of nowhere the idea that these were birds from an ocean. Like all his devout fellow-lamas, the Hermit of Tsang believes in the existence of oceans, ring upon ring of oceans and gold mountains: indeed the sacred texts are adamant.

  How can a rainbow span a sky that has not one drop of water in it?

  Here the lamas train their disciples to run in a trance hour after hour over long distances and rough terrains without fatigue or injury. They are advised to fix their eyes on one point, such as a star. They are trained also by means of the breath to generate heat, so that sitting naked in the snow they will feel no pain and will be able to melt it under them. Wrapped in a wet robe, they will dry it on their bodies. A lama of high attainments is able to reduce his stature cubit by cubit; to incorporate himself in another; to send out into the world aspects of himself so real that all who encounter them are deceived; to create visions of the Bodhisattvas lasting many hours and visible to multitudes; to dematerialise himself. Such a lama is able to choose his successive incarnations, creating what is called here a rosary of births. After every death he enters the chosen mother at the instant of conception. His followers will seek and find the child he has become. If they fail, he will find his way to them. He will know them. He will claim his old drinking cup, his rosary and bell. His old dog, mad with joy, will come capering around him.

  Parts of the Land of Snows are so dry that, no matter how cold the weather, snow is rare; the nomads greet a snowfall there as a sign of milder weather. Coppery faces around the campfires split into white smiles; pilgrims sleep wrapped up in skins and snow; firelight gilds the white-crusted boughs of the last surviving trees.

  I take out the glass of ice and look at it. Is that a crack in it? No. Upside down it is a rounded cone, a stupa. But I have made a mistake, taken the glass out too soon. A ball at its heart is loose water still, and out of it a storm of tiny bubbles springs and spirals, descending like flakes in a paperweight; faster, in a surge as I turn the glass this way and that. Then ice slips loose at the invisible edge of the glass, which has misted over; and wobbles, free. I put the glass back.

  The Hermit of Tsang is standing under a tall tree with green fronds, hung with flowers like bells, like curls of butter folded to make bells. Nearby is another tall trunk with four leaves only, two shrivelled and two splayed open and golden, which he recognises as fig leaves. One is a hand held upright with the palm facing out, and the other is flat, dipping to the earth. This second tree is in the mudra of a Bodhisattva. Is this a sign? Can it be that he has entered a sacred image? Om. He opens his mouth to say the mantra appropriate to this Bodhisattva. Om. Om? Panic grips him. He has no memory of the mantra! Is he losing, or has he lost – his mind? – his way? Om. He stands frozen in mute supplication.

  For a stranger, one unable to speak the language, above all one of another race, it is far from easy to enter the Land of Snows and, leaving the roads and the yak-trails behind, penetrate alone to these crags. But once there you might find a cave or an abandoned hermitage with water flowing through it and a village nearby whose inhabitants, seeing that a hermit had come to live there as in the old times, would clamber up the rock face to leave warm tea and barley-meal at the mouth of the cave each day. How could the hermit have known of the old cave? people would say, their buttery faces alight in a smoke-filled yak-skin tent or a stone room, the children half-asleep but listening, wrapped up naked in skins with the fur on the inside. It must be the same Hermit, the one who lived there before, in another incarnation.

  Lamas who are weather-masters can hasten or hold off the rain.

  There are lands where the people, the old original people, leave an offering of corn-meal by the mouth of a deer they have killed for food, to sustain it in its next world. Here in the Land of Snows if need obliges the people to slaughter an animal, thus breaking their Vows of Compassion, the herdsman asks its forgiveness, performing in exchange a ritual that will procure for it a rebirth in a higher form.

  Manifold are the paths to Enlightenment. Most take the Graduated Path in the hope that in the course of maybe innumerable lifetimes they will arrive at it. The Short Path that leads to Enlightenment in one lifetime is fraught with perils. Those who choose this path and have a Guru who will guide them on it must confront the Lord of Death and all his cohorts. A monk on the Short Path to Enlightenment will, for example, be instructed to spend night after night alone where a corpse, cut in pieces, has been strewn among the rocks. There he must perform the ritual of self-sacrifice called chöd. The monk must dance, hitting a drum and blowing a leg-bone trumpet, and call up a female spirit to behead him. She feeds his body to the waiting demons, who munch his limbs, slit his belly and, jeering, lap his blood and his viscera as they flow out steaming. This is the Red Meal. Later the same night, humbly he will call the spirits to the Black Meal, offering his ashes this time, mudsodden, and his burnt bones. Some of the monks who persist in this practice lose their minds. Some die. For them the Short Path of chöd is a step over a precipice.

  Here among these summits live sorcerers who have in their possession a dried human tongue whose magic power is theirs to wield. The sorcerer must lie mouth to mouth on a corpse, embracing it while mentally reciting the magic words until it stirs, rises, struggles, makes wild leaps in the air. At the last, its icy tongue will jab into the sorcerer’s mouth. Now he must bite it off, after which the corpse will fall inanimate again; or, failing, die.

  This time when I take my glass out of the freezer there is no mistake. It is solid. Set upside down on the table it is a cone of ice whose resemblance to the Crystal Mountain of the Land of Snows is clear. The ice itself is far from clear; at its core is an opaque double shape, like a small egg in the act of breaking away from a larger egg below it; and this is afloat in flounces of ice like half-beaten eggwhite. Clouds, these eggs, in a sky of ice, clouds composed of a spray of millions of dense bubbles that glitter wherever the light reaches. And all around them waves, and jagged ridges, precipices, a cave mouth, a hermitage.

  Immediately a crust of ice forms on the outside of the glass. I turn it right way up. Within minutes, bubbles are bursting on the surface. Soon the ice cone slips easily out of the glass and, set on the sill in the low sun, starts to dwindle. Gauzy like the wings of insects, the stilled waves catch alight; the bubbles caught in them are magnifie
d; they are all pits and silvery flakes, like the surface of the moon.

  Its mountain gone, how small the glass has become!

  In the Land of Snows, where the sky, the air, has the absolute dry clarity of a burning-glass, the mind which aspires to attain to that same clarity may, in the vast solitude and stillness, for a time achieve it. The consciousness expands to take in all it sees and knows and has ever known. All time becomes one. In sultry or damp weather it can happen, pilgrims have noted, that the disturbance of the air causes the past briefly to well up and flood into consciousness, only to subside as the air dries, keeping time with the air’s drying.

  Pack-animals are roped in single file on the bank of a lake at sunset, their bellies afire with the lights thrown up from it; they are a rosary of amber beads. A monastery straddling a low hill is wrapped night and day in a thick fog; the yak-butter lamps burn all day inside; nothing beyond or below the monastery is visible to the pilgrim, for whom it might be afloat in the sky, a ghostly ship with white prayer flags for sails for all he knows (while the monks, having no conception of ships, stay rooted in rock.) High on the peaks, the sky is so sombre a blue that to the pilgrim’s dazzled eyes the golden incandescent towers of rock that block the sun are themselves light and the source of light.

  Winter is upon us. This is the season of rainbows. Gloom, cold, and lamps on inside the whole day long, the old wooden walls shrinking, swelling. Now the blue-tongue seldom crawls out from under the house. Frogs are starting to appear, and mushrooms. Crickets creak in the long grass. High among darkening leaves two or three fat yellow quinces dangle, soon to be shed, along with the last bright tomatoes, the four leaves left yellowing on the fig tree. The long sun shafts of the morning and evening catch dead leaves quivering in mid-air, each folded around the legs of a spider like the shell around a hermit-crab. The red leaves have all fallen from the long-legged grapevine. Gulls soar high overhead without a cry. On some nights a wet white silence descends on this house and on these cliffs and salt marshes – on others the sky becomes black ice – but this never means snow, not here, only a vast fog. Bellowing like cattle, invisible ships on their way out to sea file past the rockshoals from beacon to beacon, lighthouse to lighthouse. The horn of the lighthouse on this shore booms all day, all night. Days, nights; you trace their passage only by the progress of the lamplight; room after room, a rosary of lights. If only snow would fall and this became for a time, for a winter, a land of cold glass and of silence, a land of slow motion then no motion then a slow thawing into new motion. But it will never snow here.