Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane

by Gerald Murnane

  I think of the man’s brain as made up of many cells. Each cell is like a monk’s cell in a Carthusian monastery, with high walls around it and a little garden between the front wall and the front door. (The Carthusians are almost hermits; each monk belongs to the monastery, but he spends most of his day reading in his cell or tending the vegetables in his walled garden.) And each cell is a storehouse of information; each cell is crammed with books.

  A few books are cloth-bound with paper jackets, but most are leather-bound. And far outnumbering the books are the manuscripts. (I have trouble envisaging the manuscripts. One of my own books – in my room, on the grey Sunday afternoon – has photographs of pages from an illuminated manuscript. But I wonder what a collection of such pages would look like and how it would be bound. And I have no idea how a collection of such bound manuscripts would be stored – lying flat, on top of one another? sideways? upright in ranks like cloth-bound books on my own shelves? I wonder too what sort of furniture would store or display the manuscripts. So, although I can see each monk in his cell reaching up to his shelf of books from more recent times, when I want to think of him searching among the bulk of his library I see only a greyness: the grey of the monk’s robe, of the stone walls of his cell, of the afternoon sky at his little window, and the greyness of blurred and incomprehensible texts.)

  There are very few Carthusian monks in the world – I mean, the world outside my window and under the grey sky on Sunday afternoon. But when I say that, I am only repeating what a priest told me at secondary school nearly thirty years ago, when I was dreaming of becoming a monk and living in a library with a little garden and a wall around me. Apart from the priest’s vague answer, the only information I have about the Carthusian Order comes from an article in the English Geographical Magazine. But that article was published in the 1930s at about the time when I was learning to read in my other lifetime that leads back towards the Age of Books. I cannot check the article now because all my old magazines are wrapped in grey plastic garbage bags and stored above the ceiling of my house. I stored them there three years ago with four hundred books that I will never read again – I needed more space on my shelves for the latest books I was buying.

  What I mainly remember about that article was that it was all text with no photographs. Nowadays the Geographical Magazine is half-filled with coloured photographs. I sometimes skip the brief, jargonised texts of the articles and find all I need to know in the captions under the photographs. But the 1930s magazines (in the grey plastic bag, in the twilight above the ceiling over my head) included many an article with not one illustration. I imagine the authors of those articles as bookish chaps in tweeds, returning from strolls among hedgerows to sit at desks in their libraries and write (with fountain pens and few crossings-out) splendid essays and admirable articles and pleasant memoirs. I see those writers clearly. I knew them well in the years of my teens, as the 1920s passed and the Great War loomed ahead. When those gentlemen-writers post their belles-lettres to editors, they include no illustrations. The gentlemen actually boast of not knowing how to use cameras or gramophones or other modern gadgets, and their readers love the gentlemen for their charming dottiness. (I have never learned to use a camera or a tape-recorder, but when I tell this to people they think I am striking a pose to draw attention to myself.)

  I do not think the Carthusians would have objected to a gentleman-writer’s taking a few photographs of their monastery, so I assume that the author of the article trusted his words and sentences to describe clearly what he saw. The monastery was in Surrey, or it might have been Kent. This had disappointed me. When I first read the article I no longer dreamed of becoming a monk, but I liked to dream of monks living like hermits in remote landscapes; and Surrey or Kent was too populous for dreams about peaceful libraries. The only place-name I remember from the article is Parkminster. I looked into my Times Atlas of the World just now and found no Parkminster in the index. (While I looked I vaguely remembered having looked for the same word more than once in the past with the same result.) Parkminster is therefore a hamlet too small to be marked on maps; or perhaps the monastery itself is called Parkminster, and the monks asked the writer not to mention any placenames in his article because they wanted no curious sightseers trying to peep into their cells.

  But, in any case, the article was published in the 1930s, and for all I know, the Carthusians and their cells and the word ‘Parkminster’ may have drifted off towards the Age of Monasteries and I may be the only one who remembers them, or at least what was once written about them.

  Yet, when I think of the man reaching up to his bookshelves, on a grey afternoon in the year 2020, I see broad gravel paths with trees above them: whole districts of paths with cells beside the paths and in every cell a monk surrounded by books and manuscripts.

  The man at his bookshelves – the last rememberer of my book – not only fails to remember what he once read in my book but cannot remember where he last saw my book on his shelves. He stands there and tries to remember.

  A lay-brother walks along an avenue of his monastery. Lay-brothers are bound by solemn vows to their monastery, like other monks, but their duties and privileges are somewhat different. A lay-brother is not so much confined to his cell. Each day while the priest-monks are in their cells reading, or reciting the divine office, or tending their gardens, the lay-brothers are working for the monastery as a whole: taking messages and instructions and even dealing, in a limited way, with the world outside the monastery. Each lay-brother knows his way around some suburb of the monastery; he knows which monk lives behind which wall in his particular district. The lay-brother even gets to know, in a general sense, what the hermit-monks keep in their libraries: what books and manuscripts they spend their days reading. A lay-brother, having only a few books himself, thinks of books and libraries in a convenient, summary way. He learns to quote in full the titles of books he has never opened or never seen, whereas a monk in his cell might spend a year reading a certain book or copying and embellishing a certain manuscript and thinking of it for the rest of his life as an enormous pattern of rainbow pages of capital letters spiralling inwards and long laneways of words like the streets of other monasteries inviting him to dream about their cells of books and manuscripts.

  A lay-brother walks along an avenue of the monastery. He has an errand to undertake but he is in no hurry. This is not easy to explain to people ignorant of monasteries. Monks behind their walls observe time differently from the people in the world outside. While only a few moments seem to pass on an uneventful, grey afternoon outside the monastery, a monk on the other side of the wall might have turned, at long intervals, page after page of a manuscript. The mystery can never be explained because no one has been able to be at once both outside and inside a monastery.

  So, the lay-brother is in no hurry. He stands admiring the vegetables and herbs in each of the gardens of the cells he has been instructed to visit. When each monk has come to the door, the lay-brother asks him a certain question or questions but with no show of urgency. The lay-brother will call again, he says, on the next day or, perhaps, on the day after. In the meanwhile, if the monk could consult his books or his manuscripts for the needed information…

  There is more than one lay-brother, of course. There may be hundreds, thousands, all striding or ambling through the leafy streets of the monastery while the last of my readers runs a finger along the spines of his books and tries to remember something of my book. And although I think of the lay-brothers as walking mostly through a particular quarter or district of the monastery, I know there are districts and more districts beyond them. In one of those districts, I decide on the grey Sunday afternoon when I have to decide whether to begin my writing or to go on sipping – in one of those districts, in a cell with grey walls no different from all the grey walls in all the streets in all the districts around it, in a collection of manuscripts that has lain undisturbed during many quiet afternoons is a page where a monk once read or w
rote what the man in the year 2020 would like to recall. The monk himself has forgotten most of what he once read or wrote. He could, perhaps, find the passage again – if he were asked to search for it among all the other pages he has read and written in all the years he has been reading and writing in his cell. But no lay-brother comes to ask the monk to look for any such page. Outside the monk’s grey walls, no footstep sounds on many a grey afternoon.

  The man cannot remember what he once read in my book. He cannot remember where among his shelves he once put away my thin volume. The man fills his glass again and goes on sipping some costly poison of the twenty-first century. He does not understand the importance of his forgetfulness, but I understand it. I know that no one now remembers anything of my writing.

  So, on many a Sunday afternoon I leave my writing in its folder. I cannot bring myself to write what will become at last a greyness in a heap of manuscripts I can hardly imagine.

  In the bookshop, I paid for my books and pocketed my change. The books were still on the table where the man had stacked them while he checked their prices. The man waited for me to take away the books so he could go on with his gazing, but I wanted to say something to the man. I wanted to reassure him that the books would be safe in their new home. I wanted to tell him that some of them were books I had wanted for a long time – unjustly neglected books that would now be read and remembered.

  The topmost book was Precious Bane, by Mary Webb. I touched the faded yellow cloth cover and I told the man that I had been searching for a long time for Precious Bane; that I intended to read it very soon.

  The man looked not at the book or at me but out at the rain. With his face towards the greyness at his window, he said that he knew Precious Bane well. It had been a well-known book in its time. He had read it, but he hardly remembered it, he said, especially since his health was not what it had been. But it didn’t matter, he said. It didn’t matter if you couldn’t remember anything about a book. The important thing was to read the book; to store it up inside you. It was all there inside somewhere, he said. It was all safely preserved. He lifted a hand, as though he might have pointed to some precise point on his skull, but then he let the hand fall again into the position where it normally rested while he gazed.

  I took my books home. I entered the titles and the authors’ names in my catalogue, and then I put each book in its correct place in my library, which is arranged in alphabetical order according to authors’ surnames.

  On the following Sunday, when it was time to stop sipping and to begin writing, I thought as usual of the man in the year 2020. He still tried and failed to remember a certain book, the book that I had written forty years before. But after he had walked away from his shelves and had sat down again to sip, I thought of him as knowing that my book was still safely preserved after all.

  Then I thought of the monastery, and I saw that the sky above it had been changed. A golden glow was in the air; it was not so much the yellow of sunlight; more the dark-gold of the cover of Mary Webb’s unjustly neglected book or the amber of beer or the autumn colour of whisky. The light in the sky made the avenues of the monastery seem even more tranquil. The lay-brothers on their way from cell to cell sauntered rather than walked. Each monk in his cell, when he reached for a certain book or manuscript, was utterly calm and deliberate. And when he held up a page to inspect it, the light from his window lay faintly gold on the intricate pen-strokes or the tinted initials, and he found with ease what he had been asked to find.

  On that afternoon, and on many Sundays afterwards, I wrote while I sipped. When I next called at the bookshop I had been writing for six months of Sundays.

  After I had paid the man for my books, I told him I was a writer. I told him I had been writing on every Sunday since I had last seen him. By the following winter I would have finished what I was writing. And by the winter after that, my writing would have been preserved in a book. I wanted the cover of my book to be a rich, gold colour, I told the man, although he seemed hardly interested. I did not care about the colour of my dust-jacket, but when forty years had passed and the jacket had been torn away or lost and my book had been stored in a far corner of a shop like his, I wanted the gold colour of its spine to stand out among the greys and greens and dark-blues of all the almost-forgotten books.

  I told all this to the man while he went on gazing out into the sunlight as though it was still the same grey that he had gazed at when he told me about the books he could never forget. But this time the man would not reassure me. He was the last of a dying race, he told me. There would be no more shops like his in forty years. If people in those days wanted to preserve the stuff that had once been in books, they would preserve it in computers: in millions of tiny circuits in silicon chips in computers.

  The man lifted his hand. His thumb and his index fingers made the shape of pincers, with a tiny gap between the pads of the two fingers. He held his fingers for a moment against the light from outside and stared at the crack between them. Then he let his hand fall, and he went back to gazing in his usual way.

  On the following Sunday I did not go on with the writing that I had wanted to become a book with dark-gold covers. I sat and sipped and thought about circuits and silicon chips. I thought of silicon as grey, the grey of granite when it was wet from rain under a grey sky. And I thought of a circuit as a grid of gold tracks in the grey. I saw that the tracks of a circuit would have a pattern hardly different from the paths of a monastery. The circuits I thought of seemed rather more remote from me than any monastery. But the pattern was the same. I could see only thin trails of gold across the grey, but I supposed the gold came from close-set treetops on either side of the long avenues of the circuit. The weather over the circuits would have been an endless calm autumn afternoon, the best weather for remembering.

  I still could not imagine what sort of people would walk beneath the overspreading autumn-gold. But a few Sundays after I had first thought about circuits, I began to write about a monastery where a page of writing might have been buried deep beneath a stack of manuscripts in a grey room but that page would never be lost or forgotten. As I wrote, I believed that my writing itself, my account of the monastery, would rest safely forever in some unimaginable room of books under gold foliage in a city of circuits. That monastery, I wrote, was only a monastery in a story, but the story was safe and so, therefore, was the monastery and everything in it. I saw story, monastery, circuit, story, monastery, circuit…receding endlessly in the same direction as the lifetime that would have taken me towards the Golden Age of Books.

  But as I wrote I came to see that the monastery was not, of course, endless. Somewhere, on the far side of the monastery wall, another greyness began: the greyness of the land of the barbarians, the streetless steppes where people lived without books.

  Those people would not always stay on their steppes: the Age of Books would not go on forever. One day the barbarians would mount their horses and ride towards the monastery and turn backwards the history I had so often dreamed of.

  I stopped writing. I poured another drink and looked far into the deep colour in my glass. Then I read aloud what I had written of my story, pausing now and then to sip, and after each sip to gaze at the red-gold sunset in the sky over all that I could remember.

  Cotters Come No More

  My father had been dead for four years, but I would have resented anyone’s thinking that the man walking ahead of me was the fatherly friend I needed. Yet the man was my father’s younger brother and I admired him.

  I admired him, for one thing, because he preferred to look at his land rather than farm it. He milked his cows at the proper hours; but on most afternoons, when he should have been out in his paddocks, he leaned on his garden gate and stared at the ibises on his dam or at the row of cliffs two miles away where the land ended. Or he sat at his kitchen table with an opened book propped against the teapot in front of him. He would read the book, but he would also watch the flies among the chop-bones and
the streaks of tomato sauce on the plate at his elbow. Every so often he would bring an upturned drinking glass slowly down through the air towards a foraging fly. If he trapped the fly he would carry it in the glass, with the palm of his hand underneath, to one of the spiders’ webs in the kitchen window. He would throw the fly into the web and then stand with his hands on his hips, observing.

  While he walked ahead of me he whistled a piece of what he and I called classical music. I wished I could have named the music. My uncle would ask me eventually to identify it and would grin when I failed. I was the young man from Melbourne, where live concerts were presented in the Town Hall, and he was the yokel who listened to ABC programs on his battery-powered wireless set and who read books by the light of a kerosene lamp.

  I could see no path across the paddock where we were walking, yet the man ahead of me made occasional detours as though he followed some old, leisurely trail. He had told me that morning I would learn something important before the day was out. He had his binoculars over his shoulder, and in his right hand he lugged his portable wireless. He might have been leading me a mile away from the road only to show me the nest of an uncommon bird. Or the chief event of the afternoon might have been his sitting down beside me on a hilltop, taking out of his trousers pocket the folded form-guide from the Age, pointing to a certain name among the fields of horses, and then fiddling with his wireless until I was just able to hear, above the crackle of static and the buzzing of insects in the grass, the call of a race more than a hundred miles away with the horse that my uncle had brought to my notice in the thick of the finish.

  It was someone else’s farm that we were walking across: a set of out-paddocks with no house in sight. The mob of yearling heifers that wheeled and galloped away from us might have seen no man near them for weeks. From the top of each low hill I saw a clump of scrub, or a swampy hollow with short green grass sheltered by man-high stands of rushes, and each clump or hollow seemed the very place where I would be sitting a few years later with a young woman beside me.