Seems to me when you have yourself a brow bar (they only do eyebrows), a blow-dry bar (they only dry hair), and a tanning salon (they brown people) in the one block, it could be your locality is suffering what we might call First World Problems Syndrome. Meanwhile, in Arnhem Land…
Tag: beauty
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Hazzard lights
This morning I woke late and slowly and heavy and smiling, blindly at everything, the sun and the distant trains, heavy with the discovery unflowering in me: my heart is full of love. Heavy with love, impersonal love that is personal, dripping from me, in me, and through. Love is like honey through a window, as the great songwriter once said. Out of bed I took up my book, working slowly, carefully through the last pages of Shirley Hazzard’s impeccable novel The Transit of Venus. I’ve read it twice before and only now realise why, early in the second chapter, it forewarns us with such a light confidence:
“In fact Edmund Tice would take his own life before attaining the peak of his achievement. But that would occur in a northern city, and not for many years.”
I always wondered, why would he kill himself? When he has devoted his life to this one woman and finally, by the end, she realises him. Thinking about the delicacy and quiet triumph in the description of their long, dry, separated love I glance across my desk with its starburst of opened notebooks. A prong of a specific tree given to me for meaning lies dying inaudibly in its glass vessel. It shades a shallow basket filled with candles and pens. I go back to the book, pick it up in my hands like an album carried from a wreckage in a world now lost and gone, by fire, by water, by the toil of time which places everything behind us like a mirror. Her work is so perfect. “‘I work. I think of you. These are not alternating propositions – I think of you always. Since writing you last, I’ve been to a show of drawings by Leonardo, a one-man industrial revolution.’”
Irreplaceable Shirley Hazzard, alone in her room, writing from a kind of understanding few can be bothered to share. I hear the ardour of her disciplined quietude beating behind the pages: “She would be better off in a home. Christian said this to Caro, who replied, ‘She has a home. You mean an institution.’” Like Jane Austen’s I ration her few novels, unable but afraid to wear them thin. Getting up out of the sunshine I say almost inaudibly to my companion, spilling the steaming cup of tea, If I could write like this I would never do anything else. Thinking of writing about her work I am “A big woman in violet [who] leaned against the mantel, empurpling the view.” These thoughts pass through me like tiny fishes, transparent in sunlight, as deep in love the echoed longing might come. If I could be beautiful like you, it wouldn’t matter, I read – or imagine. Turning the last page to the end I suddenly realise with a hot shock: she is about to die, the main character actually dies on the final page.
I paid insufficient attention to the last two or three lines. Beforehand as he is watching her go there are people grappling for their status and their airbearable possessions. And “The passengers passed through the disembodied doorway, one by one. There was a woman in pink linen: ‘Does this machine spoil pearls?’” They are “claiming, clutching, harbouring.” The man who tried to make her see, an ophthalmologist, climbs aboard without recognising her. His death has also been foretold. Everything deep, light, ironic and sweet. The love that is wisdom, the wisdom of love comes and takes a seat quietly, far back in the aircraft. Then:
“The roar could be seen, reverberating on blue overalls, surging into the spruces. Within the cabin, nothing could be heard. Only, as the plane rose from the ground, a long hiss of air – like the intake of humanity’s breath when a work of ages shrivels in an instant; or the great gasp of hull and ocean as a ship goes down.”
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flowers upturned
Tonight I passed a very low hedge, glossy and cropped to ankle height. Into the shining thicket of its waxy green leaves someone had dropped two white flowers, different flowers, lying face upwards as though growing there… because we are all in the glittering gutter, but some of us gazing at the stars. Earlier in the week I found and have kept the tail of a bright pink balloon, just the knotted end which captures the breath, starfish-seamed and reminding me irresistibly of a belly button. As I walked along thinking of the flowers and remembering the belly button remnant of balloon I saw three people stop at a traffic light. Two large guys wearing black and between them, toes turned out and wearing a gathered skirt, a small woman carrying two hula hoops over her shoulder at rest. She was like a soldier comfortable with her bayonet.
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she-moon
Can there be anything more magnificent than clouds passing, at night between us and the stars, unhurriedly and without pause passing from east to west like the sun. In the distant western hills a community of storm birds screeches and wheedles and spools and yearns. The visitor I brought back with me from Europe had never seen the Southern Cross. It took him a long time to see what I was pointing at, some weeks back, because it is famous and small and dim: a cross properly. Dame Southern Land. The reef, the trees, the ineffable quiet hills. All of the creatures who burrow along the branches or through soil here underneath my head. The long beach, the wrecked mountains, the pulse. I’ll fight for you.
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Orion’s belt
Lying on my back on the sharp grass I saw the stars, some of them, saw Orion’s Belt, or some of him, he is who the Greeks once saw they say only instead of Orion arching his back I saw a giant dragonfly plummet like a biplane doomed in the direction of the distant soil, dragonfly ploughing through Orion’s chest, a kind of shield ingrown, gone awful. I have left it there and come inside.
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tilt a world
Finally, bodysurfing. It must be a decade since I have surfed, maybe since before moving to South Australia where terror of sharks somewhat put me off. That feeling, you know that feeling? Carried by water, gasping for green. You invite the water to take you. The water picks you up and takes you. Rushing with the thousand million bubbles carrying me along. Making myself lean and long like an arrow, like a board. Glances from the other surfers, that joy at the wet dark head surfacing from the spent wave, way up close to the shore. I can see why dolphins do it, I can see why people learn to ride boards. It’s been so long since I surfed I forgot to take a breath before the first wave and had to pull out of it in order to gasp for air. There is that ineffable serenity when the whole world is tilting and green.
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the great beauty
If there is a chance you can get to see the Italian film before it closes The Great Beauty: do. It is just full and wonderful. Luscious but with not a drop running over, rich with sentiment free from sentimentalism. We sat so spellbound by the slow credits when the lights rose we were alone in the cinema. All the way home we were talking about it, but silently, pointing things out to each other to see. Under the moon we talked about it, mostly in gestures and unfinished language: the part with the flamingoes! the nun climbing the stone steps on her knees! the strippers in the window, the tourist who dies and the women singing on the antique balcony! It’s about a writer, who is old now and has only ever written one book. By the end of the film he knows what he will write next. He’s standing on a cliff top, indescribably except by film. If you love music, or dancing, or writing, or Rome, or the fact that human civilization has existed for a time on this planet: go see the film. I found it superbole.
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following a stick
My arms are full of scratches from traveling among the trees along the river. It’s interesting how so much of what we see is due to attention. A woman passed behind me as I was crouched in a mossy hollow this morning, poking the water with a stick, and until she was almost on top of me I did not see or hear her, though I could hear in her voice she’d seen me. A dozen stick-lengths away, on the water, passed a long pointed boat filled with army recruits. They were wearing bright orange life jackets and looked like ducklings. By remaining quiet and focussing on my bent stick, dragged by the green current, I stayed hidden though my white t-shirt and dirty orange sneakers must have been in plain view. I used to think of mindfulness as awareness of everything. Now it seems more like acceptance, and focus. There will often be a train clattering over the high arched bridge. There will often be an opal drake, steering absently in the water as though floating on his back. And presumably every leaf, every petal of the shower of gold blossoms overhanging the narrow path has its own sensation of the feeble sunlight trickling through the branches.