A Body of Water by Beverley Farmer

Author:Beverley Farmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Giramondo Publishing
Published: 2020-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

SEPTEMBER

THE HOUSE THAT’S FOR SALE in Mercer Street in Queenscliff is Henry Handel Richardson’s old house (the Historical Society will have the details) – the house, that is, where the family stayed when her father was the Quarantine Officer here. It was built in 1864: a grey-roofed white weather board, set back on a lawn that slopes up to where the verandah was. There are old bush roses and flowering trees in front, and a set of swings. Nice, but out of my reach. I’m glad, anyway, to know which house she lived in: one more knot in the network.

Almond blossom is white, red at the heart.

The skin on my arms is becoming a fine crepe.

I think Black Genoa is a dead stump. The one green shoot at the tip has withered. The story – a death story – have I hexed the tree? And J as well? It means more to me than it should. No: where does such a ‘should’ come from?

‘Black Genoa’ is at least partly a homage to Marjorie Barnard and her persimmon tree – should I put that under the title, or would that seem to be directing how it’s to be read?

In the centuries before he could be represented by his image, a stupa stood for the Buddha, or an empty saddle or throne, a wheel, or the Bodhi tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment. Some of the sources name the Bodhi tree as a fig, others a pipal. Where have I read that the pipal is a variety of fig? That’s not, however, the source of my reverence for the fig, which goes back to the first summer in Greece, to the village, to waking up in the heat behind the shutters to secretive figs with the dew still on them, wrapped in leaves – splitting them open, dark red and sticky, eating them whole with the first coffee. The summers of Northern Greece, Macedonian summers, that harshness and abundance – no rain for months on end, and the fruits of the earth swollen, cracked, split open in the heat.

Muddy morning coffee we had with the heat seeping on the sheets through the slats, and the lotus-flower cool flesh of figs.

I am so sunk into parasitic inertia that I have no material of my own. I have no centre. Being passive, I have no power to animate a situation, a character…If I could have an aim, then everything would fall into place. I want to remain open, have a ‘negative capability’ – but Keats never meant that to extend beyond the conception of a work to nullify the act.

To begin a story, for me, always means to choose a place. I have to fix it accurately to begin with, then give it a warp, a discrepancy – that légère gauchissure Valéry wrote of (why can’t I find my old copy of Charmes?). From that warp, or several of them, the fiction can begin to grow. In ‘A Drop of Water’ it was the ripe quinces the monk saw, which were here all over the grass as I was writing – not there.

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