like wild pigs against the dark sky

There are books that have been pegged to my memory by a detail, while the rest of the book is a general shape and feeling (a fog of characters, plot, the what-happens, etc) and the one detail stands on its own, not part of this mist impression but another separate summary, one point that contains the book, or is another book, a unit, Elizabeth Hunter in Eye of the Storm opening her eye a little and revealing some world of spirit -- her eye-glint is what I mean by my detail -- and I intuit a book inside or within the detail or behind the detail: inside the detail, ready to unroll, a quiescent spring, the rolled-up tip of a fern, the corgi rolled like a cashew in Anne Tyler's Accidental Tourist, which they gave us to read in high school, a "high, rat-colored car" in Flannery O'Connor -- in which story? I don't recall, but if you say to me, "Flannery O'Connor" then I see this car standing in a sunlit bare street -- I picture it hunchbacked -- Dorothy Wordsworth noticing in her journal that the swallows outside her window had the tails of fish -- and then on fish, I think of the rotting carp that I saw in a Japanese pool, alive but harrowed with mould, ripe haze in their eye sockets, myself watching them while adults nearby were earthing toy pinwheels over graves. Where was that? Dorothy's brother William consulted her diaries when he wanted to remember a detail for his poems and she wrote about the meeting with the leech-gatherer. If she had chosen other details, would he have written other poems? If Christina Stead hadn't been in love with a man who was Jewish, if she hadn't become interested in Judaism via him, would the stormclouds coming over the mountains in The People With the Dogs have been habited like the rabbi? Her lover appears disguised like a cloud, or mist-hat as the Middle English had it, and the details in those old English poems are guided into life by the sounds they make -- it's poetry, Geoffrey Hill said in his Oxford lectures, forcing us into patterns we might not find if we were not writing poetry; and Greer Gilman, imitating the Middle English alliteration, finds details like that too, for Moonwise. Marguerite Young in Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, describes a set of mountains with the word "razorback". I imagine her thinking of the shape of the peaks before she wrote razorback, and it wasn't until she had the word running through her that she remembered -- the word reminded her -- razorback pigs -- because she goes on like this, "snouting like wild pigs against the dark sky."

"His hair had grown three inches since he left Persia at sunset, just when the sun was setting over the empty box factory, over the bare razorback hills snouting like wild pigs against the dark sky, over the trees naked of flowers, the leafless bushes, the foundry that had no bricks and no fires and the bell-tower that had no bells and the flour mill where the flour was black as coal dust," she writes, with one item leading to another, the trees bare of flowers conjuring up the bushes that are bare but can't also be bare of flowers, so it has to be something that sits on a branch like a flower -- leaves, obviously -- and then we already know (I mean, if we're reading the book then we've worked out) that this man has come from a town named Persia so we need buildings as well as plants, and those buildings will be like the plants, in that they're without their natural attributes. So the foundry has no fire, the bell-tower has to have no bells, the flour has to be without the quality that makes it most obvious to the human eye: its whiteness. "Coal dust" because flour too is dust: we've kept the shape and changed the colour. We could have written "the flour mill that has no flour" but this way we stay with the meaning of the passage without being repetitious; we did the same centuries ago when we wrote, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; / Coral is far more red than her lips' red; / If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun." Loss is tedious but not literature; let's strike a balance. The more the MacIntosh world loses, the richer we are in words. The blackness of the flour might also be the "dark sky" earlier, and the absence of firelight in the foundry.

Young's language adds and then subtracts, it draws, then erases, then draws again, or draws and erases at the same time, by which I mean that she will name a thing in order to say that it is not in fact there: "No tires, no spare tire, no instruments, no instrument board ... no lights, no rear view mirror, no side mirrors, no tongs, no bellows, no fire, nobody ever pregnant, no star ever born." She writes a word and then overwrites it: "Mr. Spitzer had attended Mr. Spitzer's funeral, and that was why he was so hopelessly benumbed, why he knew so little of all these current events, these current months, these currents in streams, these air currents, this passing or flowing onward." The characters imitate the prose as well as they can within the obvious limitation of being imitation people, the American man from Persia has decided not to cut his hair until the Democratic president is out of office and yet he's never signed up to vote, Miss MacIntosh opposes all British institutions down to the King James Bible but she only wears British shoes, the protagonist's surname is a tumbling action, Cartwheel -- Vera Cartwheel -- veritably she turns around and around, never knowing if she's head or foot -- she grows up next to that shuddering thing called the sea, and her author loves to mention those unstable-looking things, stars, and that middle-colour, purple. Instability! says the book, although it can't say any of it without being stable itself, a block in two volumes.

Charles Dickens prophesised Miss MacIntosh when he renovated a solid object into an abstract. "Miss Slowboy insinuated herself into a spencer of a fashion so surprising and ingenious, that it had no connection with herself, or anything else in the universe, but was a shrunken, dog’s-eared, independent fact, pursuing its lonely course without the least regard to anybody." Which has to be one of the strangest descriptions of anything ever written.

ornamented with a hole

I want to say that I can remember a meat pie in one of Stead's books, but I've tried, I can't. Food, though, food in general, plenty of times. The Cotter family in Cotters' England gets hold of a chicken and miscooks it into a mangy wan disaster, which confuses them; they can't judge the dazzling badness of this meal, because things around them are so bad and have been so bad for so long, that they don't know how a well-cooked chicken could ever be extorted from the universe, and what would it resemble? Each family member goes through their own private set of events in the book, and they arrive at different ends, but the sum of these characters, collectively, is that they're baffled by any act of creation, the effect they have is that of mould or rot, they can't cook food without spoiling it, they can't make friends with a woman without wrecking her, they are distorted versions of the human being, a making animal, they are the antithesis of civilisation; they are destruction. They're not only financially poor, they're poverty itself -- poverty has made them into poverty -- they are the two children under Christmas Present's robe in A Christmas Carol, Ignorance and Want, and their meal from that chicken is the hellish version of the Cratchits making robust glory out of a cheap goose.

In another part of Dickens, Flora Finching is buying a meat pie for Little Dorrit.

When the 'three kidney ones,' which were to be a blind to the conversation, were set before them on three little tin platters, each kidney one ornamented with a hole at the top, into which the civil man poured hot gravy out of a spouted can as if he were feeding three lamps, Flora took out her pocket-handkerchief.

I haven't read Little Dorrit for months but that detail stayed with me, "poured hot gravy out of a spouted can as if he were feeding three lamps" and so I remember it now, and it comes into my head when I think of Dickens and pies together. How did these things occur to him, I wonder, why embellish the pouring gravy and not the tin platters or the pocket-handkerchief? Why this and not that, why that and not this? In his last Christmas story The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain, why does his imagination leap into gear whenever he gets to the Tetterbys, why does it die whenever he has to write about the lead character Redlaw, who goes through the book like a press-button melodrama robot, being depressed whenever the plot needs him to be depressed, being repentant when the plot needs him to be repentant, exhausted by the weight of the same story that sits so lightly on young Johnny Tetterby, a boy who staggers around with his little sister over one shoulder? He has a baby to carry, Redlaw has a plot, and the plot is heavier.

The plot of the Christmas Carol doesn't need Dickens to tell us that Marley was dead four times on the opening page and digress onto the subject of Hamlet's father. That extrapolation doesn't do anything for the A to B of the story but it is essential if the book wants to be what it is. Evidently each book has a spirit, or what you'd call a soul, not bone, not flesh, but somehow existent. Here's a proposition: that spirit may have originated precisely in those moments when the mind decides that this is the detail that will be written and not another and it will be described this way and not that way, the moment when gravy turns to lamp oil. These are moments illuminated, these are points in time picked out and made to elongate artificially, the writer nails them to that technology called prose but the nail goes utterly through, even the head, and you're left with one wooden board not two together; the prose stays but not the instant. "I myself for instance have written down memoranda of many skies," said Ruskin in his Fors, "but have forgotten the skies themselves." If you extracted all the details from Dickens' books and gathered them together you would have a biography with the characteristics of a constellation.

eat it, I'll know you

[continued]


Why should the women cook? The author has made their home a symbol of hospitality in her book and this man is counting on her to stand by her symbol. His joke depends on the reliability of his god. But aside from that, why don't they tell the strangers to go away? I look in M.'s secondhand copy of the 1965 Farm Journal's Complete Pie Cookbook and feel as if I'm holding evidence of a complicated answer in my hands. From beginning to end, the author, who is nameless, and probably a committee, tells women to cook and men to eat. That arrangement is described several times clearly in the introduction.* If a man isn't present then the food can be aimed at friends, family, guests, or children. (Chocolate Crinkle Cups are "Party dessert for the Junior High set.") But the idea is that the person who bakes must be a woman and that the woman must give her cooking away.

The assembling of the ingredients and the baking of a pie is not the complete action of a cook. The cook is expected to bake, then distribute, then receive gratitude. This is the life cycle of cooking. One excerpt: "To a farmer, an apple tree covered with blossoms is a lovely sight [...] But you can bet he also has thoughts of a juicy wedge of apple pie. We predict that any of the apple pie recipes in this cookbook will bring you his compliments. Try them all to find his very favorite!" The worth of a pie can be measured by the enthusiasm with which other people receive it. "One time I made 25 of these pies for a men's dinner," says the inventor of the Harvest Apple-Cranberry Pie on page fifty-five. "I served them with cheese slices and the pies really made a hit." That is how she sells it.**

Anything can be co-opted into a bid for power, suggests Christina Stead; the man in Dogs can turn the women's habit of generosity against them, and the host in House of All Nations can force the guest to eat even when that visitor is so stuffed and faint he's asking her to open a window. The exercise of her "strange feminine instinct" seems imperative. And I suspect that this word "instinct" is Stead's way of saying that the same information that passed from the wider world so naturally and easily into the language of the Complete Pie Cookbook (where it is taken for granted like an ancient folk myth) has affected Mme Haller so profoundly that the power to feed and receive compliments feels like her native right. "If you don't eat it, I'll know you don't like it," she says, and the guest eats.

(Contemplating that scene, I realise for the first time that the Pie Cookbook never tells you how to cope if your guest doesn't want your pie, although "Try them all to find his very favorite," and similar sentences should provide you with a solution that the authors don't explicitly state -- the answer is, of course, that you should offer them another pie. The natural life cycle of the pie would be interrupted if the guest said No forever; you might as well cut down a rainforest and expect the monkeys to go on living. But that problem never comes up in the Cookbook, where all the people who aren't cooks, are vacuums of lubricious greed.)

It's true that the food in Stead is not a pie, but the dynamic in the book is identical, ie, the cook expects to give her food away and other people expect to receive it. Stead's point, or my point, since I'm the one comparing the two books, not her, is that a mass of different manipulations can be built around this elementary armature, and White, too, packs multiple ideas around the skeleton verb of eating. Dorothy and Basil both have a meat pie but Dorothy's eating is not like Basil's eating, and the reader has seen enough of their mother Elizabeth by now in the book to know that her meat pie eating would be different again, and her nurse (who is one of three, I don't think I've mentioned the other two), would be different as well, and this situation would pertain even if each of them had exactly the same kind of pie, same size, same shape, containing the same sort of meat, bought from the same shop, for the same price.

People will always wage power struggles, demonstrates Christina Stead: whatever tools they have they'll use, even generosity is a tool. Human beings are innocent animals; the parasite vine grips the tree trunk without hatred, a snake uses the venom it's given. Four decades after 1965 the language around pies has changed only slightly, just enough to stop Ken Haedrich's Pie (The Harvard Common Press, 2004) telling you that one sex should do all the cooking and the other sex should do all the eating. But the language that encourages you to give your productions away has endured. ("Serve this to your family and friends and see if they can guess what's in it.") And the people who read the book use the same language -- it has to be cultural, I think, this pie-language, this vocabulary that goes with the atmosphere of North American pie. Here's an online review by someone named Sheree from Illinois: "The joy a fresh baked pie gives to someone makes me feel like I am making a difference. People love getting homemade pies, so much so it almost brings them to tears. My husband's co-workers, people at the gym, employees at stores that I frequent, and neighbors have been the beneficiaries of most of them. The reviews have been outstanding!" Here's her ammo: "during the past month I have made over 20 pies." With House of All Nations between my brain and my ears I hear these "people at the gym, employees at stores that I frequent" grinning, grinning, and uttering the words of Mme Haller's visiting lunch-couple, eyes bubbling, delirious and feeble with nourishment, "Oh, wonderful, wonderful, I wish I could cook like that. How did you learn to be such a wonderful cook? Did you learn it at home?" Surge, surge, confident Sheree, a tank who cannot be stopped: "It is time to make pie!"

The older cookbook has savoury pies and the new one doesn't, so I like the old one better in spite of its assumptions. Here in the US I've learnt that when Americans hear the word "pie" they think of a pie with sweetness in it -- a sweet chiffon, or sweet fruit, or sweetened spiced pumpkin, or sweet-tart lemon -- creams, curds, puffs, and fluffs. But the pies in my mind are closer to the pies in Basil's hand, the meat pie, the steak and kidney, the beef and mushroom -- Four 'n' Twenty puts the cow's anus in there, we used to tell one another at school, innocently bringing Patrick White's connection between the mouth and the arse into our discussions, literati in embryo we were -- my idea of a pie is an object with gravy; a pie without gravy is the thing that appears in the world while the world is waiting for a pie with gravy to arrive; it's a stopgap; and this is the reason I began writing about meat pies in the first place, not so much for Patrick White, or his characters, or his book, or even Christina Stead -- to be honest with you, I want a meat pie.







* For example: "Some young men still refer to their homes as 'the pie house' -- a tribute to their mothers' baking skills." "And some Farm Journal readers tell us they bake birthday pies for their husbands by request." "Young women, as recently as a generation ago, practiced to bake pretty pies of exceptional quality for pie-supper auctions in one-room country schoolhouses [...] [the auctioneer] hinted who baked the pie he held, removing the lid of the box just enough to give the tantalized young beaux a glimpse of the treat within." "Remember that pies please men. Since men are the great pie eaters and promoters, let's give a rancher friend the last word ..."

**According to both books, the cook can anticipate at least four different categories or types of praise. Type 1: Surprise and delight at the physical presence of the pie, its dimensions and colouring. Type 2: Explicit reference to the taste of the pie. Type 3: Requests for the volume of the gift to be increased, eg, I'd love another slice. Type 4: Attempts to discern the origins of the pie, its Eden, eg, Did you make that yourself, Oh I must have the recipe.

After I'd finished typing that post I came across this conversation in Leonora Carrington's Hearing Trumpet, and thought; ha; coincidence.

Mrs. Gambit thought, no doubt, that I was getting too familiar, so she changed the subject of the conversation. "We have cooking classes once a week," she said. "People can practise self-control by making sweetmeats for everyone else, without tasting any of their own cooking."

Though neither Pie nor the Pie Cookbook expects the cook to starve. "This is the best cheese pie you've ever made or tasted," they say: etc.

(Edit: Tom from Wuthering Expectations's said some friendly things about this post on Twitter. Much appreciated.

Second edit: I don't know if anyone remembers the muttering some months ago when the current owner of Boongarre (which was one of Stead's childhood homes), decided to add redevelopments to the place, but now he's selling it. That listing will vanish eventually, and the link will go dead, but for now the property blurb looks like this:

History, charm, absolute waterfront

Sydneys most privileged waterfront locale on the tip of Watsons Bay peninsula in the heart of exclusive Camp Cove. "Boongarre" nestles within Sydney Harbour National Park, Green Point Reserve and the waters of Sydney Harbour, on 1214sqm land (approx). Its 270 degree exquisite views, with all that is Watsons Bay at the forefront and Sydney CBD on the near horizon.

Originally built in the 1870s, its original features are still very much in evidence and these integrate harmoniously with an aesthetically faithful restoration and renovation. It has both the allure of an easygoing 4/5 bedroom family retreat and the grace of an architecturally significant Australian residence. It was the childhood home of renowned author, Christina Stead, and owned by the Stead family from 1918-1980.

Both the elegant lounge on ground level and the gracious master on the floor above are fronted by bay window clusters that overlook its own huge stretch of private gardens and the vast spread of Sydney Harbour beyond. Leafy stone courtyards extend all major ground floor rooms. One of these edges an early extension that provides an extra large casual family room or a teenage retreat with ensuite.

A babys room links conveniently to the master through its ensuite. The 3 car lock-up garage spreads to a generous workroom, and there is forecourt parking for 2-4 more cars.

Property ID: 2009546006)

join the mess round her mouth

Patrick White often gives his characters food and he often lets them fart. Both ends of the alimentary canal are allowed to have their say, and I even wonder if he found himself doing it, for the first time, because he wanted to be fair: imagine that one end of the relevant tube made its appearance in a story he was writing, and by its presence it invoked, like magic, the other end. After that he couldn't leave that other end out. It was pressing to get into existence, so he let it through. Elizabeth Hunter in his Eye of the Storm, is provided with a pineapple, and she drops, too, stony pellets into a commode. "Naus-e-ating!" says Elizabeth's daughter Dorothy when her brother Basil gives her a meat pie. "She could feel the tears hurtling hot down her cheek to join the mess round her mouth." White's characters are often disgusted by their food, or the author will be disgusted for them, they're left grubby, and eating is dirty and babyish. "Basil has swallowed his last mouthful. He was wiping fingers on his breast-pocket foulard." Basil fouls his foulard* and gravy runs from the pie down his chin, he speaks and "sprays the windscreen with several fragments of gristle."

Dorothy loathes the meat pie, and not the pie on its own, but herself in the act of eating: "her unwillingness and contempt turned to loathing; worse on discovering something loathsome in herself: she was filled with a guilty voluptuousness as though biting into her own flesh." A person has to open a mouth in order to eat, and Dorothy would rather not open herself for anything; her way of coping with awkward moments is to open her handbag and look inside seriously for nothing in particular, then snap it closed. Sometimes I read her like this: The world has tried to open me up? I take my revenge with this bag. I open it, I look inside. I make a little mimicry of the world's assault on me. Revenge in miniature. I'll be the prosecutor here. (There are other ways to look at the bag. I won't go into them.) But she can't live without "biting into her own flesh." She has to eat.

She is sensitive and hysterical, and so is her author. His prose is screwed so tightly to a point, and the implications he draws are so large and supernatural (Elizabeth Hunter opening her eyes slightly in my last post and her nurse perceiving, all of a sudden, beauty, death, a pure spirit world, and a goddess), he describes incomprehensible eternity pressed into small physical events, like big feet in small shoes, repeated events -- and eating and the eviction of morsels and gases, what's that but the epitome of compulsory repeated events? Here is pressure and sadism carried out in a routine way: the dismemberment, torture, and crushing of food.

In life he liked to cook, he liked to eat with friends, and ate a meal with Christina Stead on more than one occasion. Stead's character Sam Pollit forcing chewed banana between his lips into the mouth of his daughter has a mirror image in literature, and that mirror image appears in Patrick White, during the early chapters of The Vivisector, as Hurtle Duffield's mother pushes soft chocolates from her mouth into the mouth of her son.

There is food-warfare in White and food-warfare in Stead, and they are two different styles of warfare. Food in White is personal and invasive, the characters smear themselves, they betray themselves with food (we see Basil's thoughts about the pie and he looks like a poseur), they become dirty with food, the food attacks anything ethereal in them, the act of being in the world is plain and grubby, this grubbiness is a reminder that they exist. The nightmare of this book is the opposite of a sleeping nightmare, that dissolving and slippery evanescence: the nightmare in Storm is to be helplessly embodied, awake and trapped in flesh, to be Samuel Beckett's Unnamable, a consciousness revolving on top of a tower of carcass.

But Stead's people are not sensitive to that kind of anxiety, they like to know that they exist, in fact they don't want anyone else to forget it, and so they talk and talk (one in Cotters' England talks another character to death), or they make displays of money, the warfare they wage is directed outward, at the social human world which they desire on general principle to overwhelm (as did their creator, proud of the fact that House of All Nations was eight hundred pages long), and food is part of that warfare, an exterior battle, character against character. Henny Pollit's fight against her husband takes many forms and one of them is this: she insists on butter for her table and meat instead of beans. But the most spectacular example of food-warfare comes in the middle of House, when one couple stuffs another couple with so much food that the husband of the other couple nearly faints. His wife discreetly puts a single peach on his plate. The other couple fight back -- they pile him high with fruit and cream. "Some strange feminine instinct prompted Mme Haller to feed that great mountain of flesh till his eyes popped." This is a hostile generosity, this hospitality is greed reversed; greed is an idea that Stead pursues through this book -- the idea of overfeeding. A man in The People With the Dogs decides to play a prank on a women, so he puts up a sign, inviting strangers into the house for all-you-can-eat steaks and potato, cooked by this women. A mob of passers-by arrives demanding food. The women as a group are taken off-guard. They feel compelled to cook.

[to be continued.]







* I don't think White uses this word anywhere else in the book, which makes the placement here seem deliberate, the foul in foulard brought out by the foul scene around it -- the spraying gristle, the hot liquid running down Dorothy's face -- here is the precise naming of a clothing item in partnership with floppy gross sloppery; accuracy mating with a sewer, which is a common kind of sadism in White's language.

You can look in David Marr's Patrick White, a Life for stories about the man's cooking.

from which comes congruence, and the harmony of dissident parts

(The first paragraph of this post refers here and there to earlier posts. If you haven't read them then don't worry, it should all clear up by paragraph two.)







But your knowledge of gardens isn't confined to only two examples, you know they're not defined solely by what can be excluded from them, the conclusion at the end of the last post was based on minimal evidence, madness, madness, and yet if that was all you had, then why wouldn't it seem convincing? Ideas about plants, trees, beautiful flower beds, whatever else strangers imagine when they think of gardens, none of that reaches you. The idea of gardens solidifies around the idea of exclusion and your brain starts to provide you with a logical shape for this garden that can keep things out, it explains to you, your brain does, this -- a high wall, spikes, invisible force fields, signs erected, unspoken social understandings, children scolded, spy cameras, laws to protect the desires of garden owners, and so on, a society and shape builds up inside you, and humbly you live there for a while. My brain was linking one thing to another eagerly again yesterday when, as I was reading The Eye of the Storm, I came across a character who was (and as I write this I wonder what I mean when I say that a character is something, but how else do I phrase that thought) a married woman's French great-aunt named Eulalie. There is a Eulalie in Proust as well, not an aunt herself, but a friend of an aunt, and the words "Eulalie" and "aunt" so close together put my brain into a state where, when, later, Patrick White brought a couch into the story, I had the impression very vividly that the character in his book was going to sleep on the same couch that Proust's Narrator gave away to a brothel.

It seemed so convincing that I only dreamishly wondered how the characters had made their way into a brothel since they hadn't been in one a moment earlier. (When I say "dreamishly" I mean that my mind coped with the question automatically, as it does in dreams whenever anything impossible happens.)

When one of White's nurses on page one hundred and eleven tries to imagine "beauty, such as you had longed for, but had so far failed to grasp" I saw (prompted by the appearance of the word "beauty" and the idea of failing to grasp it) that she was going through the same dilemma as Julian in Lawrence Durrell's Revolt of Aphrodite. They should get together -- I thought immediately -- it would be mutually beneficial, and I congratulated myself on this brilliant thought, wondering if there was any way of somehow getting a message through to one of them, to let them know how much better their lives would be if they followed my advice, which would only be a suggestion, nothing pushy, just a good idea in which they might be interested.

Furthermore, I could point out, not only are both of you thinking about grasping beauty, you're also both inspired by a woman who is like an "idol" and who has blue eyes. The dying Elizabeth Hunter in Storm had eyes like sapphires when she was younger, while Iolanthe in Aphrodite has a pair "bluer than any stone." Julian wants to find an example of a beautiful woman because he believes that an experience of beauty will introduce people to a distinct and valuable definition of freedom. He explains, "But the only road to freedom of such a kind lies through an aesthetic of some kind. Beauty, from which comes congruence, and the harmony of dissident parts and which echoes back the great contrivances of nature." Elizabeth Hunter's nurse has already had a vision of a state that might be the freedom Julian is envisaging. Her patient opens her eyes and "one of the rare coruscations occurred, in which the original sapphire buried under the opalescence" forcefully appears. "Momentarily at least this fright of an idol became the goddess hidden inside: of life which you longed for, but hadn't yet dared embrace; of beauty such as you imagined, but had so far failed to grasp (with which Col grappled, you bitterly suspected, somewhere in the interminably agitated depths of music); and finally, of death, which hadn't concerned you, except as something to be tidied away, till now you were faced with the vision of it." And Julian's plan for Iolanthe reaches one of its crucial moments when she opens her eyes: "with a long delicious inspiration the lady woke; the two eyes, bluer than any stone, inspected first the clean white ceiling, and then travelled slowly down to take in our own surrounding faces; recognition dawned."

At the end of Storm a character looks into a genuine sapphire and goes into a rapture, his chest becomes painful, "flesh was translated into light," and when, confronted, he accidentally drops the gem he is "temporarily blinded:" he has mislaid his eyes.

So in these stories there is the idea that there is a thing that can work like a shock or, in Julian's word, "congruence," leaving you disembodied and freed, or with an idea of disembodiment and freedom. (Though you know as soon as they start describing this state of freedom, that every attempt to reach it has to fail: what else could happen?) There is probably some way I could compare that to the experience of being freed (or not freed but shaken loose) from the book, when I thought that Storm had shifted magically into the same brothel that appears in Lost Time, the identical brothel, and we were in Paris even though we were also in Sydney, where most of Storm is set.

Books are made of cues and holes, the reader fills those holes, the reader goes to work and patches up the countryside that the writer presents in glimpses, filling out the landscape with a sincere inner anticipation aimed (depending on the book) at trees and paddocks (we approach objects before they are there, suggests Heidegger, we anticipate them so that we can encounter them) or buildings, mountains, city streets, houses by creeks (Christina Stead), sombre forests (Ann Radcliffe), until you're convinced that if a character walked over to the left of their present location they still wouldn't fall into space, even though the author could fling them into space as easily as they could make them stroll into a room -- still, you think they won't, unless the author has already let you know, via examples, that this is the way they prefer to work, booting characters into the stratosphere, dropping them off cliffs in the middle of Bourke Street, tormenting them with vacuums, etc. There are many authors who try to make you forget that evidence in a book is not a law of nature but an author's choice. The narrator of Gerald Murnane's short story When the Mice Failed to Arrive believed, when he was a boy, that a storm overhead meant lightning was going to come in through the classroom window and strike one child dead, specifically, exactly one, so he prayed that it wouldn't be him. When he took an unusual route on his walk home from school he imagined his father searching for him, and when he saw him, the narrator thought, his father would tell him that something terrible had happened and the house had burnt down. There he was, this narrator, walking through a peaceful calm Australian suburb (I don't remember Murnane using the words "peaceful" or "calm," that's my personal polyfilla) believing that a disaster had struck his home and nothing else around it. There were no visible signs of this disaster yet he was sure it had happened; his lying mind was completely convinced.

to use his garden

When I said in my last post that Ruskin wouldn't let Carlyle have free run of his garden because he spat, I was thinking of a passage in Joan Abse's book, John Ruskin: the Passionate Moralist. It goes like this: "Later, in Praeterita, Ruskin was to express remorse that he had not in these years given Carlyle complete freedom to use his garden, whenever he wished, as a refuge from the heat and dust of Chelsea. But, in some unpublished passages of the manuscript, he disclosed his reasons for not doing so which subsequently he evidently thought better of making public. The 'insuperable obstacle' had been Carlyle's smoking and, even worse, his spitting! Ruskin confessed that he had liked to keep his garden in pristine condition so that he and sometimes Joan, could always lie down at any time to examine flowers or grass without fear of anything but a little dust on their clothes. With Carlyle in the garden, indulging his bad habit, this would clearly have become an impossibility. So he concluded wryly: 'I never was happy in listening to Carlyle, but when the end of his pipe was up his own chimney."

Ruskin, according to that paragraph, felt no desire for the pleasure Carlyle must have acquired by smoking and spitting, a fact interesting to me, who in his shoes might have felt jealous that I couldn't have that pleasure too, smoking and spitting, spitting and smoking, and tipping out my pipe ash on the lawn, as Carlyle might have done, or injecting samples of my own private liquid into the secretive soil of the planet, leaving my saliva behind to spin away from me into the night with the turn of the earth, leaving it to arrive one day perhaps at the top of a mountain, as Ruskin in Modern Painters imagines a grain of sand doing, elevated by heaving topography from the subterranean strata bed of a dead stream to the peak of a mountain where comets fly past with their arses on fire and clouds precipitate rain or snow, depending on the time of year. (I came across a webpage recently where someone was claiming that the word mystical came from the antique mist-hakel, or mist-hat, a common phrase about seven hundred years ago among English-speaking people who wanted to refer to the clouds that hover around the peaks of mountains or hills, but this is contradicted by every online dictionary I've been able to find. They all say it's plain mystic plus -al, and this is a disappointment to me, imagining, as I wanted to do, that every time anyone described something as mystical they were in fact subconsciously contemplating the qualities of clouds, specifically lingering ones, seen from below by people in valleys, or, another way of putting it, the word mystical would always have suggested looking upwards.)

When he was a boy, John Ruskin I mean, he wanted to play with the anthills in his parents' garden, but the gardener kept sweeping them away. "I had nothing animate to care for, in a childish way, but myself, some nests of ants, which the gardener would never leave undisturbed for me, and a sociable bird or two." If you put this fact next to the adult Ruskin's private dislike of Thomas Carlyle's spit, and let's say for the sake of argument that you knew nothing else about gardens, you might conclude that gardens exist so that people can keep certain things out of them, and that the definition of "garden" is "an area of land from which objects are excluded," with these objects being whatever the controller of that land wants them to be, anthills, body fluids, anything, or perhaps, taking these two examples, you could narrow it down to, "objects which are physical evidence produced by the activities of living creatures" (eg, ants, Thomas Carlyle) for we have seen no proof that any other kind of thing can be excluded, and perhaps nothing else can.

designed to be seen in relation

I was reading Ruskin's Fors Clavigera when I came across Giotto's Charity, like this, in the Ninth Letter, "and make the field gain on the street, not the street on the field; and bid the light break into the smoke-clouds, and bear it in their hands, up to these loathsome city walls, the gifts of Giotto's Charity, corn and flowers." Of course I was rivetted immediately, as you are too, I know, because Proust read Ruskin, translated him as well, critiqued him in the preface that has been published separately as On Reading, and he uses Giotto's Charity in Swann's Way, Swann himself giving that nickname to a kitchen maid who wears "ample smocks" which "recalled the cloaks in which Giotto shrouds some of the allegorical figures in his paintings." Well, how goes it with Giotto’s Charity? he says to the Narrator, in Moncrieff's Englishing.

And, so, because I have a human mind and because that mind likes to link thing to thing and make what seem like logical deductions at the time (following the same neat and weblike system as more obvious logical deductions, such as, for example, the one you'd come to if you saw a body hit the pavement ahead of you, then looked up and spotted an open window) -- because my mind likes to deduce, and I can't say the same for yours, since it would be presumptuous, you being you and not me, so I shouldn't -- and perhaps I shouldn't even say this about me, but that's another deduction, and as I said, I'm addicted to them -- a hunter in a jungle, thrilled by pawprints -- anyway, because my mind likes to deduce, I thought that Proust must have had Giotto's Charity lodged inside him after reading the Fors, and, therefore, when the opportunity arrived for a comparison to surge up in his mind and run out of the brain into the medium of language, which was waiting like a prophylactic to enclose it, then Giotto's Charity was there, ready to go, schloop, into the rubber. Well done Giotto's Charity -- provided by chance, stored against need, and utilised at last. The final step being the rare one. Think of all the brainstuff we never use, piles of it, lounging in heaps. They talk about an author's influences; one day they should look at all the author's noninfluences, all those hundreds of books they read and forgot. Reading: what a near-total waste of time.

If all the authors in the world mentioned Giotto's Charity in every single book then I would probably have passed over it in Ruskin and taken no notice, but as it was the words gleamed out at me, a point of focus and apparent clarity, golden bridge for a second, and I shaded my eyes, impressed by the shine or sheen. And the same when I came across the phrase "all the year round" on the first page of Charles Dickens' introduction to the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, knowing that he used the same set of words twenty years later as the title of a magazine. That human habit of linking, too, might have been the reason why an article about Geoffrey Hill appeared in the Guardian on January 31st, an article that ZMKC linked to in a comment after my post about Les Murray's Manuscript Roundel. "Carol Ann Duffy is 'wrong' about poetry, says Geoffrey Hill", is the article's title, and the journalist, Alison Flood, was referring to a lecture Hill gave last November in Oxford. It was one of the same Oxford lectures I was listening to while I was unscrewing my bottle of oil. Duffy in an interview had decided that "the poem is a form of texting" and Hill in his lecture disagreed, saying that poetry is language condensed but texting is language truncated, and also that "texting is linear only. Poetry is lines in depth designed to be seen in relation or in deliberate disrelation to lines above and below," which is true.

He mentions two of Duffy's poems, and mentions, too, her background and his, very similar, he says, neither of their families were wealthy. One of Hill's grandmothers at least was very very poor, as we know from the Mercian Hymns. She was a nailmaker, "hare-lipped by the searing wire." "Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak / this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood / and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg." But he and Duffy have gone in different directions: she is Britain's poet laureate, a populist, eager for outreach, and he is Geoffrey Hill, with a reputation for difficulty and being a crank and a harlequin, as he describes himself, a Ruskinian role -- Ruskin in the Fors is aware of his popular place as a crank, and plays with it -- I think plays is the right word -- he plays with it and also is it; and the same with Hill, who refers to himself in the lectures as a "Ruskinian Tory," and again in an interview he gave afterwards. "I would describe myself as a sort of Ruskinian Tory. It is only Ruskinian Tories these days who would sound like old-fashioned Marxists. I read and re-read Ruskin, particularly Fors Clavigera."

But Duffy. It's worth mentioning that Hill doesn't drag her into the speech gratuitously, no, this isn't a tangential attack, instead he integrates her, combining her with other references, for she is, it seems, like them ("them" being the Elizabethan poets, London riots, popular singers, and other items he mentions) part of the ordinary material of his days, whatever came along to aid him, debris that he seeks out or scoops up by chance. She is part of a larger atmosphere of opinion. He brings her in as he brought everything else in, ideas clustering around a core, a hazy rather than direct method of building an essay-point. As far as essays goes he really does essai, like Montaigne, like Fors too, in a cumulative way which lets him wander, like water in a mangrove swamp, as opposed to, say, water firing itself straight down the chute of a ravine, instead spreading out into marshes, pools, and billabongs, but always remaining water. So too Geoffrey Hill, no matter what he talks about, always reminds you that he is Geoffrey Hill. "Shit-eating grin," he happens to remark at one point, discussing the behaviour of politicians, and the phrase seems so appropriate that he stops and relishes it all over again, "shit-eating grrin," and gives his considered opinion of the words. And he marvels as he remembers that he is standing near a place where Ruskin lectured, once upon a time, with Thomas Carlyle in the room, a pair of friends, although Ruskin wouldn't let Carlyle have free run of his garden, because he spat.

But the point I was getting to when I mentioned the Guardian, was that the interview Hill read, the one with Duffy, was published in the culture pages of that same newspaper, as was a review by Sam Leith which Hill critiques later, and in fact listening to these lectures I get the impression that he reads the book pages of that publication pretty avidly, and so, when, at the end of the lecture, he makes a disdainful comment about the art and culture sections of newspapers overall, you could connect that disdain back to the Guardian in particular, although all other papers can be implicated as well, since he didn't name one when he was doing his disdaining.

I suspect that the link between the article and the speech, the initial bridge, the moment when Alison Flood felt the focus of alertness take shape between herself and Geoffrey Hill, was the same instant that he brought up the name of her employer, a word to which she must be perpetually alert, brain trembling for its cue like brain of lynx or jackal, his voice tickling the trigger marked Guardian inside her head, so that the true subject of "Carol Ann Duffy is 'wrong' about poetry, says Geoffrey Hill" is not Geoffrey Hill or Carol Ann Duffy or the lecture or Oxford or poetry or professor or laureate, but the paper itself.