a bower about a dozen yards off

Wondering if this dependable house phenomenon in British literature, after thriving quietly for many years in the service of other things, was seized, expanded, and decorated by Dickens, for Mr Wemmick in particular, but for others as well, e.g., Marley becoming a doorknob, Krook characterising the front of his shop with bottles, Dick Swiveller referring to "his single chamber" in the plural "as his rooms, his lodgings, or his chambers, conveying to his hearers a notion of indefinite space, and leaving their imaginations to wander through long suites of lofty halls, at pleasure."

Jaggers is so secure in his personal cunning and viability that he never locks his house; he never needs to, for no one will rob him. “You know where I live; now, no bolt is ever drawn there; why don’t you do a stroke of business with me? Come; can’t I tempt you?” he says to the best burglars, according to Mr Wemmick. Wemmick, meanwhile, has his moat, his drawbridge, his happy pantomime of security and wealth. Jaggers, as mentioned, is his own security. His protection does not need a look. They both derive pleasure from their different securities. Each one is integral to the state of his own house. The house is about well-being. Wemmick talks about himself being fantastically "besieged" in the future and holding out with his cucumber frame.

Then, he conducted me to a bower about a dozen yards off, but which was approached by such ingenious twists of path that it took quite a long time to get at.

The device of the secure house might lead (if you could trace it) to the hidden house, Badger's den in Willows, 1908 - this personal ownership of the mysterious grotto, hideaway, or prison cell, of a Gothic novel, the ruins of a Roman settlement holding up his ceilings, too, ruins domesticated – and it also might lead to the sight of the Twins on their tree, spotted but invulnerable in Titus Groan, 1946. And did the commercial wealth of the Victorians contribute to it; the Great House, the Secret Garden?

(Is the dependable fictional house more particular to this nationality than to others? I am not going to hazard a guess, though now there's Beowulf, their ancient chronicle, the story of a double home invasion, or one home invasion answered with another – the action taking place in Denmark, although the manuscript we have was made elsewhere, English, indoors; and Beowulf himself was no doubt a direct inspiration for Aunty Jack centuries later threatening to Come Round To Your House And Rip Your Bloody Arms Off if you didn't tune in to the show again next week. Observe, if you will, this merging of the hero Beowulf and the villain, Grendel's Mother, standing, in the persona of Aunty Jack, upon a rock, her hand in a boxing glove, grunting at you; how well you can imagine her seizing a foe and wrestling in the dark hall of Hrothgar, or living in a swamp, being of massive nature as she evidently is. That old hall, maybe, developing, coming within the reach of more people, not strictly kings and thanes; Wemmick inhabiting his Heorot.)

suddenly through the gap

Mudpuddle points me back to Sarraute's Age of Suspicion: Essays on the Novel, a book that I have come to realise describes Sarraute's own habits as well as those of the other authors she discusses. Over the course of her career her fiction grew more and more closely into the frame of pursuit she ascribes to Dostoevsky, "these attractions, these feigned withdrawals, these pursuits and flights, these flirtings and rubbings, these clashes, caresses, bites and embraces, to excite, disturb, bring up to the surface and allow to spread, the immense, quivering mass, whose incessant ebb and flow, whose scarcely perceptible vibration, are the very pulse of life."

"This is common for an author," I say to myself, "they see their own reflections," remembering the moment between four and five o'clock on Saturday afternoon when I looked at the preface to a 1951 Oxford edition of Sterne's Sentimental Journey, and noticed that the last owner of the book had written, "herself" in the margin with a pen next to one of the paragraphs. I turned to the end of the essay and the author was Virginia Woolf. "We hardly know what jest, what jibe, what flash of poetry is not going to glance suddenly through the gap which this astonishingly agile pen has cut in the thick-set hedge of English prose," she had written, the other person then beginning their pen-mark at "glance" but "glance" in this book is at the start of a line and I think this is the only reason why they have begun there; really they were reacting to "agile pen." They believe that Woolf had such a pen, and that it cut a gap "in the thick-set hedge of English prose." Later I saw a mark in the same ink next to a place where Woolf quotes Sterne, "I think I can see the precise and distinguishing marks of national characters more in these nonsensical minutiae, than in the most important matters of state," -- but the ink mark leaves out the end of the quotation, "where great men of all nations talk and stalk so much alike, that I would not give nine-pence to chuse amongst them," which may mean that they did not think Woolf had the same opinion of great men that Sterne did, or that it was not germane to their point. Next to it they have written, "All imp. to V.W." On another page there is a squiggled line next to, "It is thus that Sterne transfers our interest from the outer to the inner. It is no use going to the guide-book; we must consult our own minds." This time the person has not written the name of Virginia Woolf or put any note but I believe they are still thinking of her. She is in their minds so much that they have stopped using her name. She is implicit. At the end of the essay they have circled the word "must" in "but enough of must; it is not a word that Sterne was fond of using" and given it a long tail that runs into the margin where they have added, "yes thank heavens." This could mean that they think Woolf is too demanding or it may mean that they want to remind themselves of the thing she has done here in her essay.

If they are getting so comfortable with her that they are leaving out her name then they might have been at the stage where they want to talk back to her as well; stop deviating from my comforts, Woolf. The end of the preface is about to meet us both, I see it coming, I will tell you to shut up now, knowing that you will do it: nice: obey -- and she does. "Both the gentleman and the lady are trying to control the novelist’s perspective so that it shall resemble and reinforce their own," she wrote once, in her essay on Robinson Crusoe. The person who wrote "Asshole" against one of the villains in my copy of Radcliffe's The Italian knew that they and the author were in cahoots.

on where we wanted to go

Why should I compare David Ireland to Virginia Woolf, I ask myself, when there's nothing in common between them, and the difference is so obvious, so absolutely gaping and open, like a chasm or pit; why should they be brought to the same area – because I had his two books in my head and then I read hers; that's why – it was the chronological proximity of my reading. Taking a non-fiction hardback off the shelf at UNLV a few days ago I discovered that the North American author (whoever they were, I'm not sure) had read a number of Australian books and come away feeling puzzled because the authors seemed not to arrange an ambition for themselves and move after it in pursuit; instead they circled around an idea that they did not directly reveal or, perhaps, she suspected, understand. Then the book would end.

The two David Irelands were like that, I thought: this circling around a large unstated balloon (through a mosaic of small scenes) and the ending would be a conclusive destruction.

But he tells you that direction itself is a treacherous idea, and the suspicion he feels towards any purposed motion is one part of his satire; purpose will be thwarted, it's the way of the world. "The Boatman and I were concentrated absolutely on where we wanted to go. We had no mind left over to escape each other. Back and forth we went from side to side, left right left right in perfect time, getting no farther forward; each, for the sake of a tiny inconvenience, wishing the other had never existed." Those are the last lines of The Unknown Industrial Prisoner.

Completeness and intellectual working-through are problems in Woolf's work, according to John Cowper Powys in his 1931 monograph on Dorothy Richardson. It is a strength in Richardson that she doesn't do that, he says. "She takes her place in the great role of thinkers who, like Heraclitus and Goethe and Nietzsche are intent on Life Itself, in its mysterious flowing stream, rather than any human hypothesis of its whence and whither."

olive trees bearing splendid fruit

In particular, it is recorded of Sir William James, that he regarded this emperor with feelings of abhorrence so personal and deadly, as to refuse him his customary titular honours whenever he had occasion to mention him by name. Yet it was the whole Roman people that conferred upon him his title of Augustus. But Sir William, ascribing no force to the acts of a people who had sunk so low as to exult in their chains, and to decorate with honours the very instruments of their own vassalage, would not recognise this popular creation, and spoke of him always by his family name of Octavius.

(Thomas de Quincey, The Caesars (1851))

None of the immortals or of mortal men heard
her voice, not even the olive trees bearing splendid fruit.
Only the gentle-tempered daughter of Persaios,
Hekate of the shining headband, heard from her cave,
and lord Helios, the splendid son of Hyperion heard
the maiden calling father Kronides; he sat
apart from the gods away in the temple of prayers,
accepting beautiful sacrifices from mortal men.

(Anonymous, To Demeter, from The Homeric Hymns, tr. Apostolos N. Athanassakis (1976))

utterly vanished -- how strange it was

Moments being weighted and weighed is what I see then, when I look, and why do I see them, and what am I looking for: well. The load lost: “it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished -- how strange it was! -- a few sayings like this about cabbages” (Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway).

And then the madness of swagmen in Don Watson's book, The Bush: Travels in the Heart of Australia, the author proposing that the “jolly swagman” in Paterson's poem might have been jolly because he was not all there, mentally speaking, this schizophrenic fleeing persecution (the one down the road who screamed at me, “Police! Police!”), and yet sanity would do the same job, the security officers at one of the casinos having a man flee on them the other night when all they were going to do was trespass him, but he fled, they fled after him (and that moment's weight was felt electrically by the officer, he reported afterwards: he could feel a voice inside him telling him not to run, but instinct took over and he ran as a dog runs when you run away from it. Walk away next time! they told the man when they caught him. Walk calmly and we wouldn't have worried about you, but you ran), they felt suspicious now, they did a background check, and behold the man had warrants out for his arrest -- now in gaol. “For thy Self is the master of thyself, and thy Self is thy refuge. Train therefore thyself well, even as a merchant trains a fine horse”  (The Dhammapada, tr Juan Mascaró).

But my point was that we tend to forget the likely insanity of swagmen in spite of it being stated throughout the literature of the time, on and off, and Henry Lawson finishing his story with those words about the bush, “the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds.”

It is so unacknowledged that there is not even any denial of it.

The man in the casino was sane, and so I'm guessing was the one on Friday night who acted against a taunt by knocking one victim unconscious and beating the other one's face against the edge of a concrete box until the skin was off his forehead. I never expected to see another man's skull, remarked the security sergeant. The forehead-man was drunk when he came up with the taunt, and potentially delirious with the lightness of moments; say he felt instinctively that his moments had no consequences. “'Here shall I dwell in the season of rains, and here in winter and summer;' thus thinks the fool, but he does not think of death.”

peaceful waves

Bathgate's reviewer never mentions rhymes. The poem as a poem -- as a mechanism of language -- is almost concealed from the person who reads the review, aside from the mention of “lines which are both wise and true.” What's a line like when it's wise and true? The meaning matters to him, not the form. A poem can do two things in this review: it can introduce you to characters and it can describe landscape. It would be indistinguishable from prose if it didn't have those “lines.” The reviewer quotes from Ivan Graeme.

The glossy kine browse lazily,
Or on the grass repose.
The grey-duck swims so warily
In pool where raupo grows:
While from the sea there swiftly comes
The black-capped, long-winged tern;
The drowsy blue-fly heavy hums
Among the russet fern.
The wide Pacific's peaceful waves
Are scarce heard from the shore,
Save where a dark cliff's feet it laves
With distant muffled roar.

He likes the kind of poem that could be described as an “immersive experience,” smooth, jerkless, joltless, giving him the beautiful feeling of flying through the pages -- which is the style that Bathgate pursues; and so the reviewer doesn't describe it, he doesn't need to, it's the warm water in which he's lying; he looks up.

miming the appearance of characters to whom something happens

When I remember that line from the Alexander Bathgate review in the Literary World, “if the author had been blessed with a spark of humour, the verses would have gone straight into the fire,” I realise that I don't know where the reviewer laughed.

Why should I know where the reviewer laughed; why should that be open to me – because it's a review, I say.

The contempt is clear but the details indeterminate. I can see the general sentiment but I can't agree or argue with the specific thought; and I suspect this lacuna is irritating me simply because it is a lacuna, and not because I sincerely want to know the details of the reviewer's contemplation, mild frottage of the brain, and why feel it in the first place I ask, when there is the problem of vanishing electrons that I could be studying instead: what a waste of a human mind, what a dilettante, when I could be more like the mathematician I met on Thursday, who was working his way through quantum physics to find an equation that would put his schizophrenic visions into logical perspective – set theory, he said, and a woman who was eavesdropping interrupted us, saying, Well we've all been to college.

From my perspective (as she came sideways into the corner of my vision) she was acting out what Jacques Ranciere calls “the intoxication of art,” which is, “mining the act of appearing, instead of miming the appearance of characters to whom something happens, or who feel something,” (Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, translated by Zakir Paul) though from her perspective I can believe that she was coming at Ranciere from the opposite direction and that she was miming a character to whom something had happened, and who felt something.

"If they had been blessed with a spark of humour," she thought, " -- and by that I mean proportion -- this conversation would go straight into the fire."

In the rest of the review I see that Bathgate's reviewer is irritated by the footnotes (“they are a necessary evil, and should be reduced to the smallest compass”), that he is bored by the characters, and that he admires “excellent bits of landscape” in some of the poems. Iredale might be “singularly fatuous” but “a few lines” in the book “are both wise and true,” though he doesn't tell you what the lines are and here again is the lacuna (“Then kill it,” says Irma), for nothing in the other poems seems any smarter to me than Iredale, a long piece of blank verse which argues that we should reject sexual attraction in favour of platonic love between men and women because “higher love” can last forever, extending even into heaven, but “Passion lasts a fleeting day” -- the poet presenting his idea in a binary moral narrative about a man who stumbles into “passionate love” and has to be rescued posthumously from a supernatural giant named Lust, by the devotion of two pure women: “both are clear from stain.”

I snickered at an ungainly rhyme on page two, “Fair Alice Bain: Anon he knew the pain,” and that was as close as I came to an instinctive understanding of the reviewer's point about Bathgate's sense of humour.

pasteboard and filched laurel

When Richard Tuttle was a young man he heard that the famous artists of his time were making their art large because they wanted to represent the universe, which encouraged him to make his art small so that he could approach the same desire from a different angle. Is that a story of dissatisfaction or not, I wonder. The reviewer who wrote about Alexander Bathgate's Far South Fancies for the Literary World was more direct when he said, “if the author had been blessed with a spark of humour, the verses would have gone straight into the fire” -- criticising the writer for his lack of dissatisfaction; and saying that Bathgate was not talented at the essential skill of discontent which is also discernment: “the most zealous and earnest, therefore the most discontented,” as Ruskin refers to some “leading masters” of his day when he reviews Charles Eastlake's Materials for a History of Oil-Painting (1847).

As though these two critics believe that the artist has summoned a demon that deserves pain as a sacrificial recompense for its appearance, Ruskin even using that word, “pain,” in The Cestus of Aglaia.

I say triumphal home, for, indeed, triumphal arches which you pass under, are but foolish things, and may be nailed together any day, out of pasteboard and filched laurel; but triumphal doors, which you can enter in at, with living laurel crowning the Lares, are not so easy of access: and outside of them waits always this sad portress, Patience; that is to say, the submission to the eternal laws of Pain and Time, and acceptance of them as inevitable, smiling at the grief. So much pains you shall take—so much time you shall wait: that is the Law. Understand it, honor it; with peace of heart accept the pain, and attend the hours; and as the husbandman in his waiting, you shall see, first the blade, and then the ear, and then the laughing of the valleys. But refuse the Law, and seek to do your work in your own time, or by any serpentine way to evade the pain, and you shall have no harvest—nothing but apples of Sodom: dust shall be your meat, and dust in your throat—there is no singing in such harvest time.

When the Literary World reviewer writes “the verses” he is referring to Eric Iredale, the “most ambitious” poem in the book but “singularly fatuous,” he decides very confidently; though that confidence does not impose itself on the world firmly enough to stop The New Place: The Poetry of Settlement in New Zealand, 1852-1914 (1993, ed. Harvey McQueen) from associating Iredale with the word “fascinating.” It is “a fascinating blend of Victorian values and concerns worked into a recasting of the Ranolf and Amohia legend.” From that angle it can be fascinating and I have heard someone explain the urban fantasy book he was reading by saying that it had “an interesting concept.“ These two pieces of language go together.

would suit one another

This transience in the Heike, the characters pass but the story remains, the reader's transience proves the permanence of the story, we are unbearably destroyed, it unbearably retains itself, meanwhile warning itself that it will pass too. That is its lesson, which it is avoiding.

In Shirley Jackson's Sundial the people are refusing to change and not even refusing, they don't know that change would be possible, they have never thought about it, the proud and crimson notion of self-critique has never occurred to them, and even the end of the world and the death of every other human being is not changing them; the apocalypse won't complete their selfishness, the awesome dynamite of the air leaves them placid.

If they were made immortal somehow by the disaster then they would not change either (because the author has made them changeless), and if you transferred Murasaki Shikibu's characters from the Genji to the modern age they would still refer to people by their titles and by their descriptions (because she has made them that way), the names on their own feel too bare to these Heian souls even though the moderner tells them it is fine, it is a habit now, nobody minds, look you can call me Hiroko, I don't care, I'm wearing a Pokémon hat, but it would be the nature of a name to be ashamed of having been said, when they did it, the word "Hiroko" sounding filthy; they are like polite children who have been required to shout "fuck" and the Shining Prince shines red for he is blushing, he is bringing the old age back in a sluice of blood.

So, stasis in the Shirley Jackson, stasis implied, and in the Heike it is transience implied; the emphasis is on the characters' fortunes, not their behaviour, and those fortunes change. But in The Sundial Shirley Jackson is staring at her people's behaviour and introducing their changed fortune (the end of the world, the destruction of all human life, the firestorm) only as a sort of sarcastic counterpoint.

The reader scans the two books, the reader searches for new lessons since lessons seem to be hinted at or stated in the styles of each, the reader notices that the matriarch of The Sundial and Kiyomori in the Heike are very close to one another personality-wise, they are both stubborn, and the old woman on her deathbed would be calling for Yoritomo's head too, and Kiyomori, if he had been facing the end of the world, would be putting measures in place to assure his ongoing dominance in the new world, as the matriarch does, sorting out her crown and a golden dress, and if the author Shirley Jackson does not respond to her actions by calling her "profoundly sinful" (like the anonymous authors of the Heike regarding Kiyomori) then it is only because she, the writer, has moved into a phase of authorial repose that you could refer to as a cynical shrug. And what small touch or nudge would need to have occurred before she could have written those words, "profoundly sinful," instead of the ones she chose (native to her blood, the words she chose), what rotation on the axis of events, what refounding of cities or nations, the reconstitution of her childhood, the distribution of her feelings in a new direction, pushed there by some event that never in this plane occurred?

The reader looks at Kiyomori, looks at Mrs Halloran, and realises, "Those two would suit one another." This is the moment of inspiration and they announce, I will write a fanfic.

Conjunction! Kiyomori and Mrs Halloran! The fanfic writer pursues that conjunction, the conjunction is the point, the permutations of that conjunction, kinks, romance, murder, or whatever else, the conjunction being an intensifying agent or otherwise species of excitement-food, quick stab to the braincells that then suffer the ancestral memory of their freedom as single-celled organisms millennia ago traversing the nourishing slimes, this conjunction is the vehicle of change, therefore of transience -- the situation, as it has existed up to this point, ends -- the situation before in which Mrs Halloran and Kiyomori were not united and no connection between the Sundial and the Heike seemed possible ends, as, suddenly (genuinely suddenly, I say from experience, since it occurred to me as I was writing that last part of the sentence, "would suit one another" -- okay -- idea!) the connection is possible and likely and even demanded by the thought and why not, in this world where a thought can make anything seem mandatory, pretty much anything; and call that inspiration, call this Georg Trakl's "sweet corpse" at a different register, call it a ruthless magnetism.

building me temples and pagodas

This blurb on the inner flap says that the ur-theme of the Heike is transience -- "the fleeting nature of power and glory" -- the writer of the blurb taking into consideration the deaths of so many warriors and aristocrats, the dissolution of the incredible and nuanced Heike strength, the more-than-a-few references to Japan as a collection of "scattered millet grains" as if the nation is in danger of being licked up by a chicken, the characters comparing their lives to dewdrops, the assessment of passing tears in the sleeves of the aristocrats' robes, "they moistened their sleeves" (again and again), the number of buildings burnt, a statue of the Buddha accidentally melted, the capital shifted to Fukuhara then shifted back, the characters who renounce the world to become monks, nuns, or suicides, the multiplicity of rivers and sea-waves that need to be crossed; and the story is horrified by the opposite of this idea, Kiyomori's recalcitrant stubbornness, immobile and determined man, glaring at the skulls in his garden, not running away from the giant trickster face, and even the agony of his burning fatal illness will not stop him wanting Yoritomo's head.

"Never mind building me temples and pagodas,
never mind pious prayers for me once I am gone.
No, I want Yoritomo's head off and hung before my grave,
that is the only commemoration I wish."
What profoundly sinful words!

His stubbornness is not natural. But it might not be wrong to say that the Heike is in awe of him as Paradise Lost is in awe of Satan.

And yet the structure of the book in Royall Tyler's translation is steady, not fleeting or changeable, it stays around exerting its pressure on events, which are never allowed to wander away from the centre. The parasol stories can be romances or tragedies, they might involve a crowd in a city, they might describe lovers reciting poetry in a still garden at night (one parasol can be the opposite of another, is the point I'm making), but they are always relevant to the Heike clan or its enemies the Genji (they are in sympathy, these parasols, the mask changes but the purpose always keeps the same face).

Not one of the characters is immune to the gravity of the book. It binds them to its planetary surface. It bears them in the field of its momentum. Their transience is not transience for the reader, who sees them fixed by this gravitational pull. The reader's feeling for transience is being inhibited by the form of the book while it is being piqued by the events and language in same book, this Venus fly trap that tongues me in by talking about things passing, exciting movements, but it keeps me there so that it can survive and endure, and not suffer that dewdrop life itself, not pass away, so it becomes a TV show, it becomes a film, it becomes a book in translation, it becomes a kabuki play and another kabuki play, it draws "on all the technology around," as Hugh Kenner wrote once about Homer: "Homer is the West's six trillion dollar man. For two millennia and a half at least we have kept him alive and vigorous with an increasingly complex and costly life-support system that from earliest times has drawn on all the technology around" (which comes from his essay Ezra Pound and Homer). The reader enters that machinery.

Here's a picture: a book is a door, a small metal door into the side of a machine, into an engine, it is the petrol cap, the reader unscrews the front cover, the reader pours themselves in, the machine keep growling, the characters revive in their two dimensions, they go through it all again, the reader is three-dimensional, they can see into the guts of the two-dimensional character-animals, the story is on another plane, no one knows the name of this plane, no one has a number for this plane; the book stays still and feeds.

for you, reader

Telling M. how the Heike was structured I picked the idea of a television series, saying to him, look, you have one large umbrella-idea that runs from the start to the end, and in this work it is the rise and fate of the Heike clan, the rise so proud and domineering that you wait for them to fail because the laws of life say that everything must fall, gravity, hubris, old age, all that feeling. Then they slip, they slip further, someone burns a monastery by mistake, this error haunts the rest of the piece, they're toppling now, and you wait to see them meet the ground. The slip and then the fall are two sub-umbrellas under the main umbrella, as in a season of television you find one large umbrella -- how are we going to defeat the monster that appeared in episode one? -- then smaller umbrellas -- are those two warriors going to fall in love? followed by the question, is their relationship going to last now that he has discovered she is a werewolf?

Under those umbrellas you find the still-smaller sub-umbrellas or tiny cocktail parasols that run for a few hundred pages, or ten pages, or one page, the story expanding into the realm of the very small as if discovering first its own molecules, then the particles inside the molecules, which sometimes are single chapters or songs meant to be recited or sung; the Heike is a performance cycle, the collaborative composition of many people, which is a point of difference between this and that other long Japanese classic, The Tale of Genji, work of a single woman (though you can assume (along with the scholars) that her daughter or some other person wrote chapters near the end, also how much did it change when the readers who wanted to keep the book decided to write copies for themselves in that age before mechanised printing, with us having only the transcriptions, no original, and the earliest partial, material, and fragile copy dated one century after the author died?), written down, read aloud after it had been written but written first, written prime, written before anything else, existing first in a written form, emerging first like a rising vivid squid that comes like a blushing rosebud into the expressive extroverted part of the world when Murasaki Shikibu began to draw the letters with her brush, starting its life in a bath of ink, George Eliot almost a thousand years later in Adam Bede explaining the theory, "With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader," though the next line about showing us the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope is not in any sense applicable to the Genji, which is about a prince of the Heian period living in Kyoto where people often do not even have their names mentioned because those words said and abandoned to the air and to the ears, not kept safely in the mouth and mind but stripped nude so that they can be thrust into the intelligence of any passing terror, are too accusatory, too brutal, and the author prefers not to turn them into a public spectacle by vulgarly writing them down.

Which leaves the readers righteously confused but at least the nonexistent people in the book have had their feelings respected.

Which is an interesting notion, the politeness of Heian life, in which real people are only mentioned circumspectly by their titles or by a description, so as to avoid the crass nakedness of names and simultaneously to intensify the social-inbred atmosphere of the courtly clique (where you have to be in the know to fully appreciate everything), this politeness applied to fictional characters, whose feelings can't be hurt, who will never judge you no matter what you call them, who will never snub you or discriminate against you, who will never have their revenge even if you call them by a familiar slang, these characters treated as respectfully as if they were standing next to you, or sitting in the building over there, fanning themselves and ready to take offence (increase in politeness equalled by the steady increase of possibilities for delicate offences and insults, one tree with many flowers), and yet they will not know you, the fanning woman will never refer to you as anything at all, not even circumspectly, which means that you will never beat her at this niceness-game, and she will continue to sit fanning in her cage, radiating impermeable manners (since in order to permeate them you would have to extract the character from the book), and beating you. (The characters have never lived and yet they are also Heian.)

with many blows

As for the decapitated son in the Heike -- forever now running, forever now without his head and running at the same time, headless and running or running into his father's sword -- save yourself father, he says, run away, but no says his father and off goes the head, poor perishing child who never knew, when he approached his father at the age of two or three, that this day was in his future, that this father who gave him a cake would one day take off the head that ate the cake -- I had to look him up too for he had faded like shadows. I remembered his M and none of the other letters. He was this:

M_____

That gap was occupied by I-don't-know-what, an impression or artificial fullness, reassurance, or enough padding to make the word behave like a name, non-intact but nameful, an echo mistaken for a speech. When I remembered him running away from Imai Kanehira a thought came into my head, "What's after the M?" This was a new feature for him, and not in the poem. It was a trait added by myself and no other person. What was his father's name; that was another mystery, and so there were all these mysteries around the mysteries in the story as it would have been if it had been recalled fully in every detail by myself which is how I pretend to remember it when I say, "The Heike is like the Iliad in such and such a way --" all the while feeling endless avenues of but opening here and there as I run down the corridor of this proclaimation, all opening behind me where I cannot see them, still, other people, seeing, saying, "Monsters coming out of that door," like spectators in the audience of a horror movie, pointing, "The Iliad you say?", galloping over that connective bridge even as they doubt it, monsters coming to get them too, coming, coming, coming; and each book teaches a new system of forgetting.

If I knew in advance what I was going to remember then I could have a book made -- I don't know how but it could be done if I had a prophetic telepath and a research assistant; I'd outsource -- with nothing in it except the parts of novels that I was destined to remember. I would read nothing except that book. Then I could start speaking about books or writing blog posts exactly as I'm doing now, based on everything I was supposed to recall. The outsourcee would know when I'd need a reference too, so they'd leave page numbers, eg, they'd write,

son can't escape, running, endangering father, they are being attacked, "Muneyasu was too fat to run even a hundred yards" (Heike, page 436, about three fourths of the way down the page, Seno-o, father won't go, waits with son, beheads him, invites death, slashes at enemy, eventually dies, see pg. 437, "They answered him with many blows | until at last they struck him down.")

I had to look up the page numbers to write that too. It was blahnumber filling the gap this time instead of blahname. If a book disappeared as I was reading it, piece by piece, each page dissolving after I had left it for the next one, and I couldn't go back, I think it would be as if I had eaten it, gone like that.

the end of a shovel

Nakamura Utaemon IV in the picture on the cover of my Heike has the strange eye deformity that you sometimes see in traditional Japanese portraits, the iris and pupil trying to slide into the bridge of the nose, possibly not the thought he wanted people in the future to have when they thought of him, and possibly not how he would have wanted to be remembered if anyone had asked for his preferences, but the real Kiyomori would possibly not have wanted to be remembered by my few lonely memories of him in the Heike, steaming on his bed or encountering skulls off the back patio.

And the approach I have to things is usually sideways or indirect, the thoughts I have when I meet a piece of work are not thoughts the artist would probably suspect me of having, even if they knew me, for example, when I saw the film Casino last Monday night (I have deleted six words here: see last post), through the first half or so, during the sight of Joe Pesci cramming the sharp end of a man's own pen into the mild pale-pasturing meat of that man's own gentle throat (gentle as a cattle's wattle), I was thinking, every time we saw a domestic interior, "Is this the house that belongs to the friends of that woman who wrote that memoir about her time as a casino model?"

We had seen this woman at a library event (her name is Elaine McNamara and her book is In The Midst of Cowboys, Crooners and Gangsters: Recollections of the Las Vegas Glamour Era, LifeStories, 2011) where she'd told us that her friends had to live somewhere else for nine months because Martin Scorsese was in their house with his camera crew.

(We saw Cullotta at a similar event a week later: see last post for the relevance of him, a man with a square-cut snow-colored beard.)

The house was next to a golf course, she said, so I looked out for the golf course. When the golf course arrived I relaxed. There's the house. Seeing the way Robert De Niro's fictional casino was positioned on the Strip, with the Flamingo down the road, I felt an unpleasant but triumphant discriminatory emotion -- a poisoned emotion I would say, poisoned by the suspicion that it was not very worthy of any intelligent human being, not only unworthy of myself but unworthy of all of us without reserve, and in a good world or the one in J.M. Coetzee's new book it would barely have been born but intelligence would have overruled it, yet we have had our instincts collectively for many years, creating various instant feelings in our hearts, and they have saved us from lions or wild dogs or being eaten by the crocodile in former centuries (and even in current times, depending on your homeland and opportunities, observe that a film director off the coast of EnZed yesterday was killed by a shark, a man with a volunteering ethic of whom it was said, "He was always there at working bees on the end of a shovel"), now they counsel us to avoid a certain dark street when we think we see a movement at the end or "it just looks wrong, it feels wrong," myriad tiny events reaching us I suppose, and converting themselves instantly into a menagerie of warnings the moment they are touched by our senses which in this way creates them though not efficiently enough in the case of the man Joe Pesci stabbed in the throat, and I cannot escape them myself -- discriminatory towards De Niro's character because he was lording himself around as though he ran the Wynn and his fictional casino was only replacing Bally's, which opens onto the world with a neon plastic people-mover that puts security so far away from the pavement out the front that they always have illegal buskers on the concrete in Spongebob Squarepants costumes or else playing the bagpipe while the Bellagio fountains in the background emerge from the concealed iron tubes in their violent bursts.

The interior of De Niro's casino is played by the interior of the Riviera, which appears again in The Hangover and other films. The four casinos that Rosenthal ran (see last post) have been imploded, replaced, incorporated into the MGM Grand, and, in one instance, maintained by a conglomerate known as Boyd Gaming, which is one of those business entities that have filled the essential leadership role formerly occupied by crime mobs, filling it insufficiently, is the song from parts of the public, because these companies do not restrain the ordinary criminals who have taken over the crime part of the mob role, the murders, the prostitution, and so on, off the Strip, the mob would have stopped them, but this is nothing but nostalgia and rose coloured glasses, say the opponents of that crew, and it is true that Old Vegas can be regarded with nostalgia, not only mob-related, but also nostalgia for the times when children played with lizards on the same land that is now covered with tract housing and English-named streets, or nostalgia for dead entertainers, Cee-Lo Green opening a new show inspired by Liberace -- Loberace is the name of the show, and for the publicity months ago he did honestly and sincerely dress in a lobster suit, this well-spoken gentleman decorated and armoured provocatively like a crustacean beast of the deep, with the pink cliffs around the city all luminous at sunset.

this role

I couldn't even remember Kiyomori's name to be honest. I had the word blahname in place while I was roughing out that last post and had to go to the book to find out who he was. I knew his skulls and the picture of his glare; he is the man on the front cover of this copy of the Heike, looking angrily off a balcony in a print by Utagawa Hiroshige, who was drawing (I am going by a description of the picture at the Ashmolean Museum website) a kabuki actor named Nakamura Utaemon IV. "Utaemon ... performed this role in the first month of 1845."

Seven years later he died, I don't know how, and the same professional kabuki name went to Nakamura Utaemon V, who moved the Utaemon dynasty's base of operations north-east from Osaka to the larger city of Tokyo and passed the title to Nakamura Utaemon VI, a man who died in 2001, specialist in female roles (onnagata), and he was an honourary citizen of Las Vegas, not as a resident but as a gambler like the Japanese character in the film Casino, which I'm going to mention in a moment, a fact I know for sure because I've gone back to insert this sentence. Now I'll have to scroll down and change the way I've introduced the film in the next paragraph because apparently I've already introduced it in this one. (Now I have come back again because this paragraph went on for so long that I have converted the next paragraph into the start of its own post.) Utaemon died on the thirty-first of March, 2001, "a remarkable day on which snow fell onto the cherry blossoms against the backdrop of an evening moon," but the real-life counterpart of the high roller in Casino was stabbed to death with a sword in his kitchen while members of his family were away from the house looking for strawberries. "The day of his funeral was dreary with snow." In the film he is played by Nobuyuki Matsuhisa, the head of Nobu restaurants and Robert De Niro's frend. Both of them were in town recently, Matsuhisa and De Niro, opening a new Nobu hotel development at Caesars' Palace. The lobster sushi at the opening banquet was so fresh that it is alleged to have quivered. De Niro is in Casino too, playing a casino manager whose fictional behaviour was inspired by the genuine actions of a mob associate called Frank Rosenthal, though most people mention him by his nickname, which is Lefty. Dead now, he did not stay in Las Vegas after the events depicted in this film; he died in Florida. The fictional Rosenthal comes to Las Vegas because he has been sent there by the Kansas City mob, short men like large-lipped moneybank frogs sitting together in the basement of a grocery store eating the spaghetti that has been cooked for them by the store-owner's mother, who is played by Martin Scorsese's own mother Catherine. The owner of the store is not played by Catherine Scorsese's son, but his daughter Cathy plays the owner's nameless daughter. Fake Rosenthal is a perfectionist and the frogs trust him to run their casino, the Tangiers, which was invented by the filmmakers to represent the four different casinos that genuine-Rosenthal actually ran, all of which were the property and responsibility of the Chicago mob (or outfit), as was he. The Kansas City outfit, in the film (which was in real life the Chicago outfit), sends one of his childhood friends to help him, Nicky Santoro, played by Joe Pesci, who has been based on a thug named Tony the Ant Spilotro, who, if you've seen the movie, really did run a gang of burglars who used to knock holes in the sides of banks and stores at night, and steal the money or jewels inside. They were known as the Hole In The Wall Gang, which has to be the least imaginative crime nickname ever but at least it lets you know their modus operandi and does not misrepresent them. No one has to waste time asking questions because there it is in front of you, they were the Gang that made Holes in Walls. Spilotro's nickname was Pissant but the newspapers couldn't print it, therefore they called him the Ant, and he is ant-like in his pictures, small and tight next to Oscar Goodman in a photograph that is more or less well-recognised in Las Vegas, Goodman being the city's most popular former mayor, and would probably have been mayor unto death if there was not a limit on the length of time a mayor can serve. Now his wife is the mayor. (An illustration of them appeared on the cover of Las Vegas Seven before Valentine's Day, the ex-mayor with a bare chest of hair and cushions and the mayor in a romance-novel outfit like strawberry ice cream.) Goodman was Spilotro's lawyer, which is the same role he plays in the film. In the film he wears 1980s glasses with huge frames, as in the photograph, but nowadays I think he's switched to contacts. He used to represent the Hole In The Wall Gang too, and I've heard that one day he owed them several hundred dollars so they knocked a hole in his own wall and took it while he was out at an evening function. Las Vegans are frequently but not universally affectionate towards Oscar Goodman, whose client Tony the Ant once crushed a man's head in a vise until his eye rose from its socket and emerged. In the film he only threatens to do it, in real life he really did do it, popping the eye out while one of his sidekicks looked on, eating pasta, an individual named Chuckie the Typewriter, which was, as Spilotro once remarked to his friend Frank Cullotta, a "heartless" thing to do while a man was being murdered, the eating I mean, of the pasta. Cullotta was the leader of the Hole In The Wall Gang under Tony the Ant. In the film he is played by Frank Vincent and his character is named Frankie Marino. The original man, Cullotta, was present on set as a technical advisor. Scorsese hired a number of locals for minor roles as well, and anyone who is interested in trivia might like to know that the Metro officer who came to Robert De Niro's house towards the end of the film really was a Metro officer. De Niro asks him how his life is going, and the cop tells him that his wife is pregnant again, which got him a laugh from his friends at the premier for reasons that I won't go into. Cullotta, if you've seen the film, is also the nameless assassin who comes between two cars in a parking lot at the end and shoots another actor dead. (I think I saw somewhere that the actor who had been hired to play the assassin wasn't getting the murder right therefore Cullotta had to step in, gesturing Infirm of purpose, give me the daggers.) He's grown a beard since then, and the trimmed edges make his chin and throat look neater. Cullotta: The Life of a Chicago Criminal, Las Vegas Mobster and Government Witness is the name of his autobiography. Whether it is good or not I couldn't tell you because I haven't read it.

deeds and ways

The Heike, the Heike, o, the plump son is present then gone in less than two pages, sad ephemeron, and even the characters at the forefront of the book come back to my memory only in a few strange scenes, in my mind they are not more substantial than Muneyasu, they are not long and consistent as they appear in the book but brief and impressionistic; I remember Lord Kiyomori more specifically than any of his contemporaries because he has supernatural skulls in his garden one morning when he wakes up, Book Five, Chapter Three,

dead men's skulls beyond counting, rolling and churning,
up and down, in and out, rattling against one another with a huge clatter.
"Attendant! Attendant!" he called, but, as it happened, no one came.
Meanwhile the skulls clumped into a great mound,
bursting the bounds of the garden, some hundred and fifty feet high --
a mountain of skulls, now suddenly crammed with living eyes,
all of them training on Lord Kiyomori an unblinking glare.
Kiyomori glared back, unperturbed, and under his gaze
they disappeared without a trace
like frost or dew in the morning sun.

Lord Kiyomori is one of the book's important characters, prime mover of the Heike clan, present by page two --

... his lordship
Taira no Kiyomori,
tales of whose deeds and ways
surpass the imagination,
exceed all that tongues can tell.

-- followed by his genealogy -- he is the single figure who grows into a mass of figures before that dwindling-to-a-single-death at the end, the book shaped like a Christmas cracker or a long con, first a pinch then a bulge then a pinch, or a silence roaring up into a noise then down to another silence, Kiyomori the first chime or deep ping, he is followed by the conglomerate boom of the orchestra, then there is one note from a triangle and the music is complete.

He occupies more page-time than Muneyasu and Seno-o but in my memory he is only one action, one gesture, like them, the fat man hefting his jelly across a stretch of grass, soon beheaded by his father, then the violent Kiyomori, empire powerbroker, glaring at the eyeball'd skulls, though now that I have begun writing about his lordship I remember more of him; there is a gigantic floating face that stares through his window, again this is in Book Five, "an enormous face, a full bay wide | peered into the room" so he glares and it vanishes -- and after that (now he is surging in, he is occupying several scenes in my mind, Muneyasu has nothing more to add, he wasn't around for very long, his father was around for slightly longer but I forget the rest of him; they are defeated) I recall his death. He was sick, he had a fever so hot that his skin made water boil, he lay in agony, blaspheming against his enemies and steaming; this torture was explained when his wife had a dream about hell spirits. All these hundreds of characters mark ye and he is the only one who attracts this kind of sustained attention from the spirit world. The skulls and the giant face are not significant parts of the plot, they don't contribute to the diplomatic shoving that occupies the first part of the book where they occur and yet their role is emotionally important, they are a warning and a premonition, they tarnish and complicate Kiyomori's worldly success, and when I realise that two of the illustrations that come with this book are pictures of the skull-staring incident by different artists then I start to think that it has been memorable to more human beings than just myself, that the sheer startling arrival of those skulls is a memory-glue with universal potential, that this may even, over centuries, have become the skulls' most important role in the Heike machinery, this fish-hook snagging of the audience's attention, the ability to leave a scar behind after the functional plot points have sunk away and gone as they have for me, I know, I barely remember them.

he made slow progress

The Heike is a long historical epic, seven hundred and ten pages in the Tyler version (hardcover, Viking Penguin, 2012), made of twelve books that have been divided into nine to twenty chapters each, two clans going to war over the Japanese sovereignty at a period of time that corresponds roughly to the 1100s in Europe, lots of major characters, masses of minor characters uncounted by myself but they appear so often that there must be several hundred of them; and many are only there long enough to obtain a name, a distinguishing characteristic, and a death, like the young soldier who is so plump and lax that his warrior father comes back to salvage him during a retreat: the son chuffing slowly away from the enemy, the fit father charging off, the father realising what has happened, the father turning back, and both of them perishing. "Although still a young man in his early twenties, Muneyasu was too fat to run even a hundred yards and despite having discarded his equipment he made slow progress." Run away father, he says.

"No," said his father, "my mind is made up." As they waited,
Imai Kanehira bore down on them at the head of fifty howling riders.
Seno-o shot his last arrows,
seven or eight of them, rapidly --
five or six riders fell, stricken,
dead or not, there is no telling --
drew his sword, beheaded his son,
and charged into the enemy,
slashing at every man around him.

Death in the Heike usually strikes a person after the story has explained a set of overwhelming odds, either mobs of enemy soldiers or a series of events that has crushed the character's emotions until they're so distraught and shamed that they whip out a sword and do the necessary. I know this is not unusual in literature, a character suffering, suffering, then dying, but the volume and detail of these deaths in the Heike seems noteworthy, a tapestry of little described deaths summoned together to produce the larger picture of an entire clan's death, like miniature scents in a huge smell, as in the Iliad you have a mass of soldiers dying in their specified ways until finally the atmosphere of destruction swallows the city, that large death the retrospective echo of the smallest, the force of one being pressed down or up the food chain and shoving the elements above or below, one man in the Heike hearing about the deaths of several other men and sinking into anguish, shaving his head and leaping into the depths from a humble sea-going boat -- the repercussions from that death leading to the very last death in the story, the final act of demolition, one corpse, the bulge of deaths dwindling to a solitary dot.

oodle ardle wardle doodle

A character performs a small action and becomes memorable, the rest of this character's behaviour could be anything but the detail sometimes drives itself into my memory, the man Essex in Shirley Jackson for example, touching the older woman's elbow, or a number of characters in The Tale of the Heike, which I read in a translation by Royall Tyler who lives in rural NSW and if he had made his translation at home would have done so with the magpies going, "Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle," outside the kitchen window or the study window or wherever he works. I am not the man's interior designer but I know what magpies sound like though that bit of euphony was not invented from life but borrowed from a poem.

There might be a more convincing way to write magpie noises but for now I will borrow, so that anyone who has read the poem may identify those words with magpies immediately and submit to their memories of a depressing piece of verse, a very helpless submission, if they have it, and I will tap into the power or habit of their minds and inflict upon them this memory which seems fair enough if my aim is to fill them for one moment with a nebulous magpie-impression, which it might be, I haven't seriously examined my intentions in this regard, and why should we specify real ones when literary ones will do well enough very quickly while I go on to the next thing, which will be the Heike? Human characters suffer in the magpie-poem, they age, the magpies are detached Fates having a good time in a tree, or a bad time, or some sort of enigmatic time, and like this Europe encounters the southern hemisphere in those mono-aural and Nornish idea-birds, which would possibly not have occupied the same position in a piece of poetic art if the poem had been written by someone else from somewhere else; by correlation an Australasian Heike would have had less ritual suicide since it is not a local habit in that region, nor is listening to magpies a local habit in Japan thanks to lack of opportunity which in this instance means lack of magpies, though you will note, however, that the phrase "lack of opportunity" does not always means that magpies are lacking but sometimes something else. This could be the only time in your life that you read the phrase "lack of opportunity" and understand that it means also "lack of magpies." That is speculation and I will add that Japan is not deprived of birds in general. There are many crows there, a lot of them, having witnessed some myself, one specific group of about four or five walking on an asphalt path and staring with alert head-movements at the grass or at their feet, which were doubtless sharp-nailed and craggy-black, and in them mites, mites by the toenails, mites between the scaly armours, and on those mites other mites, and so on down in dizzying seclusion, inside a middle-sized industrial city to the left or west of the Pacific Ocean.

It is also true to say that the magpies possibly would not have occupied that position in the poem if another person from the poet's own country had written it, therefore see that people are like nations with a new culture in each, along with warfares, petty battles, and other terrors, and that they live by planting their flags, now magpie-this, now magpie-that.

Speaking of flags, I had one Year 5 teacher who showed us a scar across the top of his scalp, a scar that had been made, he said, by a magpie, but we had been reading a book about a boy who put an ice cream bucket on his head to protect himself from magpies while he climbed a windmill which makes me wonder now if the story might have been an attempt to make the head-scar relevant to our learning processes. Yet we used to cover our heads with softball gloves when we went under the magpie nesting tree by the decaying netball courts with their rotting soft edges so we all knew that genuine magpie scars were an entirely feasible development of our skins as well as his.

dragged by force

Gaps will be filled, the world wants gestures, "If a monk wanted a book during hours of silence, he made a sign of turning the leaves; if he wanted a classical book, he scratched his ear like a dog," writes Charles Homer Haskins in The Renaissance of the 12th Century; and the early Catholics made pilgrimages to Palestine, says J.N. Hillgarth's book The Conversion of Western Europe 350 -750; they went there to see the places and objects that they recognised from descriptions and perhaps just to get out of the house: "No doubt the pilgrims' motives were mixed, combining, at times, curiosity and tourism with asceticism." Palestine was there, and they were not in it, they must put themselves in it, therefore they went.

One tourist during the 600s came across the couch where Jesus had lain during the wedding at Cana and Jesus was not occupying those cushions at the time, no one was on it, so he lay on it, as did his friends, and his parents' names were not on this couch, so he put them there, a fulfillment of the world's promise -- it was possible for his parents' names to be there -- they were not there -- he put them there -- and relieved himself, and fled from the experience of that vortex. The possibility occurred to him -- my parents' names could be there! -- at that moment he experienced a terrible vacuum, which seemed exterior to himself. Rushing into it he added the names. Irresistible finity had presented itself.

Reading this story I wonder, Where is that couch now, where has the couch gone, what happened to it? I can't believe they've destroyed the couch. I want to see that couch; I want to look at his parents' names, and what handwriting did he have when he described himself with this word: "unworthy"?

... upon which, unworthy as I am, I wrote the names of my parents.

(he explained in a letter, and it must have been translated by Hillgarth)

He knew he shouldn't but he did it anyway, tall child, easily swayed. The early Catholics, who worked against the pagans and Arians during the first centuries AD, must have believed that the mind can choose the system that occupies it, the thread, in other words, that makes it tie events together with one implication and not another implication; the mind could choose Catholicism or paganism, it had to be deterred from paganism; a pagan today did not have to be a pagan tomorrow, the particle was charged one way or another. Bishop Boniface went out from the European south to convert the Germans, other missionaries went out to convert the British; the Spanish in their Lex Visigothorum (642 - 52) laid down a law of force and said that magicians should be scourged, scalped, and then dragged through ten villages.

Magicians and invokers of tempests, who, by their incantations, bring hail-storms upon vineyards and fields of grain [...] shall be publicly scourged with two hundred lashes; shall be scalped; and shall be dragged by force through ten villages in the neighbourhood, as a warning to others.

(Translated by S.P. Scott)

Well yes, you think, but they could have gone further.

lyft hit vp

A plot is a prompt followed by a prompt. The aunt who looks at Amy and wonders if her employer gave her an outfit for free, is one piece of a machine that Olga Masters builds for her book, a machine that you can call the sub-plot of Amy and Lance, a little drum she touches now and again until the reader is ready to see a conclusion, hoping that the effort that writer and reader have put into this construction doesn't go to waste. They anticipate that Amy will either tell Lance never to come near her again or else the two of them will date, and then other events will come out of that.

The question people ask when they see a strange machine is, What does it do?

Machines are expected to help, to gratify, to entertain, to comfort, to exaggerate speed or finesse or skill, and in this they are like people, how will this machine assist me or annoy me, a person wonders, how will this person assist me or assail me they wonder when a stranger appears in the room, how can I graft them to me, can we make an android together, and be useful? Ruskin was wroth in his diaries when people at a dinner party engaged themselves in small talk and wouldn't tell him any practical facts that he could use -- pointless, he complained: a waste of my time. He wanted them to teach him about geology, or any piece of science. That was what he would respond to; he'd react and a conversation would begin. He was a writer, he knew the opening he wanted, and he was rigid; his wife complained; he stood by the mantlepiece at parties.

Two parts, two beings, teacher and pupil together are a centaur, the mechanical arm fixed to the living shoulder is half an android, the centaur is an android and the android is a centaur, the reader and writer together are both. Olga Masters in the 1980s is screwing the pieces together for her mechanical arm or horse body. The appearance of a machine creates anticipation. The reader lifts the front cover and looks inside, ready to set this contraption going. The Green Knight rides into King Arthur's court where the men and ladies are eating a Christmas lunch of dere mete and he suggests that someone should chop his head off for fun, then, after that, if he survives, they can visit him at home and he will chop their head off in retaliation, a good game, he says, a fantastic entertainment, for these were the days before television.

With that the quest asserts itself, the Knight is strange and aggressive to heighten the mood, and of course he survives the decapitation otherwise this would be a majestically short poem and the story would end there, which it can't, the blood of storytelling itself will not let it end there, on page whatever -- say page five, I don't have the book on me, but early is the point I'm making -- the Knight is forced to survive, the muscle of storytelling gets into his eyes and makes them blink on the detrunked head as it rolls across the floor under the Christmas dining table, getting kicked and spraying gore, then the cruel momentum of the story makes him "lyft hit vp," this head, which is squirting red against his green clothes, and put it back on his shoulders "as non vnhap had hym ayled."

He leaves efficiently and grandly. The story is triumphant, it has manhandled itself into existence, it secures the head on the neck, and the horse gallops out of the dining hall, through whatever architecture leads it to the front door of Arthur's castle. We have to picture this part for ourselves, the exit of the horse from the castle, the horse managing to get through doorways, the horse leaving the building, the Knight looking around to work out how to make his way home from here, he consults an internal map, he guesses the right direction immediately because the story has no reason to let him go astray, therefore it won't stand in his way, trip him over, or slow him down with adventures, rainstorms, mountains, wolves, or anything else, the scenery is indistinct ahead of him, it is colourless, there is no village or building anywhere nearby, there is no grass, there are no trees, there is nothing that resembles countryside or sky, and the journey between Arthur's court and his far distant Green Chapel will not present him with any of the obstacles that confront Gawain when he rides out a year later to find this Knight again, because the camera-eye of the poet will be sitting on Gawain's shoulder, while the Knight has nothing now, he has left that eye behind at the lunch table, so with that he fades, and is no longer there.

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)