Silence Read online

  AD 1000

  Day like a great rock. The first day in the Year of Our Lord 1000. Thus a man Adam by name and known as the Ready. Son of a law-speaker, though himself a peasant. Simple in garb, stands Godly on watch. He stands on watch awaiting the dawn, Adam the Ready in the last of the dark, his old axe Ironflank bright aloft, wife Gudrun at his side. The sodden swamp of winter lies on the land around. Themselves braced ready for the first day which shall be the last. The rime-cold marsh grass flat, a rattling raspberry stands against the wind with sticks a-clatter. Ghosts sigh through sedge. They wait without let, this Adam and Gudrun. They alone dare gaze at the dark tower dark at world’s edge. Left by Romans who crucified Our Lord. The tower of slaughterers’ stones locked in place and built with the Devil’s cunning. They gaze at that tower and the ruined gate beside. The river between as slow as melted lead. Without let they wait. The good man Adam and Gudrun his wife. Wait for the day of the Holy Grail, the cup that held the blood of Christ. Wait for the sun to show his face and God to appear in wrath and mercy. The last of all the world’s days breaks. A glim of sky tints the clouds and the axe aloft. A glim on the ground creeps to the tombstones underfoot. Creeps to frost-hard tussocks and ghosts among the sedge and rattling canes. Sure enough the ground begins to crawl about. Wife and man watch graveyard slabs by their own will shift. Long shadows crawl on the mud where bloodless fingers gripple the lip of open graves. And mossy heads with slime-clogged locks and rotted swaddlings lift their fleshless limbs and faces. Children among the olders, whom time and plague have eaten out, turn like flowers to greet the eternal light. The virtuous, hasty with their greed for praise, arise. They rise to hear the Last Trumpet blast in glory. Rise to claim their seat at God’s right hand. Thus watched at dawn by Adam who was first and now is last and Adam’s good wife. The ghastly dead stand tall to claim eternal life. Stand the difficult standing at resurrection’s dreadful pull.

  But the blare of angel trumpets never sounds. The witnesses see nothing but the sun. The sun glides up unheralded. Light lips the rim of yet another ordinary day of toil.

  Winners

  I know them … you see, I know these people … the ones who stand for law and order … law and order! made out of nothing … clearing the decks for healthy greed, that’s what … clearing the decks alright, so get this through your head … they sit on their fat backsides in offices and call it work … some nerve! … and more and more there are desperate people haunting our streets like that man slouched over his cardboard sign on which he has printed HOMELESS HUNGRY HELP … he expects compassion … hell, no! … wrong city, wrong country … this place is wealthy and spending up big … not for the likes of him to spoil people’s fun with his complaints or his squashed cap on the footpath between his knees … what does he think! … the very idea that we are honest-to-God social, responsible, civilised citizens takes the cake! … no way, not since the death of society when Margaret Thatcher led the world in a triumphal rampage back to some sort of Dark Ages of the striving individual … each for himself or herself … and don’t forget how we leapt on the idea, too … it also took us to make it true … Thatcher alone was nothing but a ranting politician … the homeless, indeed! … so, a few passing people throw away their loose change? … the pirates of the stock exchange will have something to say about this over morning coffee in the city, but for now they can’t stop, they can’t be stopped … they’re in a hurry to get to a business lunch … a punishing schedule when you come to think … the homeless are no subject for consideration among those who work for their living and live by standards and stand on their own two feet … you know what I’m saying? … with money in the bank … Amen … nor is homelessness a subject for the homeless, because when you don’t have a place to live it’s so much the subject that you’ll talk about anything but … and your life’s so busy too … so planned … you know, planned around places of possible refuge, comfort, lavatories public and otherwise … opening hours and closing hours, warm spots for shelter, places to wash and sit … food … how far you need to walk … how safe to jump the tram … bakeries known to give away yesterday’s stale stock if you get there in time, police evasion, oh all manner of necessities … better to talk to the homeless about epistemology or suicide, Substance & Illusion and the New Science of Giambattista Vico … take a guy like this with his head in his hands, cradling the weight of his brain and mystified by it, he’d understand the saints … though maybe not the point of becoming one if you’ve had your throat cut or been crucified upside down … and no doubt he knows better than most how to debate with a Trappist who’s not allowed to hold up his end of a pleasant altercation … so he comes down to this, perhaps because he’s the culprit of something … hunched over a cardboard homeless sign … life going from bad to worse … quite young with greasy hair to hide his face … saying nothing, quite mum … trusting the written word to speak for him … because, in the telling, he mightn’t quite get it clear … well, for starters, he might break down … maybe you’ll object that he’s doing what he can … because admittedly it isn’t easy to put oneself out there on the street … but this is not a thing the winners can ever be expected to appreciate … no point asking passers by who do pass by how they would feel if … hmm, hmm … you see my point? … get real! … HOMELESS HUNGRY HELP … homeless, indeed! he’s lucky they don’t kick him in the face for spoiling the serenity of their day … he’s lucky they don’t yank his old jacket off him, split his chest and rip out his guts, the pearly ball of his intestines, heart spouting startled blood, rightness is on their side because loudness is rightness … word is that they’ve never been otherwise … and I might as well tell you this is not exactly news … they were the same when I was a kid … they had no less cause to smile back then … they are the same as they were when the war broke out … and when the next war broke out and all the wars since … they are the same as they were when they fought to keep segregation and apartheid and laws against the poor doing what the rich took for granted … don’t imagine this will change just because of the brilliant Julian Assanges of the world who insist on popping up now and then … way back they were the ones burning witches and smashing works of art and they’ll happily do it again … they were the ones to cram Indentured Labour on board the slave ships out of Africa, to cram the streets of Nuremberg in adoring multitudes sometime later … tarara-boomdee-ay! … pocketing profits when the stock exchange tumbled … always the same crew … hypocrites, bullshit artists, genteel thugs … they’re still up for plundering villages and raping the helpless, they’ll torture anyone for having unfamiliar ideas … all the more readily if there’s oil to be had or precious minerals the locals have no use for … even the passive ones among them are catered for, sitting with equanimity in suburban livingrooms to watch asylum seekers drown in leaky boats on television … they come from a long line that goes way back … they were a bad start for any country and they’re going to be an even worse finish … but don’t imagine for a moment they are without secrets … ssh ssh … they have secrets right enough … like every tinpot tyrant and tyrantess, every bureaucrat, every hope-smasher and heretic-murderer in history … and the biggest of those secrets is ignorance … at all costs they will protect this precious ignorance of theirs to pass down to their brats like a congenital disease … they don’t know and they don’t want to know … despite, now and again, a suffocating shadow getting stuck in the windpipe and choking them by surprise … though in general they survive these little interruptions and reminders of mortality to do another deal, fix another contract, outwit another rival … whatever … it’s all so sporting, matey, casual, so horribly Australian … you can’t mean this one wearing an Ermenegildo Zegna suit? … I surely do! … compassion’s an odd quirk his kind doesn’t have the stomach for, a lethal drug … well, because it dulls judgement, scores no goals and pays no dividend … they don’t have the temperament for it either, it’s a constitutional thing, a medical condition and nobody to blame �
�� what they do have is the rage to purge, to clear things out and knock stuff down … it’s a world of quick responses, theirs … hit the button before you think … on sale everywhere … if the Americans do, then what else is there to say? … don’t just take my word for it … they’ll swear blind that the market is God, don’t you know by now? … HOMELESS HUNGRY HELP … plagiarism anyway! … they keep going and that’s how you can tell who they are … they don’t waste their breath … they say nothing because there’s nothing to be said … and if you drive on drugs you are out of your mind, okay?

  Glider pilot

  Both craft safely airborne, the biplane glimmers fish-like ahead of him as it dips sharply, allowing the tow rope enough slack to slip free, and then banks up and away across the evening sky. Enclosed in his cockpit he always registers this moment of liberty because his glider sighs, easing its slender ribs, righting the long spine from the tip of its greyhound nose to the tuck of its tail. No longer stressed with the drag of external power. Tilting by discriminating degrees into the wind.

  The last shaft of sunlight glances off the dwindling biplane ahead (that’s good old Tony out there) to stamp the aircraft, like a silver cross of Lorraine, aslant on the emptiness. The earth below is already veiled in night, the earth of home. He scans his map board, consults his compass and checks the instrument panel. Satisfied with his climbing altitude and the course set, the pilot lifts the goggles strapped to his leather helmet and fits them down over his face.

  Gradually, gradually the remaining light evaporates from the sky—whisked aside, ahead of him, just like that—and he has the sensation of dropping into darkness, although from experience he knows better than to doubt the altimeter glowing phosphorescently among other indicators of survival. The precision structure which encases him sings its subtle, deep vibration. All is well. He lets out a long-held breath. So far so good.

  A swift low-lying cloud feathers against his windscreen to drift behind and he thinks about the theory that, supposing outer space were ever reached, incredible speeds would induce a sensation of such stillness loose objects could float, weightless, about one’s head. A sheen of moonlight far below glazes the hammered-metal sea. In half an hour, he knows, the coast of France will creep across, corroding this lovely brightness, eating it away till nothing but a total void is left. And does. France, the defeated land. He feels a remote thunder of shame loom beneath him like a whale. The secret claustrophobia of air-raid sirens seeming already to worm deep into the inner ear. Cymbals of stored light clashing twice only as he blinks.

  Entombed, he has nothing now to sustain his faith but the interpretation of a grid and the mathematical tables he has learned by heart. Pure geometry. Triangulating infinity. He discovers what it is to inhabit a pyramid, passively to watch the last stone—in the last doorway to the only passage connecting his chamber to the light—set in place.

  Dials glow dimly and he ponders the mystery of phosphorus, of plankton at sea, waves folding on a seashore, fleeting traces of light among sand granules, of cause and effect, of the philosophy of being. And like flecks of this same phosphorus, momentary glitters spangle the void below. Tiny imperfections in the blackout blanketing every other sign of civilisation, a betrayal of towns expecting bombs, towns which must certainly be ringed by batteries of anti-aircraft guns.

  Occupied territory.

  A gentle cough from somewhere behind him interrupts his reverie. A man’s cough. The hair bristles on the back of his neck. Then comes a furtive rustle of thick clothing. But he knows, of course he does, he remembers: there are six men packed in the hollow belly of his glider. Didn’t they shake hands with him, one by one, out of respect for death? Blood-warm hands? Each man with a parachute strapped to his back? Having flown them beyond the notion of a frontline already, he must now reach the right coordinates for them to jump. He cannot fail them. He must not. Their destination known to him alone.

  The paratrooper squad sits, patient with the admirable patience of trained men. At his word, as he is aware, they are ready to cast themselves out into the dark sky with the inexplicable abandon of courage. Fighters. Each one hunched round his secrets of love and fear, each one unmistakable as anybody else, each one a stranger. This is the mission. They know what they know must be done. As he knows what he knows. No need to speak. And, once free of his human cargo, he will steer the silent glider to sweep across the thermals, razoring wings righting as he turns for home … doubtless in the stab of searchlights and between the first bursts of shellfire.

  But, just now, war is this and only this: a state of suspension in the unheard power of knowing.

  Notes

  A contributing factor to the silences being explored is that most of these pieces engage with a ‘silent’ partner, being written as if by others: by the anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet of The Wanderer, by King Alfred the Great, Sir Joseph Banks, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Joseph Furphy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Hermann Broch, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Bruno Schulz, William Faulkner, Henry Green, Samuel Beckett, Malcolm Lowry, Wolfgang Borchert and Gabriel García Márquez.

  Of course, these tributes do not pretend to be more than echoes, intonations and the structures of reason—the actual voices of the originals will always embody an underlying subconscious energy unique to the writer and impossible to reproduce, since voice is indissolubly bound up with what we have to say.

  Some are freely based on fact (such as the presentation of Captain Cook’s thigh to his crew), others are entirely factual (as with the threatening fax sent anonymously to Judith Wright), but most are fiction. In certain cases references are built into the text (as with Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address), making a separate note redundant. Specific voices and references which may not be self-evident are as follows:

  ‘Semaphore’: Wolfgang Borchert, The Man Outside.

  ‘The Rigatti Motet’: developed from John Milton’s mention of catching a distant, myopic glimpse of this enthronement in 1638, in Defensio Secunda. While in Florence Milton met many poets and intellectuals, including Galileo—then old and blind and still officially a prisoner of the Inquisition. Milton’s contemporary, Giovanni Rigatti (b. Venice, 1615) was already famous as a composer, appointed maestro di cappella at Udine Cathedral when he was just twenty.

  ‘Hartmund Eischlbeck’: James Joyce. The quotation embedded here is from Ulysses.

  ‘James Cook’: Sir Joseph Banks, Journal.

  ‘A Conservationist’: Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. The poem quoted is ‘Silence’ by Judith Wright. I was present at the same afternoon tea with Mr Giri, the president of India, in 1970, when, to his amusement, her deafness led to several abrupt changes of subject. Many years later, at Judith Wright’s house, she showed me the fax quoted here.

  ‘Talkad’: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Notebook. This temple is still buried under the dunes.

  ‘L’Étoile Bleue’: autobiographical incident, 1959.

  ‘A toast’: Henry Green, Concluding.

  ‘The dreaming bird’: based on an article in Science magazine, November 2000.

  ‘William Donnegan’: William Faulkner, Light in August. William Donnegan, a member of the Niagara Movement, was murdered in 1908.

  ‘Babak’: based on a protest against the forced detention imposed on asylum seekers by the Australian government under John Howard. Babak is a fictional character placed in an all too real situation. The nursing sister who stood against the system (at another such camp) was, I am proud to say, my wife Bet. The plight of refugees seeking asylum in Australia remains an unresolved national disgrace.

  ‘The flame priest’: the anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet of The Wanderer.

  ‘Winter campaign’: Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil. Drawing on material from both Frederick the Great (Military Instruction, translated into English in 1797) and Napoleon (Military Maxims, published in 1827).

  ‘The experiment’: Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier.

  ‘A
couple’: Joseph Furphy, Such Is Life.

  ‘Sunken liner’: Gabriel García Márquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch.

  ‘The Beefsteak Room’: Henry James, The Wings of the Dove. This meeting did indeed take place on 9 July 1886, as recorded by Bram Stoker himself, when Sir Richard Burton was induced to recount the famous anecdote again.

  ‘Querencía’: an incident witnessed personally (and filmed by Ian Dixon) in 2000. Querencía is a word I first encountered in a poem by Thomas W. Shapcott.

  ‘Modesty’: Gertrude Stein, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor. The letter material is based on Darwin’s account of his travels in Chile in 1834 in A Journal of Researches. Emma’s interior monologue is entirely imagined. They married in 1839.

  ‘Knots, ties, etc.’: quoted from Commander J. Irving’s revision of J. Tom Burgess’s Knots, Ties and Splices of 1884.

  ‘Noise’: Charles Dickens, Bleak House. At Myall Creek the massacre of defenceless Aboriginal people in 1838 was committed by eleven convicts—some still serving their sentences as unpaid rural labourers, others as ticket-of-leavers having partial freedom—who were eventually brought to trial in New South Wales by Governor Sir George Gipps. A twelfth murderer, their leader, John Fleming, the only freeborn man among them, was never caught nor brought to trial. Such was the class system. He himself and his atrocious crime were real enough, but his fear of silence and his shield of noise are my invention’ in fact nothing seems to be known of him apart from his name.