David Malouf - An Imaginary Life

The days pass, and I cease to count them. The river is far behind us.

Occasionally, far-off on one of the hilltops, we see horsemen, and watch the grasses part and darken as they ride downhill - towards what? We never know. Nor do we see anyone closer.

Once or twice in the night I wake to find the Child sitting stark upright beside me, listening. I hear nothing, but know what it is. There are wolves close by. When one of them approaches he rises softly, stands tall in the dark, and makes little growling sounds in his throat, and I see the wolf’s eyes flash greenish as it lopes away.

I no longer ask myself where we are making for. The notion of a destination no longer seems necessary to me. It has been swallowed up in the immensity of this landscape, as the days have been swallowed up by the sense I now have of a life that stretches beyond the limits of measurable time. Is this what the shaman experiences when he sets off from the circle he has drawn with his own hand, and where his body squats? - this venturing out into a space that has no physical dimensions, and into a time that may be, in human terms, just a few minutes but is also eternity? Is this the land his spirit passes over on its way towards the pole? And is that what lies on the far side if this grassy plain? The pole? Is that where we are going, the Child and I? How long does it take to get there? In whose trance am I making this journey? And who is my companion? I ask myself that now, watching him move in the light just a few feet from me, naked, as he had been all these last days, poised in the stillness, half rising on one foot with his whole body alert to whatever it is that is in the grass beyond - who is he, this Child who leads me deeper into the earth, further from the far, safe place where I began, the green lands of my father’s farm, further from the last inhabited outpost of the known world, further from speech even, into the sighing grasslands that are silence? Where has he come from? Out of which life? Out of which time? Did I really discover him out there in the pinewoods, or did he somehow discover me, or rediscover me, out of my own alienation from the world of men? Is he the Child of my first days under the olive trees at Sulmo? Is it the same Child? Is there, after all, only one? And where is he leading me, since I know at last that it is he who is the leader, he now who is inducting me into the mysteries of a world I have never for a moment understood. Wandering along together, wading through the high grasses side by side, is a kind of conversation that needs no tongue, a perfect interchange of perceptions, moods, questions, answers, that is as simple as the weather, is in fact the merest shifting of cloud shadows over a landscape or over the surface of a pool, as thoughts melt out of one mind into another, cloud and shadow, with none of the structures of formal speech. It is like talking to oneself. Like one side of the head passing thoughts across to the other, and knowing in a kind of foreglow, before the thought arrives, what it will be, having already received the shadow of its illumination. I am growing bodiless. I am turning into the landscape. I feel myself sway and ripple. I feel myself expand upwards toward the blue roundness of the sky. Is that where we are going?

The earth, now that I am about to leave it, seems so close at last. I wake, and there, so enormous in their proximity to my eyeball that I might be staring through tree trunks into an unknown forest, are the roots of the grass, and between the roots, holding them together, feeding them, the myriad round grains of the earth, so minute, so visible, that I suddenly grasp the process by which their energy streams up through the golden stems. They are almost transparent, these fine long stalks. One can stare right through them and see the sap mounting in bubbles. They are columns of light, upright channels by which the earth feeds itself to the sky. And at their summit, so far-off they seem unreachable, the feathery grass heads plumping and nodding in the breeze, into whose sweet seeds all the richness of the earth ascends.

Round the base of these roots, seeking refuge amongst them as in a forest, finding food, are the smaller creatures - wood lice, ants, earwigs, earthworms, beetles, another world and another order of existence, crowded and busy about its endless process of creation and survival and death. We have come to join them. The earth’s warmth under me, as I stretch out at night, is astonishing. It is like the warmth of another body that has absorbed the sun all day and now gives out again its store of heat. It is softer, darker than I could ever have believed, and when I take a handful of it and smell its extraordinary odors I know suddenly what it is I am composed of, as if the energy that is in this fistful of black soil had suddenly opened, between my body and it, as between it and the grass stalks, some corridor along which our common being flowed. I no longer fear it. I lie down to sleep, and wonder if, in the looseness of sleep, I mightn’t strike down roots along all the length of my body, and as I enter the first dream, almost feel it begin to happen, feel my individual pores open to the individual grains of the earth, as the interchange begins. When I awake I am entirely reconciled to the process. I shall settle deep into the earth, deeper than I do in sleep, and will not be lost. We are continuous with earth in all the particles of our physical being, as in our breathing we are continuous with the sky. Between our bodies and the world there is unity and commerce.

Perhaps that is why the breaking of the earth around us into the newness of spring seems, this time around, to be occurring at the very end of my nerves. The furriness of the little round catkins we discover on occasional bushes, the stickiness of new leaves that begin as a glossy finial and suddenly unfold out of themselves as tiny serrated heart shapes, all this, at such close range, seems miraculous, and so too is the exploding into the air of so many wings. A membrane strains and strains, growing transparent, till the creature who is stirring and waking in there is visible in all its parts, forcing its own envelope of being towards the breaking point till with its folded wings already secure in the knowledge of flight, and of all the motions of the air, it flutters free. The whole earth creaks and strains in the darkness. The sounds are tiny, but to an ear that has been laid close to the earth, entirely audible. I think sometimes that if I were to listen hard enough I would hear my own body breaking forth in the same way, pushing at the thin, transparent envelope that still contains it, that keeps it from bursting forth into whatever new form it has already conceived itself as being, something as different from what we know as the moth is from the chrysalis.

The Child too seems to me to have new being out here, and I no longer ask myself what harm I may have done him. He too has survived his season among men. Some new energy is in him. He is lighter. He moves faster over the earth. He is alert to every shift of the wind and mood of the sky as it carries the weather of tomorrow and the day after towards us, to every scent of the hundred grasses and herbs and fat little buds that spread around us their invisible particles. It is these grasses and their parasites, the worms, the grubs, the small winged grasshoppers, that provide us with nourishment. The Child gathers them where they hang, feeding in their chains above the earth, one creature grazing, taking in goodness, and passing on into another’s mouth. We are at the end of the chain. Each day early, the Child hunts, feeding me now out of his world as I once fed him out of ours.

I watch him standing, at dusk, at the edge of whatever place we have found to rest for the night, staring out northward into the immensity of grass.