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A SUGGESTION TO THE SUN
A man appeared by the stunted tree framed in the kitchen window. "Are you coming out!" he called. "There's a lot of blood," she shouted back, "I'll be there in a minute." The cotton toweling had been maneuvered, so that it was tucked firmly between her legs. She sits at the small kitchen table. Her moon-drawn blood warm and wintry.
Fat hornets search out the open cupboards for a resting place. Her bare feet are relaxed, cool and dry on the broken lino. The hot steam of the kettle and milky black tea give her as much pleasure as the morning. Warm air is rising with its collection of moisture and particles from a cracked enamel mug. It's like early daylight lifting from the brown river's centre. It's the type of strong autumn weather that makes her want to extend her muscles into its sun and yawn. The frost is up late, the land still stretching out and stiff with sleep. The magpie on the window sill is too content and remains dormant. She places her voice into the quiet gaze of the puffed up bird. 'Shoooo!,' she says, 'You're getting fat!' The old fibro homestead sits like a plump infant on the gidgee log stilts. It rests just above the earth where the emus walk beyond the clothesline. This is the riverside property where they live.
He is outside drinking wine and sketching his shadow. Everywhere he looks he sees himself. In this series he will attempt to break past his own projection and enter the land. This revelation is a few weeks down the track. Today he controls the weather with his brush until it slaps him. A sudden wind topples his papers onto the wet brown paint. He is making art outdoors. He socialises with dust, old green bottles, grey floodplains and bleached shells. Up to his ears in insects and birds he cannot identify, he is preoccupied with idle chit-chat as he moves steadily through their territory and his work. It is when he loses balance and becomes unsteady that the clouds will finally sing. For now these long sections of scrubby forest and olive bush just look on, waiting for him to learn while they teach him nothing. He thought, I have a woman inside the hut. Yesterday he had told her that he had the ability to enjoy himself while others were sad. He wasn't joking when he said that he prided himself on this strength. She got upset. "You can go down with the world when it sinks," he said. "You'll be no good to anyone then, least likely us!"
He paints all the scrub on the property, but he doesn't know the nature of the flora that gathers and thrives there. She walks towards him through the broken timber. He paints her naked in his head. Only once had she been still and happy while he covered her with paint. It had been good, like a long and drowsy afternoon at the beach. Since that day he admired and was also horrified by the artists who wrapped up the coastline in plastic. She had expressed it better when she said, "All those sea animals that die beneath that plastic are a sacrifice to their cleverness." Now every time they are close, he makes the request that her body be given up to art. Whether she answers or not makes no difference. She has learnt to change his words into something else. When he asks if he can paint her naked again, she says, "Yes, it's beautiful isn't it." Usually she is talking about the distance where the sheep walk undisturbed by the property owners, straggling in the harsh terrain, muddy bogs and bush flies. She has sympathy for their neglected journeying, to the extent that even when she is staring at a red bull ant near her footprint, her voice had this sad distance in it. "Lovey, exactly how close are you to a bull ant anyway?" He's all smiles. This morning she is nursing the first day of her moon cycle. He knows that soon she will need him as much as the sun. She has left the kitchen table and drifted over to him with her enamel mug, the tea growing cool.
She arrives at the canvas like a ghost. "Jesus. It really takes it out of you doesn't it?" This time she hears him. Her senses are fresh to the outdoors, vulnerable to words that have been weathered. "Whatever it is you want, I don't feel like it." A few seconds later, she tries to see his face but the sunlight blinds her. "Do you understand the trees?" she asks. "What is there to understand?" "The bark," she says, "you're frightened to touch it? Why won't you take off your hat?" He shook his head as he spoke, as if to give his speech motion, as if the words weren't enough on their own. "Do we have to launch ourselves at everything? Do I have to plunge my hand into that spiders' web before I sketch it? Do I have to swim in the Birrie River to understand the current?" She said, "Why not just swim?" He was quick to answer her with a question. "Since when have you swum? We've been out here for months." "I got drenched in the storm," she said. "Well my love, why don't you do something with the experience?" She watched his slender wrist flicking the brush, his billowing shirt and big white hat. He looked like a large waterbird as he spoke, like a gangly crane but not as elegant, slightly safari in attitude, dressed for an attendance at a distressed and angry hive where honey was being stolen. She sighed and drank in the river with her eyes leaving it untouched. Apart from that she didn't want to do anything else. "The season isn't right for swimming," she mumbled, but that wasn't it. "The question is not did you touch it, but did it touch you?" he said.
All autumn while he painted himself, she lived like an anticipation of winter light, her thin pale legs beneath her skimpy night dress. She moved through the day and the night trying to solve the riddle of herself and him. Within her was the ability to tread lightly. She rarely collected burrs and rocks that she gathered, she soon threw back. She bled on the land. It absorbed her fluids and removed the stain. She held her stories as the land held its stories. They were remote sisters. She wasn't concerned whether someone chose to paint her or not. "You've gone quiet again," he said. "You aren't going to swim in the river." He jabbed his tiny brush into the mug of rainwater from the tank. He could suddenly look very fed up and weary as he painted, as if he was held in a trance and then spat out at intervals when the art didn't need him. She wondered if at these times he had any memory of what he was meant to be doing. "The silence is deafening out here," he said. He spoke again but louder. He asked her why she danced for the storm yet refused to pose naked for him. She said, "I had my clothes on then."
"I know," he said. "But I saw through them. I can see through all the storms into your heart, and there you are shaking like a calf." In her mind she danced for the storm and the cattle in the stormy paddock. "You danced for the storm?" he said. She has a lapse in concentration. She is not going to be what he wants her to be. "You know what you did. It was as crude as a belly dancer at a Kings Cross strip joint. The truth of the matter is, I'm the fucking artist and I'm the only man who didn't see it!" When the sky storm turned itself into an early night, the local shearers had stopped in a convoy on their way past the property. 'Is that a sheila out there?" The driver had broken suddenly. Beneath her skimpy night dress shattered by wind, she had taken to the sky, brown, naked and flimsy, like seed from pods. As if seen for the first time by the shearers, there was now the dark rain gathering the sheep and saltbush right in front of their faces. Beyond it went the legendary wild cattle crowded together in the distant paddocks. The excitement of sudden lightning lit up the miles. Further up the road the shearers' quarters waited for the politics, poker, fighting and their grisly tiredness. But they had been stopped in their tracks. The wind had made a mess of their logic, as they watched her moving out on the property, and their smiles were longing, bad and lonely.
"I'm pleased you didn't see me," she said. "I'm going for a walk and then I'm going back inside." "Well, make sure you walk along the fenceline lovey, less burrs. A kiss before you go?" But she didn't turn. Let him sort out the daylight and improve upon that. It wouldn't listen like she had. She was not the sun bringing down the world trajectory with fire. She did not move back over the land and pull the curtain of night up over her face. No one would miss her presence for many hours and the animals wouldn't sleep because her gaze was too restless and bright. She would click off like an insect. It was no great catastrophe. Besides, she didn't mind buzzing around the nothingness of him. She just didn't want to be a fly confused about flying. To make matters worse, he believed that he was able to improve upon everything she said or did. Sure there were more burrs where she walked now. Anyone could have told you that. But he said it and he said it often. They rarely let each other forget their second rate attempts at life. If she had chosen to take another route back to the house, he would have accessed that with his sharp intellect and within seconds he would have made her path safer, or given her a more convenient option. It was all about making life easier for both of them. It was about protection and civilisation.
"Watch out for the desert sun," he called after her joking. She hadn't worn her hat again. Why was it called a desert sun, when it was just the sun everywhere else? Was it the forest sun or the ocean sun? Was it the sun of the city or of the suburbs? Everyone seeks to claim ownership of the sun, she thought. They connect it to a landscape, so that it doesn't incinerate them and the sun and desert are held together in that orbit, so that the desert becomes the sun. The desert sun. Now that he had set foot on the property and observed the sun's path through the sky, nothing would ever be right here. She walked away from him west over the land, as the sun travelled away from him west through the sky. It was warm on her neck. It reassured her that she was taking the right route back to the house. The sun spoke to her of the day. "I am myself. It is the earth moves this season, and who claims the desert." She said, "You are powerful." She searched the distance for other signs of love and got bitten by a bush fly. Since he had come out here to drink wine and paint, things had changed and she had been there to observe it.
Today she doesn't feel capable of taking the right path back from his artwork to the house. She decides to go to the river and even as she does, she feels like he has told her to. She turns momentarily to make sure he isn't looking and there is his white shirt with the red clay stains like corrugated iron. She continues on alone, trying not to imagine a route she should be taking. While he was present the desert sun would never set right. There would always be something else it could do, to make itself better in his eyes. Yet his perspective had nothing to do with the world. If the sun was suddenly to change its course and set more the way he saw it, this would be simply the nature of its being and not necessarily it shifting towards his taste. It might be right for him and give him some sense of satisfaction. He might take credit for it. But the sun is independent and not prone to manipulation. From his perspective he was simply making a positive suggestion to the sun, but it wasn't what the sun would be doing. So it didn't change its direction for him, which only served to frustrate, so he tried harder. "It can get really lonely out here," he said finally. His words fell flat. He sat for many long hours out in the dry scrub beneath the tree that neither of them was able to identify, trying to give himself to the desert sun. The sun won't listen and it does not care, she thought. He will go mad out here. Many had talked to the sun before him and only the flies had answered.
She is beyond his manipulation. She is entering into the conversation of the river. She has gained five pounds of fluid and her swollen ankles are resting on the slope, her fat wrists and thighs weighing her down. She feels the swell of the river draw her into its mud, until they are both the one warm swamp. She doesn't want to wait there like a crayfish. Besides, all the underwater territories are taken up. She would have to fight her way in before positioning herself. Once positioned she would have to be satisfied with that. The surface suited her imagination better. Her blood is running through her pubic hair and along the pale skin of her inner thighs. It makes a dash for the dry river bank. She wants to know where her blood goes. Soon she is a dry ridge that has built its own stream. The blood tributary will flow into the river. Many generations of freshwater bream, sand logged mussels and river weed away, the ocean is waiting to claim her fluids. It has a big salty heart and an empty mouth. She thinks of swimming for the first time. What would it take for the outback to lose its dust to water, when there had been no rain for years? She knew the dry land held life but water gives it the power of birth. All life is partially water, she thought. No matter how magnificent the desert was, it was always dying of thirst. On this note we move away from the property. We are no longer attracted to the smell of blood. She is bleeding down by the Birrie River.
A mile away a sheep's head has fallen off the edge of the earth at the shearing sheds. It was ripped off by the knife man, the blood leaking like a river down from Queensland. The man with the knife said, "It's all right." The bedraggled kids that hang around the sheds are old for their age, seeing too clearly to put much trust into any adult. They shouted, "No, no," as the knife man did it, because the sheep couldn't speak as she suffered and lost. It happened very quickly for the knife, but the moment for the sheep was infinite. The present was all she had left. Her life betrayed to the smile of the kill. "No, no," the kids shouted, as her lining was ripped by the blade, so that her guts fell out in a jumble. Her shocked face rested in the grass. It was like the vulnerable sheep was just about to fall everywhere.
Even as she walked with the rest of the herd out on the backblocks, she was always going to die here. The children had their hearts broken and went away to climb the ironbark trees in the afternoon. The sun fell down upon their dirty skinny backs and made them warm from behind. They didn't know what to do with a lamb they found. Memory told them they shouldn't take it home, so they played with it for awhile and left it out for the sun. It cried out just like one of them. Like that sheep before slaughter we have character, yet we just fall everywhere behind our skin. We are crying for the world while our skin holds the world in. We must own the out of control organs as they fall from the sheep, a cracked dam breaking when it floods. We must own our bloody rivers flowing through our internal landscapes. We must hold that part of our body together, and steadfast, so that the child does not shout, "No, no." We must do what the sheep failed to do as we failed her. We must hold our minds together as they sing like mosquitoes and stare at the sun, until our crazy foreheads are burnt and crusty like rock after bushfire, our eyes downturned in bewilderment and despair.
We must close our eyes so that the sun doesn't take them to its country of the blind. We must close our damaged hearts that are dying. We must see that every human, every sheep, every insect is holding itself together. The sap in the trunk is holding itself straight up and down. The brown inland rivers are holding the banks steady, so that they whistle and cry when the floodwater breaks through to fill the dry lagoons. Winter flood is sad. It rises in the slow ending of the uneven steep-banked outback river. We must acknowledge the death and defeat of a flooded paddock. The drowned grey trees bringing tears; the earth holding itself together in space. There is something very big out there. We are not sure if it is holding itself together or what direction it is traveling in, or if it moves or stops to watch. We are very alone. We have a lot of responsibility in attending to the machinery of the mind and body.
To some extent we didn't choose to be the caretakers of these properties. Whatever we claim ownership over grows too big and finally escapes us. Today Carinda sits on the muddy bank of the narrow brown Birrie. She will not go back to the property. We have left her cycles to the mercy of this territory. She will drop her womb lining like a brown snake shedding its skin in February. There is a question in the murdered sheep. Where does this movement take her, as her blood drains into the life of another? Before there is an answer, we are leaving this part of the land. The story is left behind. The higher we fly the more alienated we become and the more we see the whole scene on earth holding itself together, like too many questions, like a suggestion by the artist to the desert sun, like the silent cry of a single sheep as she is savaged into blood, like the heartbroken children of the tin shed, who finally had to leave behind the lamb. |
