Purple Prose (14 page)

Just recently I discovered a delightful – if dead wrong – citation of ‘The Blind Astronomer' as an essay, in a 2010 paper, ‘E-Accessible Astronomy Resources', about making databases and other online resources more accessible for ‘physically challenged' astronomers. The paper discusses results from a study carried out at the University of Helsinki (2005–2009), and concludes with this paragraph, quoting my fiction as fact:

Practically everyone who lives long enough has to face physical challenges at some point. An astronomer who is able-bodied today could have accessibility issues tomorrow. We cannot expect that she or he is willing to give up practicing science. In her essay
The Blind Astronomer
(Farr 2002), the New Zealand astronomer Tracy Farr eloquently describes the changes brought by the gradual loss of her vision. With a different approach to looking at the research data, she can continue to access the universe:

‘I am freeing myself from the fixedness of the seen. With my mind open to the universe, I hear the heavens' ebb and flow as music. It is the incomprehensibly wonderful revelation of music first heard after only ever having seen black spots and lines on a white page. As my ears open and my eyes close, I hear the planets dance.'
³⁹

What strikes me most when I re-read ‘The Blind Astronomer' now, though, comes immediately before those four sentences that Isaksson quotes:

… in comparison to the fixed film of seen memory, the image not seen is loose at the edges, its elements mobile and interchangeable. It holds the promise of universality.
⁴⁰

I know that my mother no longer sees what I see. She has lost precision and detail from her vision, with images ‘loose at the edges'. When she reads, now, she must read audio books (‘ears open … eyes close'). She can no longer see faces. She's had the guts (the centre, the heart, the eyes) punched out of her sight. I imagine this dark centre as unknowable, painted in shades of black. She is left with peripheral vision, though, and, because I can't bear not to, I romanticise – I invent and imagine (I fictionalise) – what she sees. I conjure a corona of glorious colour, its elements mobile, ever-changing: egg-white light split through a prism, a peacock-tail all-in-one shimmer, sea-green,
Murex
lustre, bridesmaid-dress– yellow, a bruise unpurpling. With those rose-coloured glasses firmly in place, life unfocused holds the promise of universality; it is blurred, but bright and beautiful.

for Larry, and for Sophie

Lovely as they are, things lose infinitely from being preserved not used.

Virginia Woolf,
Diaries
¹

It's not a failure of imagination: think of Helpston as a village in a wooden box, thatched cottages, church, public house, cows, sheep, and enough figures to dress the set … Johns and Marys, all of them. The chain stretches back …

Iain Sinclair,
Edge of the Orison
²

Distaff (
n.
) a tool used in spinning; the female branch or side of a family; a woman's work or domain

At the hinge of spring and summer, the suburbs of Perth are a purple carpet. As barefoot kids we were always warned about the bees that might be hiding in this fallen profusion. Between those small bells, and the pavement lines, and the prickles, there was a lot of hopping about, a lot of staccato skipping. Our first child was born at jacaranda time. I remember the profundity of crossing the border from a single state to owning a body that had made another. The nurses came and drew a face on my chart – happy – sad – in-between? Mine always smiled. I understood that they were busy and had their systems, their checks, but at times I wanted to howl
I am not fucking happy
. This life-changing thing has happened to me and I am feeling any combination of bliss, pride, fear, sadness, awe, etc., all rolled into one. But happiness, no. In the early evenings
I would walk our baby to a big bank of windows at old St John's and we would both look out to the jacarandas as far as the eye could see. I'd tell him this would always be his time of year, his estate, this purple slide to summer.

We think, perhaps, that it is the ones to be born who are waiting, but it is our ancestors too. They reside now in the digital sea. Some are surprised to find themselves recycled in merchandise or in museums. On the radio a commentator says we are not close to them anymore, that we are living in a long, continuous hiccupping present of compressed, homogenised culture, but I think that is not always true. It has taken me years to walk back to Mary or for her to walk forwards to me, but at a two generation's remove on my maternal side she does not feel distant in the least. Once, with old photos splayed about everywhere, a friend snatched up one and said
oh my god that's scary, she has your serious face on, the one you use when you talk about art
. I think I shrugged –
normal, why not, to look like an ancestor, surely
? But now I would say what is the matter with that, with looking serious … even at the risk of an imposed smiley face.

Perhaps sometimes Mary's expressions do inhabit mine and I am happy to think that they do. But she gave me much more than that too.

In the house into which I was born there was an under-the-house. My childhood room, a long narrow sleep-out, perched above this underground. One summer, my mother dragged an old brown trunk from the darkness. Then, I knew nothing about the house, how it had come into the family, who owned it and so forth. It was simply home, named
Cathay,
with its large wild garden, shingled roof and strange room configurations that had been modelled on a sea-captain's ship. It lay in a line of houses that I thought of as
my mother's, my grandmother's, my aunt's. Or rather, they were the figures that I most associated with those houses even though my father and my uncle were around.

When I asked my mother what was in the trunk she said
maybe the other life of the house.
We found tatty papers, abandoned knitting, infant shoes and then the mask that my mother snatched up quickly. It was a face made of linen with eye-holes and a mouth. We took turns in it, running crazily around the garden, but there was already something about the mask that made me wary, some itch or inexplicable periphery that it announced. Breathless, I asked my mother who had made it.
Probably my nanna,
was all she said.

Oh,
I replied.

That night I thought about the countless times I had fallen asleep, unaware of the mask in the trunk in the under-the-house in the room beneath my bed. Was there another room again beneath the under-the-house? How deep did things go down? And how many faces had been left there by how many old mothers for me to try on?

In the crypt there are not only people's things. And what is added to the store is endlessly unfinished, overlapping, changeable.
³

As the baby, the youngest on both sides (all sides), I have always lived with a strong salvation narrative. Keep the family together – no matter – at what cost, yes, all of those platitudes. Contrarily, my sense of family is strong; my sense of family is fragile. I imagine this is not unusual. We try to stay close. We try to hold it together. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. I am a half to my five brothers and sisters. I am no blood relation at all to my oldest first cousin, Axel. I can still picture his wry expression over the kitchen bench from me on his last visit.
Look at us – the oldest and youngest – and neither of us really Dougans.
It's only
later that I remember the napkin with the cursive ‘A' embroidered on the corner. A is for …? I cannot locate an ‘A'. Is it a stray from my husband's side with its Anthonys? And then in flash I know it is ‘A' for Axel. It is an inclusive ‘A' stitched by someone in the family for a German child arriving by postwar boat to a strange country, to a whole future he is yet to own. Old linen can spark off a detective bent. Who, who, I ask my mother, in all this family, can have got this napkin ready for Axel? She thinks for a bit.
If she'd been alive then, I would say Mary.

She was a great sewer. More than that, a professional seamstress. She sewed for society women in Melbourne in the last decades of the nineteenth century. She sewed matching outfits for my mother and my aunt when they were children: for the Royal Show, pale blue dresses with Peter Pan collars and flared skirts, for the opening of the family-owned Regal Cinema, crushed velvet evening coats. When my mother was older, Mary copied Vivien Leigh's dress from
Waterloo Bridge
for her, soft crepe, rose-pink with a taffeta slip.

In old photos young Mary is a figure of great elegance with her wasp waist and piled up curls. The clothes she wore she would have made herself: high-collared blouses with puffed sleeves, long tailored skirts in taffeta and other cloth depending on the season.

And she came down to us through the words for cloth that are now unused – serge, cambric, sateen, twill – words that are folded and packed away these days in special glossaries, words that are folded and packed away like the material she left in the houses of my grandmother and my mother. A great floating dowry of cloth for now unmade garments. A box, a chest, above/below ground, an endowment, an estate.