imagines

I sit, slightly out of breath, beyond the pier, on the breakwater.

Already the massive bluestone blocks are quite warm to touch. I sit, and the sun rises, and they get hotter and hotter. The air goes dry and the sea still.

I beg for a small breeze, just one small gust of wind from out over the water, anything, as long as it is big enough to carry another imagine. If one comes I couldn't miss it. If these things work by signals then I'd have to be a beacon visible right out to sea like a lighthouse.

But I am too late, nothing comes. In two and half hours the only movement in the air is from the land towards the sea. Hot air, foul air.

By ten I'm sweaty and uncomfortable. I retrace my steps, its pointless staying any longer.

I'll have to continue to hide from the phone and the blank page. And from Janet.

# # #

It had been hot, suffocating hot, all night. About dusk the north wind had dropped and left the remaining air to evaporate.

Then, about six in the morning, there came a stream of fresh cooler air, it blew across my face from my southern window. I could smell the ocean in it from ten kilometers away.

I was up, dressed, and into the car by six thirty, happy for the first time in two weeks. Two weeks without a southerly wind, dry weeks without a word on paper. Weeks devoid of ideas, when the wind had come only from the north, across the city, choked with dust and the portent of fire.

I was elated and impatient with the traffic through the city. Peak hour was all messed up by the heat. People, unable to sleep, had taken to their cars to get in a quick dip before the sun and the routine of business forced them back into air-conditioned shelters. Everyone could feel the sun getting stronger, our cars trapped the heat. I was too excited to notice that cool sea breeze was dropping, until I parked the car and walked towards the water.

The beach was crowded with people, many appeared to have slept the night on the sand. I hurried past their little camps as they packed away their belongings or read the morning newspapers and drank coffee from styrene cups. Other people, in various states of undress, prepared themselves for work, sitting on the sand facing the sea. In front of mirrors they combed hair or shaved or applied lipstick. Two women had turned away from the water towards the sun. They had themselves propped up, with their arms out behind them like deck chairs. Their heads were tilted back, their eyes closed, their brown and oily breasts and dark nipples received the low rays of the sun without shadow. A different longing almost broke my stride.

By the time I reached the pier I was running; I'd lost any sense of elation. There were people everywhere, all of them, deaf to what had been carried on the wind, all ignorant and stupid and self absorbed. I hated them. They just sat there, obstacles on the beach, lost in trivial pleasure.

My running amused those who watched from some distance, annoyed those to whom I came close. Not that there was any danger of sand from my feet being blown in their faces, there wasn't enough wind.

Why hadn't I slept here with all these people? I could have been here when the wind changed around. What a wasted opportunity.

# # #

"No one can work in this heat".

That was my answer when the queries came and deadlines were passed and extended, and the extensions passed.

Janet, of course, has a good memory. "I thought you said you worked well in any weather. Last summer you wrote like the heat speeded you up. You had little time for anything else. Remember."

"Its the north winds. Last year there were cool breezes, sea breezes." She didn't understand what that meant but, under the circumstances, it seemed to satisfy her. I don't know how it got translated for the publisher. Eventually the phone calls and complaints melted away like everything else.

I really enjoy the fact that Janet doesn't understand what I mean, I've made it into a kind of game. I can be quite open with her, I just act as if she understands, like I had actually told her everything. When something doesn't make sense she just seems to ignore it, she apparently puts it down to eccentricity.

I told her about getting sea sick last week. I even told her that going to sea was not recreation but work, that I was doing it for inspiration, for my writing, for her, to get her off my back. She must understand that the sea is important for my work. I'm always talking of the sea-air and sea-breezes, of writing on the pier, holidays on the coast, of my shack near the ocean. She thinks the sea relaxes me, that it clears my head, enables me to concentrate. She probably even believes that it helps my imagination, helps me create my stories, my characters, form my words. She might really be that close; yet so far. She clearly believes all her writers have to have some inspirational aid for their imagination. But whilst she thinks in terms of the sea as an "aid" and the imagination as "mine" she will never understand, no matter how honest I am in what I tell her.

# # #

I've never used the term imagines with anybody, not in the way I use it in my own thoughts, as a noun, as a description for the things I once labelled with more conventional terms: "stories", "ideas", "images", "fantasies", "vignettes". As soon as I discovered they all came from the same ‘somewhere’ I needed a single term for them. Imagines is what I came to call them and I've called them that for so long now its too late to change. Never "my imagines" of course. Not even "their imagines", that would raise issues I try hard not to think about. Just imagines, without ownership.

I can't write about them; it's pointless to do so because there are obvious reasons why most people would reject the whole idea. My reputation would make it difficult for anybody to take what I had to say as "serious". If I say to anyone who knows my work "I want to tell you about imagines, where they come from and about how they can be captured or tuned into", (I'm still not sure which is more correct), they'd just take the whole thing as another of my fantasies. Or worse, they might think the fantasies had control of me. Most people see a creative artist as someone who is not overcome by the dead weight of reality, someone not constrained by that gravity which tends to secure the mind just as surely as our feet are secured to the whirling surface of the earth. A sort of mental gymnast. But if they think you have jumped too high and left reality altogether, that you permanently inhabit some other space from which return has become unnecessary or impossible, then they don't see you as creative but as mad. You can't remain a writer if people think of you as mad, not if you want to sell books. Only psychiatrists can describe the fanciful delusions of the crazy and get them published. Their readers are in sane hands.

Even if I could avoid the problem of being dismissed as crazy I'd still lose out. If I could convince my readers about imagines, my reputation could still be destroyed. For most people my work would seem like plagiarism, I wouldn't be a writer but a thief. This is what really deters me most from saying anything about imagines to anyone. I have enough trouble convincing myself I'm not a fraud.

There are plenty of times when I find myself talking to someone about "where creative ideas come from" or "writers block". If that someone is serious and enthusiastic, all bound up in a vision of themselves as a future writer of substance, I'm often tempted to crush their illusions and let them into the "secret" of imagines.

What is it that stops me? I flirt with it, I throw out hints. I'm like someone fascinated with suicide taking up skydiving.

# # #

A few months ago sitting in my study was a tall and serious woman whose questioning eyes had me so enthralled I became reckless.

As we sat close, close enough for intimate intercourse, I developed a certain melancholy about the state of my life in general and about the lack of certain female contact in particular. It was only a few months since Janet and I had fully separated our lives from our work, having previously separated our offices and then our beds.

Suddenly, there I was asking her dangerous questions: "Why does so much literature have to do with the ocean, or with wild uninhabited places? Why do Australian writers seem so preoccupied with the landscape, with the outback, with the nature of a country whose people are bunched together against the immensity of the ocean on one side and, on the other, the vast and still alien terrain of the planet’s oldest landforms?"

I went on recklessly. "I would suggest to you", I said, trying to project my most learned and reflective self, "that this is not just their subject, it is also their object."

I paused. She looked perplexed. I elaborated, touching her hand for effect.

"Australian writers", I said. "are in the process of rediscovering what all great writers have known. The real inspiration for all literature lies in nature and in our place as humans in the process of remodelling nature, a process that begins first in our imagination. Writers - artists of all sorts - have always stood in the most precarious position in that process, as observers of what was, and what now is, and as visionaries for what could be."

Her face moved closer. My despair diminished. My longing grew. I wanted those eyes. I wanted to build a bridge of words on which we might meet. A bridge on which she, being so inspired by the heights to which we had climbed, would throw convention, modesty and inhibition off into the stream of ordinary life which flowed beneath us. From its peak she would see my secret. We would be joined in knowledge.

I almost told her everything. I thought of laying out my life so she would be stunned by my vulnerability and my trust in her as a fellow writer whose potential I had recognised.

"In vast places", I would begin, "where nature is almost untouched by humans, where what-could-be is still an infinity of possibilities, there is an immense and ever replenishing store of all the imagines of what-could-have-been that could find no place in the what-came-to-be.

When I was starting out as a writer, I was like any other beginner. Ideas, the stuff that became my stories, would arrive suddenly, capriciously, erratically. I didn't ever experience a real hiatus of ideas or inspiration, but it used to worry me that such a time would come. I read everything I could from established writers on how they worked, how they protected or enhanced their creativity. I discovered almost nothing that was consistent or helpful. Almost nothing. One thing did come through from what I had read: The source of inspiration for writing could often be found in the experience of childhood."

I imagined her nodding her head at this, drawing her lips into a smile as she stepped out on to my bridge.

"My childhood was all connected to sand and the ocean. So I decided, whenever I felt tired or dull, I would travel to the nearest city beach. In the sounds and smells of the bay I thought I might recollect some of the feelings that were mine as a child. I took to walking frequently on St Kilda beach and pier. The first few times it was pleasant and relaxing, I returned to work invigorated. I didn't think at all of my childhood.

Then there was one morning at St Kilda, it was the end of summer and the weak sun seemed all but blown away by a strong wind off the sea. I walked out along the pier, towards the ocean beyond the bay. I hadn't walked for long before I had an idea for a story. Soon it was more than just an idea.

The bitterness of the wind forced me back into the car. My face and ears were burning, my skin was salty and damp, my eyes were watering. In the quiet car the idea seemed so loud, my head, my mind, was alive, taken over by it. I was filled with a story. It wasn't in words, but it was tangible, I could turn it over and around, move from its beginning to its end. It had echoes of voices and feelings and a sense of a place and of time. Yet I knew it was formless until I examined it, under my probing it took shape. It became so clear that all I had to do was to go home and write it out.

Then, each time I returned to the pier another story would force its way into my head.

Eventually, I had to limit my trips. Once, I was in the middle of a story and I felt the need for fresh air. I thought I would mull it over with the wind and salt in my face. Instead that story was pushed out of my head by another which was so urgent, so fresh and clear, that I could work on nothing else until it was completed. It was a strange and disorienting experience. It took over my life. The story involved a person for whom the police helicopter becomes a symbol of everything in his life over which he has no control and against which he must act. An ordinary person, deeply concerned by the deterioration of the world that would be left for his childrens.

Until I had that story written out, the frequent noise of a police helicopter, which I had never noticed before, became an obsession. Wherever I went it seemed to be following me. I became paranoid. I believed that the police had discovered that I was writing a story about shooting down their helicopter and were following me, deliberately harassing me." (I would laugh here to reassure her that that state had been temporary. By now I had to be careful.)

"After a while I stopped being concerned about the strange regularity of these new stories. I settled into an easy rhythm. At the end of one story I would visit the water and soak up another. When I needed exercise during my writing I found that walking around suburban streets cleared my head but left the current story uncontested. I ceased worrying about running out of ideas."

I thought it would be good to slide my hand over hers to join our bodies where the arms of our chairs almost meet. She would feel my hand, a sure hand, solid, sensitive, real.

"Then came a day, a clear and unusually warm spring day, when I felt like commencing something new. It seemed like the perfect day to return to the pier, to enjoy the sun and to fish for another story.

It was a wonderful day to walk out over the water amongst the boats and the sea-gulls. The sky was lightly cloudy, but the rain had passed. The sun was shining on the city and everything glistened and looked washed and clean. As the sun warmed the lawns of the little park beside the water a fine layer of steam unfurled a lazy whiteness on which trees and bushes were set free to float. But there was no wind, so they lay becalmed.

It was so still that in the marina the yachts lay unmoving in soft smokey-blue water. Sounds carried above the deep voice of the city: peoples' shouts, sea-gulls' cries, sand paper rubbing across the hull of a boat up on blocks, music from a radio out on the water, a splash as someone tipped something off a yacht into the quiet sea."

At this point I would grab my journal from the shelf above the desk. She could lean over it with me, our shoulders touching. Good solid steadying things, the touch of shoulders, the spine of an open book, words scrawled on a page with the date at the top.

"As you can read, there was plenty for me to observe, to write about.

See this bit here about the antics of some sea-gulls playing with litter at the edge of the water. Whilst I watched they developed a group game, like kids in a playground. First just a couple of birds, picked up bottle tops from the sand, dropping them from their beaks into the water, then diving under to retrieve them. Each time they waited longer and longer after the bottle top hit the water, so they had to dive deeper and deeper below the surface. Other birds tried it too. Soon there must have been thirty birds all playing the game with bits of plastic and silver paper, with flotsam and jetsam of all varieties.

Look. Here. Here are notes about men asleep in cars along the water front and couple in other cars with steamed up windows. There I wrote about the faces of joggers as they ran past along the footpath those that were lost in their thoughts, those that looked out to sea, those who looked at the cars, curious about the lives of the occupants.

All this." I flipped through the pages. I draw her eyes back to mine.

"Yet I came home with nothing in my head. No stories."

She would be frowning, perplexed, unsure of where I was taking her, but captured by the sense of intimacy which had grown between us, in my quiet bookish study, ten kilometres from St Kilda beach.

I was confident and clear in what I was saying, I had rehearsed it many times before. I went on.

"The warm spring weather continued. Each day I went back to St Kilda and was disappointed. My head remained tied to the world I could see, my imagination seemed to have left me stranded in real life.

But on the forth day it changed. Again I hurried home with a story about three women who meet once a week for an extended lunch time adventure which they take it in turns to create."

I assumed she would have read that story, it had been widely reprinted.

Then I looked at her, feeling the touch of her lips, worried about the intensity of her eyes. I knew that my desire would have made me falter at this point.

How would she react to my description of those terrible months when I became obsessed with the inconsistent fruits of my visits to St Kilda? What would she make of my plan, my rigorous elimination of all those factors which might explain what was happening on those days when the sea could not move my imagination? Would it all seem too calculated, rational, logical, uncreative? How would she look at me after I had told her of my hundreds of visitations at different times, my various acts of concentration and meditation, my detailed observations of the weather, of the tides, of the position of the moon, of the number of people on the pier or the beach with me, the state of my body, the dreams I had had the night before, what I had eaten, how I had slept, the time since my last orgasm?

I wouldn't want her to read that part of my journal, to examine my thoughts during that time of testing; that time which finally established that the stories came into my head only on days when the wind blew off the sea.

"Only when the wind blows off the sea?" What was that tone in her voice?

I knew without question that my final explanation would set a gulf between us which could not be crossed. She may listen politely as I explain the nature of imagines. She would surely be moved by my descriptions of the ordinary people who give them birth. People who dream of other lives, other conditions, other possibilities and different futures.

But could I make her understand why so many dreams, so many imaginative creations, are abandoned because the world seems unable to sustain them? Could she as a creative person really appreciate that so many imagines fill ordinary people with a sense of sadness and emptiness and despair. I couldn't explain this. I was at the point where my rehearsal always collapsed.

Putting it one way made it sound like a religious experience. There was another, but that sounded dry and academic. At least the first way still allowed room for poetry and passion. But being thought of as "religious" was almost the same as being dismissed as mad.

So, I said nothing of imagines. I just talked of the importance of childhood experience, of recapturing innocence, of finding ideas in early dreams and hopes. We talked about the value of naivety.

Whilst we talked I watched her lips and allowed my dreams as much freedom as circumstances permitted.

She left with several books I generously thrust upon her, that she would have to return.

After she'd gone I tried to work but the longing and the dreams grew stronger in her absence.

I thought of her returning the books and lingering while we talked, and of her returning again after that, and yet again. I dreamed of her, here in my studio or at home, an intimate companion. I thought of her arms and legs and shoulders and the curve of her stomach and breasts. She was often naked as she walked around the house or sat reading something we would later discuss.

But my longing wasn't really sexual. I thought of us joined in a quest to explore all the implications of imagines. When I reached out to place my hand on her bare skin, as she lay behind me on the old cane lounge, I would be affirming something we shared not just in our bed but walking hand in hand along St Kilda pier with the wind in our faces.

"How long do imagines survive?", she would ask one night, lying awake in the dark.

We would talk a lot in the dark.

At another time we would discuss the probability that people would open one of our books to a story from an imagine to which they had given birth.

"Would someone recognise their own?"

I had thought about this, often. The idea of someone abandoning an entity of their own creation is such a tragic event.

"Surely people must develop some compensating mechanism. They must have some way of repressing the memory of the human progeny they felt forced to discard because they could no longer embrace it, because it seemed so out of place.

She had the same thoughts: "If I could listen to all my readers as they finish a story I believe that I could detect with fair certainty anyone who had given birth to the imagine on which it was based. Many people will put down a book and say: ‘Yes, that's right.', or simply, 'I wonder ', or 'what if? ' But there are others who say 'if only the world was like that ', or 'quite impossible', or 'what ridiculous flights of fancy that woman comes up with', or 'lovely to read, but pure escapism'. Those are people who recognise something they don't want to, something they had thought themselves many years before but had come to reject as foolish, as impossible, as hopeless dream."

That would lead to talk about whether we should think of ourselves as writers of fiction.

"I feel more like a biographer or a translator" she would shout from her desk in the other room.

I might tell her how for a long time I felt like some kind of medium. Like that ordinary woman, who lives in an ordinary English village, through whom great, long dead composers send back further compositions from the afterlife. I used to think that imagines came from authors whose pens were not stilled when their bodies were laid to rest. There are aspects of that idea I am still taken with: "I like to think that the immortality of my earthly writings will not quell my urge to write when the earth is no longer my living abode. I love the idea that I will find some totally ordinary person whose living hand I can direct across the page whilst I float out above the ocean with all those orphaned imagines."

"It wouldn't be a hand moving across paper", she would shout from the shower, "when you're dead you'll have to direct hands across keyboards. I keep telling you you'll have to learn to touch-type."

God, what a formidable pair we would make.

Wouldn't we?

# # #

I think about her as I endure the journey home from St Kilda, away from the rocks and the pier and the empty sea.

First thing to do indoors is to pull out the phone plug. Then its down on the floor where its cool. I close my eyes. I can make her return faster that way.

She delivered the books about a week after we had first talked; she stayed for a while and we drank a little wine. She called me once after that, a few weeks ago, on the phone. She was going away up the coast for a holiday. She would keep writing in her journal and offered to send a post card. It hasn't come.

Lunchtime passed, but it was too hot to eat. I move to the bed to doze, the floor was hard on my back.

Then its dark, I'm awake, exhausted and drained. I have forced myself awake to escape from one of those hot hallucinatory nightmares.

I dreamt that I was awoken again by a cool damp breeze across my all but naked body. There was little light, just enough to see a woman sitting at the end of the bed. At first I thought she had returned from her coastal holiday. Then I realised it was Janet.

"I didn't mean to wake you. I was trying to leave the bed without disturbing you. I wanted you to get a good long sleep, now its cooled down. You've been so tired, that's why you can't write."

The breeze from the window was strong enough to catch her hair.

"No, no, I'm fine", I said, sitting up.

"Please", she said, putting her hands on my shoulders. Her eyes wanted mine. I looked away.

"Get some rest", she said. "If you keep going like this you'll never get the book finished. You'll get sick. You know you do when you're tired."

She pushed me back on the bed and fell on top of me. Her skin felt cool against my chest. I rolled her off.

I stepped out of the bed and grabbed my shorts.

"What are you doing?"

"Going for a drive. To the beach. To St Kilda pier."

"Its one o'clock in the morning."

I had my top on but I couldn't locate my thongs or my car keys.

Janet was looking at me very strangely. She climbed off the bed and went to the door. She banged it closed and lent back against it.

"You're obviously not going to the beach", she said, "so, where you are going? Why are you lying to me?"

"I am going to the beach, to St Kilda. I have to. I missed the cool breeze this morning. Where are my thongs?"

I felt the breeze drop away. I became slightly hysterical. Janet seemed to be itching for an argument and continued to bar the door. We fought.

I banged her away from the door and pushed her on to the bed. She was crying, sobbing, saying I was overworked, neurotic, that I had to see someone.

I knew then I had to tell her about imagines. She would have to understand.

I felt a great relief as I went through it all.

I came to the unrehearsed part and went right on. "Its a remnant of evolution", I said. "Imagines were vital to our survival as a species, the thing that distinguished us from animals."

We were sitting on the bed again by this stage. It was too dark to see her face, to see what she'd made of my discovery. I could only go on, through to the end.

"Humans, only humans of all the animals, could look at nature, at an inhospitable wilderness, and imagine how things might be changed to suit our needs. The future was always in our heads before it was in our hands. We survived even the most appalling conditions and hardship because we could 'see' in our minds how things could be different. We made the world in the image of our dreams. But then, after a while the world wasn't an empty terrain, it was full of the things we had previously created. There became less and less room for new ideas of how things might be, for ideas that didn't conform to what we had already made.

You must see how sad it is. We're the dominant species because of the power of our imagination. Because of our imagination we evolved to our present civilised and complex existence. But the product of that evolution is that there is now no room for imagination. Except as an escape from reality. Now we dream to escape a future we can't change."

She was silent. So I went on. "Dreams, imagination, once were the source of all our power. Now they are only a source of escape from a power that we don't have.

By 'we' I mean ordinary people, people who don't have the power to shape the future, or influence those who do.

But such people are still human, still have dreams, limitless dreams. Not dreams offered to them by institutions created to channel the dreaming urge within allowable limits, but real, creative, dreams that know no bounds. Dreams of desires fulfilled.

Such dreams frighten many people. They appear to have no place. People feel their power but experience their impotence. So they are thrown away, rejected.

But what I found is that they survive. Those dreams, ordinary peoples’ dreams of how things could be, can survive anywhere they are not contradicted by what already exists, anywhere there is still a space for them. A space like the ocean which we have not been able to mould, where anything is still possible. I catch them, I hear them, I see them, as the wind tosses them to the edge of the ocean."

She moved away to look at me.

She was still very quiet.

Then she spoke, slowly and quietly.

"So now I understand the trip in that ridiculous boat, in the north wind. Why you were desperate to go to sea even though you knew you would get sea sick.

I'm beginning to understand a lot. You actually believethis don't you. You believe that peoples' dreams live on. You talk of it like a life force, an ocean of spirits, an energy. You really believe its out there, to be tapped into, a vestigial power of human vision that survives. You pride yourself in being an atheist, you hat religion, yet secretly you believe in an after-life, dream spirits that live on in the ocean. A sort of heaven on earth. Look at the role you've allocated yourself in this. These imagines really only survive through you, you give them life again. They are reborn through you, you are their chronicler, you turn this formless stuff into words to be given back as a gift to the world, to the very people who have cast them out.

You believe that this.., this, this...soul , of the human species, is preserved through your writing."

I didn't like her tone.

"Tell me", she said, leaning back even further, "just how did this..this enlightenment, come to you? I understand how you narrowed down the occasions of you inspiration, ...your visions, ...to those days when the wind blew off the sea. But what tests did you conduct to understand that there were imagines in the wind?

And how did you discover their origins and meaning? Was there a burning bush and tablets of stone, a voice that told of your destiny and your role in saving humanity?"

Something made me go on, I couldn't stop, it spurted out.

"It all came to me one windy day at St Kilda. It was there, suddenly, for me to see, to understand. It was in the wind. It all made sense."

She was laughing. At first I could only feel her body shake the bed.

Then she was laughing out loud.

If she said I was mad, I knew I would hit her. I could feel the blow welling up inside me.

That's what woke me up.

There is no sign of a cool breeze and no Janet. For a while I feel too exhausted to move.

I force myself up and pack a small bag. I take the sheet off the bed. I make my camp on St Kilda beach at eleven o'clock.

At four o'clock in the morning the tiniest gust of wind blows from the ocean across the bodies littered on the sand. Only I am awake and ready. My head is filled with a story and I tumble back towards the car desperate for my pen and paper. I explore the story, I turn it over and over. It concerns a writer who discovers the origin of imagines and is driven to madness because there is no-one with whom he can share his knowledge.