LINDA MARIE WALKER - Line of Sight
He writes about the Alps and the clouds over Northern Italy. My world has always been small, impeccably bordered, and yet I have never felt at home. The streets don't smell as a memory I have and believe, but which is not possible; I must inhabit this high land. These two people are directed, are firm in their body, are appeased. Their words come raw, and in my blank setting acquire significance, which is too grand as description, but, they stick to my Alpine leaning. I heard a poem by the man on the radio one morning and it was beautiful because one word naturally followed another, as if shadowed. I keep opening the traveller's books, marking pages, looking at the Atlas. One day I will build a garden in the Italian Alps because of him, and the gardener before me. At my street corner I glimpse some semblance of otherworld, but remain unconvinced. The man should not have died, it was avoidable, based on a decision about pain, and this has puzzled her, that he accepted advice which defined his fate. This must make a difference to the value of advice. He had a garden entirely in pots, but not hanging. To feel accomplished he wanted to garden, and be seen to garden, by meticulous care of individual plants. His yard was covered by a low native creeping shrub. The traveller, noting the Italian clouds from the peak of an Alp, said, "it would appear that the sunniness of this country, as well as its traditional blue sky, is something of a myth." (2) He was high in the world. I wake to my street and sounds which although I'd defend, are not mine. I'm a stable itinerant. I meet the woman at a friend's and she starts whispering again, about the man who died and who will take his place, and how she almost loved him. She says she doesn't believe in love, and that mingling looks is a formula for disaster. I search for the Alps in journals but am cautious because one picture is captioned: "This photograph is an example of relentless trimming as the enlargement was made from a portion of the original negative..." (3) I could argue that the Alps have been lived in for a long time and I have no signicficant history and my street can't be ancient. One garden there had the same gardener for fifty years and his passion was conifers and beds of scarlet salvias and geraniums. Then the educated gardener came along and cut most of it down, the old gardener grew gloomier and gloomier as his life's work was unravelled before his eyes. No-one recognized the puzzle the old man had made. Finally his garden vanished, all the statues and pots were dumped, all the winding gravel paths leading nowhere were dug up, and the mountains and valleys across the way were seen. He had closed out all sights, made the property exclusive, kept the beauty veiled, visible from the curves after wandering through his forest, for he had left gaps; he based his garden on gaps, spaces of difference and distance, keeping sacred the inside and outside. Suddenly everything was there, the church, the farms, the stone fences and huts, and all of the sky; the blue bore down, manners changed.
My favoured gardener was called to places. He wrote, I was called to the castle which was once the storehouse for salt for the Kingdom of Savoy, and he'd work out a border in white-flowering shrubs, and break the reflected summer light from the lake by planting a screen of silver birch. Here, by the way, are some of the things of my downfall: finely detailed doors and windows, wrought iron gateways between thick pillars, and stone fountains in courtyards. These are not in my street. They are described as objects of austere charm. The frettings and carvings and sculptings are so restrained that they only just pass telling, like the whisperings of the woman, that's a fact. The man who died wore enviable clothes, he was known for his dark jackets and tailored slacks, and the knit of his socks. I am curious about how people dress, what they combine. I was at the gate of an institution the other day, a repository, and the guard dressed in a black skirt and shirt was farewelling a famous guest who wore a brown leather jacket which was old and wrinkled and he had one arm in the jacket and the other not, or so it seemed, but I found out later he has only one arm. He was tanned, tallish, and formidable, as a word I've lately heard applied to tall men, and in the way the jacket laid over his shoulders he was safe, he had found an article of faith. The guard was attentive, committed in a sense, to him, and it was understandable in view of his clothes. I see that jacket as my Italian garden. In the Alps I will look like him, like I should. This theory is not passionate, I won't pack bags, rather I will go into the days sniffing, waiting for the gardeners in the street to burn their piles of cuttings, because I want the smoke of changed backyards. Essentially, says the gardener, it's deciding which clues to follow and which to ignore. He's mostly concerned with misfit gardens, he relishes gardens which are errors, or have been badly altered, he seeks the genius loci in the spoiled and ugly. He says, I can't make anything new, and more, shade implies trees. Gardens are often made to hide unwanted views, and any honest gardening takes a verdant heart. The gardener and the traveller were fugitives, and by the woman's version of the dead man he was too. Amongst his belongings were two hundred love letters from a woman known for her solitude, her vagabond style, and they were all sad, about how she wanted fidelity and despite her strong mind which she wrote was eloquent, she desired a home. Single minded desire means cutting off the edges, said the gardener. The whispering woman had briefly known the traveller, or so she thought, as he sounded like someone she met at the dead man's house. She said he was too old to be credible, that he sat stiff in an armchair and from time to time said a few sentences which bore no discernible relation to the discussion, but were nevertheless answered. It could be true except I heard he'd died when he lost his sight and couldn't see the Alps. I didn't dare mention the gardener. He was keen on new gardens too, on gardens for refreshment, ones based on an immediate instinctive response, the flash he called it. He ripped away lushness, uprooted so-called travesties of style, and limited himself to scant plant material, coming back to light and shade, earth, stone and water, foliage and flowers, recalling the gardens of the renaissance which were built for walking and conversation, before the landscapes of other countries were imposed. So, meet violence with violence, in a manner of speaking, to make a garden a place of rest. My favoured traveller searches out foreground and background, and has the same tendencies as the gardener, a pertinacity for order. I can't turn my street into the Alps, I can't even garden the Italian way, my foreground is several pots of lavender and geraniums, and my background is pictures of the Alps and writings by these two contemporaries. Together they counter the whisperings of the woman and the passing by of men with one poem. I hear them talking to each other. One day when I'd pulled the kitchen table near the window a noise like a cart coming down the street turned out to be an Italian man rolling a wine barrel. The sound was old like a smell. I walk to stare at the vegetable gardens of the Italian families. The woman phoned to say that caterpillars had eaten her tomato plants overnight, the stems were bare, and that the Italian man across the street showed her his and they were like oranges. She said, it's in their history, they build gardens for love not beauty. She also said that the plants in the pots of the dead man had been emptied into his grave. I go out my sidegate to see what I can se. The traveller reckons the foreground bridges the gap, and leads thinking toward the valleys, so that the front sights are not themselves potent but foils for further, or far-off, effects. It's not a bad notion. It saves embracing the border and the beyond simultaneously, a means of avoiding the obvious. I skirt round my dispassion by planning a departure; slowly, as I'm still keen to hear the whispering. All my objects, the kitchen plates, the lounge curtains, the bedroom light, the passage rug, the garden fence are unmatched, disharmonious, unhistorical. I can't visit buildings which have grown out of the ground, or gates which mean more than function. My days suit the reading of maps, the ease of location. But when I move to the Alps the route will be organic, altered by the seasons. There are sparrows in my garden, wild cats, and rats at night. I am a hundred steps from a highway, and late at night I remember that. It may be years before I leave, when this face has vanished: "... it is simply there that I should like to live." (4) I won't visit. I put money away in jars and envelopes, it is romantic. I could plant trees and shrubs, and arrange boulders to lessen the discrepancies, and believe the woman had talked with the traveller. Gardeners go to Gothic manuscripts, to du Cerceaux, to Kip's engravings of country, to the embroideries of Le Notre for influence, and to the Mogul gardens of Kashmir. And then they form their philosophies on the picturesque, that's the story of the English Garden (at one point in time anyway). A garden is made: a bird bath from Copenhagen, a flight of steps from Italy, some informal planting from Zurich, and a herbaceous border from Miss Gertrude Jekyll. (My favoured gardener says of Miss Jekyll: "I remember her in her eighties, a dumpy figure in a heavy gardener's apron, her vitality shining from a face half concealed by two pairs of spectacles and a battered and yellowed straw hat. Discerning the principles lying behind her experiments with colour and form, versed in the nature of soil and water and growth, (she) was able so to write about gardens that now, fifty years later, the principles she defined are still valid although much of her actual work was, of course, local in application. As always in the case of a pioneer in any field, the repercussions of her influence have been differently and indifferently understood. I can think of few English gardens made in the last fifty years which do not bear the mark of her teaching, whether in the arrangement of a flower border, the almost habitual association of certain plants or the planting of that difficult passage where garden merges into wild." (5) I read and re-read articles about the Alps between Italy and Switzerland, but I can't possess them. That is, if the woman speaks I answer, if the man passing tells me a story I listen. I have a clue: when I travelled east I was thought a German. I figure that denotes roots. When I was high in other mountains I visited friends of the traveller. He stayed with them, he was enticed to all tall places. They had his out-of-print books and I copied down passages. They told me he went blind. I spent days in their shop by a wood fire. Finally I hiked to a summit. I told the woman this and she said her dead friend was there the same year. He'd bought coats. And, she said, the thin air and cold had further weakened his health. These five (the woman, the man, the gardener, the traveller, the deceased) are pictorialists, they underlie a rhythm I can't hum, not even whimsically. The dead man's garden pots were willed to several people including the woman. Hers is planted with nasturtiums. On my table are marigolds, flowers which I had not thought of as "...the ephemeral sexual display in the yearly cycle of a plant's life..." before reading the gardener. (6) I hadn't dispensed with the foreground for the monotonous background before reading the traveller. The woman visited me on a Sunday and bought x-rays of the dead man's lungs. The poet is away again. I live in flat land, I walk for days without seeing a hill. The trees and shrubs are cut back in my street, every corner has a clean edge.
Part Two
I must leave behind the objects, I must start out, begin. I must leave the garden, which of course I've done before, and today the rain. There is no wind. The woman's name is Lilly Isabella. It could be her own. Isabella was my grandmother's name, a woman casual with a shotgun, whose home burnt down ten years after she died, who tended roses and made a living from potatoes. Lilly I. doesn't have boyfriends anymore, because of her position on love, but she boasts about those who gave her gifts: cups, plates and bowls; her house is full of tales, about thieves and cripples and drunks. But I have followed her. And she meets a man in a cafe in the city. Out of curiosity, and because of the misgivings I have about my street, I planned a week of surveillance. I needed time. She walked to the cafe. He was older than her. They were not just friends. It was their pose, not conspiratorial, but sensual in both gaze and embrace. They exchanged envelopes. I was good at following people. I was spying because of what I heard as depressions in her speech, and because I believed her less and less, but heeded her quips more and more, her parting homily. It was never something I could quote. I'd recall it when I longed for expensive cheese, or was convinced about a colour. I'd bank the cheese money, and lose interest in the colour. I did not want this to happen to the Alps, and it could, even though I'd not mention them. She could reduce sound, each tender idea, and by the lightest of blows demolish unspoken ones. I had to discover a counterpoint. Because from my garden or window or verandah I did not have one, couldn't work one up. I followed her through the parks, the playing grounds, and rubble of demolished office blocks, down lanes of old oaks, past the gardens of succulents and hothouses to the narrow busy streets of our city. He said to her, you will come for a long time. And she said, it's not a masquerade. That's the only talk I heard. I waited then across the street in a less salubrious shop to watch him walk away. His straight back obvious amongst the crowd. She would leave soon, heading to her house with the falling apart garden and the plastic pots stacked on the porch near a kitchen table where she told me about a lover she'd had who lived near a river and who brought gifts, the last one being dried peaches that looked like old genitals and she gave him up. It was the brown-ness, she said. While I am here the Alps will be simpler, they will ease my need to love my street. When I go I may find a formless mass of peaks and valleys, that's the risk. I took her seriously. If I began to sink, fall in love, I'd reach for the books, and stare at the Alps and come around, and gradually see a man not a monolith, for I was easily swayed. It was her clothes, the combination of yellow and red, the long tops over tights, a piece of ground she'd claimed. I wanted to fault her. I wanted her confession. I could see them through the window. Meeting a man in a cafe did not constitute love, it did romance however, and that was good enough. I composed conversations between them, I wanted gossip to penetrate their separate worlds and leave scars, so they'd say remember-when and what-if. I came from flat land. I'd be told, the flats are flooded, the fog is low on the flats. The hills were low too. My favoured traveller had lived in the Alps in all four seasons. He was a sportsman trailing through the snow fields from hut to hut, battered by storms, listening to his thumping heart, waiting for the silence. And writing notes only possible away from familiar territory: "In the monotony of snow lies a subtle charm." (7) She left her house or received visitors after four in the afternoon. She was known for her publications, or tampered biographies as she called them. Her style was well paid, she fitted together unlikely bits and pieces making up names and occupations, and the magazines printed her stories with pictures she provided. She found these at second-hand shops. She interviewed me as a sought-after gardener and we found a picture of a woman who looked exactly as she sounded. We called her Esther Wallace. I started hunting for books on gardeners and she stopped weeding her garden. I came to the land between Italy and Switzerland. A gardener who was a great formalist in 17th Century France is discussed now as using mathematical doctrine, and achieving optical and symbolic results, Hercules standing blocking the furthest point. "... as one begins to walk around the pool, with the intention of attaining the grottos and the position of Hercules, something is seen to be wrong with the relation of the grottos to the pool, and all of a sudden the truth and trickery of this construction are revealed: the grottos are in fact considerably lower than the pool, and separated from it by a wide transversal canal, nearly one kilometer long! (This effect was achieved by utilising a corollary of the tenth theorem of Euclid's 'Optics', which states that the most distant parts of planes situated below the eye appear to be the most elevated.)" (8) Some have said I should widen my scope, that I should cultivate a social capacity. Some have ridiculed my garden because it isn't exotic, it looks like a roadside. I overheard an old man say he knew a person's personality by their garden. When younger I didn't care for growing trees or flowers or vegetables. She will remember this man's talk, she will mix matter and memory and write him up as someone else. To follow her I walk in a landscape of wet soil and white skies. That's what I'll say if there's a trial, if I'm caught harming her. I will go by train to the Alps. I will quickly pass through a new country. I'm not seduced by settings or plots. Once I could only have got there by foot or mule. Exhaustion deters me, I don't intend making an effort, I won't appreciate it more. My traveller writes about the steadfastness of eternity, and barbaric lusts. On the train he says I will have the aroma of cheese, onions, and boot leather and strong tobacco, the scent of hay. They are the Pennine Alps. I don't need commiseration. On one of the summits of Mount Rosa on the Swiss-Italian frontier is the Margherita hut, the highest building in Europe, or it was in 1940. It was (or is) an observatory and a shelter for climbers. He had mountain sickness there but taught the hut-keeper how to play shove ha'penny. Early morning, he says, is the best time to photograph snow "... as the slanting rays of a low sun reveal the texture of (it)." (9) A month went by and winter set in and I was overcome by repairs to the trellis and re-potting and by the warmth in my kitchen in the late afternoon. She rang to say she would write more articles on the gardener and could she interview me again. I agreed, we could both carry on a fabricated life, trace unmade tracks. Alp-bodies are old-fashioned, I have one. Where I was round and smooth I am straight and sharp. I could easily have accompanied the traveller, dressed in thick pants tucked into long woollen socks and leather boots, tied to him with rope. I'd rather have waited though at the inn in the village tucked up in a bed watching the snow, and preparing myself for the evening meal of soup and bread by the open fire down-stairs. I don't wish to climb the Alps. She said she wanted to write about style, could I take that line. I was reserved, but again agreed. Firstly there's light and shade, what goes where. I'd opt for shade, and then shape, and the relations of angles, curves and slopes. I'd make steps, stairs and ramps to "... act as lines of communication." (10) No flower borders, or rose bushes. Then I'd go back and plant edibles because, at base, I'm practical. Absolutely no decoration, but a harshness. Not even to intensify vigour. Because, as the gardener says, theme is debased by the overtly decorative. I'd be artless, deliberately placing each plant. My one trick might be stones, but I'd be vigilant. Discard and burn, two rules of gardening. Once, for a job, I swept the autumn leaves into piles along the street, as an old man made little fires in the evenings. He eventually petitioned the council to uproot the deciduous trees beside the road and replant with evergreens. It was done. It's cool in the summer, but cold in the winter. This favoured gardener pretends each garden is his own and he will live with it forever. At once all fancy goes. He says, if I insist on indulging in fancy "... they will either remain to reproach me or else be cleared away as evidence of my incompetence." (11) Then there is tiresomeness: will a dripping fountain be a pleasure always, will patches of earth lay bare for weeks. Is a garden just a place to look at. I'm concerned with a small space, the inner city backyard. Gardening is composing, putting love with passion; it is laziness and duty, growth and decay. Le Notre's insistence that there be a space next to the house equal in width to the height of the building from ground level to cornice is no longer heeded. Level land needs the grace of discretion, not drama. I said all these things and it came out sounding relevant. I had gone to her house and we sat at the table outside, late afternoon and she made no move to meet the man. She had enough material for another article. She began to tell me about a man she'd met at a dinner who had lived with the dead man for three years when he owned a shack by the coast and they'd made a living care-taking the other empty shacks for the winter. And during the summer they worked on the boats. It was coincidence, she said. Yet at this stage when she writes and he administers the affairs of a small institution whose motto means "long flight is permissible" she is shocked by what she calls "this interruption". That is, she said, I've bought a wheelbarrow, and I'm back at the drawing-board, I have to work it out in terms of levels and proportions. She deliberated over the words and I was meant to know their meaning. The topographical details have separated, she said. I took this as an apology, she was whispering. I would have talked of the Alps similarly so as to avoid contamination. She was constructing her writing at the periphery. She described him as older than she cared for, quieter than she liked, and heavier than she desired. I supposed she meant the man in the cafe. So I left, she looked none the worse, she rejected mitigating conversation. I walked back in the early evening light to my Alps.
Part Three
Day by day, pulling out weeds, the Alps my backdrop, I watch my garden, a cavern, my hands inside the ground. I met her man eating. We were both at a small bar. I said I missed her and wondered about her house, who was caring for it, etcetera. We sat by the window, it was a fair season, enough rain, windstorms. He smelt like the past, crumpled and musty. The dawns were later and the sky was patches of orange and pink, otherwise the softest grey. He said she had mentioned me. I said that she had told me of the dead friend. This seemed to soothe him, or verify me. The coffee was bitter. He nodded to passersby. He belonged to those in the street doing their chores. We were awkward, listening to the sour music. Six articles were published about the gardener, the last on composition. Lilly I. had left the city for the middle of the country. She had an assignment on deserts. He was joining her shortly. In the Alps there are lakes and picturesque mornings and lingering dusks. I am a bad traveller, never wanting to see the sights, contrary, needing to get back to the room. If all I seek is another room, preferably without a view, why put my heart in the Alps. He didn't look like an Alp man. He had the sailor demeanour I see in men, a nervous attention, a silence, a wavering of the eyes and hands. He said he was waiting for someone. So I moved to another table. I opened my square book on gardening, searching for more phrases of consequence. In her last article on the gardener she had misquoted me. I was preparing notes on specific gardens. A man joined him, and I recognised the poet who'd told me of his one poem. He saw me. They exchanged envelopes. The institution he administers is a repository for relics, historical papers and books, and objects, a place for cast-offs. Anyone can delve into its archives; it is a warehouse with shelves to the ceiling and long mobile ladders. I haven't seen inside the place, it is on the edge of the city. Over the last years the city has spread despite the lack of transport and the changed weather. I recalled I had heard him on the radio about the warehouse and its clients. Amongst them lovers of the ancient gardens, like those in north India. I couldn't see myself climbing ladders although I respected history. In a notebook I block out shapes and recorded titles and page numbers. I am uninterested in long vistas. Weight and distribution affect me, what's beside what. I'd like a wardrobe of two suits, four or five shirts, a dress or two, and long cardigans and jackets. The two men talked furtively. They wore loose clothes. Unlike the Mogul gardens of Persia I don't have a nucleus. The Monarch took the central pavilion, easing himself before his public, the garden spreading outward ("logical irrigation") in repeated canals and plane-shaded paths. (12) Persia is a desert, and its gardens were built in quarters. In the Alps I will see a garden re-arranged by my gardener. It's the one where the old gardener slaved for fifty years over his conifers and salvias. Where the new one came like an army and uprooted the whole scheme. There was a ravine with a footbridge, he called it a "... dull affair, just a planked footpath with rustic handrails made of twisted branches stripped of their bark and painted brown." (13) He rebuilt the bridge to make it a focus, more than mere passage shaded by the beech trees. Having built a series of ponds beforehand, he "... designed a wooden handrail ... in Chinese fret pattern ... painted deep ivory white, to show up sharply against the shadowy trees." (14) This is what I have: Lilly I. in the centre, the two men at a nearby table, me in dull clothes, a small garden of no-repute, gardening aspirations, a favoured gardener, a favoured traveller, and the Alps. I could sit around for years letting them dive and sway together. I take them one by one, and pretend I am the popular gardener. I hadn't known Lilly I. long, she came with a change of circumstances, a decision about quietness. It was a cool night, I'd consented to a gathering, she arrived bearing a red plate of cream cakes, whispering to people as she passed, telling me something about the man in the corner. Later she asked if I'd met him. Then she told me about cats and roads and country nights. The men at the table were leaving. Her man went straight by, the poet stopped to say he'd had a letter from her and she'd be staying awhile, and her articles were selling. He said he'd heard I was a gardener. I'm a pleasant conversationalist, I nodded. I hoped he'd never see my garden. They walked off. I went into the shops to feel the clothes, but the racks were crowded, and the light hot. In my garden all is well, what I wear there is inconsequential, no-one looks me over. I salvaged lengths of wood from the Italian neighbours to make a new gate, and dug a strip along the back wall for hollyhocks. The spinach is strong amongst the geraniums and it's time to pull out the pumpkin vine. I will plant marigolds, but not the weak petunia, to fill the gaps. And make beds of violets and basil, and balance a comment like "last year I took the rotting bunches of grapes off the vine and paid the price" with a sword fern beneath the ivy which is parting the iron fence. My gardener worked around the world pulling out and putting in trees and shrubs, debating the size, habit, colour, texture, culture, and history of single plants, contrasting the spikey with the horizontal, the matt with the glossy. He avoided habitual associations, or so he said. "The pink of a peach or mauve-pink of a Judas tree must be kept away just because of the conifer's undertone of yellow-gold." (15) He plotted. A map-maker, making gardens sites of tension and content, knowing how far a hedge will throw its shadow, causing curves, steepening banks, lowering the water level. Insidiously invading the gaze with rigid plans and stretched scales, compressing space into a drift of white asylum. I have not replaced the rotted trellis, or hammered in the rusted nails, all visible from my kitchen window. My traveller has probably never dealt with an unborn street, has instead taken to the mountains with lust, utterly convinced. Bringing back tales, arranging them into valley and peaks, saying "... there is witchery in space and distance ..." and "... arrange the picture ... as carefully as you would plant a garden." (16) He went again and again to rid himself of the sight of ordinary things, to make an archive of memories, to define romance, using words and phrases like: celestial shore, rhapsodies, limpid like hill-water, waning and waxing shadows, ethereally blue, the music of heights. (17) And so I stare at the Alps, and resist leaving my house. I have decided to follow the traveller's 1940 route to the Margherita hut. In a spare room I have laid out maps and lists. I am buying clothes to pack in a suitcase ready for my impending look. I note the dress of people, sure they have sanctuary. I'll be safe in the Alps, my face will change, because I'll be home amongst the high people.
- Linda Marie Walker
1. Page, Russell, The Education of a Gardener, Penguin Books
Ltd., 1985, p 273 - 294
2. Smythe, F.S. The Mountain Scene, Adam and Charles Black, London,
1937, p 61
3. Smythe, F.S. ibid, p 61
4. Barthes, R. Camera Lucida, Hill and Wang, New York, 1981, p 38
5. Page, Russell, ibid, p 93 - 94
6. Page, Russell, ibid, p 56
7. Smythe, F.S. My Alpine Album, Adam and Charles Black, London,
1940, p 14
8. Weiss, S. Allen, "Anamorphosis Absconditus", Art &
Text 23/24, 1987, p 34
9. Smythe, F.S. ibid, p 114
10. Page, Russell, ibid, p 61
11. Page, Russell, ibid p 63
12. Page, Russell, ibid, p 73
13. Page, Russell, ibid, p 75
14. Page, Russell, ibid, p. 75
15. Page, Russell, ibid p 78
16. Smythe, F.S. The Mountain Scene, p 4 - 5
17. Smythe, F.S. The Mountain Vision, Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.,
London, 1941, p 180 - 181