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On ‘If on a Winter’s Night Some Travellers…’ by Marion Halligan

Nicholas Harding, Untitled (Estuary snorkel) 2005, Courtesy Olsen Gallery, Sydney

Within this handful of proper nouns, so much pathos, humour, mystery and pain. I saw maps unfold across the globe and traditions receding so far into the past they were barely decipherable. What to one culture may seem dizzyingly complicated is, to another, ordinary. Names may contain history’s greatest upheavals in all their pitilessness and terror, as well as one person’s whimsy, or life-saving choice.

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In Marion Halligan’s ‘If on a Winter’s Night Some Travellers…’, the author describes a photograph of her baby daughter, Lucy, dressed in red. ‘There is a picture of Lucy sitting almost on the hearth, holding up an orange.’ Halligan calls the orange ‘…an object of admiration, of wonder.’ Her recollection of the still image is […]

Within this handful of proper nouns, so much pathos, humour, mystery and pain. I saw maps unfold across the globe and traditions receding so far into the past they were barely decipherable. What to one culture may seem dizzyingly complicated is, to another, ordinary. Names may contain history’s greatest upheavals in all their pitilessness and terror, as well as one person’s whimsy, or life-saving choice.

‘I live to encounter phrases that have the power to undo me. Where these words go, or what I will do with them, is unknown.’

The woman lives alone. She has long been sexless. When lustful dreams trouble her, reminding her she has a body, she reaches her legs to the other side of the bed, and lurches onto the cold emptiness. The bed seems wider than the world, her heart empty as the heavens, no boundaries in sight and no one to hear her plaint.

She was lying to several different people for money. She didn’t ‘not come’ from money; her mother had some money and since her mother was dead Romy had some money. She was twenty-nine. ‘I’m twenty-two,’ she said. Not everybody had to be a revolutionary. If she were rich she would be good at it.

What was always apparent at the outset, however, was her passion for what she did and for who she was. Dot was never, nor ever would be, a wallflower or a shrinking violet – instead she approached life with a kind of bravado and swagger that I could only envy. She knew she was a peculiar talent and she did everything she could to realise her potential.

Define yet again this propensity to write journals – an ongoing conversation with oneself, the inner necessity to define to a certain extent one’s relationship with the events of one’s life…

Cats and comets / are cousins. / With arching tails / and bright orbiting / mating swoops. / I used to sleep / hugging my cat / I used to sleep / my nose buried / in her fur.

How difficult it might be to abandoned and alone, at Easter, at Roma Trastevere Station, watching trains arriving and leaving without you to all sorts of exciting destinations; knowing everyone else was on their way up to the mountains, or off to the seaside; to visit with friends and family; to partake of festive wine and cured olives and fattened, delicately spiced, young lamb.

when I did bleed, some months later, I found that same / humiliation, the conversation I’d rehearsed, how to tell / my mother I was somehow now more grown, a mush / of words I could not say: instead I tried to hide it: and

To lean back and forth on the common room rocking horse, thinking that I was part of something, a motion if nothing else, that might eclipse my pure presence for a moment. Pure, as in not part of anything; hardly counted, hardly desired, and if desired then not fitting.

A museum of objects in my study that accompanied the long journey of writing still cast their wonderment through thoughts and imaginary possibilities; the many pictures on the walls and desk – a small print of a Rainbow Serpent, birds, art, photos of dust storms, haze, smoke, a young boxer, mythical landscapes in Asia – all had this responsibility.

While travelling in the mountain realm I discover in clear weather how unbusy the Earth / can be mountain after mountain as far as the eye can reach. / Lonely, I make myself noticed by touching with my left elbow and right big toe / the beginning and ending of a hundred-metre-long white thread.

She herself was on her way to the moon, and if you laughed at the sight of the fish between her legs, she would eat you – and you came out again as a fish. The man had laughed, and half of him had already disappeared, he was staring straight ahead with a pair of black eyes, and he would go on doing that until she chewed his eyes to bits, and when he next saw something, it would be as a fish.

I could be a murderer, a thief, a seducer of minors, this country offered me the lot and in my anonymity, which hung like a protective cloud around my actions I felt my own response. I was beguiled, enticed, with all these impulses seeming already to have been lying, primed and ready, inside me. Vietnam was the sort of land in which I could get lost inside myself, the land of inner opportunity, and I did get ever so slightly lost and I committed one small crime.

i’m not scared of anything / the door’s just nicer shut / and so are the windows / and the drains, taped over / but the vent’s wide open / because i cannot reach it, / so i watch it like TV and / huntsman comes right in.

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