Isinglass

When our neighbour, Sakura, heard from Mayu that I have a taste for saké from her part of the world (I like its malty flavour), she invited us to this year’s saké festival. She is a farmer’s daughter from Joetsu, about 45 ks away from here on the coast of the Sea of Japan; she doesn’t drink and so offered to drive us, in our car, and act as our guide. It was a rainy night as we sped down Highway 18 and into a maze of little dark streets in the old town; and arrived at a brightly lit, old-fashioned mall with pink plastic awnings and a row of a few dozen tents down the centre of the road. They held street food stalls and saké booths. We ate some nuggets of deep fried flake and egg plant before making our way to the head of the mall where I bought, for ¥3000, a little white cup with a red horse rampant inside a blue circle, and an orange wrist band – all that was required to sample each kind of saké on offer and for sale in the twenty or so saké shops. The rain was still pouring down and, every now and then, a rough wind would flap the canvas awnings and shake the flimsy tents; but the street was crowded nevertheless and everyone was engaged in enjoying themselves, eating and drinking, with the greatest good humour. In amongst the crowds of people with their colourful umbrellas coming and going I felt like I was part of one of those crowd scenes from a Hokusai or Hiroshige print: families with children, old men and women, young lovers, teenagers, workers, cruisers, voyeurs, a cavalcade of faces who could have belonged to any era. Miss Saké 2024 and her friend, in kimono, passed by and she smiled winningly at me. I saw a burly fellow with pink hair wearing a blue boiler suit. At the saké booths they filled your cup, you tasted the offering, and on that basis decided if you wanted to buy a bottle. This, too was accomplished with smiles, laughter, jokes, insinuations, provocations. No one minded if you didn’t buy, everyone was happy if you did. We came away with six bottles which I will enjoy over the next few weeks (Mayu doesn’t drink either). We also watched a couple of expert omelette makers wielding their square iron pans over hot gas elements, making tamagoyaki, Japanese rolled omelette, and bought one fresh from the pan. That was today’s breakfast. A little further on, outside a shop which sold myriad products derived from soy beans, you could, for ¥1000 yen (about ten dollars), pile as much miso paste into a plastic container as you you were able to in thirty seconds and keep the result — so long as it didn’t topple over and out of the container. Sakura paid her money, the man gave her a spatula and a square plastic receptacle, the woman started her stop watch and off she went. It was a bit like piling up ice cream in an ice cream cone — the plastic receptacle wasn’t very large so she was soon managing a trembling, gelid mass of brown paste which threatened at any moment to fall. About five seconds before time was up she had to stop and just hold her spatula on top of the quivering heap; several seconds of pure suspense; then the thirty seconds passed and she could tip her load into a plastic bag in a bin, from which it was extracted, tied up and weighed: 2.9 kilos! Afterwards we went to a very good restaurant which Mayu and I, with her mother, had been to once before; it turned out to be Sakura’s favourite and the place where she brought her family to eat when she received her first pay packet from her first job. Here the saké was poured into a glass placed within a small wooden box without a lid; the glass was filled to over-flowing, the residue remained and you could drink it from the corner of the box with a little salt on the wood for added taste — a bit like drinking tequila from a salt rimmed glass but without the lime or lemon to bite into next. After dinner we went to a nearby Starbucks so that Sakura and Mayu could have sweets and hot drinks; and then we drove back home, very happily, in the rainy night.

*The image of the horse is derived from a figure which appears in outline on Myoko-kogen, the mountain, as the snow begins to melt in spring. It’s a sign that it’s time to plant the rice. Sakura told me that the saké with a red horse on the label is the very best Joetsu has to offer and that if I saw a bottle, to buy it without even tasting it; but, alas, it must have all been sold because I never saw any. The other image is of a decorated grill or manhole in the street where the festival was held.

Et quid amabo nisi quod aenigma est?

1

One of Melbourne’s grand edifices is evoked, howsoever obliquely, in the opening sentences of Giorgio de Chirico’s 1929 novel Hebdomeros: ‘And then began the visit to that strange building located in an austerely respectable but by no means dismal street. Seen from outside, the building looked like a German consulate in Melbourne. Large shops took up the whole ground floor. Though it was neither a Sunday nor a holiday the shops were closed at the time, which gave this portion of the street a weary, melancholy air, that particular dreary atmosphere one associates with Anglo-Saxon towns on Sundays. A faint smell of docks hung on the air,the indefinable and highly suggestive odour given off by warehouses adjoining the wharves in a port. ’ 

Needless to say, de Chirico had never been to Melbourne; but he might have seen a photograph of a building there: a grey sheer-sided monolith, with lighted boutiques, deco reliefs and an eagle over its entrance door, which used to stand on Collins Street. Or something else entirely. Imants Tillers identified the connection thus: ‘Melbourne entered de Chirico’s imagination when he received a postcard of the Italianate Treasury Building in Melbourne from his expatriate Roman friend Gino Nibbi.’ Nibbi, a devotee of the works of Paul Gauguin, was a bookseller who sold the latest modernist titles in Melbourne from the late 1920s until after the war. In the 1950s he organised shows in Italy for painters Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker.

In the book Hebdomeros asks his two companions what they think of his ‘purely personal’ description of the building; they say it is ‘odd’ but that is all. I haven’t seen the French but the phrasing of the English is interesting: ‘like a German consulate in Melbourne’ — without actually being one? Nevertheless it is a portal into an alternative reality and once Hebdomeros and his friends have gone through it, they (and we) are in a place of unfolding strangeness which is not just unknown but unknowable ― the timespace of dreams where you may glimpse many wonders including, for example, Gerald Murnane’s plains and Dorrit Black’s hills.

John Ashbery, who published translations of parts of Hebdomeros under his own name and in 1992 wrote a brief introduction to a complete English language version, remarked: ‘Everything about Hebdomeros is mysterious. De Chirico wrote it a decade after his genius as a painter had mysteriously evaporated. He wrote it in French, a language not his own, and he invented for the occasion a new style and a new kind of novel.’ That translation, which first appeared in in 1966 in an edition of 500 from Four Seasons Book Society, New York, was unsigned and to this day both the identity of the publisher and that of the translator remain obscure.

Ashbery, who also reviewed the book when it came out, said that in 1966 no such publishing house existed at 550 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, the address Four Seasons used; also that the book carried a printer’s mark from Belgrade. ‘The introduction is by James A. Hodkinson, a name unknown to me and not to be found in the pages of the Cumulative Book Index and the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, though he is obviously no novice and his text is full of valuable insights and little known scholarly information.’ He also calls the unknown translator’s translation ‘excellent’. Chances are, though it remains unconfirmed, he did it himself.

In 2014, in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue of a show called Dreamings: Aboriginal Australian Art Meets de Chirico at the Museo Carlo Bilotti in Rome, art historian Ian McLean suggested that the timespace Hebdomeros and his companions enter through the door of the building has affinities with the Everywhen (‘Dreamtime’) of the Aborigine. ‘From the first pages de Chirico collapses all worlds into a fluid timeless space that mocks modernity’s linear historicism and allows Hebdomeros to slip effortlessly into ancestral events as they existed in a never-ending present.’

He also points out a path whereby de Chirico might have encountered Aboriginal metaphysics. Arrernte poetry was chanted by Tristan Tzara at Cabaret Voltaire in 1916; he had come across transcriptions of some verses in the anthropological works of German Lutheran missionary, Carl Strehlow, domiciled at Hermannsburg, west of Alice Springs, between 1894 and 1922. Furthermore, contemporary scholars Emile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud had read Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899) by Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen. Durkheim used insights gained from their pioneering study in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912); as did Freud in Totem and Taboo (1913); both books the Surrealists knew.

Even the word is strange: a yoking together of ‘hebdom’ and ‘eros’, where one refers to the number seven and thus to events which might repeat weekly; while the other is the Greek god of love. It is de Chirico’s own invention but does have echoes, for instance in the arcane terminology of the Catholic church, in which a hebdomadary is ‘a member of a church or monastery appointed for one week to sing the chapter Mass and lead in the recitation of the breviary’. Does that suggest the eponymous hero might have been, in another life, some kind of priest; or that he is a celebrant both of eros and of the unconscious?

In a 1916 letter to poet Guillame Apollinaire de Chirico wrote: ‘It has been almost two years since I have seen you. The Ephesian teaches us that time does not exist, and that on the great curve of eternity the past is the same as the future. This might be what the Romans meant with their image of Janus, the god with two faces; and every night in dream, in the deepest hours of rest, the past and future appear to us as equal, memory blends with prophesy in a mysterious union.’ In another place he advises us to look upon everything in the world as an enigma and to live as if in an immense museum of strange things.

2

When in 1981 I moved into a house at 9 Thomas Street, Golden Grove I found rolled up on a shelf at the top of the cupboard under the stairs a reproduction, on stiff, high quality parchment, much creased, of a drawing by Giorgio de Chirico called The Return of the Prodigal (1917). It was one of a number of intricate drawings de Chirico did at this time, including, for example, Solitude and The Mathematicians. A painting from 1922 reiterates most of the main features of the 1917 drawing although the gibbet I recall from it is absent. Another painting of the same subject was made in 1924 and another in 1929, each a view of the two figures in essentially the same pose but standing before different backgrounds. De Chirico returned again and again to certain images and the prodigal son was one of them; he must have had issues with his father, a Sicilian engineer who built railways in Greece.

How did the drawing come to be in the cupboard? The previous tenants were a couple of painter friends but when I asked they said they knew nothing about it. The landlord and lady were rentiers; an art critic and a painter respectively, George Berger from Vienna and Mimi Jaksic-Berger, a Serb. George, who was Jewish, had come to Australia in the 1930s and for a time taught adult education classes alongside the redoubtable Bernard Smith. He also invented the movement, Abstract Impressionism, of which Mimi was the sole practitioner and only exemplar. Mimi’s hectic acrylic washes, now gathered under the title ‘lyrical abstraction’, are about as far away as you can get from de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings, which are cool and mysterious, both in their imagery and in the invented space that imagery occupies; but I still think the drawing must have been theirs.

Curiously enough, in those days the streets of Golden Grove sometimes resembled a scene from one of de Chirico’s paintings. On autumn evenings, when the sky turned green, you would hear the distant rattle and clang of trains passing through Redfern Station and the roar of traffic on Cleveland Street; people would stand as if frozen in enigmatic attitudes (usually outside pubs) at end of day; and then the facades and silhouettes of the buildings lining the deserted streets in the warehouse district would seem to exist, incontrovertibly but for no known purpose, in a darkness all of their own beneath the radiance of that vast, greenish sky.

I found other things in that house. At the back of another cupboard, in the upstairs bedroom, I came across an oval commemorative badge with a broken pin and a bronze relief of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, opened in 1932, on the front; and a small silver anchor made to be hung on a chain around the neck, an antique symbol (it’s on the coat of arms) of Sydney Town. And, in the garden, which grew over a thick midden of black sand from an ancient swamp, amongst much else, a rusty earth-encrusted fob watch. I have never before or since grown such fecund, resinous and hallucinatory crops of marijuana as I did in the rich mulch of that soil.

At first I thought The Return of the Prodigal must have been about the Great War and its aftermath, a flesh and blood father meeting his son returning from the Front as the mechanical or schematic man of the future. This can’t be sustained however from an examination of the paintings de Chirico did after the drawing. In these works the suited man, if indeed he is the father, looks sometimes like a statue made of marbled cloud, not flesh, and sometimes like a wraith; the mechanical son is now as extravagant as an Elizabethan courtier wearing an elaborate ruff, now bland as a tailor’s dummy; while what was an embrace, howsoever equivocal, in the drawing, in the paintings typically resembles two men bowing to one another so that, absurdly, their foreheads touch.

I see the horsed figure in the background as a conquistador and the low, flat building behind that as an adobe compound from out of the new or old Mexico of Billy the Kid. But where is the gibbet? I’m sure it was in the drawing, but it doesn’t appear in any of the painted versions; unless it was not a gibbet but a tower; or even a set of black sails, like those which Theseus neglected to take down from his ships when sailing back from Crete after killing the Minotaur, thereby occasioning the death by suicide of his father, who was hoping to see the white sails which meant his son was still alive. De Chirico often painted statues of Ariadne, who rescued Theseus from the labyrinth; Ariadne, whom he also forgot, leaving her behind on the island of Naxos.

Despite their wealth of references there is no warrant for a definitive interpretation of any of de Chirico’s works; they exist, in their infinite and quite possibly redundant suggestibility, to confound understanding. Robert Hughes wrote: ‘He could condense voluminous feeling through metaphor and association. One can try to dissect these magical nodes of experience, yet not find what makes them cohere.’ Equally mysterious, to me at least, is my decision, when I moved out of that house, not to take the drawing with me. I left it rolled up, creased and dirty, in the same place in the same cupboard where I found it two years before. I regret that now; and yet — what shall I love if not the enigma?

images: the Old Treasury Building in Melbourne; The Return of the Prodigal (1929); an early (1911) self-portrait with the epigraph (from Nietzsche) written on the frame

This is a haniwa figure I saw yesterday in a small upstairs room at the Northern Culture Museum in the village of Soumi in Niigata prefecture. An unusual museum – it was, until after the war, the home of the Ito family, who had farmed the surrounding land on the Kanbara Plain since 1750 or so. The original Ito also worked as a dyer of cloth and the family gradually diversified into other areas of commerce as well as buying up more and more land until they owned a vast area of the old province of Echigo, including 60 odd towns and villages. Their house was built along traditional lines early in the Meiji period, in the 1880s, and is beautiful without ostentation and rich without opulence. During the Occupation the great estates like this one were broken up and the last of the Ito family to administer the lands decided to turn the house and its immediate surrounds into a museum. That way, he reasoned, the house, with its 64 rooms, and its contents, particularly its art and ceramics collections, but also the superb detailing in the wall panels and the furniture, could remain in situ as they had been while it was still being lived in. So it proved. The gardens too have been preserved, including a magnificent wisteria older than the house and the lotus pond I posted a photograph of yesterday. This particular variety is known as the Oga Lotus after a botanist, a Dr Oga, who successfully grew one plant from a seed found in a peat bog outside Tokyo, also during the Occupation. Fuel was scarce in those days and people started digging up peat beds to burn the turf. A wooden boat was unearthed, then another, and another. Archaeologists were called in and determined the site was an old docking area on the river from the Yayoi Period; the boats were about 2000 years old, as was the seed Dr Oga germinated, grew the plant to maturity and then disseminated its seeds to parks and gardens all over the archipelago. There were also the remains of two wooden boats in the museum where I saw the haniwa figure – not ancient relics but dug-out craft of traditional design that had been used to navigate the waterways on the Ito family’s extensive rice farms. Haniwa figures are about the same age as the lotus seed; they were unglazed, hollow clay figures used to decorate mound tombs in the Kofun period (c 250 – 650 CE), which followed immediately upon the Yayoi. The Jomon preceded both and there were many Jomon artefacts in the upstairs room too, most of which had been gathered from the Ito lands or the areas surrounding them in Echigo. In another upstairs room all of the farm’s tax records and other documents stretching back nearly three hundred years were archived as they would have been kept when they were still in use. Downstairs the kitchen, where 60 kgs of rice were cooked every morning, was also intact, with the wooden beams in the roof smoke-blackened from thousands of open fires and the wooden floors worn down by the tread of many feet. The mats around the central hearth could seat 16 people comfortably. You could also see the living rooms and the grand reception area, 100 tatami mats in extent; the five tea houses in the gardens, one of them an equilateral triangle; and the old rice storehouse now converted into an art gallery which displayed a modest and charming collection of artefacts from Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Peru, India, South-east Asia and of course China and Korea. In the entrance way, much decayed, was a norimono, a sedan chair. Two traditional farm houses had been transported onto the site and re-built near the lotus pond; the photo below is Yoshie, Mayu’s mother, sitting at the entrance to the smaller of the two.

The other day I got stung by one of these – an Asian Giant Hornet or, as the Japanese call them, Sparrow Bees. We had a nest removed from the wall of our house last autumn and, although they’re said never to return to the same place, it seems we have another one. I haven’t located it yet but, just like last year, wherever it is has access to inside the house. I must have removed twenty or so over the last few weeks. It isn’t hard, they’re docile and they want to be outside; so I just open a window and, using a fan, usher them out. Until Thursday.

I was making the bed and when I picked up one of the pillows, there was a dopey looking hornet crawling along the sheet. I was a bit dopey myself; I wasn’t thinking straight. I thought I could pick it up with a tissue and throw it out the window. It didn’t take flight but it moved quicker than I thought it would; and when I tried the second time, it eluded the tissue and stung me on the outside of the index finger of my right hand, just below the nail. I backed right off – and the thing that bugs me is, I don’t know where it went. I think it was probably dying and hopefully it’s dead; but I haven’t found its curled up body yet.

There’s the sting at the base of the abdomen. About a quarter of an inch long. It barely left a mark but the pain was spectacular. A Japanese etymologist described it as being like ‘a hot nail being driven into my leg’. I wouldn’t go that far but it was an intense, burning pain that rapidly transferred to my ring finger, then my other fingers, then my wrist, them up my arm as far as my shoulder. Nothing I put on the place of the sting had any effect. I started to wonder if there might be neurological complications.

The really intense pain lasted for about four hours and the analgesics I took didn’t seem to make much difference – although what if I hadn’t taken them? I lay in bed for quite a while wondering where the insect was and also, minutely, monitoring my symptoms, almost as if I’d taken a drug of some kind; and in the end fell asleep. When I woke up in the night the pain was still there but it was less; and by morning it was gone.

Next day, Friday, I was untroubled by any after effects; but today, Saturday, my finger is red and swollen and feels tight; it isn’t sore, exactly, nor exactly itchy; but it feels and looks like a sausage on the barbecue about to burst. Maybe I should prick it and see what comes out (not).

Strangely enough, I don’t feel any animosity to the sparrow bee that stung me. I actually rather like them and over the weeks I’ve been shooing them out of the house I have had the feeling that I’m getting closer to them. Too close, obviously. Ouch!

I’ll be more respectful next time.

Images from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_giant_hornet#/media/File:Asian_giant_hornet.png

I am fortunate indeed to own a copy of Geoff Cochrane’s Selected Poems, one of those inexhaustible books that you can take down from the shelf at any time and find something good to read therein. It is a hardback with a copper coloured ribbon which I leave in place between pages 182 and 183 because on the former is a favourite line: ‘Guadalcanal. Tulagi. Halavo Bay.’

It sounds inscrutable and perhaps not very poetic but to me is full of resonance. They were three places Geoff’s father, who was a radar mechanic, served during World War Two; and my father, who was a meteorological officer, did so too. Guadalcanal is of course in the Solomon Islands; Tulagi is a small island, in the Florida group, to the east of Honiara across Iron Bottom Sound (so called because of the amount of shipping sunk there); while Halavo Bay is a place on Florida Island itself.

There was a flying boat base, built by the Americans, in the latter part of the war, at Halavo Bay. A single RNZAF squadron was also stationed there – Number Six Flying Boat Squadron, which Dad always called ‘Fish and Banana’. I don’t know for sure that Geoff’s dad served with that unit too but common sense says he must have been among the 351 servicemen pictured above and below. He and my father might even have met.

I’d love to talk to Geoff about this but it’s too late now, he’s dead, so’s his dad and so is mine. I don’t remember us ever meeting but we may have done. He was a year older than me and we drank in the same pubs in the early 1970s – he in the Duke of Edinburgh in Wellington and I in the Kiwi in Auckland. But if I was in Wellington I’d go to the Duke and if he was in Auckland, he’d go to the Kiwi. That’s how it was in those days.

And I was good friends (still am) with a woman who was in love with him. Well, she was in love with two men at the same time, both called Geoff, and she used to agonise over which one she loved best, or which one loved her best, I forget which. We had a one night stand in 1973 so there’s that too: quite a lot less than six degrees of separation.

Anyway it’s my dad’s birthday today, he would have been 104, improbable as that sounds (he only just made three score and ten). Geoff’s dad, I don’t know what year he was born. He talks a bit about him in the interview with Damien Wilkins which introduces the selection; and there’s a really good poem about his dying in the book.

The one that mentions Halavo Bay is really quite random but it works too.

It’s called Saffron & Salt:

I wash my plate and light a cigarette

and sit through the galling news

from home and abroad.

A three-year-old girl is tortured to death

for being ugly.

Better to walk away, walk out across Crawford Green

just as the sun is setting.

*

Guadalcanal. Tulagi. Halavo Bay.

My father was a radar mechanic.

They didn’t salute on the runway.

They didn’t wear their sparks, in case they were captured.

Sparks. They didn’t salute or wear their sparks.

*

I pass the pharmacy, the Four Square,

the Acropolis Fish Supply.

On a warm, pre-Christmas evening,

the smell of curry rolls being deep-fried.

My father worked and raised his kids and died.

And there’s no reclaiming him,

no getting him back from the air.

No gathering his smoke,

no shaping his smoky semblance.

~~~

351 members of RNZAF No. 6 Flying Boat Squadron pose in front of a PBY-5 Catalina. Halavo Bay, Solomon Islands, 1944 (Colourised at top, B & W above)

It’s still the rainy season here – ‘plum rain’ – and the weather is hot and humid and very wet. Mould is rioting in the cupboards and insect life proliferates. The other morning a moth dived into my cup of green tea. I’ve removed sparrow bees (a kind of hornet) and some sort of black wasp from the house in the last few days: no idea how they get in but they do. A couple of mosquitos too but they are the least of our worries.

The cicadas are creaking maniacally and the crows are cawing their special brand of lugubrious doom. Every time you go outside you get zoomed by these striped, green-eyed flies which, if you don’t watch out, will fasten onto your skin and suck a bit of blood out of you. When we go anywhere in the car, as soon as we open the door, three or four of them will fly in and we have to open all the windows and drive fast to blow them out again.

I went for a walk the other day and tried to rescue a damsel fly from a spider’s web. These ones resemble dragon flies and have blue bodies and beautiful copper coloured wings. It was caught in what I took to be a vacant web stretching over the waters of a narrow creek and it was moving so I thought it must still have been alive. I hooked the web with a stick and drew it towards me.

All of a sudden the damsel fly fell, wings outstretched, into the water and floated away; I think it was already dead. Meanwhile the yellow spider which had been sucking its innards out from below, also fell – not into, but onto, the water. I saw it scamper away across the meniscus to the bank. It was round, plump, about the circumference of a drawing pin head and the yellow of pale butter.

After I got back from that walk I noticed a red lump on my left arm, on the biceps above the elbow, which was intensely itchy. I managed to avoid scratching it but the itch was tremendous, next level. I kept wondering what had bitten me and it wasn’t until much later that night that I remembered a few times when I’ve been attacked by bird lice. Same incredible itch. No creams or unguents helped.

With bird lice there’s always a little black spot in the middle of the red lump – the lice itself – but I couldn’t see anything like that on this one. Nevertheless, at some point, in the middle of the night, I scratched the centre out anyway and poured tea tree oil onto the wound. It didn’t stop the itching but did give me some relief; and gradually the intensity diminished.

A couple of nights later we were round for dinner at Mayu’s mum’s house when I felt something on my right ankle. I pulled up the leg of my white chef’s pants and saw a small black insect on the lower part of my calf. Without even thinking I slapped at it and whatever it was exploded in a spray of blood. Upon further investigation I found the wound was actually further up my leg, at the back, two more or less horizontal, parallel incisions, one longer the other. It bled for ages.

This wound was neither itchy nor painful and is healing up ok. What made it? There are ticks whose bite does not itch nor cause pain; but ticks are not soft bodied. I don’t think it was a mosquito because it didn’t have wings. I’ve looked online but nothing I’ve seen there looks like what I saw. I wish now I’d paused a moment before whacking it; on the other hand, you don’t want to mess around with bloodsuckers. A lot of them are infectious, carrying horrors like Lyme Disease.

This is wild country. We are on the edge of a mountainous region which extends a hundred kilometres into the west, most of it untracked, the home of bears and boars. And insects. It may be that the full extent of the populations which live here has not yet been described. When the local farmers go out to tend their crops, they look like bee-keepers: hats, gauzes, gloves, long sleeves, long trousers tucked into boots. Given the extreme humidity, I don’t know how they stand it; but it’s probably better than being eaten alive.

Twenty years ago this October I went for a swim in the Flores Sea. I like swimming but on this occasion I didn’t want to go in the water; I did it out of a probably misplaced sense of obligation. I’d been out to the island of Rinca to see the Komodo dragons and we were on our way back to Labuanbajo; we being myself and my boatman, a old guy called Papa Sulu.

I forget now how I arranged to hire him; but remember meeting him down at the wharf in the pearly grey light of early dawn. The tall twin hurricane wire gates were locked, but Papa Sulu was slim enough to slip through the gap where they didn’t quite meet. He laughed his toothless laugh as I climbed up and over the fence and jumped down on the other side; and then we set off, in his big, flat-bottomed, wooden boat powered by a thumping diesel engine.

He spent quite a bit of time on the voyage trying and failing to rig a blue plastic tarpaulin as a sail. He also, alarmingly, at one point put on an orange knitted hat, rolled out his prayer map and knelt in the wheel house praying to Mecca while the boat, inexorably it seemed, veered towards the shore of one of the green islands that are ubiquitous in those seas. He finished his devotions before we ran aground and we continued on to Rinca.

I was his only passenger; but we coincided at the jetty on the island with another boat with three French tourists aboard; and a group of Bajo, sea gypsies, who were drying fish on the rooves of their intricately carved lipa lipa and generally just lounging around. They were a family group and Papa Sulu joined them for the duration of my visit to the dragons; and when I returned, we started back to Labuanbajo (which itself means the port of the sea gypsies). And it was on the way back that he stopped at a small, sandy, jewelled islet and insisted I go for a swim in the pellucid blue waters of the Flores Sea.

He didn’t speak any English and I had no Bahasa so we communicated non-verbally. Hands, faces, bodies. He considered a swim a part of what I had bought from him and was offended when I indicated I didn’t want to go in. After all, I told him, I had no towel and no togs. This conversation was amicable, if awkward; a kind of stand-off. The circuit breaker was the arrival of the boat with the French people aboard. They moored further up the beach from us, disembarked and all three – a woman and two men – waded out into the shallow warm water; at which point I felt I had no choice. So I stripped off and dived in and went for a swim as well. Then we continued on to Labuanbajo.

The next day a guide took me on the back of his motorbike out to a cave which allegedly showed signs of early human occupation. This was 2004, the year of the announcement of the discovery on Flores of the small prehistoric people called Homo floresiensis. I must have already heard the news because I remember discussing it with a fellow on the plane back to Denpasar. The cave was undistinguished, one of those destinations which locals think Westerners like to see without really knowing or caring why.

It was called Mirror Stone Cave and I recall standing on a sandy floor, among brown rocks, in a shaft of sunlight falling from far above, and beginning to feel very strange indeed. There were bees up where the light came from and their buzzing sounded enormous. I thought I might be about to faint and my balance seemed awry, as if I didn’t know how to stand properly any more. The feeling passed almost as soon as it had come and, although I didn’t forget what had happened, I put it down to some atavistic response to the genius locus of the ancient cave.

The day after that I was due to fly back to Bali. I caught a mini-bus, with a group of raucous young men on board, to the airport and waited, a bit anxiously, to see if I could get on the plane. It was a small aircraft, seating maybe forty people and you couldn’t book. You just had to turn up and hope for the best. I was sitting on one of the pale blue plastic bucket seats in the terminal, reading Alfred Russell Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago when all of a sudden the lines of print detached themselves from the page and floated off to the left. When I tried to follow them with my eyes, they seemed surrounded by jagged, iridescent shapes which likewise moved as I tried to track them.

Reading was impossible and when the flight was called and I joined the straggly line of people out on the paddock that served as an airfield, it took all my concentration simply to walk or, if standing still, stay upright. I wasn’t the only one. There was a German guy who was so sick he looked like he was dying. He was white as a ghost and slumped between two of his friends, who were holding him up. I heard one of them say he’d picked up an ear infection diving at a resort island to the north of the town. His friends were trying to get him back to Bali but I don’t think the airline staff let him on the plane.

I did make it but, by the time I got to Denpasar, I was more or less a basket case myself. I had about twelve hours to wait before my flight to Darwin and I’d intended to spend it having a look at Kuta Beach and other notorious tourist traps in the vicinity. Before island hopping east I’d spent a few days relaxing in Ubud but that’s all I’d done. However, going anywhere now was out of the question; so I passed the interminable hours sitting on airport chairs or else lying on the floor. I was still dizzy and I still had that strobing vision; I was only really comfortable on my back with my eyes closed.

I made it to Darwin and successfully negotiated the three or four days I spent there, with symptoms that gradually diminished, if that’s the word, over time. I did go to see a doctor but he was a prick. First of all he scolded me for going unvaccinated into a zone where the encephalitis mosquito breeds; then he snorted in disbelief when I told him I hadn’t been bitten by a mosquito; and finally decided I might have contracted some hitherto unknown tropical disease which he might get famous for discovering. ‘I’m not going to let you go until I find out what you’ve got,’ he said; but he didn’t and he did. I went to another doctor once I was back at Pearl Beach but by then I was asymptomatic and he just said: See a specialist.

I didn’t, or not at first. But the scintillating scotoma, as it is called, recurred a couple of times – though without the dizziness or lack of balance – so in the end I did. The specialist was another prick, who asked what was wrong with me and then, as I told him how I’d picked up an ear infection in Indonesia, simultaneously paraphrased what I was saying into his dictaphone. I suppose I wouldn’t have minded if he’d written it down but doing it this way just seemed rude. He sent me for tests: an MRI scan, a whole suite of ear investigations, hearing evaluations and so forth.

When, after all the results were in, I went back to see him he said: ‘You have an ear infection. It will either get better or it will get worse. That’ll be a thousand dollars.’ I tried not to pay him but the alacrity with which he sicced the debt collectors onto me, and the avoir dupois of the heavies they sent around, soon changed my mind.

All this happened years ago and, since then, the scintillating scotoma, also known as the fortification illusion, has come back a few times, usually when I’ve been stressed, caught a cold or come down with the flu. I’ve had Covid twice but in neither case did it feature. Until now: on Thursday morning, without warning, the scotoma returned, in full colour, flashing and glimmering on the horizons of my sight. It faded after about half an hour but was here again yesterday, this time in black and white. And again this morning, in colour but muted. Now concentrated on my right eye, whereas the other two visitations were stronger on the left.

So what is going on? I don’t really know. The scotoma is usually the harbinger of a migraine headache but I’ve never had a migraine (although my mother used to get them) and my symptoms these days are purely visual. That is, I don’t suffer nausea, dizziness, lack of balance – I just can’t read or write while the illusion is present. I’ve also found out that it is a neurological condition, unrelated to the health or otherwise of your eyes. In other words it’s in the brain, most likely in the visual cortex there at the back of your head.

I could be stressed. I’ve been working quite hard, pushing myself, writing every day; but I’m not even half way through the first draft of the current book so there’s no question of stopping or even pausing. I might have to take a different approach, try to see the daily visitation (if that’s what it becomes) as a form of entertainment, on the one hand, and an opportunity to find out a bit more about how the brain works, on the other. We shall see; or else we won’t.

The history of the universe — and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives — is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. – Borges

After a severe and unexpected setback in my professional life, I decided to take a few days off and go for a holiday in the mountains. I wanted to reassess, I suppose, but I also wanted to forget. I chose the place I went to more or less at random, mainly because there was a bird sanctuary there and also something called a lava park on the slopes of a nearby volcano. The birds, I thought, might sooth my wounded soul; and the lava park re-awaken a sense of wonder at the strangeness of the world. As for the hotel, I picked that because of its price and its proximity to those other attractions. I did not really think about its name until I arrived there late on a weekday afternoon, just in time to check into my room, take a hot bath and then go to the restaurant for dinner.

I noticed that the signage varied in curious ways: sometimes it was ‘The Longinghotel’, sometimes ‘The Longing Hotel’; and once, on a mat, ‘LonGing HoTeL’. Later one of the wait staff told me that the owner had in his youth wanted to become a writer; then studied as an architect, thinking he might express himself through the designing of buildings; and finally settled on hotel management as a way of combining his need for self-expression with his desire to serve a community. The décor was faux Victorian English, all heavy oak and red leather, and the menu, unusually for that time and place, featured vegan alternatives, with a marked emphasis upon fresh vegetables in the cuisine. The clientele they hoped to attract, my waitress said, was single urban women looking for a healthy, safe and quiet place to recharge their batteries.

There was only one other person in the restaurant besides me, a woman in her forties perhaps who fitted that description, with a bobbed haircut and a sharp, almost predatory profile, sitting alone on a raised floor on the other side of the room, a bottle of red wine open before her. She seemed self-possessed, indeed self-absorbed, as she slowly ate her food, pausing now and again to sip her wine. The hotel’s policy was, if you did not finish a bottle at a sitting, you could take it back to your room with you; and that is what she did when, in time, she gathered up her possessions and, without once looking in my direction, left the room. It was dark by then and I did not see which way she went. When I finished my own meal, I went out into the courtyard where several late model expensive cars, alongside my own older and cheaper one, were parked, and crossed over to the adjoining building in which my room was situated.

I had noticed, earlier, that the foyer doubled as what they called on their website ‘The Library’. Three self-contained booths, with bench seating before wooden tables, stood parallel to each other beneath high shelves which ran the length of the wall. They contained a number of heavy old books, all bound in red and gold, plus some knickknacks which seemed incongruous to me. I remember a pair of horses cast in some kind of silver metal; a doll made out of straw and dressed in blue and white checked gingham, with long golden plaits; and the grimacing head of a demon which was, I found out later, the spirit who inhabited the volcano and caused it, on occasion, to erupt. I am a reader and I was curious to find out what this collection of old books might be; however, by this time, after a long day’s drive, a hot bath and a heavy evening meal, all I wanted to do was sleep. I decided I would look at them more closely in the morning. 

Next morning, however, I slept late and had to hurry to make the breakfast room at the appointed time; so I took only a cursory glance at the spines of the books. It was enough. I saw that they included a number of volumes of two of the most famous of all the many sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: the 9th, the so-called Scholar’s Edition, which began publication in 1875 and completed in 1889; and the even more famous 11th edition of 1911, which came out all at once, was the last published in England and the first to include substantial contributions from American scholars. It was, I knew, beloved of the Argentinian, Jorge Luis Borges, who owned a full set, all twenty-nine volumes, including the index. It was, some say, a pinnacle as well as a milestone; within three years the world would descend into war and Europe as she had been would disappear forever, along with much of her wisdom and her learning.

Over breakfast, which I ate alone in a private room on an upper floor of the restaurant, I tried to remember the Borges story whose plot turns upon the discovery of an entry in an encyclopaedia concerning a mythical land which, as the tale unfolds, becomes increasingly real, to the point where it replaces the configuration of our world with its own. I couldn’t recall the exotic names which make up the title of the story, nor could I figure out how the various entities — there are three — related to each other; but I felt sure I could find the story without too much trouble online and determined I would do so once I had investigated in more detail the volumes in the library.

Alas, when I returned there, I found the woman I had seen the night before in the restaurant sitting in the middle alcove of the library with her immaculately coiffured bobcut, her laptop open, a black coffee in a paper cup beside her, and a glass of water next to that. I paused but she did not look up. Behind her was one of the two sets of encyclopaedias, those from the 9th edition, which I could not come near without disturbing her. I could, however, examine those of the 11th. I photographed their spines with my mobile phone and, at random, took down one of the volumes and opened it. It was #27-28, TON to ZYM, and the first entry concerned Tonalite: ‘in petrology, a rock of the diorite class, first described from Monte Adamello near Tonale in the Eastern Alps. It may be described as a quartz-diorite containing biotite and hornblende in nearly equal proportions.’

That didn’t seem to lead anywhere in particular so I returned the volume to its place on the shelf. The woman with the bobcut had still not shown any sign she even knew I was there, although she must have. I was in her line of sight, had she looked up from her screen; but she did not. I felt obscurely ashamed of myself, as if I was stalking her; or rather as if I wanted her to notice me, wanted her to engage with me in some way. In fact, what I really wished for her to do was move out of the way so I could look at the spines on the volumes of the 9th edition; but how could I do that? Especially since she did not deign to register my presence. I left the rest of the volumes unexamined and returned to my room, first to look at the photo of the books of the 11th edition, then to see if I could find the Borges story.

They were, for what it is worth, these: Vol. 3-4 AUS to CAL; Vol. 5-6 CAL to CON; Vol. 9-10 EDW to FRA; Vol.11-12 FRA to HAR; Vol. 19-20 MUN to PAY; Vol. 27-28 TON to ZYM; plus a supplementary, one of the so-called New Volumes: Vol. 31-32 ENG to ZUL. All encyclopaedias (not to say all books) go out of date as soon as they are published; all are in a constant state of revision. In the case of the Britannica, in its print-based phase at least, these revisions came out as supplementary volumes; which is why 31-32 took up a comparatively large alphabetical range compared with the others.

I noted that this particular edition combined two volumes of the original publication between one set of covers, suggesting it was published later than 1911. However, since I had neglected to look at the imprint page, I did not know when. Beyond that, I felt a kind of vertigo in the face of the vastness of the enterprise, the sheer amount of information, much of it since proved erroneous, contained in even these few books; the impossibility of ever comprehending what it amounted to or what its significance, if any, might have been. There are those, I know, who have read editions of the Britannica from beginning to end; an American businessman, Amos Urban Shirk, did so with the 11th and afterwards with the 14th (which he said was a great improvement). I felt so intimidated I could not even read in full the one and half pages devoted to a description of Tonalite.

On the question of its veracity or indeed reliability I’ll quote another American, the writer Willard Huntington Wright, an art critic, a modernist, a Germanophile, a cocaine addict, later an alcoholic, who in the 1920s published, under the name S S Van Dine, a series of popular detective fictions featuring a private eye called Philo Vance. In 1917, under his own name, Wright wrote Misinforming a Nation, an extended critique of the 11th edition saying, amongst much else, that it was ‘characterized by misstatements, inexcusable omissions, rabid and patriotic prejudices, personal animosities, blatant errors of fact, scholastic ignorance, gross neglect of non-British culture, an astounding egotism, and an undisguised contempt for American progress’. The date, 1917, is surely significant as the year in which the United States entered the war on the side of the Allies and against Wright’s beloved, if brutal and antiquated, Prussians.

The Borges story, as I had anticipated, wasn’t hard to find. Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington State, had posted it at a site called, mysteriously, politicalshakespeares. It is of course the famous Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius (1940) and, at a little over 5000 words, one of Borges’ longest stories; nevertheless, still short enough to be read at a sitting. Understanding its complexities, however, might take a little longer. I won’t attempt a summary but will essay a brief exposition of its subject matter. Uqbar is a fictional country, notionally in the area north of Iraq, between the Black and the Caspian Seas, where Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia are now. Tlön is a world invented by the inhabitants of Uqbar, a part of their mythology, you might say, their literature perhaps, or even their philosophy. Meanwhile Orbius Tertius is a secret society, founded in the late seventeenth century by some extreme idealists, who included Bishop Berkeley, and whose ambition was (or is) to project these two imaginary worlds into our own in such a way as to replace what we call reality with their own mythic constructions. If the attempt is successful (and in the story it seems that it will be) Earth will become Tlön.

The story turns upon a sentence found in an encyclopaedia, describing a belief held by an heresiarch of Uqbar: ‘For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or (more precisely) a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe.’ The encyclopaedia in question, Borges says, is The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917), ‘a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1902’. Three separate copies of this cyclopaedia are examined in the course of the story and in one of them, at the very end of Vol. XLVI, between pages 917-921, is an entry on Uqbar. This doesn’t appear in the other two, both of which conclude Vol. XLVI with Uppsala. Meanwhile in all three copies XLVII begins with a consideration of the ancient city of Ur. This I interpret as a sly, typically Borgesian nod to the notion of an ur-text as the original or earliest version of a piece of writing, to which later revisions may be compared to ascertain their status.

The 1902 Encyclopaedia he mentions is more usually called the 10th edition (1902–03) and is in fact a reprint of the 9th edition, along with an 11-volume supplement, with the succeeding volumes numbered from where the 9th left off; that is, from 25 to 35. Of these additions, the 34th volume is an atlas containing more than 120 maps, with a gazetteer, while the 35th volume has an index to all 34 previous volumes, a list of the contributors to them, and a key to the abbreviated symbols used as signatures to the articles. Here, for the very first time, ‘X’, signifying anonymity, appears. Borges’ description of the New York reprint as ‘delinquent’ refers to numerous mistakes in the production of the work, including errors of pagination which are crucial in a such a large, indexed work.

Does the Anglo-American Cyclopedia exist? Yes, it seems so: ‘a literal (but delayed and pirated) reprint of the 1902 of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Typically bound in black and gold, the cyclopaedia was originally sold door-to-door in those countries where copyright could not be enforced.’ Including, I suppose, Argentina. This information took the wind out of my sails. There were no black and gold volumes in the so-called library at The Longing Hotel. Perhaps I had been hoping, subliminally, to find in one of them some equivalent to Borges’ discovery of the entry on Uqbar. I was probably thinking, half-unconsciously, that I might find an entry relating to Tlön — hence my choice to take down the volume Ton to Zym, of the 11th, the day before. Had there been an entry for it, I now realise, Tlön would have appeared in the previous volume, which wasn’t on the shelf. Later, when I had the opportunity, I looked at it again and ascertained there was no entry relating to Uqbar in it either.

If you have been following my somewhat desultory narrative thus far you will have realised that I was suffering from a form of delusion which is often indulged following a professional setback of some kind. A kind of magical thinking perhaps. As if I might find something in one of those books which would redeem me from the blow to my ego consequent upon my failure to progress in my working life. Something rare and unknown, something that, in its exceptionalism, would guarantee my own unique value. I was half aware of this myself; half aware, too, that my positioning of the woman with bobcut and laptop, like a dragon before treasure, between myself and my desire, was itself a form delusive thinking: so long as her presence prevented me from examining the books, I could hold on to the notion that in them lurked some extraordinary discovery which only I could make.

So that, when I next ventured out of my room, on some pretext or other, into the foyer / library and found her sitting there still, gazing at her screen, as before (but with the addition of a half-eaten sandwich on a plate beside her left elbow), I felt relieved. I decided to return to my original plan and spend the day exploring some of the attractions of the local area. I went back to my room and got myself ready for a walk in the woods. With canvas shoes on my feet, a straw hat on my head and a feeling that wasn’t too far away from a childlike excited anticipation, I set off to visit the bird sanctuary. It was about half an hour’s drive away from the hotel, down leafy, narrow mountain roads, a glade or two in a valley on the lower, gentler slopes of the volcano.

For some reason the navigator in my car took me to the opposite side of the sanctuary from the Visitor’s Centre where I had planned to begin my walk. It was a vestigial carpark, unsealed, with spaces (one of which was taken) for just three or four vehicles; but there was a noticeboard, with a map, and I decided, rather than driving further round the sanctuary, to walk to the Centre. The path was broad but unsealed, stony in parts, smooth in others. Sometimes there were steps. It went up for a while, through trees, then down, crossed a small area of open grassland, and plunged, more steeply, down to a creek bed. Another rise, another descent and soon I was walking down a paved road upon which the Visitor’s Centre hove into view: a low, modernist building, with architectural decorations, constructed on the shore of what might have been an artificial pond.

It was curious how few birds I saw on that walk, which took maybe twenty minutes. In fact I saw only one: a small, dark, anonymous silhouette flying from branch to branch in the canopy. The lack of birds, however, was more than made up for by the proliferation of bird watchers. I must have encountered a dozen or more, conspicuous by the equipment they carried: cameras, small and expensive, or large and expensive, with extravagant zoom lenses upon them; binoculars slung around their necks. I even met one couple, a man and woman, carrying fully extended tripods as tall as they were as the laboured along one of the paths. These people, without exception, regarded me with undisguised irritation. I was, I realised, a distraction, a disturbance, someone likely to scare away the birds, which were fugitive, shy, perhaps irritated themselves by the unfailing attention of the twitchers and photographers. Can birds be too much watched, too much photographed? Yes, I think they can.

There were not many people in the Visitor’s Centre, mostly tourists rather than bird-watchers, mostly old, queueing to use the facilities, which were compact, to say the least, and could only cater for one person, of any sex, at a time. I looked briefly at the photographs on the walls of mammalian wildlife that inhabited the sanctuary — black bears, red foxes, a kind of giant flying squirrel — as well as charts showing pictures of the birds I had not seen. I understood then that, because we were up on the slopes on a volcano, where the forest begins to thin and the trees to shrink in size, the bird life was not just sparse, it was small as well. The sanctuary was home to warblers, finches, tree creepers, buntings, flycatchers and the like and it was probably for this reason there were so many photographers about, hoping to catch a glimpse, or rather an image, of one of the tiny, rare creatures which populated the lower slopes of the mountain.

After I had looked at the wall displays, I bought a drink of water from the kiosk and went outside to sit down and drink it. The air was loud with the croaking of frogs. The pond, which was shallow, had a ridged bottom, as if there were heating elements concealed beneath the concrete. Or was it for freezing? The woman who sold me the tetra pack of pure mountain water said that, small though it was, the pond was used for ice skating in winter. The sky, which had started out cloudy, was clearing and there were scintillations of light on the surface of the water, below which I seemed to see some kind of black, spreading stain. When I took a closer look I realised there were hundreds, probably thousands, of tadpoles moving in great clouds, like nebulae, over the bottom of the pool towards the deeper water. Their black bodies seemed still to be connected to each other by the jelly of the spawn in which the eggs they had hatched from were laid.

It was impossible to imagine all of these tiny fish-like things growing legs, re-absorbing their tails and, eventually, hopping out on to the land. Indeed, I have heard somewhere that under certain circumstances a tadpole will remain a tadpole for the term of its natural life, however long that is — not very long, I suspect. Perhaps in time they might become salamanders. And it was then, irrelevantly, that I thought of a joke my son once told me. Not a very good joke, and a sound joke too; but it works in print. What do you call a fish without an eye? he asked. Of course I didn’t know so he supplied the answer: a fsh. These tadpoles, however, had eyes, bulbous extrusions which also seemed to partake of the jelly of the spawn from which they had come. I shuddered and turned away.

On the way back I took a different route and was suddenly surrounded by birdsong. ‘Song’ might not be the right word. I heard cheeps and trills, chirping sounds, squawks, the breathy, strangled suspense that presages the bush warbler’s shrill; then the shrill itself. Once I stopped for a man poised in the middle of the track, his camera held to his eye, pointing upwards into the canopy. He was quite still, indeed preternaturally so, and I could not understand how he could hold that pose without any camera shake. But that supposes it was moving footage he was taking, whereas it was more likely he was waiting for a particular bird to present itself to his lens in such a way that it would be worth his while to press the shutter button. I waited for what seemed like ages but was probably only a minute or so, before he sighed and lowered the camera from his eye. Had he even got the shot? I could not tell and he did illuminate me as I passed.

Further along I came to a rest house on the brow of small hill from which you could view the volcano, if it had not been shrouded still. I descended to the bank of another creek, running through a valley whose sides were dense with a growth of vivid green ferns which made a circle with their unfurling fronds; and spanned at intervals by mossy green logs like bridges which could only be crossed by small creatures, mammals, reptiles, even tree creeping birds. The path climbed again and I came out near the patch of grassland mentioned earlier. This, I learned at the Visitor’s Centre, was a good place from which to see the volcano so I walked down the path a way to see if the vapour had cleared yet from the sky. It had, or nearly so: the profile of the enormous flattened cone, with its rounded peak, was visible almost in its entirety: there was just a single patch of cloud obscuring the highest eminence, where the notch of the crater was, and even this looked as if it was about to dissipate.

Here I did something which is so out of character it perplexes me still. I stood and gazed at that cloud as if I could, by the power of my will alone, make it go away. I saw the ragged black shadow it cast upon the green and purple slopes of the mountain; I saw the ineffable blue of the summer sky behind; I imagined that cloud as a dragon, a lizard, a fish with fins and a tail. Sometimes it seemed as if it was indeed dissolving; at others it seemed to thicken and grow. I knew the volcano was active, that steam often rose from its crater; but could not tell if that was what I was seeing. I must have spent fifteen minutes engaged in this futile enterprise; in the end I left, with the summit still enshrouded. I felt strange, light-headed, almost free. When I returned to the carpark I discovered that the path I had taken through the sanctuary resembled a figure eight, otherwise known (when lying on its side) as the infinity symbol.

In town, beside the railway station, was a vast emporium, where several hundred boutiques selling branded merchandise stood side by side along covered avenues where shoppers in fashionable clothes, with fashionable dogs on leads, browsed. Various national and international brands had outlets here and people would come by train from the metropolis, not simply for the convenience, or the lower prices, but to have a day out. There were many restaurants and cafes too and at one of these, which called itself a bistro, I ate a lunch of meat and salad and bread. It was themed after a Mongolian yurt, and there were veritable tents inside, where you could sit cross-legged and dine, scattered here and there beneath the vast domed timber superstructure which mimicked the lattice of flexible poles which, on the high plains, would be covered by felt or some other fabric.

Afterwards I went into the old town to look for gifts to take back to my wife and my son. For my wife I bought a pale yellow jade pendant in the shape of a cat’s head, because she is and always has been a cat fancier. I knew that she would receive it ecstatically, wear it for a few days then add it to her collection of similar things, some of which I had also given her, others which she had received as gifts from family members, from friends, perhaps (who knows?) from admirers who pre-dated my arrival on the scene or even (perish the thought) remained contemporary with me. For my son I bought, from the same shop, a small oblong piece of green glass which, though undistinguished, I thought he might treasure, keeping it beside him at his desk when he was gaming, or carrying it with him in his pocket when he went out to work, servicing machines.

Then I went back to the hotel. Where, to my astonishment and perplexity, the Dragon Lady still sat before her laptop. I had more or less forgotten about her and to find her there again seemed like a re-entry into a tedious yet oppressive nightmare. It isn’t too much to say that her continued presence there among the encyclopedias affronted me. It was like a calculated insult, especially since, as before, she refrained from giving any indication that she knew that I was there. On the other hand, there was something admirable in her absorption. Her day, it seemed, had been a long one, judging by the empty take away coffee cups, the plastic water bottles and the discarded sandwich wrappings which surrounded her workplace. It was the kind of situation which, in a soap opera, demands a theatrical sigh that is overheard (and ignored) by the one who had occasioned it; but I suppressed this uncharitable urge, went to my room and prepared for my evening bath.

She was in the restaurant that evening too, in her usual place, on the raised portion on the other side of the room from where I sat; but this time we were not alone. A young couple had arrived — if those in their thirties may be called young — and they were in the first flush of the kind of romance which wants the world to see how much they love each other and how wonderful that love is. I watched them, covertly, as they wished to be watched. I do not know that the Dragon Lady even knew they were there; although they were visible from where she sat, with her back to the kitchen and a view out the window to the carpark. She had her bottle of red wine before her, sipping judiciously, as was her wont. As before, she finished her meal, gathered her things, picked up the unfinished bottle and made her way, past the lovers, towards the door.

It was then that she gave the only indication that she knew of my existence and perhaps even of my vague obsession with her. As she crossed the room she paused, as you do when you think you may have forgotten something; but she did not look back at her abandoned table but sideways, at me. Our eyes met, briefly, and she smiled, enigmatically but not conspiratorially: as if she knew something that I did not and, whatever it was, would never be divulged; or not to me. I had not seen her properly before. I mean I had only seen her in profile. Her face was round, rather plain, with full lips and almond shaped eyes; but I was struck, above all, by the signs of fatigue around those almond eyes and the worry lines on her forehead. This was the face of one who suffered, in the normal course of her days, from what I assumed to be a too great a commitment to her work.

When I returned, later, to my room I saw that the hotel staff had cleaned the desk where she had sat of its detritus. This meant that there was no longer any obstacle to my examining the volumes of the 9th edition she had, as it were, sat on guard before. The irony was that I no longer wished to do so. That look had destroyed my obsession, let alone my ambition. It was only out of a sense of duty (duty to what?) that I photographed their spines; and it is that same sense of duty that demands I record them here: Vol. VIII ELE to FAK; Vol. XIV KAO to LON; Vol. XX PRU to ROS; Vol. XXIV URA to ZYM; Vol. XXVIII ELE to GLA (new volumes); Vol. XXXI MOS to PRE (new volumes); Vol. XXXV Index.

The so-called New Volumes belonged to the 10th edition, the one published in 1902-3 and pirated in America in 1917, the one that Borges and his colleague consulted; and Vol. XXXV functions as the index for all of the thirty-four volumes which precede it, including the atlas. If there were anything about Tlön, Uqbar or Orbius Tertius in this edition, I thought, the way to find it would be to consult the index. But I wasn’t going to do that until the morning. And if the Dragon Lady had returned to her station, I would not do so at all. Tomorrow was, after all, my last day here. I intended to check out of The Longing Hotel, visit the Lava Park and then drive home to the city.

Next morning there was no sign of the Dragon Lady. She wasn’t there when I went to breakfast and she wasn’t there afterwards either. I did look into the Index but found nothing under any of those three words. No surprises there. I also looked into Vol. XXXI MOS to PRE in case there was an entry for Orbius Tertius; but there was not. I could not really understand any more why I had thought there might be. My vanished obsession seemed to have nothing to do with anything except perhaps the distressed state of mind I had been in when I first arrived at the hotel. Curiously enough, that too seemed to have departed. I wouldn’t say I was better but I was no longer compulsively re-playing the events of my recent humiliation in my mind.

When I went to return my key to reception, I mentioned my fellow guest to the young woman behind the counter, who doubled as a waitress and was, I knew, inclined towards gossip. It was she who had told me about the hotel owner who had once wanted to write.

Oh, her, she said. She left this morning.

What’s her story? I asked.

She’s a regular, the receptionist said. She comes here all the time. Every time she has a new book to write.

Oh, a writer, I said.

Yes, romances. She’s very successful but she publishes under a pseudonym and I don’t know what it is. I think the name she uses here is fake too. Amazing really. She writes a whole book each times she comes up. Or so she says. Takes her all of three days.

That is amazing, I said. She seemed very focused.

Oh yes, that’s her. We don’t like her because she’s rude to the staff. Well, not exactly rude, dismissive. She likes things just so and if they aren’t, she gets cranky. But her money’s just as good as anyone else’s.

With that, she ripped the paper receipt out of the terminal that had just debited my credit card and handed it to me.

Do come again.

It was only when I was walking to the car that it occurred to me I had the whole thing the wrong way round. Maybe, I thought, she is not a character in my story; maybe I am a character in hers. That would explain the enigmatic look, for instance, as well as her studied refusal to otherwise acknowledge me. Perhaps I had become the protagonist — or the antagonist — in her latest romance novel. Perhaps my evocation of her was actually her evocation of me. Was she writing me or was I writing her? After all, in this world, it is hard to tell who is a demon and who a subordinate god.

The Lava Park was further up the mountain than I had been before, past the treeline, where the truncated cone seemed vaster and more imposing than it had looked from lower down; though its colours were the same: sombre green, bruise blue, purple, black in the shadows, with one or two white streaks of snow lingering in gullies or on ridges. There was an enormous carpark, almost empty this weekday morning, and a gigantic, moribund Visitor’s Centre which had closed, perhaps due to some degeneration of the concrete out of which it was made. You passed this monstrosity and then crossed a bridge to the other side, where a newer Visitor’s Centre had been constructed. It was a circular tower, and it looked as if it did not have much time left before it too became a ruin.

A cluster of souvenir shops had been built beside the gates that led to the path which climbed up to the temple on the side of the mountain. The lumpy, twisted shapes of the solidified lava were all about; there was a key detailing the outcrops resemblances to things of this world: bears, perhaps, or pagodas. Dragon ladies. I paid no attention, preferring to look at them as things in themselves. The lava flow followed an eruption in the year 1783, nearly 250 years ago; the last time that malevolent demon stirred. In the interim, plants had begun to colonize the field and it was these impromptu gardens which I found enticing. Lichens and mosses had been succeeded by herbs and small shrubs. Some, azaleas or dwarf rhododendrons, pale orange and yellow, were still flowering; after them had come the miniature pines and the other dwarf trees. No matter how grotesque the original formation might have been, the growth of plants had softened their harshness and made an order which, while never symmetrical, was always pleasing to the eye.

There were few people about; and as I climbed I heard the tolling of a bell, reverberating in the quiet, still air of the day. Soon I came to the bell itself; one of the kind you see in temples all across the land, rung by retracting then letting go a horizontal wooden shaft with a muffled, metal tip, which strikes the side of the bell, which tolls. Usually only temple monks are allowed to ring them; unusually, here, anybody could ring the bell and most people did. I did too and heard the sound roll up towards the flank of the mountain. It seemed the bell was calling to the mountain while the mountain was calling to the bell. The volcano had been shrouded as I drove in but now, without any intervention on my part, the vapours had cleared and you could see its dark silhouette against the pale blue sky. Its profile resembled, a guidebook said, a sleeping man. Or rather a subordinate god.

After I had paid my respects at the temple, dropped some coins into the wooden repository, and made my wish, I went to sit on a bench beneath an aged pine tree which, by the thickness of its needles and the twistiness of its trunk, had probably been planted rather than grown here spontaneously. There was a view of the mountain; now and again, another pilgrim rang the bell and its deep sonority rolled through the air. A wind from the south blew up, whispering in the pines and ruffling my hair; it passed and then came again, as breath follows breath until we cease to be. Somehow the events, such as they were, of the last few days had freed me – to wander at will in other worlds than my own. I thought I had never known such peace before nor ever would again. And then I thought that, having once attained peace, how would I ever lose it? Even if only its memory remained.

There is a smell of sulphur in the air

yellow iris flower beside the netted pond

in slate-dark water blue grey koi swim

a rufous dove cries unseen over & over

as if repeating an unanswerable question:

is this where the dust of your bones lie

under a grey stone with lotus petal

& stamen festooned with lichens rising

before green hills into the white sky —

or are you on that island way down south

where they say you died of fever

while on a secret mission to Tsushima?

Your statue shows a man in a conical hat

with brush & tablet in the act of composition

the poem cut into the stone beside it

Basho says you wrote at beautiful Matsushima

advising the mellifluous, unlovely cuckoo

to change its body for the body of a crane

rara avis said to live a thousand years

& to make children’s wishes all come true

On the way to your grave we visited a sake shop

in the carpark where we left the Vitz

stood the house where you were born

belonging to an aunt or else your grandmother

the man who raised you was a sake maker too

his place was up the valley at Suzuki

Afterwards we saw the grave of a Tokugawa

he who might have been your natural father

the cryptomeria that had grown there both cut down

forgotten flowers withering in their vases

Tadateru’s legitimacy was in 1984 affirmed

but not his supposed son’s paternity

A cuckoo calls again again within the green

gardens of the castle where that other father

lived out the half a century of his exile

during which he took a local girl to bed

the one the merchant from Suzuki married

the one who then became your mother —

I wonder again if you died on Ikishima

or did you die ascetic at Haruna

the mountain overlooking Ikaho east of here?

Are you the dove, the cuckoo or the crane

or are you among the raptors on patrol

above the mirroring waters of Suwa-ko

or maybe you’re the sable crow who sits

upon a power pole outside the hotel window

blinking his white eye & looking over

the fault lake towards the other shore

the one from which there can be no return.