Isinglass Read online

  These were years of despair and isolation; and on 2 October 1953, Claire’s heart gave out. She lived on, an invalid, for another eight years. After her death in 1961, Bliss suffered a breakdown but recovered and, in 1965, published a second edition of his work, Semantography (Blissymbolics). By this time he was more than a little paranoid: Then something happened: the tourist explosion. Suddenly everyone realised that only pictorial symbols could bridge all languages. And equally suddenly, academic busy-bodies run to scientific foundations and ask for millions of dollars for research into ‘The Feasibility of Designing a Complete Symbol Language’. They knew of my work. Either they did not mention my name and the title of my work in their papers, or they changed my term into a general term, speaking of the better semantographies they will invent, given the millions for research. In anger and unhappiness I added the term Blissymbolics to my work which these would-be plagiarists could not take over.

  The breakthrough came in 1971, when Bliss learned that children with cerebral palsy at the Ontario Crippled Children’s Centre in Toronto, Canada, were being taught to communicate with his symbols. He collaborated with a draftsman, Jim Grice, to redraw the pictographs, of which there are now about nine hundred; the number has been capped to make the ongoing translation into computer code more feasible. The world copyright for use of his symbols was licensed to the Blissymbolics Communication Foundation in Canada in 1975. He was still paranoid; there was a falling-out with the foundation in the late 1970s but it was sorted out and the renamed Blissymbolics Communication International now owns an exclusive license, granted in 1982, for the use and publication of Blissymbols for people with communication, language and learning difficulties.

  Bliss was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize but, after Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger were awarded the joint prize in 1973, and Tho refused to accept it, Bliss withdrew consent for his nomination. In 1976 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia for services to the community, particularly handicapped children. There was a third edition of his book (Semantography-Blissymbolics: A Simple System of 100 Logical Pictorial Symbols, Which Can Be Operated and Read Like 1 + 2 = 3 in All Languages (Sydney, 1978)); and in 1979 he was finally given the academic recognition he craved: an appointment as Honorary Fellow in Linguistics at the Australian National University in Canberra. Bliss died in 1985; that same year The Blissymbols Picture Book, in three volumes, was published in Coogee.

  C took from her handbag a white card with some symbols printed upon it in black and handed it to me. We were stopped on a red in Rose Bay, at the corner of New South Head and Dover roads, just before you climb the hill to Vaucluse and the arcadias beyond. I stared at the hieroglyphs:

  Do you get it? C asked.

  I shook my head. The lights turned green. I gave the card back to her and started up Heartbreak Hill.

  It says, said C: I want to go to the movies.

  Which one, I joked. Avatar? Nowhere Boy? The Road? They’re the last three films I saw. We could go and see The Hurt Locker if you like, it’s still on. Or we could go to Coogee … where one day in 1925 or thereabouts, irrelevantly, Len Lye saw a great white shark surfing the glassy waves.

  She wasn’t listening or she wasn’t hearing, who knew? She was staring out the window. Halfway up Heartbreak Hill—so called by despairing runners in the annual City to Surf race—if you look to the left you see the white towers of the city, like the superstructure of some impossible ship moored forever beneath the cobalt sky, from which the single span of the Harbour Bridge, its massive iron girders thinned to gossamer, makes its fragile leap across the water.

  At that distance the sails of the Opera House also take on a diminutive grandeur, like the petals of some formal flower, a gardenia perhaps, as painted by Georgia O’Keeffe. Behind that, more gossamer threads of the scaffolding of the rides at Luna Park and the pale clown face with its sardonic teeth glimmering … I heard C give a little gasp but did not say, or perhaps I did, what I was thinking: a foreign city is beautiful seen from the hills / but seen from the ghetto it’s a pile of shit.

  We did not stop; we toiled on and up and over the hill and then out along the spine of the ridge leading to South Head, with its defunct lighthouse resplendent among the high green fields, before plunging down the twisting road into the village above the cove. Here I always think of Mr Darwin’s Shooter, Syms Covington, in the novel by Roger McDonald, with his deafened ears and worn-out body, reading his former master’s epochal book by candlelight in a fallen-down wooden shack above the sands of the bay; and knowing as he reads that he too is implicated in the fall of the God he has always believed in, that he has himself collaborated in the death of the Author of Creation, the orphaning of the world. All those specimens of whelks and barnacles he gathered and boxed and sent 12,000 miles by sea to Down House in Kent, England, all those Galapagos finches he shot and preserved and labelled, all that uncritically collected knowledge which he gave willingly, for a little money and no glory, towards the composition of the Devil’s Book.

  I found a park along the side of the narrow road which leads to South Head and we got out and walked back to the pier, where venerable palms grow above the turnaround and an old brick pub stands on the corner, while in its cool shadows superannuated drinkers wait along the bar for their next cold schooner to pour foaming into an iced glass. We were going to eat in the fish restaurant there, at a rickety table under a blue-striped umbrella, with views of the harbour, the city, the west.

  By now it was well after two in the afternoon and the lunchtime crowd had mostly dispersed; there were only a couple of tables still occupied by groups of well-fed, well-liquored, well-upholstered diners anticipating a somnolent pause in their daily indulgence. We heard the Parp! of a car horn and the party nearest to us got up and rolled out to the waiting taxi. C looked grateful for the cessation of their noise and adjusted her hearing aid. She ordered a fig and fetta tart. I was having fish and chips, with a green salad which we shared and a carafe of cold water.

  I thought that now perhaps she would resume her account of the meeting with Thursday in the donga at Berrimah, but she did not seem so inclined, picking distractedly at her fig and fetta and looking squint-eyed into the blazing light of the autumn sun, the sequins dancing on the waters of the bay.

  It was at a reception in Toronto, she said, apropos of what I did not at first understand. He was the guest of honour, he spoke. A small man with bad English, excitable and chaotic, prey to an enthusiasm that never quite cohered. I went up to him afterwards and shook his hand. We spoke briefly about things that don’t matter. I remember he explained how he came up with the term semantographics: Greek, semanticos, ‘significance’, with its root in the word ‘sign’; graphein, ‘to write’. Signwriting. It wasn’t anything he said, it was … his spirit. This twinkling of intelligent obsession which believes it has in its power the saving of the world. This dedication to an idea which makes the processes of ordinary living both meaningful and somehow also irrelevant.

  I told her that the eastern suburbs of Sydney are full of little old European men and women who speak bad English with great conviction and hold in their inviolable memories the traces of extraordinary lives; how most of them are wealthy, or at least comfortably off, but you never know where their money comes from or what they had to do to get it; and how many of them must have had to abandon their skills and qualifications, their predilections and their passions, for the minutiae of landlordism, dealings in real estate, the conveyancing of property, not souls. And how, notwithstanding, there are still among them men and women such as Charles and Claire Bliss must have been, who carried through the horrors of the last century some light which they mean to find a way to shine upon the poorest of lives, the most reduced of existences. Or something like that.

  C looked a bit sceptical.

  The thing is, she said, his cards were of no use to Thursday, because he doesn’t have the knowledge upon which the symbols depend. How can you read cinema from a front-on pict
ure of a lens with a horizontal arrow that means moving next to it, if you don’t know what a camera is? Or a house of moving pictures? What if you’ve never been to a theatre? Most of the cards require some sort of context to be useful, some shared understanding of the world. And he seems to be from somewhere else. From beyond. Anyway, he didn’t really even look at the cards, just a brief glance, but what he did do then was make some sort of mark on the floor, with his fingertip, in the dust. This red dust that blows in everywhere. So I guess in that sense, as a provocation, the Blissymbols did do something for him after all.

  What did he draw?

  Well, I’m not sure if I know the answer to that and I’m not sure the question’s even relevant. He made his mark and then rubbed it out. Just like that. And then he looked at me. What that look told me was that he wanted to communicate, that he knew how to communicate, but that it wasn’t going to be in words, it was going to be in pictures. That’s when I had my idea. I wondered what would happen if he were given the materials for the making of images. Like you do with kids in kindergarten. What if we gave him things to draw with? Crayons, coloured pencils, a set of watercolour paints? One of those pads of art paper? I got Lee to organise it, get the permissions and so forth, while I went out and bought the actual paints and paper. It took a couple of days, but we did it. We fitted him up like an artist. And then we left him to it.

  Oh, she said, dropping a clatter of cutlery on her plate and pushing the plate away. I can’t eat this, it’s too much. Do you want it?

  Her strong brown arm lay bent on the tabletop, her silver wristwatch and her sleeve of green lace. She was wearing a pale-yellow skirt. I did, I was starving. I forked the last of the crumbly pastry, the creamy fetta and the pink bits of fig into my mouth while C watched, discontentedly.

  I think I need a drink, she said. Do you want a whisky?

  The waitress brought us two tumblers of pale gold, without ice. She drowned hers with water from the carafe while I sipped the Laphroaig neat, feeling it burn away the residues of salt and vinegar and pastry and grease from my gullet then settle hot and opulent in my belly. I wanted to hear what happened next.

  Did Thursday draw? What did he draw?

  Not what you might think , she said. Certainly not what I expected. Lee was appalled; it caused all sorts of trouble for him later. He didn’t use the pad, didn’t use the paper. Just the crayons and the paint. He stayed up all night, right through that night, painting. On the wall. He did this amazing wall painting, this mural. It was a city, a Paul Klee or a Max Ernst city, a city of the mind perhaps, or of antiquity. A dream city. It was a wonderful thing. It took a few days and nights to do, beautiful days and nights. All the other men who lived in the donga watched it come clear. They loved it. And then other men in the camp heard about it too and came to look.

  I tried to photograph it but the photos didn’t really work out; they don’t do it justice. Words can’t describe that painting. I’ll try but you’ll have to bear with me. I’ll do my best, but I might need your help.

  How do you mean, my help?

  I’ll tell you what I saw and you can write it up later in that way you have. That is if you still want to be involved.

  There was no archness in the way she said it. We were past skirmishing; she knew as well as I did what form our collaboration would take, was taking: in that moment there was between us a complete understanding. I saw she had tears in her eyes. And then I also knew without a doubt that Thursday’s painting was no more.

  There is a green hill far away / without a city wall … she sang in a clear high child-like voice, pitch perfect, then blushed and stopped.

  How do the deaf sing? I wondered, or rather, how do they hear themselves singing? Is it via the transmission of soundwaves through the bony structures of the skull, as we who are not deaf hear our own voices speaking?

  We may not know, we cannot tell, what pains he suffered there … I added, not singing, speaking the words.

  Yes, she said, Thursday’s painting made me think of that old hymn, which always confused me when I was a kid: without a city wall, I wondered, why was the green hill without a wall? Why would it have a wall anyway? Of course it doesn’t mean that; it means the green hill stood outside the city walls. It’s Golgotha, though why Golgotha should have been green I still can’t understand. Anyway …

  He drew a green hill, long and low and curving as a rainbow does. Before a blue sky. A river flowed around this hill; it came down on both sides, like a moat, and in the confluence of its two arms became a wide estuary that met the sea. There was the yellow line of a beach either side of the estuary waters and he had touched in white lines of surf breaking there, in the foreground, right at the bottom of the actual wall he was painting on. The city on the hill was walled about its circumference and there were gates in the wall and the central gate, above the estuary, stood open. The city itself was a pile of flat-roofed ochre buildings scaffolding upwards like a ziggurat towards a high red palace floating resplendent just below the summit of the hill. It didn’t really look Asian to me; if anything it seemed African, like something you might see in Mali perhaps, or even further north.

  (C had visited West Africa in her youth, she had been I think as far as Timbuktu.)

  He had sketched in palms along the avenues of the city, and shade trees and groves of fruit- or nut-bearing trees with red or orange or golden orbs among the leaves. These orchard groves were in unenclosed parklands either side of the city, on the lower slopes of the green hill, and here he outlined the shapes of animals, antlered deer or horses, and also small grey elephants which were caparisoned with woven cloths. Yes, and there were white birds, well I think they were birds, ibis perhaps, on the green, and others like paired black eyebrows on the sky.

  Hieroglyphic devices figured on some of the ochre house walls, in black, and also on the outsides of the city ramparts; but these were too rudimentary to be read, they were just patterns intaglio-ed there like the writing you sometimes see on mosques. Black boats with white sails on the wide arms of the river, upon whose waters lily pads floated, or lotus, with pink flowers, and beyond, outside both walls and river, masses of what I took to be forest trees amongst which, here and there, were cleared fields where some kind of crop was growing—grain I think, but whether it was rice or millet or corn I couldn’t say.

  This was more or less how it looked the first time we saw it; over the next night and the next after that, he filled in more detail and also peopled the city with tall red strangely elongated figures which were out of scale, too big for the place in which they lived; they were elaborately coiffed, or else wore ornate high headdresses, extravagant girdles around their waists, and long tassels fell from their armpits and from their girdles almost to the ground. These long-limbed elegant men and women were as if stilled in the midst of dancing; many were just stick figures but some were taller and longer of limb and more detailed in their accoutrements; and in a great crowd they came forth from the city by that open central gate and out onto a flat field that lay there between the estuary and the walls; and at their head, two central figures, a man and a woman, bigger than all the others, stood with their arms extended as if engaged in some ceremony, the blessing of the waters perhaps. While below, on the shores of the estuarine lake, smaller figures, children, played among the reeds that grew so thickly there.

  Bradshaw figures … I murmured, too low for her to hear me; and in any case I did not wish to interrupt her flow. But she had paused anyway, as if trying to summon back what sounded more like a vision than anything that could have been painted on a wall in the manner she had described. Especially the wall of a dusty donga in a detention camp in sweaty Darwin.

  There’s more … she said and paused again. Drank the rest of her whisky. I signed for the waitress, who was hovering impatiently, waiting for us to finish up and go, to fill our glasses again.

  Purple pennants flew from some of the higher buildings, she said. I felt I could see things in that paintin
g that were not actually there: pavilions of teak housing minstrels and dancers. Beaten copper sheeted and glowing from on top of the inscribed walls. Parasols. Tapestries of silk hung in the interiors of dim galleries and in antechambers where woven mats of aromatic grasses lay on the packed earth floors. I even heard some kind of melody rising there, the music of flutes and drums and something with a single taut string that was bowed and made a high wild melancholy sound.

  It was something I will never see the like of again. Nor anyone else either, perhaps.

  C took off her glasses, shrinking her eyes to small round beads of glinting blue corundum. She rubbed them hard, using the knuckles of both hands. Took a sip of her fresh glass of neat Laphroaig.

  I thought I knew already what had happened: the authorities had found the painting and ordered it to be destroyed.

  No, she said, that’s not right; perhaps it might have turned out that way … but no. Word did get around amazingly fast, everyone in the camp, the inmates I mean, all of them wanted to see it and many of them did; so of course the guards heard about it too, and it was reported to the higher-ups. Lee was called in to an interview with the commandant or whatever he calls himself, and was reprimanded for his … sponsorship of vandalism was I think the phrase they used. But they seemed to feel a need to go cautiously, probably because they didn’t want to antagonise the camp. There’d been riots on Christmas Island and they didn’t want Berrimah in the news as well.

  No doubt they would have, and no doubt by now they have repainted that wall; but as it happened Thursday got in first. He did it; he painted out his own painting. I was there; I saw it happen. Lee too, we were both there. It was one morning when we went back in to see what progress he’d made. The fourth morning, I think, the fourth since he’d begun, I mean. It hadn’t changed much, he’d just elaborated some detail, the inscriptions on the walls, the costumes the tall figures wore, their ornaments.