An invisible racecourse, no less than a visible, could be no more than a detail in the foreground of a far-reaching invisible landscape. The chief character might have supposed himself unable to comprehend the true extent of such a landscape or the intricacy of its details if he had not understood from the first that the landscape existed only in potential; was encoded in what he had yet to read or to write in his upstairs suite in the building of several storeys.
The chief character, then, had no need of any special faculty for bringing to mind such a detail as the name of the personage who was the owner of the racehorse that would carry the colours pale blue and dark green in one or more races that would be run in due course in a building of several storeys in his, the chief character’s mind. The chief character simply came by the information that the surname of the personage mentioned was Glass and that the initials preceding his name in racebooks and form-guides should be G. G. for the given names Gervase Graham or, perhaps, Gary Grenfell. If I could think of the chief character as having deliberately chosen the surname for his own chief character, then I might admire the chief character for his perceptiveness; for his seeming to be aware of the pattern of imagery, so to call it, in the work of fiction in which he himself is no more than a personage. But the personage with the surname Glass has the same sort of existence in the mind of the chief character as that personage has in my own mind. Like the hundreds of owners and trainers and jockeys who frequent one or another invisible racecourse, the personage named G. G. Glass has always existed in potentiality awaiting the appearance of his name in a text such as this.
In the place where I sit writing these words, a racecourse is often described as a place where persons of every rank compete as equals: where the magnate may have to watch his costly horse overtaken in the straight by an animal of unfashionable breeding owned by a syndicate of bar-attendants. While I was writing the previous paragraph, I was led to postulate a contest at one or another invisible racecourse between an invisible racehorse carrying the pale blue and dark green colours of G. G. Glass and an invisible racehorse carrying my own colours, as though a writer of a work of fiction might sometimes exist in potentiality awaiting the appearance of his or her name in a text such as might be written by an invisible personage mentioned in an invisible text. The appearance of my own racehorse on the other seeming side of my own fictional text might have shown me something of what I had hoped for as a child when I had wanted to see outwards from the coloured glass that I often looked into.
A certain brief section of my unfinished book was set, as it were, in an old timber building at the rear of a house of grey sandstone surrounded on three sides by mostly level and treeless grassy countryside. On the other side of the house were a few bare paddocks. Beyond these paddocks were cliff-tops overgrown by scrub. Beyond the cliff-tops was the Southern Ocean. The old timber building was all that remained of the timber house that had been replaced by the house of grey sandstone more than twenty years before the birth of the chief character. The persons who lived in the house of grey sandstone were the parents and the four unmarried siblings of the father of the chief character. When the chief character first visited the house, in the summer of his seventh year, the persons who lived in the house had for long been using the old timber building as a storage-place or dumping-place for unused or unwanted furniture and belongings.
The chief character visited the house of grey sandstone several times during the summer of each year until his tenth year, when his father’s father died and the house and the surrounding paddocks were sold. At some time during each of his visits to the house, his mother would tell the chief character to go outside and play. The chief character would then go in search of his father’s youngest sister, who was almost always at work in the kitchen or the laundry. He would ask his father’s sister, who was his youngest aunt, for permission to go into the old timber building and to play the gramophone that was kept there. His youngest aunt would always give her permission but would remind him to be careful of the gramophone and the records, which had belonged to her when she was a young thing, as she expressed the matter. (The chief character thought of his aunt as middle-aged or old, although she was in her mid-thirties.)
The gramophone, as it was called, was little more than a turntable and an amplifier in a portable case. In a box near by were twenty and more records made from some or another glossy black material. The records were brittle and some of them had been cracked or chipped before the chief character had first handled them. At one side of the gramophone was a handle that had to be turned many times before each record was played. Seemingly, the turntable was set in motion by a concealed spring, although the chief character was never curious about such matters.
The chief character took care when handling the gramophone and the records although he could not believe that his aunt valued them or would ever use them again. He supposed that she had lost interest in them as she had grown older. In later years, when he had learned more about his youngest aunt, the chief character supposed that she had discarded the gramophone and the records during the year before he had been conceived, which was the year when his aunt had been preparing to become a postulant in an order of nuns; that she had stowed away in the old timber building not only the gramophone and the records but perhaps other items that seemed to her frivolous and distracting after she had decided to lead a simple regulated life in a building of two or more storeys.
All of the records were of songs popular in the USA in the late 1920s. Only a few appealed to the chief character, and these he played repeatedly. The sound was what he called scratchy and many of the words were inaudible, but he heard enough to be able to feel what he hoped to feel whenever he listened to a piece of music: to feel as though a person unknown to him in a desirable place far away from him desired to be in a place still further away. The song that he played most often had the title “O, Dem Golden Slippers” and was sung by three or four male persons.
The chief character was never able to make out the words of the song. The only words that he recognised were the words of the title, which words were sung often as part of a refrain. He supposed the singers to be unhappy men and their song to be a lament of some kind. Even in bright sunshine, the old timber building was only dimly lit, with much discarded furniture having been stored in front of the two small windows. The record that the chief character played most often had a bright yellow label at its centre. The words on the label were printed in black. Even when the mostly level grassy countryside all around was in bright sunshine, the chief character was able to think of himself as sitting in darkness while he listened to the gramophone. He liked to stare first at the spinning black record and then at the yellow central circle and then at the dark blur of words on the inner yellow.
Among the images that appeared to the chief character while he stared at the dark blur that had formerly been printed words — among those images were some that arranged themselves as though to illustrate for his benefit the meaning of the incomprehensible words of the song that sounded from the spinning record. The most notable of these images was of a pair of slippers made from translucent glass of a colour between orange and gold. The slippers, so he came to understand, belonged to a young female personage whose home was a building of two or more storeys. The unhappy men might have been former servants of the father of the young female personage. The men had been sent away from the house of two or more storeys after the father of the young female personage had suspected that they had fallen in love with his daughter.