On days when the sunlight was especially bright outside the old timber building, the chief character would sometimes look away from the black and the yellow blurs while he listened to the incomprehensible words of the song the title of which was intended at one time to be the title of a long and complicated book of fiction. At such times on such days, the chief character would look in the direction of one of the two small windows of the old timber building. He would look in the hope of seeing there the crowd of dust-motes that he sometimes saw swirling or drifting in a shaft of sunlight. Sometimes while the record was spinning on the turntable of the gramophone and while the wavering music and voices were sounding in the old timber building, the crowd of dust-motes seemed to portend something. The song sounded always as a lament. Nothing in the words or in the music gave rise to hope. Whatever was lost or far away would always be so. The young woman, the owner of the slippers of orange-gold glass, would keep to her room in the building of two or more storeys. But the specks of yellow went on swirling or drifting in the shaft of light for long after the song had ended. The movement of the specks caused the chief character to think of energy held in check or of meaning waiting to be expressed. At any moment, the yellow motes might break out of their aimless-seeming formation and might arrange themselves far otherwise; might even comprise a set of signs requiring to be read.
The parents of the chief character would not allow him as a child to attend race-meetings with his father. The parents hoped to keep the boy from following the ways of his father, who had lost large sums of money to bookmakers during year after year. When, finally, the chief character attended a race-meeting for the first time, he was in his sixteenth year and in the company of his father’s youngest brother. While the horses were circling behind the barrier before being called forward by the starter for the first race at the first meeting that the chief character had attended, the movement of the horses recalled to him the swirling and drifting of the dust motes in the old timber building where he had listened as a child to the gramophone belonging to his youngest aunt.
One or another section of the book that I failed to complete would have included a report of certain details that appeared to the chief character after he had been injected with a measured amount of a substance that he knew by the name of psilocybin. The section would have begun with a report of the chief character’s consulting a medical specialist in the hope of learning why he, the chief character, seemed unable to write poetry or prose fiction or to persuade some or another young woman to be his girlfriend. The following is a summary of the other matters that would have been reported in the section.
The chief character consulted the medical specialist for several months, after which the specialist proposed that the chief character should stay overnight in a certain private hospital while the psilocybin affected him. It so happened that the chief character, during one of the months mentioned, first met up with a young woman who later became his girlfriend, who later still lived in a room in the same house of two storeys in which the chief character and two other persons lived, and who later again became the wife of the chief character. It so happened also during another of the months mentioned that the chief character wrote the first notes for a poem that became, several years later, his first published poem. Despite what had happened during the months mentioned, the chief character went on consulting the medical specialist so that he, the chief character, could experience the effects of a substance that was said to alter a person’s perception.
The private hospital mentioned in the previous paragraph was a building of two storeys in an eastern suburb of Melbourne. The chief character was shown into a small room on the upper storey. The room contained only a single bed and a bedside table and a wardrobe and a chair. The window-blind had been drawn against the late-afternoon sunlight. On the blind were shadows from the upper branches of a tree in the walled garden beside the building. The chief character had to change into pyjamas and to lie in the bed before the medical specialist injected into his, the chief character’s, bloodstream a measured dose of the substance mentioned previously. Soon after the injection of the substance, the chief character saw in his mind the first of a series of richly coloured images that appeared to him during several hours.
The first of the images mentioned above were of zones of red and of blue and of yellow and of green forming intricate patterns or designs. If the chief character had recognised outlines of persons or of objects among the patterns or designs, he might have supposed that he was looking at window after window of stained glass in some or another gigantic cathedral. Instead, he supposed that the images were of unfamiliar details of the entity that he was accustomed to think of as his self, as though he had stood in front of a source of light so powerful that it caused to be projected on to some or another surface near by much-enlarged images of his brain or of his nerves. (Some days later, he recalled certain patches of colour that had appeared on the dark surface of the rug where he had played as a child with his collection of glass marbles. He had often placed one after another translucent marble so that the sunlight would cause a patch of faint colour to appear in the shade of the marble. After he had learned from his reading the word essence, he thought of the patch of colour as revealing the essence of the marble.)
Later, the chief character seemed to himself to be standing in a corner of a walled garden beside the hospital of two storeys, except that the plants and the pathways were those that he had seen whenever he had visited as a child the stone house where his father’s unmarried siblings lived with their parents. From beneath a certain bush in an opposite corner of the garden, some or another small creature seemed to be signalling to him. What he saw was a series of tiny flashes, and yet afterwards he used the word winking to describe the sight. He understood, in the way that he seemed to understand certain matters in his dreams, that the creature under the bush was one of a sort of beetle that had infested the garden around the stone house mentioned above. He had learned from his father’s sisters to call the beetles soldier beetles. He admired the beetles’ wing-cases, which were dark-brown with orange-yellow markings, but after he had heard from his aunts that the beetles damaged many of the plants in their garden he killed any beetle that he saw and afterwards earned praise from his aunts when he told them how many he had killed. The beetles were easy to kill, especially the many pairs that moved less nimbly because they were joined rear-to-rear. These he sought out so as to boost his tally. He did not learn until some years later that the joined pairs had been copulating. For as long as he saw the signals that he later described as winking, the chief character understood that the sender of the signals shared with him certain secret knowledge although he, the chief character, could not have said what this knowledge consisted of; for as long as he saw the signals mentioned, the chief character understood also that the sender of the signals was well disposed towards him; and soon after he had first observed the signals, the chief character understood further that the sender of the signals was God — not a symbol of God or a manifestation of God but the almighty being that he, the chief character, had addressed in his prayers during earlier years and had tried often to see in his mind. God was no more and no less than an image of a beetle with orange-yellow markings on a dark-brown wing-case in an image-corner of an image-garden in his, the chief character’s, mind.