Several years after the bustling afternoon mentioned in the first section of this work of fiction, I read for the first time a later edition of The Art of Memory, by Frances A. Yates, which had been first published in London in 1966 by Routledge and Kegan Paul. I learned from this book for the first time the detailed history of a set of beliefs and practices that I had previously known about only from references in other books. I learned from the book by Frances A. Yates that many a scholar from so-called classical times almost until so-called modern times discussed in theory or used in practice a system that was intended to store for ready retrieval every fact or concept or notion or item of doctrine from any branch of the so-called arts and sciences that the scholar might ever have need of. (During much of the time while the system was in use, printed books did not exist.) A person using the system had first to establish in his or her mind an image of a building, preferably of several storeys each with several rooms. Such a building was often called in the book a memory palace. The person then placed in one after another position in one after another room on one after another storey of the image of the building one after another image of one after another object that would serve afterwards as the perceptible reminder of some or another item requiring to be remembered.
In a later chapter of the book mentioned above, the author tries to explain the contents of a book the unwieldy title of which she replaces by the word Seals (Latin sigilli). The author of the book is Giordano Bruno, who was burned as a heretic in 1600. Frances A. Yates explains that Giordano Bruno was a follower of the so-called Hermetic philosophy, one item of which seems to have been that each human entity is a replica of the divine organisation of the universe. The same author explains further that the so-called Trinity Seals described, and sometimes depicted, by Giordano Bruno in his book are the simplest visible representation of a memory-system designed to occupy not a palace of several storeys but the universe itself as it was understood by the Hermetics.
I believe I may have learned less from reading books than I have learned from writing books, even those books that I later left off writing. While I was reading about the book mentioned in the previous paragraph, I seemed not to understand what I was reading. I seemed to be trying but failing to see in my mind images of a universe arranged around a vertical axis whereas every image that I had been aware of had been arranged around a horizontal axis. Soon after I had read about the book, however, I understood that I myself had written a book in which was mentioned, if not depicted, the simplest visible representation of a memory-system; a book in which were mentioned, if not depicted, sets of racing colours, racecourses, and even a few racehorses. My memory-system might have seemed to occupy no more than an upper room in a building of two or three storeys, but its figurative extent would have seemed to me no less than old Bruno’s hermetical labyrinth would have seemed to him. Tract after tract of mostly level grassy countryside, each with trees on its farther side — this would have been universe enough for me.
During the months before the bustling afternoon mentioned in the very first section of this work of fiction, I used often to glance at a certain young woman while she and I and many other persons waited on a certain suburban railway station. I took note of the yellowish hair of the young woman and of the tilt of her nose. I hoped I would be able to keep an image of the young woman in my mind while I was writing a later section of the book of fiction that I was then writing. After I had abandoned that book of fiction, I sometimes regretted that no passage of my own fiction would ever bring to mind any image of the young woman. However, I remained hopeful that some or another image of her might appear in the future to some or another reader or writer of some or another page not of my making. Now, having brought to an end this present work of fiction, I am even more hopeful.
In some or another room in a certain memory palace, some or another compiler of pages may already have had sight of her image. She is a trainer and also, perhaps, an owner of racehorses on a property in countryside resembling some or another district of New Zealand or of Tasmania. Near the centre of the property is a training track enclosing a swampy area that might be called today, in the place where I sit writing these words, wetlands. I could wish that the sighting mentioned above might have occurred on one or another morning when the young woman would have been loading one or another of her racehorses into a horse-float to be taken to one or another distant racecourse not yet mentioned in any work of fiction and, by definition, never able to be so mentioned. I could hardly doubt that the young woman’s helper would be a stern-faced older woman. Nor could I suppose that the building partly visible between trees in the middle distance would be other than a house with attic windows or an upper storey. As for the item dangling from the lapel of each woman — the shield-shaped card that will later admit her to the mounting-yard beside the distant racecourse — the badge on the breast of each female personage would be of black and of gold.
About the Author
GERALD MURNANE was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1939. He is the author of eight works of fiction, including Inland, The Plains, and Tamarisk Row, as well as a collection of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs. Murnane has been a recipient of the Patrick White Award and the Melbourne Prize. Barley Patch won the 2010 Adelaide Festival Award for Innovation.