The Trip Home

The Tall Painter, the Music of Language, and the New Day

J. Y. Gao

THERE WAS A CERTAIN IMPERFECT PERPLEXION TO THE GOLD-SPECKLED CLOUDS that made them look as though they were painted by a tall man with long arms straight onto the purple canvas of the dusking day. I was on my way home from school, and the additional commitment of afterschool activities had kept me uncommuted until that very moment. It was a long moment, really. A period of about 15 minutes when the luminosity of the sky reached its most comfortable level. There is a distinction, though, between the comfortability described here and the comfortability more commonly prescribed to the sky’s luminosity. A ‘comfortable’ luminosity to most, perhaps all, evokes the precise lighting of a certain time of day in combination with a certain configuration of cloud coverage where the eyelids can be fully relaxed and do not need to squint. Though the level of luminosity I described as comfortable is, in fact, of a lower intensity, an intensity that makes the viewing of the sky itself a comfortable experience for the eyes. Perhaps what I had found most harmonic about this long moment of skywardly appreciation on my delayed commute home was the discovery of such a scene, and the momentary transition my visual sensors performed.

The bumpy limp down the road towards the train station had always racked me with guilt at the thought of my knees shocked by the wooden heels of my school shoes. Nevertheless, wooden heeled school shoes have been the only shoes I’ve bought since the summer holiday before the commencement of Year 9. It was a worthy trade off. For the price of my knees, I receive in return the hollow echochamber ring of wooden knocks at every heel strike, and the pointy and casual elitism of the pointy-shoe experience. The lack of side-walkers and cars that dusk, promoted my walk to a deafening click. I was sickly uncomfortable with ‘dusking day’, but I was reassured with the memory of ‘dawning day’ – well actually the thought process went round the other way (‘dawning day’ first, then ‘dusking day’). But I don’t think ‘dusking day’ sounds right, hence the uneasiness. And my uneasiness grows with ‘…cars that dusk’, but the meaning is clear, and the syllable fits the rhythm. It so IS about the rhythm. Isn’t it? I like to read out great segments of writing I find in books and articles, and my liking for the practice has grown since I heard the gentle, soothing clarity of Fitisemanu’s read-to-the-class voice. So for me, at least, it IS about the rhythm. 

I’ve found most appreciation for the rhythm of a strong elusive authorial voice in sentences that conclude things with a blissful note. The end of a character description, a plot exposition. The end of a chapter – a novel – a series. There’s always a gem hidden inconspicuously amongst the string of words, a subversion perhaps, an oxymoron, the technique where two opposite nouns like ‘ice’ and ‘fire’ are put together (like the ‘Song of Ice and Fire’ in G.O.T.. It is a bit cringe I understand, the pairing of ‘ice’ and ‘fire’). And so it must be subtle too. Not cliche. But not in all cases, like this one, for example: 

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, falling into the waves. It was falling too upon every part of the churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay drifted on the crosses and headstones, on the spears of the gate, on the thorns. His soul swooned as he heard the snow falling through the universe and falling, like the descent of their end, upon all the living and the dead.

The ebbs and flows of beautiful sentences can be traced. The last sentence of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ begins with an anacrusis, and the long note of ‘swoon’ starts the musical bar, the natural the pitch falls down and quickly across ‘as’ and ‘he’, pauses briefly at ‘heard’ and continues its descent across ‘the’ before the bow retakes between ‘snow’ and ‘fall’, playing the same note. The note drags a tail behind ‘falling’ and descends further across ‘through the’, reaching its lowest point in the phrase at ‘universe’ and holding the pitch across ‘and’ and ‘falling’. A breath across the coma, and the rise through ‘like’ and ‘the’ to a mini-peak at ‘descent’ and a quick fall off at ‘end’. Breathe. ‘Upon’ builds to a long and dragged ‘all’ which crashes down to a shortened ‘living’. Finally and emphatically, it whispers ‘and the dead’. 

And although ‘the lack of side-walkers and cars that dusk’ falls short in a comparison of gravitas against the words of Joyce, you see what I mean in terms of rhythm. And so as I walked down the hill that dusk, with my shoes clicking obnoxiously the rest of my delayed commute home (that dusk), I felt a sudden brightening of my surroundings. I was elated for a moment, for I thought I was visited by a messenger from God, or had been caught in the cross-wire of a miracle performance by His Son, but what really rathered my multitudinous school shirt flushed, making the white one pink, was that I exited the tree coverage and was about to step down the newly constructed steps near the intersection of Blue and Miller Street. 

That was when the imperfect perplexion of the gold-speckled clouds caught my attention. The moment of transition. My eyelids tensed quickly as my pupils readjusted to a relaxed state. When my eyelids opened comfortably, I saw, through the opening between trees 50 metres down Miller street, the Sydney CBD shimmering, the twinkling lights fighting glaringly at the enormous orange eye that sat on the horizon to the west. Towers of cloud loomed over the city, and the sky stretched its mighty expanse across the land, right over my head, and up towards Pacific Highway and the North Shore beyond. I saw the tall man too, dabbing the masterpiece of his 12 hour lifespan with a delicate brush, as if any detail could be changed for the better. The purple undercoat soon turned dark, and the echoing low hum of the pointy crescent moon was soon whitewashed across a sleeping city, cleaning it for the fresh new canvas of tomorrow.