Crossing the Plains

This is the sort of task that I didn’t think we did any more: students had to continue this narrative in the style used by the writer, and incorporate one literary device from a text you have studied in Module C.

The plains that I crossed in those days were not endlessly alike. Sometimes I looked over a great shallow valley with scattered trees and idle cattle and perhaps a meagre stream at its centre. Sometimes, at the end of a tract of utterly uncompromising country, the road rose towards what was unquestionably a hill before I saw ahead only another plain, level and bare and daunting.

In this large town that I reached on a certain afternoon, I noticed a way of speech and a style of dress that persuaded me I had come far enough. The people there were not quite the distinctive plainsmen I had hoped to find in the remote central districts, but it suited me to know that ahead of me were more plains than I had yet crossed.

Late that night I stood at a third-storey window of the largest hotel in the town. I looked past the regular pattern of streetlights towards the dark country beyond. A breeze came in warm gusts from the north. I leaned into the surges of air that rose up from the nearest miles of grassland. I composed my face to register a variety of powerful emotions. And I whispered words that might have served a character in a film at the moment when he realised he had found where he belonged. Then I stepped back into the room and sat at the desk that had been specially installed for me. (Gerald Murnane, The Plains)

I turned on the light that I had brought with me and began to work on the rewrite which had occupied me as I dreamed my way from the city to this place, through the silences of the land which admitted no identity. I felt that I was correcting that narrative with which I had struggled for much of my life. An anonymous job in an anonymous city, a tiny soul crushed, ant-like, beneath the immensities of steel, glass, concrete, cable, data, document, and infinite org-charts. Crushed equally beneath the lifeless weight of a marriage which was no more than a series of todays and tomorrows.

Entirely effaced, featureless as the plains I had crossed to arrive here, I began to create the new self who would come to view this town as its birthplace. My hand trembled with desire and responsibility. I wondered how many other new selves were coming into being in this warm evening, in this quiet hotel.

Step by step I sketched out the architecture of my new self, the arches and shadows, buttresses and transoms, of an entirely new and unguessed-at person. As I worked this immense new soul into being I continued to emote, the mannerisms which I had devised as I crossed the plains, which had put to flight the animals and quiet-grazing truckers that I had met. The same identicality, the bleached-out, three-colour country, the flatulent people, which had at first provoked only a kind of petulant despair in me, had become the blank canvas on which my mind sketched a new self.

I emoted surprise, delight, disdain, even an ingenuous confusion. As I did so, I became aware of the many other fictions around me, struggling to stand upright, like puppets being raised by their strings.

A finger of light blazed into the sky and a burst of music began, but just as abruptly, ceased.

I leaned oer the desk and looked at the street. When I had arrived in the late afternoon, it had been an empty and generic strip of harsh sunlight, dust, war memorials, and geriatrics legless after an afternoon’s bowling. Now, glittering balls turned and twinkled at intervals in the half-bankrupt strip mall, and the door of my hotel was dispensing human versions of the same glitter.

A few of the plainsmen, uncomfortable and awkward in their post-wash pressed clothes, tipped back hats that merited their own postcode and called up to me. Greetings and invitations of unusual specificity floated on the evening air. I withdrew to my desk and snapped off the mirrored light. Reborn, remade, the inward truth of myself which had emanated little by little as I crossed the endless flatness, was now fully mature.

Turgida Prose was ready to compete in the Rural Drag Queen Championships.