Pat Jacobs A Lovely Mandala |
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| Pat Jacobs © Copyright 2004. Pat is the Patron of the Peter Cowan Writers Centre..She recently awarded winners of our 2004 Patron's Prize in August. Pat is the author of Mister Neville and Going Inland. Pat is an award winner. In 1998 she won the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, Fiction Award, for Going Inland, and in 1991 Mister Neville was shortlisted also in the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards. |
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| Pat Jacobs |
| A Lovely Mandala The woman and the child were the only riders on the Carousel. Side by side the gaily painted horses with flaring nostrils rose and fell in a matched restraint; the twisted golden pole winding them up and down. It was early in the morning at the marina, but when the carousel started up, the glowing light bulbs around the gilded roof came on, and the music. In 4/4 time the two revolved. The woman sang, oblivious: I'll be with you in Apple blossom time... The child held tightly to the golden pole, watching her grandmother. The woman leaned over and spoke above the music. Do you like it? I've never been on one of these before, the child replied. Close your eyes, she said, and listen to the music. Hold on tight. You wanted to ride a horse, this is your chance. The music rolled on, a hurdy-gurdy of silly sentimental songs from the forties and fifties. The woman remembered all the words. When does it stop? The child said. Stop! It might never stop. It might go on forever. The horses might take off. We could see everything: people's back yards, the tops of skyscrapers. Just hold on tight. Like a Chagall painting the woman thought, we could rise up into all that blue, floating like those fabulous figures. The woman's skirt rode up. Her hair blew free. With each turn of the carousel she noticed something different. Mothers sat on the grass drying children, cold from their early swim, feeding them hot chips and drinks to warm them up. A serious father stood with two little boys in front of the line of clowns, the sinister row of gaping mouths turning from side to side. Not the clowns, she wanted to call out, it's a mockery. They'll never win. A young couple in sleek cycling clothes huddled over their coffee, their bicycles propped up beside them. The girl eased her cap, letting the curls spring out. The man feasted on her with his eyes, not caring that his capuccino was going cold. Around them the woman saw, as if it were truly visible, the aura of their attraction. The baker had opened his ovens and the aroma of fresh bread swirled in the damp morning air. The woman felt all her senses alert, savouring everything. In the enclosed circle of the carousel with the music rolling over them they were revolving spectators; caught and held in the moment of illumination. The horses pranced, their necks arched, their legs forever at full gallop. The woman and child were captive riders. Nothing clings to us and we hold to nothing. She had been struggling with the Zen teaching, but here she was, back in the moment of her first ride on a carousel: the giddy pleasure; never wanting it to end. It was as perfect now as it had been then. She felt like writing to Paul Davies saying: I can confirm that the notion of linear time is irrelevant. It is all about feelings. He would know that. All is empty, clear, self-illuminating, with no exertion of the mind's power. Pure being... She laughed up at the child at the zenith of the golden pole. Children knew - at first. Letting go was supposed to be the secret. Freefall into the ocean of love. The New Tenderness For Everything. In the special bookshops they played meditation tapes. Busy with miracles. Acting as if they had invented something. It was harder if you were a woman. Even if you wanted to let go. Women's lives were built out of innumerable threads of attachment. They were pulled and tugged, the threads, immensely strong, as if drawn out of their own flesh. They stretched unbearably before they broke. She sang to the child, leaning over so she could hear the words, wanting her to feel careless and happy, to succumb to the music, the circling thrust, the delicious confusion of sensations. (She wondered if everyone felt the way she did. The occasional quiver in the body, part fear, part excitement.) Sensory animals, for all our noise and busyness. Caught in the gravity of the body, she thought. Held down by gravity. On a turn past the cafe she saw the owner wiping the tables, straightening the umbrellas, shooing the seagulls; she caught the expression on his face and knew he was worried by the gravity of the situation. There were not enough customers and the rents were too high. The tortas and cheesecakes sat, uncut, on the glass shelves. The cycling lovers had gone. Why was the carousel such a powerful symbol. Was it the sun? The spinning earth? And who had added the horses? And the music, and the lights? And why was it so lovely and satisfying? Time was running out. The driver had jumped on, swinging out from a pole on one arm, waiting to stop the engine. She smiled, trying to include him, but he would have none of it. His eyes were empty, as if an unendurable boredom had eaten him hollow. The possibility of happiness was part of the merry-go-round. She wouldn't let him spoil it. Imperious, she waved him on. What could it mean to him, counting out a few more minutes; a few more revolutions. Beyond the marina, the sea swung to its moon fulcrum and somewhere out there in the deep the humpback whales moved on their seasonal journey up the coast, singing a single complicated phrase that took thirty minutes to complete. And yet, who could say? To the whale, it might seem an instant in the long drifting tempo of its life. Her own existence seemed to have closed in on itself. It was odd to have lost the usual sense of time. Some inner rhythm had faltered. Sometimes she lost whole days. Or -so-called -hours. They had become indistinguishable. She looked at the child and caught her gaze. It's alright, she sent the message: no secrets will be kept from you. Life will go on... The song had changed. Now it was Innnnn... the still of the night... The beat hadn't changed. Four beats to the bar; common time. Was it the blood count, the heartbeat? Did the earth pulse in 4/4 time Haydn had composed for the Hurdy-gurdy? She remembered an immense barrel organ she had seen in a street in Amsterdam, gleaming with gilt and painted panels and a man whirling in some private torment, slashing at the air with a knife. The crowd had stood back, watching him. It had begun to snow, very lightly. The music playing, the man slashing the air, the snow... It had held a wonderful strangeness. She watched the Ad Astra dry-cleaning van manoeuvre its way on the pavement, right up to the door of the newsagents. The boy ran in with the bundle of clean clothes draped in plastic, while the driver kept the motor running. Urgency. Drycleaners to the stars. She swayed a little to the music. Her whole life was with her on the merry-go-round. She saw it made up of infinitesimal events; haphazard, overlapping, spinning past. And up there, out of sight the last Soviet astronaut, like another Chagall figure, wheeling and turning on the outer perimeter. Alone. Irrelevant. Looking down. At her. In the centre of things. She thought of Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly without knowing why. Perhaps the song had been one of theirs? There was a connection somewhere. As a child she had danced, wrapped in a piece of pink silk, being Rita Hayworth, wanting long red hair. She reached out and touched the silky skin on the child's arm. The delicate texture gave her a shiver of delight. Embedded in its smallest particle was the whole pattern of the future. The imprint of the cells binding them together, locked forever in the spiral of existence. She found it hard to believe that her own cell structure had turned against her; a natural process gone wrong one of the doctors had said. She had read that scientists were exploring chaos patterns in cancer. She liked the idea that however inward they went a pattern existed. That hidden in her own molecular structure were secrets of the universe. It made her laugh. And she was aware of the waves of sound she was sending out into the universe and hoped she was not causing a tempest in some distant milennium. The driver bent over and threw the lever, the sharp planes of his face casting shadows, making him look foreign. As if his bones held some cabalistic memory he didn't know about. Out of Europe somewhere he had come, a reluctant cabalist to turn the wheel for her. The carousel jerked, coasting on the last momentum. The music stopped. In the silence the woman and the child waited to get off. They walked up the hill. A cold wind blew in off the ocean and they hugged each other for warmth. When they reached the crest they paused for breath, turning to look behind them. The carousel in its roundness was before them. The woman could see the pattern in it. The spokes of its roof, rayed out. The pretty decorative gilt edge. The golden poles gleaming in the morning sun. The endlessly circling horses fixed in their perpetual gallop. It was a mandala. A lovely mandala. |