There is a particular photo of my elder daughter that I can no longer bring myself to look at. I’ve not been able to look at it for over two years. The photo was taken when she was three months away from her third birthday. She is running down a small hill near the baseball diamond in the huge playing field south of Rue Favard in the neighbourhood of Pointe St-Charles, Montreal. At the moment that I took the photo, I was standing slightly further up the hill; my daughter was running away from me and towards a small group of people congregating at the bottom. Those people were quite well known to me. They were the proprietor of the daycare that my daughter had been attending for well over a year, as well as some of the other local parents.
I have not yet captured my daughter’s joy better than in this photo. Even though you can’t see her face, you can intuit the joy from the movement of her body—the way she’s confidently hurtling towards people she knows and trusts. On the border of the photo are tall apartment buildings that mark the boundary of the safe world that she has known since being born. She won’t remember this moment, I think to myself in the wake of taking this photo. She won’t remember it once she’s ensconced in the new city. She won’t remember the words of French she used to deploy without a second thought. She won’t remember how she used to correct my pronunciation of the word éléphant. She won’t remember the daycare proprietor, the other kids, the other parents, the baseball diamond, the neighbourhood, the local parks—none of it.
The reason I cannot look at that photo, I suspect, is that it holds me accountable for the decision that my wife and I made. It is a reminder that I cannot go back to that time. I cannot make a different choice. There is an alternate existence that my daughter could have had that she now cannot have. The photo reminds me that we had no choice except the one we made.
We had to move.
To steal words from Gerald Murnane’s Border Districts, “I guard my eyes,” against that photo. I know that of all the photos I’ve ever taken it’s the only one that has the power to bring me to tears, to make me feel slightly out of control, to make me conscious of the incredible weight of responsibility and the irreversibility of great life decisions.
One of my favourite words is “counterfactual,” which, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, entered into use in 1946, and which may or may not be the right word for the purpose I’m about to put it to. I frequently rehearse a counterfactual in my mind: in this counterfactual we didn’t move from Montreal to Edmonton in November 2020 but stayed there, in the neighbourhood where that photo was taken, and in the counterfactual I start to progress forward through the months that follow—December, January, February, March, April, and so on—until I quite quickly arrive at inevitable turning points that would have potentially disrupted the joy expressed by my daughter on that late autumn afternoon, the first event being the obligatory moving on from that first daycare, a home daycare for a maximum of six children, to the much larger daycare, the Centre de la Petite Enfance, at the YMCA. After a year or so at the YMCA, my daughter would have moved on to a public school, and there our troubles might have intensified, because the choice of school would very likely have been out of our control. Quebec does not allow parents who were born and educated outside Canada to choose the language of instruction of their children. Our choice would have all hinged on my wife’s primary education in Alberta, some of which was in Polish, some in English. We would have been forced to produce a lot of paperwork to make our case to the ministry. And so, whenever my wife and I look back on this period of life, we move forward into vast swathes of unknowable terrain with regards to the possible future our eldest daughter would have had, not to mention the unknowable facts of our own possible futures. My wife would not have been a practising psychologist in Montreal at this point, whereas here in Edmonton she has a wonderful job in the western, prosperous part of downtown. And I don’t know if we ever could have saved up enough money to buy a dwelling that would have been spacious enough for a family of four, which is what we eventually became, and so on and so forth. In short, the photo preserves one last moment of joy, beyond which is a vast and knowable landscape.
I guard my eyes against that photo out of fear of the deep feelings it will evoke, some of which have already been evoked simply by my having just written about it, this entire account based solely on my memory of the photo. If that’s what a mere copy can do, imagine what latent powers might still be stored up in the original?
There was a time in life, of course, when I did not have the ability or the foresight to guard my eyes, when I had to trust other people, chiefly adults, to make the right decisions for me, and sometimes they did not always take this responsibility seriously. I exclude my parents from this, for they took the responsibility very seriously, and did not let me watch Star Wars or Ghostbusters, the films that many of my peers were watching. Yet the neighbours just down the road from us on Chandos Drive in Brockworth, England, where we lived for a few years, were the type of people who turned on the television and let it play all day, no matter what kind of content might be emanating from the screen. One day I happened to be in their house, playing with my friend, when the film Dirty Harry came on. In the opening scene, the viewer is transported to the top of a tower block in San Francisco. We watch a beautiful woman in a swimsuit on the roof of a tower dive into a blue swimming pool. Yet we are watching through the sights of a sniper’s rifle. Something very horrible is about to happen. When I’m watching this, I am only six years of age, and I am conscious, with a feeling I can’t put a name to—it’s in my stomach, almost like nausea—that I am attracted to the beautiful woman in the swimming pool. The camera permits me to see her in a close-up as she completes a lap and touches the wall before leisurely turning around to embark on another lap. I am conscious I should not be looking at this woman. She is swimming in a private pool on a distant rooftop and the only thing that gives me this proximity to her body is the sights of the rifle. Then the sniper shoots. The bullet pierces the woman’s back. Her expression goes from placid and peaceful to a grimace of pain. Her body rolls over and starts to sink. I now feel very sick, very disturbed. I have seen something I should not have seen. The family of my boyhood friend are going about their business of making dinner as if nothing remarkable has happened on the TV screen. This seems quite unbelievable to me. Something is wrong.
That is the first time I saw someone murdered. I wished that I hadn’t. That opening scene stayed with me for my entire life. Eventually, in my mid to late thirties, I rented Dirty Harry to see if the opening scene matched my memory of it, and I was shocked by how faithful the unfolding of the events were to the film reel I had played countless times in my mind. I was also curious about the overall story arc of the film since, as a boy of six, I’d not watched any of the rest—I’d gone home for dinner right after the killing—and I was quite astounded by how totally deranged it was. Here’s what Roger Ebert had to say about it:
The movie clearly and unmistakably gives us a character who understands the Bill of Rights, understands his legal responsibility as a police officer, and nevertheless takes retribution into his own hands… The movie's moral position is fascist. No doubt about it.
The scene that I saw at the age of six was playing well before 9pm, the “watershed,” the hour before which no content unsuitable for children was allowed to air on British television, a regulation that had been in effect since the 1964 Television Act.
The feeling I had at six—the silent protest in my body that said, I should not be seeing this—was a correct one. Yet, as an adult, I have to admit that the filmmaker knew exactly what he was doing. It was borderline pornographic to ask this beautiful woman to swim across the pool in her swimsuit, planting in the viewer’s mind the foreknowledge of an atrocity that was about to be committed. Of course she had to be beautiful. If she had been an average person with an average paunch and pasty white skin, the film opening would never have worked the way it did. The viewer is invited to watch violence done to a beautiful body. She is swimming alone. She is at peace. She is enjoying her life. She is young and healthy. The act of killing is made to seem even more atrocious because the body is one that the viewer is encouraged to covet.
Bang. Let there be an end to all that.
“Two months ago, when I first arrived in this township just short of the border, I resolved to guard my eyes, and I could not think of going on with this piece of writing unless I were to explain how I came by that odd expression,” declares the narrator of Border Districts. As a premise, to explore the origin of how the narrator arrived at the expression to guard my eyes is disarming. I’ve gone back to read that opening paragraph several times to be sure I’ve not imagined it, not misremembered, not filled in gaps that I thought were there with words of my own invention.
While reading Border Districts, I was also cataloguing informally the sights I do not want to see, the sights I do want to see, and the sights I would want every day, a list that includes my wife and my daughters, and the view from the east-facing window of our house. I remember a time when, among my few erratic contributions to the platform previously known as Twitter, were photos I took from that window on the second floor. I would attempt to capture the beauty of the rising sun. I stopped doing that after a while. It became more important to stop at the east-facing window with my eldest daughter, to encourage her to appreciate the dawn, and in recent months I’ve taken up the habit with my younger daughter, who does not yet have the language to express her admiration of the beauty, and yet will hopefully still benefit in some subtle, indiscernible way from the moments we’ve spent together contemplating the sublime realm of the morning sky.
Just as I was thinking of the east-facing window, I encountered the words “east-facing window” in Murnane’s Border Districts. The coincidence jolted me and I looked closer at the words on the page, rather than the words in my mind. The narrator of Border Districts is talking about the loss of faith among many of his friends, some of whom had even gone so far as to become priests before succumbing to a spiritual crisis. One of these friends wrote a fictional story about a young priest who used to visit churches in rural regions, and on one such occasion, at the moment that he arrived at the church, he had a desperate need to urinate, but he was immediately greeted by a local woman, who escorted him into the church, chattering incessantly, and it took many, many minutes before he could be rid of her, and when finally he was alone, he took the object closest at hand—the bottle of altar wine—and urinated in it.
Subsequently the narrator of Border Districts imagines his friend as the main character in this fictional story, and he imagines that after relieving himself in that most irreverent way, the priest (his friend) holds up the bottle and looks through it toward the east-facing window. That is to say, the only thing between his eyes and the window is a bottle of altar wine that has been substantially watered down with urine.
Murnane takes no profane delight in telling such stories. Through this incident and others he tells us that nothing happens to those who lose the ability to take religious symbols and images seriously. They walk away from faith without any apparent consequences. This can be read as a challenge to faith—to Christianity, to Murnane’s own childhood Catholicism. I am not sure the reader is under any obligations to interpret it that way. I am reminded of The Brothers Karamazov, of the pages following the death of Father Zossima. Everyone rushes to his cell, expecting a miracle:
When it was fully daylight, some people began bringing their sick, in most cases children, with them from the town—as though they had been waiting expressly for this moment to do so, evidently persuaded that the dead elder's remains had a power of healing, which would be immediately made manifest in accordance with their faith. It was only then apparent how unquestionably every one in our town had accepted Father Zossima during his lifetime as a great saint. (The Brothers Karamazov, Book VII, Chapter 1.)
Instead, the corpse begins to putrefy immediately, and emits a foul odour.
But by three o'clock those signs had become so clear and unmistakable, that the news swiftly reached all the monks and visitors in the hermitage, promptly penetrated to the monastery, throwing all the monks into amazement, and finally, in the shortest possible time, spread to the town, exciting every one in it, believers and unbelievers alike. The unbelievers rejoiced, and as for the believers some of them rejoiced even more than the unbelievers, for “men love the downfall and disgrace of the righteous,” as the deceased elder had said in one of his exhortations. The fact is that a smell of decomposition began to come from the coffin, growing gradually more marked, and by three o'clock it was quite unmistakable.
Dostoevsky is famous—perhaps infamous is the better word—for presenting his thesis and its antithesis with equal vigour. If a Christian as devout as Dostoevsky was prepared to describe in great detail the slow process of putrefaction of the body of a man who was taken in his time as a saint, I am convinced he did so with no ultimate loss of faith, and so it’s equally possible that I can contemplate the image of a man—fictional or otherwise—holding up to the east-facing window a bottle of altar wine that he has defiled, and my own faith will only be tested, nothing more, although I would want to guard my eyes if I were to stumble into that scene and catch a glimpse of that man several seconds prior to his act of defilement.
For what happened when the man urinated in the altar wine was the defilement of a sacred symbol that was previously dear to his heart. While there were no earthly consequences that we know of, he thereafter had a different future ahead of him, unless subsequent events caused yet another change of heart. To expect earthly consequences is perhaps to make a similar mistake as those townspeople rushing into the cell of Father Zossima. Miracles and other manifestations of spiritual power are happening elsewhere, not in the domain of what is visible externally, or they happen in the heart, and we are not privy to them. That is to say, you can defile your own faith but this defilement does not defile someone else’s faith, or, of course, the Faith.
But in the vignette I’ve described above, I had not yet found an explanation for why the narrator guards his eyes. While the narrator’s opening paragraph implies that this explanation will merely be a prelude to the subsequent (and possibly more important) sections of the book, in my reading of Border Districts, the explanation for the guarding of the eyes constitutes the reason for the entire book, which is why above I called it the premise.
The narrator is a man with several preoccupations, one of which is sitting on the veranda, or to be more specific, a return veranda, an adequate definition for which I cannot find—suffice to say, one afternoon he stops for quite a while on a return veranda, rather than going inside to fetch a transistor radio for the purpose of listening to the horse race in a neighbouring district (horse racing being another of his preoccupations). He stops on the veranda because he notices on either side of the front door a pane of coloured glass, or stained glass, and he considers that something of importance might be revealed to his mind if he remains at a short distance, keeping these panes of glass in the edge of his peripheral vision. This is far from the first mention of coloured glass in Border Districts. From the beginning, we—the reader—have been told that this book (or report, as it is called by the narrator in several instances) owes its existence to an incident in recent days when the narrator passed by a church in his neighbourhood and cast his glance toward the stained glass window. What he noticed, which he describes in detail many pages later, is that it’s in fact very difficult to discern the colours and shapes of a stained glass window from the outside. The best place to look at a stained glass window is from inside: “the colours and designs in glass windows are truly apparent only to an observer shut off from what most of us would consider true light.” But here a problem arises for the narrator—and note that it arises for this narrator in a way that it might not arise for you or me, because he is a very particular kind of person, rather eccentric, which he admits towards the end of the book—and the problem is the following: “anyone observing the true appearance of a coloured window is unable, for the time being, to observe through that window any more than a falsification of the so-called everyday world.”
I had approached this book expecting an explanation for why the narrator turned away from faith, and perhaps even an account of how he now guards his eyes against religious imagery that in former times held special meaning for him, and at this juncture, with the narrator's suspicion of the “falsification” of the “everyday world” by the stained glass window, I thought I had my answer. Yet Border Districts is far from that simple. We later on learn that the narrator first learned the expression, to guard his eyes, years previously. He once went back to the chapel belonging to the school where he was a pupil as a boy. In the pages of a bible in the pews, a sort of holy postcard falls out, the kind of postcard that the brothers of this institution used to exchange as gifts. On one side of the postcard is an illustration of the Virgin Mary. On the other side is a hand-scrawled note: “Guard eyes while in town.”
The narrator understands this to be a resolution against temptations of the flesh: in town there would be people in fashionable and possibly even scanty clothing. The brother wills himself not to look. I cannot find anywhere evidence that the narrator does not share this general guardedness; in fact, the very opening of the book invites us to follow him in understanding how he came to take the expression for his own.
There are a couple more things that should be noted about this narrator. He tells us he is incapable of abstract thought. He tells us also that he has on numerous occasions tried the practice of meditation, but he cannot, because he cannot empty his mind of imagery. When he speaks of religion, he notes the images that come to his mind; indeed, he cannot grasp someone else’s account of a religious experience unless it suggests to him images that he can hold onto solidly in his mind. When still a boy, he asked a friend what image came to mind at the mention of the name of God. The boy described a scene that in the mind’s eye of the narrator resembled the ruins of Tintern Abbey (a site of pilgrimage particularly dear to my late father, I’ll note in passing, given that a few miles above the abbey is the vantage point from which William Wordsworth composed one of his best-known poems).
I don’t find faith to be refuted in Border Districts. The faith of the narrator has doubtless become an object of ambiguity, and yet, everywhere, faith is all around him. The book is teeming with priests and lapsed priests and brothers and even an unmarried spinster reading the Bible every night, not to mention the stained glass. So much stained glass! Our narrator leads us through the labyrinthine pathways of his mind, from past to present and back again, and as he does so, he jots down, as if merely incidentally, some of his character traits, and these complete the portrait—an important trait being his refusal to ever learn to use a computer, and so we come to learn that he relies on his memory to a far greater extent than probably most of his contemporaries—and he takes us back to his secondary school experience of literature, during which he was required to read Keats, Byron and Shelley. Far earlier in this book he had told us of a classroom reader that he was obliged to read at a younger age, and how almost every single text seemed to have been placed there on purpose to impart some kind of moral lesson, and it was only the text that leaped out with no apparent moral purpose that he actually enjoyed. As a secondary student, his perspective seems to have shifted. He tells us that he never really enjoyed, in particular, Byron and Shelley, their poetry having seemed to him “fatuous and affected.” Yet fifty years later, he can recall two lines of Shelley without effort—these are in fact the only two lines of Shelley that have found a lasting place in his memory:
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity.
The narrator does not tell us the source of these lines. They’re from “Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats.” Shelley was an atheist, and yet the placement of these two lines in Border Districts, coming after a prolonged and nearly obsessive contemplation of stained glass by the narrator, invites another interpretation. Life does not fill the entire panorama. In fact, the part of the panorama taken up by life is a stain. Perhaps life cannot be anything but a stain. If the narrator guards his eyes, maybe he does so in the hope that he can catch a glimpse of something even greater than life. Maybe he agrees with Shelley: beyond the borders of the stained glass is an unknowable realm called Eternity.
My own faith, which is often flimsy and frayed, was tested and yet strengthened by Border Districts. I traveled back in my mind to the reason I was drawn to faith in the first place. To explain this, I need to go back to the neighbourhood of Pointe St-Charles, where we began. Several months before taking that photo of my elder daughter running down the hill—in other words, during the heat of that long summer—my wife received some bad news that seemed to close down the prospect of ever becoming a psychologist. The news seemed like a confirmation of all her worst suspicions, and because it troubled her so deeply, it also troubled me deeply, and I found that in a certain respect the weight of this sorrow was even heavier than if the bad news had pertained to my own life prospects. I felt totally helpless. It did not help that this news had arrived during the first year of covid, and that we had spent so much time confined, and that our daughter had been unable to go to her home daycare, and that, far away in another country, my father was slowly dying. Everything in that moment carried darkness, as if from an apparent curse. After my wife and daughter had gone to sleep, I reached out to an old friend with whom I had fallen out of the habit of communicating, choosing him because I knew he believed in God. In the condition I was in at that time, I needed to talk to someone of faith.
A couple of days later, after an exchange of emails with my friend that had been very illuminating for me, I felt a sensation I had not experienced in all my adult life. My daughter’s daycare had reopened, and one summer afternoon, as my wife and I were walking there to fetch her and bring her home, the summer light was of a rare clarity and gentleness. I felt as if I were walking only partially by dint of my own effort, and partially buoyed by an unseen force. The news that had seemed to crush me just a couple of days previously, which had made my limbs feel like those of an astronaut's returning to the earth’s gravitational pull, no longer exerted any power over me. When we entered the small garden of the daycare, we saw that the children were outside with the elderly proprietor, who went by the name Lola—the Filipino name for grandmother. The flowers of the garden were in full bloom. There were raspberries that had reached full ripeness. And our daughter’s face was lit up as if the sun’s rays were refracted through stained glass. She had spotted a grasshopper on the leaf of a raspberry bush. She wanted us to come look. It was evident she had been observing the grasshopper for a long time—peering close, and then going away again to talk to Lola or the other children, and then going back. We approached the raspberry bush with her, walking very carefully and being very quiet, just as our daughter had instructed us to be. I was almost convinced the grasshopper would have hopped away. Why should it linger as three people—two of them adults with long shadows—came close and disturbed its serenity? I had almost gone as far as imagining my daughter’s terrible disappointment at finding the grasshopper gone. Yet on that day, everything was perfect, everyone and everything was possessed of an inherent beauty, and the grasshopper was perched on the leaf. Our daughter was entranced. The light of the sun, glancing off the leaves and raspberries, gave her face, especially in its aspect of wonder at the presence of the grasshopper, an angelic glow. That day I was in no doubt that God had been with us from dawn to dusk.
When I find myself guarding my eyes, it’s because I am protecting the vision of the perfect world I was given that day.
Notes
I am currently working on a separate essay, hopefully for publication, in which I explore another of Gerald Murnane’s books. This one, A Season on Earth, comes from the very beginning of his career, while Border Districts was announced as his last book of fiction. Many of the same themes are present throughout, notably, the narrator’s obsession with images, which, the more I think about it, is almost like an impediment, or perhaps some kind of cursed genius.
And so here ends the second longest of the Substack Octopus posts to date. I’ll now take a bit of a break, until at least the May long weekend, to take time to focus on other writing projects. I hope that spring is treating you well, wherever you are!
Books
Border Districts, A Fiction. Gerald Murnane Farrer, Straus and Giroux, 2017
The Brothers Karamazov. Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Translated by Constance Garnett. The Lowell Press, New York. (e-book, 2009).
Essays, video, etc.
“Counterfactual”
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/counterfactual
Dirty Harry, Opening
Dirty Harry, Roger Ebert, January 1, 1971
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/dirty-harry-1971
“What is the watershed?”
https://rts.org.uk/article/what-watershed
Images
His Majesty King Edward VII's Minoru c.1909-10
https://www.rct.uk/collection/606265/his-majesty-king-edward-viis-minoru
(A brief aside about this photo: when I do a Google image search for “Border Districts, Murnane,” this is one of the photos that turns up, purporting to be on the webpage of a review of the book in The Guardian, but when I click through to the newspaper website, the image isn’t there. Very weird. I had to go retrieve the image from a different site.)
East-facing window – a photo of mine.
Tintern Abbey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintern_Abbey#/media/File:TinternAbbey_WestEnd.jpg
Beautiful writing, Laurence. Thanks for this. I have my own personal anthology of images from films seen in childhood that I probably shouldn't have seen.
I love this, we are visual creatures. There is a hymn that is taught to children, but that is no less relevant to adults: “Oh, be careful little eyes, what you see, there’s a father up above looking down in tender love, Oh, be careful little eyes, what you see.” It may sound prudish, but it is rather founded in Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 6:22-23 to guard your eyes, to keep them healthy for the eye is the lamp of the body and if your eye is not healthy then your whole body will be full of darkness.