Nine years on, a delicious arrival offers an anatomy lesson from history
Nine years after I had written it, the book arrived. It was sitting on the kitchen table wrapped in brown paper. No note, just a few bits of sticky tape. The artist, Geoffrey Ricardo, had delivered the package when I was out. He handed the book to Frances, 12. The screen door swung shut and Frances staggered backwards. "It was slipping," she said.
The package weighs several kilos. The book – number three in a limited edition of 12 – is housed in a bespoke navy blue Solander box with the title embossed in gold foil on the spine. The box is lined with blue velvet that is mottled like the surface of the moon and the book is bound in brilliant bright blue leather. The Relative Vigors, one of Geoff's more joyful pictures, is imprinted into the front of it.
Or maybe the correct term is etched.
The book requires special language to describe it, delicious, luxurious, extravagant, art-money language.
Colophon, intaglio, invivo, volume, two-tone Morocco goatskin, Somerset Book 170gsm pure cotton paper stock mould – these are some of the mouth-watering words and phrases that a cataloguer at the State Library of New South Wales has attached to the artist book on its listing.
The library has just acquired the book from Ricardo's dealer, Australian Galleries, in Melbourne. I don't know what they paid. Ricardo had made one copy for the opening night of his solo show, Anno Domino, Antarctica and The Anatomy Lesson, back in September 2009 and the price then was about $12,000.
The Anatomy Lesson contains 30 intaglio etchings by Ricardo and 10 poems and a tiny essay by me. The pictures are a homage to anatomist Henry Gray and illustrator Henry Vandyke Carter, the creators of the 19th-century textbook, Gray's Anatomy. Geoff made them during a residency at Bairnsdale hospital in 2003 and 2004. They depict "bodies and skeletons often in bizarre situations".
A mutual friend, also an artist, had introduced us. Geoff had already made his prints and I went to his Brooklyn studio to have a look and see if anything came up. It did. I am the daughter of a doctor. I grew up in hospitals. I then worked as a health reporter for a newspaper. I became a doctor myself, not a medical one. When I met Geoff I was edging towards a personal crisis. What did it mean to be a doctor of philosophy? Related question: what was a university for?
Geoff gave me a set of prints to take home. The pictures cast shadows inside me. I caught them. Very quickly, small sets of words arrived and I arranged them on pieces of paper. It had never happened before.
In Readings, I found On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books and Bookstores, a new essay by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, and the image of the book as a meteor sparked more ideas. I wrote Bodybook, the text at the start of The Anatomy Lesson, very quickly as well. The Nancy book seems pretentious to me now but I still like my essay.
Geoff agreed that I would get a copy of the artist book as a payment but the copy never came. We both live in the western suburbs of Melbourne and I used to see Geoff around sometimes but the invisible book stopped me from speaking to him. I was put out.
A few months after Geoff's Anatomy Lesson show, Huia published my first book. A year and a half after that, I quit my academic job at La Trobe University. Two more years passed and Scribe published my second book on the collapse of newspaper manufacturing. More years went by. I slaved over a third book. I called the manuscript The Unborn and the text has obeyed my command and remains in the incubator, permanently I suspect.
To escape The Unborn, I took a job at University of Melbourne Archives as curator of the Germaine Greer Archive. Out of the frying pan, as they say. In early 2018, as my contract was about to expire, I signed a deal with Bridget Williams Books in New Zealand to write a fourth book. That was when I heard from Geoff. He wrote to Scribe's reader inquiry email address.
"Hi, I am trying to get in touch with Rachel Buchanan as she wrote some poetry for an artist book I was making many years ago. I have just received the final bound copies of the book and have a copy for Rachel. Is it possible for you to forward this email to her?"
I wrote those poems when Frances was three. I had no printouts or digital files any more so the work was like new. There I was, aged 41, hand-printed on Somerset Book 170gsm pure cotton paper stock, a woman still close to the drama of birth, that most intimate anatomy lesson. I couldn't write any of that now. When I finally got my copy of The Anatomy Lesson, I was preoccupied with that other thing, the cold body that will never cry again. Or laugh. Or shout. Or stagger. Or shit. Every life has to end, we all know that, but the full stop is hard to take. No ellipsis. No dash. No new paragraph. What goes on a headstone?
The quack placebo
My old man's a quack
He says medicine is 5% science
And 95% art
Dad used to say that a lot. I'd forgotten the saying and the poem. After such a long gestation, our art book was born blue, Geoff, but there's life in it, so much life.
"Hi Rachel, yes the time some things take is a reality unto itself, weird, annoying and WTF … I look forward to getting it to you. Are you home this weekend?"