Quipu
by
Damien Broderick

Table of Contents

QUIPU

a novel

by Damien Broderick

Copyright © 2009 by Damien Broderick
SKU: ERBAEN0050
Published by E-Reads. All rights reserved.

For my Portland e-pals
Moira McAuliffe
and RV Branham

Quipu

Quipu [pron. "kwee-poo"; "kee-poo"]: Peruvian "object-writing" of Incas, historical records kept by placing knots in a flail-like apparatus consisting of many secondary and tertiary cords attached to a long rope; kind of magazine produced by high-I.Q. associations, esp. Point Two Six society.

The term genius commonly is used to refer to those who manifest very superior general intelligence (often defined as 140 or greater) and who have demonstrated their superiority through an unusually high level of achievement in an intellectually demanding pursuit.

Encyclopaedia Britannica

The most intelligent man in the world has not worked for two years. His last job was at Rockhampton's Capricornia Institute of Advanced Education washing cars and clearing out rubbish bins.
Now Christopher P. Harding sleeps most of the day and spends his nights sitting toothlessly in a bedroom of his retired parents' home . . . Each night Joyce and Phillip Harding are bathed by the glow of the television set in the kitchen while down the corridor their 40-year old son programs his computer or furiously writes in his bedroom beneath a row of bookshelves . . .

On page 17 of the '1985 Guinness Book of Records' Harding is listed under 'Highest IQ' with a score of 197 on the Stanford-Binet scale.
. . .The high IQ world is replete with pecking order and status. The clever members have broken away from various mainstream organisations to set up their own movements, much like bickering Christian sects. Harding talks of such groups as the Triple Nine Society, the Four Sigma Society and Intertel as though everyone knows of them.

He has taken shelter in, and is sustained by, a world community of higher intelligence . . . They write their strange and wonderful ideas on all manner of things and include autobiographical sketches to encourage exchanges between each other in their magazine . . .

The Age Saturday Extra, 15 June 1985

Terry Tao is at once very young and very old. Physically he is a rather diminutive nine-year old from Adelaide.

Sport is not his strong point (ping-pong is about the extent of it). But mentally he is a prodigy with an IQ that has been put at 221.

Of course, that is not an exact figure. Even those who put their faith in IQ tests concede that going above 200 is to enter uncharted territory. With Terry, the needle is flickering at the edge of the scale.

Terry is the son of Adelaide pediatrician Dr. Billy Tao and his wife, Grace, a physics and maths graduate from Hong Kong University. They came to Australia in 1972.

Dr. Tao has taken a look at some of the dangers: "In personality, he might become rather arrogant and rude by asking difficult questions and taking joy in other people's embarrassment . . .

"He might decide to pull out, and not do any further study as might have been planned. He may deliberately avoid taking up a conventional job with a career structure, and perhaps join the radical fringe, or the unemployed.

"He might burn out completely and lose his brilliance, creativity and productivity."
At the moment, it does not seem likely. In America recently he was asked what it was like being questioned by some of the best minds in the nation. He replied: "Sometimes I ask them questions back."

The Weekend Australian Magazine, 15 June 1985

ONE: em-cee cube

Once we knew that fiction was about life and criticism was about fiction—and everything was simple. Now we know that fiction is about other fiction, is criticism in fact, or metafiction. And we know that criticism is about the impossibility of anything being about life, or even about fiction, or, finally, about anything.

::Robert Scholes, "The fictional criticism of the future"

lost in the

For hours I loitered in the empty cat-reeking rooms, studying the children's encyclopedia entries, the obsessive computer calculations, the 50-word sagas, the correspondence with the mad woman (her originals, his carbon copies, from years before word processors), the odorous stacks of mimeographed quipu, the wall of fourteen photographs.

the first photograph

This oblique monochrome portrait is grainy, somber, regretful, bursting with a droning darkness despite the abundance of light, the reverberations of the afternoon sun. All the low swell and ripple of the sea traps shadows like crushed foil in its looping lacy brightness. Caroline is captured lightly askew, her expression as passive and warm as a Fra Filippo Lippi madonna. Eroded tussocky cliffs blur in the background, gnawed by this sea and wind, made by mere brute elements into a gothic construct in a land too new for Gothic ruins. Foreground to this remote menace, Caroline's long pale heavy hair is blown by the sea's wind, and the angled sun makes shadows on her face like faint healing wounds. She watches nothing particularly, simply standing in the rough sand with hands in the deep pockets of her leather coat, the denim of her jeans pressing the tibia bones of her braced legs.

the second photograph

Just inside the glass doors of the university cafeteria, Caroline looks across the checkerboard of Formica tables, the enormous room crowded with adolescents, young women with scrubbed features caught on one foot by the camera as they cross the floor, trays balanced, a wisp of steam rising from plates of sausages and emulsified vegetables, boys or men with hair tugged back into rubber bands, massively bearded or pocked with boils, polo-neck sweaters, high-heel boots stretched under the tables, coffee cups piled and toppling, and in all the silent stillness of the photograph a vast rumble of voices and clashing crockery and industrial machines in the kitchen that serves the servery. In Caroline's arms is a tall, heavy pile of textbooks. Her shoulder-bag has swung uncomfortably around under her left arm, and she is trying with her right elbow to adjust its pressure. It is impossible to judge what she is looking at.

the third photograph

Few cars are parked along the gutters of the cul de sac. To judge by the sharp, foreshortened shadows, the time must be close to midday. At the street's end, a wooden fence closes off an elevated stretch of railway tracks. A housewife with scarf knotted on bleached hair peers with concern from her half-open front door. In the center of the street, collapsed part of the way to the black asphalt, Caroline presses her hands against the sides of her head, blocking her ears. Her mouth is twisted and open, teeth showing, tongue pulled back. The hands at her ears are clenched. The housewife's attention has been caught by the screams. There is no evident cause for this screaming. This screaming has gone on for a long time. Caroline wears a corduroy miniskirt and tall pale boots. Her hair is held by a ribbon. A man of medium height with longish hair bends his knees at her side, supporting her sagging weight with hands positioned beneath her armpits. His face is not visible in the photograph. In the photograph, the screaming continues.

1983: mercy call

Through the electronic long distance pips, Brian Wagner hears his party identify the number just dialed, and add, "Marjory Finlay speaking."

"Top of the morning to you darling, and I just called to see if you might like to slip around to my place for a quickie." After a moment of humming long-distance silence he says, "It's a lovely day for it, the sky's all black with smoke from the bushfires, puts a tickle in your nose and a song in your heart. Tell me I'm tempting you."

"Wagner. I might have known. What do you want, you pig?"

"Your body and your mind, in that order." Before he can get in another word there's a click in his ear. Marjory has hung up.

Grinning, Brian takes his finger out of his ear, turns quickly and squints through the dusty panes of the booth up and down the street. Tired shoppers wobble past, none of them especially officious. His hand goes to the bench that holds the two frayed, mutilated directories, his own battered collection of phone numbers opened at F, his cigarettes. He can't find his piece of wire.

A woman with a laden bag of vegetables approaches, glancing speculatively at the booth. Brian holds the handpiece to his ear while he squats, looking among the ash, butts, bits of torn directory paper, piss stains, dried seeds, cellophane and crushed cardboard for his length of wire. It's gone. Sighing, he goes through his pockets for another paper clip. You never have two when you need the extra one. He finds one.

The woman has stopped. She is clearly a Muslim of some denomination, head wrapped in cloth, enormous breasts swelling without constraint to the bulging shelf of her belly, which takes up the task and tumbles in a corporeal waterfall to some point near her knees. He wonders what Marjory's feminist response would be to the sight of these horribly enslaved creatures. After all, false consciousness rampant! Apparently, though, it is inappropriate to rebuke them for their complicity, since that is to endorse a view of women as victims, a more heinous crime than ignoring women's rights to equality and self-definition.

Brian is disturbed by these migrant women. He cringes at the sight of constantly pregnant women kowtowing to their strutting, hawking, spitting, ogling men. The pointless waste of it. This one has put all her shopping on the pavement now and is gazing from her wimple through the door, waiting for him to conclude his call and let her in. They use no deodorants, either. At least he's been spared the olfactory hazard of following her.

He untwists the metal wire of the paperclip and prepares his magic trick. Suitably enough he's learned how to do this from Joseph, who had it from a nuclear theoretician in Armidale. The larceny of scientists. Leaning at a peculiar angle to cut off the woman's line-of-sight, he dials the 043 prefix for Pearl Beach, 600 miles to the north. One end of the dog-legged wire goes through the perforations of the mouth piece, nudging it right up into the diaphragm. Holding the handpiece to the box, he jams the other end of the wire into the metal keyhole that opens the box to authorized money collectors. This is the magic pass; it works one time in three, depending on conditions that Wagner cannot even begin to estimate. Presumably a current passes in a strange feedback loop through the device, convincing the poor dumb instrument that it is being fed copious quantities of gold. Or that the call is taking place within the local-call zone.

Brian dials Finlay's Sydney number once more. The moment the racheting dial concludes its last circuit, he snatches handpiece and incriminating wire from its illegal congress. The Muslim gazes in with growing suspicion, going from foot to foot. A newspaper scandal has revealed that they are routinely subject at birth, or sometimes at puberty, to the surgical removal of the clitoris, the better to create tractable brood mares for their appalling men. His stomach clenches at the thought. The phone is ringing.

Beep beep beep. "I'm sorry, Marjory," he says at once, before she can identify herself. "It's the strain. Forgive me. I throw myself on the mercy of the court."

"Strain? What strain?" Ray Finlay asks. The line is superlative, crisp as a local call. Wonderful what they can do with satellites, or is it landlines?

"Joseph's cracking up. He's falling apart. No one can budge him from his house. Somebody should have forced him to sell that damned place when his parents died. It's an Edgar Allan Poe tomb. He's been untimely interred."

"For heaven's sake, Brian."

"Sorry, sorry. Now I've gone and offended Marj on top of everything else."

"Oh, that's why she stormed past."

The Muslim woman hitches at her groin. You really couldn't see much of her face at all, though at least she doesn't wear a veil. Joseph presumably would not object to her wearing a veil if that took her fancy. Anarchists are stuck with the incongruous implications of their doctrine of non-interference.

He snickers; a friend returning from the Middle East a couple of years ago swore blind that any of the local women, in purdah, would fling her voluminous skirts over her head in shame and horror if an outsider chanced to see her naked face. Odd enough as a behavior, this performance had the ludicrous consequence in Western eyes of inverting the usual conventions of decency: for these heavily-skirted women were entirely innocent of underwear.

"This line is pretty rough, Brian. I missed that. Perhaps you should try dialing again."

"The line's okay, Ray, I got distracted. What are we going to do about Joseph?"

"Look, Marj and I are supposed to be having a holiday. We're a thousand kilometers away from the scene of the accident. Ring Mike Murphy, he's an authority on misery."

"Don't be a shit, Ray. Never forget those memorable words of John Donne: 'Hell is other people.'"

"Oh Brian, Brian. This call must be costing the earth. Use the money to take Joe out to a lash-up dinner at the Flower Drum. He likes Chinese."

"Are you mad? I'm not paying for this call, it's on the PMG." Postmaster General, Brian mused. There was a 19th century phrase to daunt and ravage the soul.

"Telecom, Brian. I'll have to ring off, you're making me a party to an act of theft against the people of this nation. Donne didn't say that, you've turned it right around. John Donne said, 'Hell is the same people.'"

A bus roars past. The pedestrian traffic is picking up. Scowling, the Muslim woman pushes her face up against the side of the booth, rapping on the pane with a twenty cent piece. This is rather surprising, given the passivity that Brian has supposed is their ingrained lot. He turns away, hitching his jeans.

"Look, I wouldn't be surprised if he kills himself."

"Oh, that'd be interesting," Finlay says, voice all hollow and dryly amused on the now-hollow line. "You could get Caro to write an epitaph for him in your next quipu."

"Don't be bloody macabre. Anyway, that's kwee-poo."

"Kee-poo."

"You're a deeply ignorant man, Ray, and I see no future for you."

"Marj is menacing me with my swimming costume. We are here to enjoy the sun and the surf, Brian. If Joseph cuts his throat in our absence, get his executor to delay the funeral until our return. I would feel deeply guilty if we missed an important clever dick event of that magnitude."

"I sent him a copy of SMART GENES."

"That was bright. Really salient, Brian. Did you slip a razor blade in with it?"

"I thought it would cheer him up to see that Big Name hikes like Gareth Jones also have a rotten time."

"Let me assure you, Brian, from the profound truth that wells up in me as I stand here in my expensive holiday flat with the phone pressed against my ear, that misery does not love company. I'll see you at the next Nitting Circle, sport." Finlay hangs up.

"It's all yours, madam," Wagner informs the waiting Muslim woman. "In your case, I imagine the trick would be to work the earpiece in under your scarves." She stares at him with fear and loathing, and turns her back, banging his leg hard with a bag of fruit. It is a reaction to which Brian Wagner is no stranger.

1982: affine romance, with no kissin'

During the winter months of 1982, Marjory Finlay has drawn unfavorable attention from her husband by every third day or so getting very red in face, first irritably then violently denouncing the cross-eyed Siamese cats slobbering and yapping at her bare toes, galloping then without pause to outright hysteria followed by muffled apology followed by self-justifying anger, the entire repertoire concluding, unanswerably enough, in a mood of high-tensile good cheer.

Such forms of what is either major personality disintegration or cunningly enciphered communication have been beefed up most recently to include farting under the bedsheet.

Broadly regarded, Raymond Finlay finds this last, taken singly, perhaps preferable to still more frequent instances of vocal outburst. It is preferable since Marjory's farts are loosed during the barely conscious, and hence morally ambiguous, descent into stage four sleep, so at least the self-justificatory sequelae are omitted.

But to regard the matter broadly (as it were under the aspect of, if not eternity, at least a very long stretch of time indeed) is almost more than Ray Finlay can manage as he enters the gloom of the bedroom each night at one or two a.m. By then, admittedly, unless they've been topped up, the ripe animal vapors are reasonably attenuated. Whenever he's tried to bed down more companionably at eleven alongside his wife, who hops in promptly at that hour in her recently acquired flannel pyjamas, he's been jerked awake gagging and quivering with involuntary loathing: snatched horribly off the hypnagogic plateau, or oneiric subduction shelf, by the nose.

From the kitchen Marjory calls crossly, "Have you finished with it yet?"

He has, at lunchtime; it is in his briefcase near his right hand, leaning against the velvet covered rocking chair in which his buttocks rest. "Finished with what, Marj?"

"You know perfectly well."

He rapidly computes in general, non-quantitative terms how much strength of mind it would take to hurl himself from the embrace of the rocker and leap to the 'pending' shelf of the wall of books, where he might read aloud very fast from left to right the titles of all possible candidates.

Instead, offering a tentative but quite bravely advanced conjecture, he says, "Oh, Joseph's story?"

"You've had it for more than two days now. You're meant to be a fantastic speed reader."

Ray opens his briefcase without undue clatter and removes the original-fiction paperback anthology. THE AUTHOR IS DEAD! A Collection of Postmodern Transgressions. Ah me oh my. The more things change, the more things change. "You wouldn't like it."

After a stewing silence, a kitten yelps.

"Sorry," Ray says "it's just that it's shockingly sexist."

"No doubt. You kept me awake half the night choking back your rage."

"I like his style of humor."

"Your rotten cronies. You stick up for each other. You'd vote for Stalin if he was a member of the Nitting Circle."

"You see, the thing is, you don't actually have to vote for Stalin, they come and—"

"In fact, Joseph's quite nice when he's not being gloomy."

"His treatment of women characters is quite beyond the pale."

"Well why were you laughing? Not that you have to explain that to me."

"Marjory, you've got to try to, you know, what was it Pope said, divide the sense from the thought. I mean, you do, look at the sort of stuff you're reading all the time. Jesus, Dostoevski was a loony fascist."

Plates and cutlery rattle efficiently. "I don't find Dostoevski remotely comic, let alone at half past one in the morning. He's never raised a laugh from me."

"No," Ray says. He slips the paperback into its proper alphabetical place, giving the pending shelf a miss. The living room floor squeaks in annoyance as he crosses the room to the television set and bends to switch it on. "No, I'm sure he never has."

A DOG'S WIFE

by Joseph Williams
counting down . . .
. . .ten

"Jane," said my mother, "you simply cannot marry a dog. It is out of the question."

I continued to unfold my trousseau, putting the linen neatly to one side and the silk undies to the other. With determined patience I said, 'I will brook no obstacle in this matter. I shall not be opposed."

Mother wrung her hands. Framed against the handsome proportions of the bedroom window, she stared into the afternoon's glow. "You always were a dreadfully wilful child, Boojum."

"Boring, Mother. Boring. Really." Some of the linen was the gift of my father's new or current wife or spouse; we had not yet, in fact, established my step-parent's gender, due to the postal strike.

"It's all very well for you to take that attitude, my girl. The fact remains that it is we who must live with the neighbors."

I began to grow angry. "Damn the neighbors, Mother. If I cared what the Fosters deemed proper I should still be wearing a veil."

"You are being hysterical, dear," Mother told me in an etiolated tone. "You know as well as I that you have never worn a veil in your life."

"A figure of speech." She can be perfectly exasperating.

"Nor a yashmak," she said, ploughing on heedless of my raised eyes and muttered imprecations, determined to have her say, "nor a garden hat. And I cannot imagine that this terrier gentleman—"

"Kelpie, Fiona. Do try."

"—that this kelpie fellow is without a degree of social sensitivity of his own. Don't deny it; I know you, my girl, we might differ on some things but I trust your instincts to that extent. This dog of yours will feel uncomfortable in our circles. You will recall that he expressed an interest in Mr. Percy's peahens only to be misunderstood. How did you feel about that contretemps?"

Glacially I told her, "It is our intention to emigrate to Australia."

Mother uttered a ferocious bray. "I see. He's found an opening on a sheep station, then?"

"That's not even remotely funny." I closed the lid of the lacquered chinoiserie glory box, and crossed the room to the mirror. My hair had lost some of its gloss. I found part of a dry leaf tucked in above my ear and quickly crushed it between thumb and index finger, letting the fragments sift to the carpet. Try as one might, running through the woods is a dusty business in late September. "There is scarcely any call on a sheep station for a theoretical nuclear physicist."

"God forbid I should belittle his mathematical skills. In regard to this grotesque proposal, Jane, it's clear enough to me that Towser has calculated to a nicety—"

Seething, I let my brush fall to the floor and turned on her, cheeks so flushed I could feel their heat. "His name is Spot, Mother. As you know. I will not have—" My breast heaved; all the words whirled in my brain. "As you know because he has been often enough in our parlor, because we have conducted this tedious argument or others like it sufficiently often and with such a plethora of redundancy that I am heartily sick of it." I looked around blindly for the brush, took up instead a silver-backed comb. Mother held her tongue but I was not appeased. I watched her reflection. "Bitch," I muttered.

She gave a satirical snort, and left the room. I could have kicked myself.

1983: there's a lot of it going around

Something pale brown and bent juts from the front slot of the letterbox. Joseph Williams has no trouble seeing that this is so, even with the foreshortened view available to him from his heavily curtained bedroom window. The postman has jammed the damn thing into a space meant for decorous Edwardian dinner invitations, if that's the way Edwardians went about getting fed.

It takes him some minutes to shove the drapes back into place, groan, trudge to the door, locate himself in the passage, all that detail stuff that gets you to the front gate. (All right: he's a little under five ten, at one time a moderately impressive height but now merely average, dwarfed by the monsters of nutrition strutting every day from the primary school playgrounds where they molest one another sexually in lieu of attending to their lessons; yes, yes, he's got dark receding hair that he continues to wear longer than most women's, another marker of psychophysical anachronism; close, blue eyes weakened by reading, if his father was correct all those years ago; the faint trace of surgical correction in childhood of a hare-lip that he believes is a blindingly visible eye-sore instantly repulsive to all women, and is convinced of this beyond the most rational or impassioned persuasion, just as he is certain that it is taken by his coevals as evidence of mental retardation). Joseph is in a condition of terminal ennui.

The pale brown thing in the letterbox is SMART GENES, a scurrilous and brilliant mimeographed magazine. But Joseph, in his sloth, has never been on the British editor's mailing list, a case unlikely to have altered. Presumably Brian Wagner, who is a stalwart list member, has decided SMART GENES would cheer Joseph up. It has certainly done so in the past.

There have been only four issues of SMART GENES to date; this is the fifth. Weakly, Joseph strips off the re-direction notice (with, of course, Brian Wagner's address on it, scratched out, the cheap sod, to save extra postage) and smiles mildly at the cover. It depicts the late Sir Cyril Burt, notorious for his tampering with the evidence that led to the creation of Britain's lamentable 11+ school streaming, a bone through his nose, regarding a copy of SMART GENES with bead-browed caution and drawn pistol. The gag line informs Joseph that it is the first apotropaic quipu Sir Cyril has ever seen.

joseph is better informed than Sir Cyril

For twenty years Joseph Williams has doted on quipu, apotropaic and otherwise. The selection, typical enough, of such a demented word as "apotropaic" (which denotes the turning away of some threatened evil, usually by staring it boldly in the eye) is one cause of his word-drunk infatuation. In this, if in little else, he resembles his fellow hikes Ray Finlay (who'd never admit it) and Brian Wagner (who'd confess to any crime).

what it is that joseph knows

Leafing through the Twiltone A4 pages for some explicit clue to Wagner's intention, the hot bushfire-smoked air rasping his antrums, he is able to take for granted that "quipu," in this case, does not refer to ancient Inca records made by putting knots in variously colored ropes but to personal magazines written, published and distributed amongst themselves by hikes, that "hike" is a shortened form of "high IQ" (which is to say, "high Intelligence Quotient"), that "intelligence" is a concept at once problematic, politically sensitive, racially dodgy and all that keeps him from slashing his throat, given his certified possession of quite a lot of it, whatever it might be. What's more, Joseph is well abreast of the fact that quipu are less often concerned these days with IQ norming protocols as such, though some residual fascination for the topic continues to persist as a kind of subtext or deep grammar in the confessions, games, slanging matches, jokes and meditations that comprise the contents of contemporary quipu.

It goes entirely without saying that Joseph takes it for granted that truly clever dick quipu are replete with neologisms such as "quipu," "Nitting Circle," "clever dick" and the like; that the magazines are almost always produced by roneo from typed stencils, or by some similar low-cost reproduction process, and collated, stapled, addressed and distributed by the editor and his or her friends, in limited editions of between five and five hundred copies; that money rarely changes hands, such quipu being themselves a kind of unweighted basket of fungible commodity futures or whatever it is that bourgeois economists use these days instead of good old-fashioned cash; in fact, the amount of tacit knowledge (Michael Polanyi's useful phrase) that Joseph possesses in this respect is awesome. All of it is called upon via Chomskyan grammar decoding protocols as lethargically he flips the pale brown pages, noticing finally (having missed it the first time through) that Wagner has marked two passages with a light Colortone Fine Liner felt tip pen.

The paragraphs enter Joseph's consciousness like jolts from an ECT electrode. Though they are processed principally by his left hemisphere, which specializes in interpreting linguistic and logical material, they leave their mark in his right: that quivering hemisphere hungry for song, splashes of vivid hue in artful forms, love and hate in inchoate gusts.

"Jesus Christ," Joseph mutters in the hot terrible summer daylight of 1983. "More Crushing Blows!"

if you're not confused, you just don't understand the situation

A decade earlier, one of the bitter lows of his life, when Joseph himself was publishing Mogadon Blues from Flat 11, 1121 Drummond St, his wretched friend Mike Murphy was finding True Love and falling from its grace like a demonstration of some faulty perpetual motion machine. Murphy was the first of the local high IQ belly openers, if Joseph's truly crude childhood indiscretions in 1961 can be laid aside as an aberration without issue. Murphy told the quipu world his woes, showed them all his poor tattered heart, regaled the bright community with haunting and comical tales of the Crushing Blows dealt by fate, God, raw accident, the vulgarity of others, his own perfect ineptitude. If he was not desperately smitten by his best friend's wife, it was a haughty waitress in a Carlton takeaway food bar. When the neighbors developed a passion for Argentinian dance and gave vent to their discovery at three in the morning, Mike Murphy's reason would totter and the wistful bleats of pain dash from his fingers into the wires and springs of his old Remington, slashing wax from stencils; ink would pour and roll, paper whine from the duplicator. More Crushing Blows! The authentic pain of a sensibility trained by the Leavisites of Melbourne University's English department, trained to concert pitch, here, on the quipu page, in editorials, answering critics and well-wishers, Crushing Blows rendered into concrete poetry, the words sent teeming forth into every English-speaking country of the world (and some where German or Polish was milk tongue! Murphy's agony and hunger surpassing lexical boundaries!), provoking a decade of shameless display.

Yet here it is, 1983, and the same old crap is afflicting not just Joseph, in Melbourne, Australia (late summer and ghastly drought and sheep turning up their poor parched twisted little toes and half the beauty spots of Victoria and South Australia ablaze or powdered to white ash and black), not just Joseph Williams and Australia, but bloody Gareth Jones as well, of Britain, who, by a kind of seasonal circadian lag, has had this to say in the pages of SMART GENES 5:

When my dentist leaves the broken root of my corrupted right second premolar interred in my jaw I am prepared to forgive him, for, as St. Cyril told us, not everyone has been blessed equally. My complaint began in earnest only when I found that the sod had managed this difficult task with the assistance of the adjacent quite healthy first molar, which he used as a fulcrum. I could have calculated the forces involved, had he asked, and warned against this course. As cauliflowers were once held to give an inaudible cry of grief when torn from the earth, my molar muttered a little lament to me and fell apart inside my head. 'Oh shit,' said my oral butcher, though he tried to laugh it off. I am planning to kill myself as soon as the swelling goes down.

Exhausted Joseph's right hemisphere is buzzing with angry resonance. Wagner, you bastard, I will not be mocked.

It is not as if I really need full dentition. How many teeth does it take to get through a hamburger? It is the implications for my sex life that harrow me. Will women be prepared to thrust their tongues inside my mouth if they meet there from canine to uvular only an ossified ridge of gum?
In case I have activated your own oro-dental phobias, rest easy. I have been speaking in tongues of my quipu writing, my sudden summer bleakness at its damaged source, its vulgar impulse, all this chewing, this public gnawing. Why do I do it? I'll tell you.
In the vain hope of getting laid.
For a fuck, lads. Shouting in women's ears is not the way to do it. This method doesn't seem highly effective either. I am planning to kill myself as soon as the swelling goes down.

It is an outrageous declaration, banal or not. Joseph has never quite come to this point in his many outbursts and lamentations, and if Mike Murphy approached it in the mid-seventies no one was taken in. So much candor has the effect of a scarcely visible hare-lip scar; it is a sure sign of feeble-mindedness. The sun bashes down. Joseph Williams totters back inside the house, where, while it is not cool, at least the glare's less horrendously bright, and drops the quipu to the linoed floor. An incurious cat noses it briefly before settling to lick a furry perineum.

1961: aspirations of the embryo

======================================================

THE LOCative CASE

Letters Of Comment to GRUMBLING WOMBATS, February ish 1961

======================================================

At once the most heart-warming and spine-chilling loc we've spied since the last ish is from J. P. Williams, a baby bright at Brunswick High School who hopes to be wed to the bride of his dreams before the Sixties is over. When we asked readers to supply some personal details, I'm not sure that this is precisely what we expected. The reaction of you eager Australian hikes was so underwhelming that J. A. Williams (of the Brunswick Williamses) is the first cab off the block for 1961. Over to you, J. W. By the way, it really is acceptable to tell us Big Name hikes your own Little First Name, J. K.

Dear Editor

I have not contributed to a quipu before, and you do not know me, although I think my friend Paul Ramsden has met you at the Point Two Six Society "convocation" last year in Sydney, and might have mentioned that he lent me some copies of GRUMBLING WOMBATS. You ask for details of readers' lives and experiences. Nothing much has happened yet in mine, but I will try to oblige. I hope you don't find this too uninteresting. I will try to disclose everything but those hidden thoughts which are a man's greatest privilege.

My name is J. D. Williams. I am five foot seven and a half in my socks. I will soon be 15, am not overly blessed with good looks but generally do not scare small children who come upon me at dusk. According to the Mensa tests I have an I.Q. in the 99.9th percentile, but this rarely shows in either school marks or behavior.

Probably the former arises from my dislike for school work, and the latter from emotional immaturity. I know from novels, learned treatises and gentle chats from my maths teacher, that I am passing through a "stage." I am aware that fellows of my age react in certain stereotyped ways to certain stimuli.

The trouble is, having diagnosed "the adolescent," discovered the still-childish drives that work him, I find the same attributes in myself. I am not pretending I cannot do anything about it. But I remain a victim of my pituitary gland. Sometimes I think the bumpkin who is ignorant of much of this is better off than I.

Some of this knowledge comes from my reading of science fiction. I have been fascinated by space travel, biology and astronomy since I was quite young. Nowadays I am more intrigued by psychology, sociology and semantics, as described by Robert Heinlein and John W. Campbell, Jr. Much of this information is new to my teachers, which is quite infuriating.

I turn to books instead of people, and find them much friendlier and more intelligent. At the moment I have only two friends (one of them being Paul Ramsden, but he is six years older than me and so has rather different interests!). I am resolved to change myself for the better, which is one reason I am writing to Wombat. If I can contact some "like-minded people" (or even some "hike"-minded people!), perhaps it will aid me in my resolve.

As a result of nearly 15 years of lonely, selfish living (I am an only child, with rather elderly parents), I am mean, nasty, unsociable and egocentric. I recognize these faults, but it seems that 15 years of habit create a deep impression. To effect a lasting change, my whole way of thinking will need to alter. This is particularly true since I want to get married eventually and raise a family. So I am going to have to change drastically, and soon, while I am still in my formative years.

Many of the books I have read claim that we are influenced very heavily by the type of civilization we live in. I truthfully feel that much of what I am—the features I dislike—can be traced back to early influences. Until I was three I had an unsightly scar on my face that was eventually repaired, but I remember other children screaming (one, anyway) when they saw me. Perhaps this is why I hated close contact with other kids. At any rate, I did not play much sport.

However, in summary (sorry for all this boring complaint, but you asked for it!) what I become is, in the last analysis, my own responsibility. It might not be my fault the way I am constructed now, but it will be my fault if I allow present trends to worsen while failing to cultivate their alternatives.

In my next loc, I will discuss the importance of imaginative fiction as a means of putting forward new ways of looking at Man and Society. That is, if you are interested enough to print this one! Best wishes,

J. D. Williams

1969: the bride of frankenstein

Paddington
Sydney
14 November 1969

My dear Joseph

So, in Sydney. If I were as cynical as Brian Wagner I'd add " . . .all safe & sound." In fact, we very nearly didn't make it. I had a prang about 100 miles out of Liverpool. Sixteen hours at the wheel, by the time we got here to Paddo, pilled of course. Had to have the radiator replaced fifty bloody bucks.

Antony and I will stay in Paddington until we can organize a beautiful, peaceful house of our own.

I am finding it extremely difficult to recuperate & my mind is not functioning. This is an extremely dull letter. Can't face the thought of a job. Hope all is well at your parents' place. I guess it isn't. I wish you'd get out of that godforsaken place.

I miss you. I yearn for your company. I'm incredibly vulnerable. When I realized for the first time that you were 600 miles away I knew how much I "loved" you (the unspeakable verb) but what's the sense in it what's the point when you won't accept it. I tell myself that you can love another person without any return of love for only so long before you are brought right up against your own bloody masochism.

Antony, of course, dramatically declares his love. How farcical. He and I have been together such a short time.

Surely you must feel something for me after 2 years even if it's only to despise oh shit why should it matter now? Hell it's all over but so often you're still with me.

I can't go on raving like this I feel slightly delirious.

Regards to parents.

fondest—?
Caroline

1982: getting started

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

LAUGHTER IN THE DIKE

the quipu of costive[l] humor

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

written, edited, run orf and footnoted by Vladimir B. Wagner for Point Two Six Amateur Press Association,[2] and out just in the nick of time to rescue his good standing and sustained credentials with that August body. Some copies will be seen by non-members of .26APA, but I regret to say that I am far too niggardly and costipated to trade for your scungy rubbish. Away with you! There's a wheelbarrow out in the toolshed. Emitted 17 December 1982. You can find my phone number in the book. Overseas readers never ring me anyway. Does anyone read colophons any more? Doubtful. I'll just keep strumming on this

[1] Concise Oxford: a. constipated; [fig.] niggardly

[2] the well-gnome writing arm of all us good guys who there are only 0.25742 per cent of in the world owing to our having smarts of 146 or more oh wow which isn't as good as Mega[3] but you can't women all

[3] the Mega Society, limited to folks in the 99.9999th percentile, which is taking a good thing a little too far if you know what I

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

As you know, I am an inveterate entrant of contests. I have pushed pennies along a train track with my nose, heedless of the iron horse and motivated by nothing better than a powerful wish to see young Billy Illywacker bested. Billy, needless to say, was scrambling along the alternative rail, shoving with all his might, short-trousered knees grinding through blue stone fragments which lacerated as well his horrible snot-hardened palms; the broad flat penny darkly dazzling in his vicious squinting eyes as the summer holiday sun burned up from coin and rails without discrimination as to metallic pigment; and I scrambled likewise, the damned thing teetering and skidding off the track, splinters in the sleepers tearing into skin and bone, the hoot of the on-rushing train and the panic-stricken cries of our youthful companions unheard by either of us in the unspeakable compulsion and fire of macho competition; ah, those were the days.

Now, of course, I am far more refined. I must needs be urged by my colleagues to enter, with tremendous diffidence, such sublimated wrestling matches as the National Time 500-item Old Time Movie trivia quiz, say.

These days, as a subscriber to many of the world's leading intellectual journals, quarterlies, newspapers and financial advice letters, it was inevitable that I would write and submit by urgent airmail the following shrunken saga (here annotated in the usual manner for the edification of those numerous members of .26APA who, it grieves me to report, would not know their asp from their Elba).

THREE MINUTE EPIC, WITH SEQUEL[1]

Zero puckers. Bright spacetime Bangs.[2]
Quark[3] soup[4]: that's one-hundredth of a second.[5]
Lumps curdle in boiling soup: nucleons[6]. Mesons[7] and anti-kin[8] smash, evaporate, leave thin grit.[9]

The light[10] goes out.[11]

Everything[12], blowing apart[13], cools to a hundred million degrees.[14]

Somewhat later: stars[15], life[16], us.[17] Thin wisps in darkness.

———————————

[1] That merry wag Brian W. Aldiss invented the mini-saga while penning the introduction to a short story anthology. He was, at the time, embedded in his monumental "Helliconia" trilogy, a multi-generational 70mm split-screen saga. In stark contrast, the mini-saga must be a miracle of concision and compression: precisely 50 words long, with a contributory title of up to 15 additional words. Upon public disclosure of this new art form, the Sunday magazine of the London "Telegraph" launched a contest that attracted entries by Frederick Forsythe, Frank Muir, Hammond Innes. P. J. Kavanagh, and the Australian hike editor, columnist, wit and namesake of the artform's discoverer, Brian Wagner, whose effort graces this footnote.

[2] A nearly perfect instance of the form can be found in the first fifty words of the King James translation of the Bible, describing creation. A somewhat more up-to-date version, using many more words and equations, has been given by the Nobel Prize laureate Steven Weinberg, in his popular (but, I am assured by that great physicist Joe Williams, accurate) account of cosmogony, The First Three Minutes. The interval mentioned in both Weinberg's title and my own is approximately equal to the time required for the primeval universe to settle down from the Big Bang singularity to an expanding mass of elementary nuclear particles, exchange quanta and neutrinos. Everything of importance to human beings occurred, of course, after this three minute egg had boiled and been removed from its shell.

1975: worth the journey

It has taken the arrival in Canberra of the Magi from Overseas, here for this international Point Two Six Convocation—prophets of Intelligence and egalitarianism alike, Hans Eysenck and Richard Lewontin, Richard Herrnstein and Isaac Asimov (a dedicated non-flyer, borne by luxury ocean liner)—to goose the media into paying attention to the indigenous hikes. Ray Finlay finds this strikingly apt.

"We're still having a bit of bother with the O.B. van," the director tells him soothingly. "I do apologize for not getting you chappies a little drinkie, but we don't want you sloshed before the actual event." She laughs and holds Ray's biceps.

"Isn't it going to be rather contrasty? I was expecting something indoors, to tell you the—"

"Relaxed and outdoorsy is what we're aiming at. We've had a fair bit of experience with sporting functions."

"Quite.

The ABC crew stagger about with wires, cables, conduits, television cameras and make-up kits. His own face has been lightly powdered. Joseph shambles out of the lavatory, looking like a clown.

"I'm starving."

"What a stroke of luck that you find yourself in a restaurant." Ray stares at his watch. "I suppose Professor Eysenck and Dr. Rose will arrive before the pudding."

"Ah, they've had to cancel," the director says over her shoulder. "Hans ate a bad oyster and it's given him collywobbles. Steven had a prior engagement, our slip-up. You'll have to do all the work by yourselves. Think you're up to it?"

"Oh shit, no," Joseph says and Ray tells her at the same moment, "We'll manage, Shirley."

Grant Moore, his macho moustache bristling, steps from the kitchen into the bistro's patio, face tanned from forays to Queensland and points farther north and retanned by artful cosmetics. "Okay, blokes, the tucker's just about edible. Let's siddown."

Ray is already seated under the merrily striped bistro umbrella. Joseph is placed at his right hand, Grant at his left. A camera takes the fourth place, with another off to one side. By artful editing it will be made to appear that they sit in the customary arrangement.

"Everyone's sick of the usual talking-head bullshit. It's 1975, for Christ's sake, not 1965," Grant Moore tells them. "And what's the fall-back alternative? How much guts does it take to slam your audience from one walk-in jumpcut to another? Listen, Ray, we're really climbing out on a limb here."

"Really? In discussing intelligence intelligently?"

"By going for conversation, period, for fuck's sake. If a point's worth hammering, we'll linger on it. We're not scared of a bit of abstract conceptualization if that's what it takes. With me?"

"Won't our chewing-tend to . . . well, muffle our conversation?"

"We can cut. We can dub. That's technical shit."

"Jean-Pierre's ready," Shirley tells him.

But it takes three false starts before the mood relaxes sufficiently for their lemon sorbet to be broached.

A DOG'S WIFE

. . .nine

I was not wholly without sympathy for Fiona's qualms, though I'd have died before admitting so. On the other hand I judged her objections fundamentally reactionary. In this age of moonshots and dime-store calculators, it seemed to me not merely ignoble but rather trite to find some course of action offensive simply because it was not hallowed by family tradition.

The fact is, Spot was the brightest dog I had ever met. He entered college under a special program, endowed by the Chomsky Institution, and was a wild fellow, mad for poetry and drinking all night and the theater. He swiftly discerned that culture as such is problematical, overdetermined, quixotic, that its appeal is essentially to the intellectually lightweight. He dabbled in painting for a time, creating a small stir with his innovative brush stroke. But it was the endless wonder of science that spoke to Spot's heart of hearts, and led to his specializing first in chemistry and finally in the application of Sophus Lie's theory of continuous transformation groups to that previously intractable poser, the 'periodic table' of elementary particles and their resonances.

Much of his work was awfully abstruse and beyond my modest attainments, yet Spot retained a sense of primal joy in his assault on the universe. One might come out into the yard with a bone from the table (for he was then living at our home under an exchange arrangement) and find him gazing raptly at the moon, his lips parted, inflamed with an innocent intoxication so much purer than his raunchy nights backstage with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I was struck then, fondly, by his ardent, wistful expression, so like Carl Sagan's. Any comparison I might make, however, is bound to be misleading. I'd never met anyone, man or woman, who affected me so piercingly. Before I knew it, I was head over heels in love with a dog, and I am prepared to confess that at first I was just as astonished and taken aback by this discovery as was my dear bitter mother a few months later when Spot went in to announce our intentions.

1969: obituaries

Bloody Brunswick

Monday 17

Nov 69

dear Caroline

Very short note before I rush out at lunchtime to post this. Spent yesterday at Brian's, helping crank out the latest HOT AIR (which you will find enclosed; the ink should be dry by the time you get it). I sat at my typewriter all Friday night writing a Letter of Comment for his LoC pages, a way of telling people that we'd split up. It's on page 12.

It's all so sad, Lovely, even though it seems quite impossible to . . . imagine how we could ah fuck it read the thing in the quipu.

kisses, Joseph

##############

WORD SALAD :: Lettuce from my chums

::A singularly strange and moving letter arrived from Joe Williams after I'd run off most of this ish of HOT AIR, but I've remixed the SALAD to make space for it. We don't see much of Joe these days, now that he's a Big Time Science Journalist, and his unhappy circumstances will therefore come as a shock to many of you. There's not much comfort to be had in words, Joseph, I know, but believe me when I say that we all share with you in your mourning::b.wagner::

It's funny. I haven't met most of the hikes whom Brian sends HOT AIR to, but I feel a sort of sense of family with you, at least as much of one as I've ever felt with any group. Despite this, I have tended to keep my private life to myself. This might seem hard for some of you to believe, having been inundated with my most passionate beliefs about politics, writing, music, and the ins and out of the School of Physics, but basically I haven't conveyed anything close to myself since about eight years ago, when I didn't know any better and sent some ghastly LoCs to GRUMBLING WOMBATS, which are certainly better forgotten.

It's hard getting to the point, isn't it? Well, taking a deep breath, I must force my fingers to the keyboard:

Two days ago, my wife Caroline died of cancer. She was buried today. I am in shock. She was a lovely, kind, poetic, sensitive person. Until the disease undermined her physical constitution, she was also a physically beautiful woman, as the few of you who met her will recall. It always seemed to me that she had something of the graceful fluid lines of bone and flesh of a French model, though her ancestry had been Australian for at least three generations. I rarely told her that she was beautiful. Now it is too late.

Those of you who never met Caro, or me, those of you who live in other States or other countries, will not be all that upset by this news, except in the general sense that we share a momentary pang at news of another's bereavement. Those of you who encountered us once or twice, but without our orbits intersecting, will perhaps feel some more direct twinge of empathy and grief. And those few, like Brian, who knew us rather better than that, who visited our house or had us around to theirs, will perhaps be rather taken aback by the news, because they will know that what I have just written is not true.

I am not married, and never have been. Yes, I have lived with Caroline at various times, and until several days ago we shared a house not ten minutes' walk from Brian Wagner's roguish den. But Caroline has not been ill, not physically, and she is certainly not dead. She has relocated to Sydney, hoping to create a life for herself free of the metaphorical carcinogens that were threatening, day by day, to destroy her. These included: my own selfish impatience and lack of caring, the frightful pressures her parents subjected her to which just tore her up, her horror at finding so many of her old friends from school or university settling into "happy" mindless bourgeois marriages and baby-making, her own secret desire to do just that and my refusal to collaborate: cancers of the soul.

And she took herself away, upped and left, went away weeping, and left me weeping too, and it is just exactly as if she were dead. As if she were lying out of touch or sight in a hard wooden coffin where no sounds can be heard and there is an odor of perfume and old suits and incense.

By speaking of cancer and death, of course, I try to let myself off the hook, try to pretend for a moment that I am not at least fifty percent responsible for the destruction of our relationship, for the chilly misery I now feel, and the despairing awareness that no amount of confession of guilt, complicity and rottenness can repair what is corroded and gone between us, that Caroline (or I myself) could just as truthfully be described as dead, killed by some insidious disorder over which neither of us had any real control.

And that last assertion is probably just as much a cop-out as anything I've written so far. So I'll stop. No flowers, by request.

::Joe's letter, which he delivered by hand late on Friday night and would not tarry as I read its baffling mixture of truth and metaphor, is not the sort of thing I have been accustomed to publishing in this quipu. Maybe it should be. Joseph and Caroline are not the only victims lately. If we could all try a little harder to express what we actually feel, even if we must do so with the aid of misdirection, we might manage our personal lives somewhat more successfully ::b.wagner::

1969: love is a german shepherd

Paddington
Sydney
20.11.69

My dear Joseph

At peace.

I received your quipu article yesterday. At first I was outraged. I wanted to tear you into small strips. I thought you were saying that you wished me dead (I might as well be). Then I re-read what you'd written and I think I understand. Poor Joseph, it's the only way you know to express your feelings. Like your refusal to speak of "love." So I take your article as I suppose you meant it, as a tribute to our relationship, to the feelings you had for me. You must admit it's a very strange thing to read. But I suppose you would not have written it if you had felt nothing at all for me. So in the end, after crying all morning, I saw what you were getting at, and your article gave me strength.

The days have been floating past restlessly and I with them. I'm starting to loosen up, though sleep comes very intermittently.

Antony is the Great Pretender. I am very wary of him now. He has a long way to go & doesn't know it. He thinks he's got it all sewn up but he's fly-papered in the bourgeois conventions he says he loathes so deeply. Every attempt to escape tangles him up further—look at what he's got himself into with me. His dope, his drinking—these are all middle-class to the bone. I'm staying on with him because I'm lost in Sydney. I'm fond enough of him but he's going to end up hating me for just those human flaws I share with him. I'm weak. I take pills to keep my sanity.

His ex-lady Francine is okay I suppose (fat bottom). Attractive but superficial. When I suggested leaving some of our stuff at her place, Antony was outraged. He can't bear the thought of my imposing on her, of being there while she's entertaining her fucking Paddo friends. He can't accept anything of me. He thinks I'm someone else.

Can't accept that I have my own thoughts. Have my silence. He keeps his mouth rattling away quite adequately most of the time anyway. He has a certain romantic (childish) fixation on me—Sad-Eyed Lady of the Slowlands, mother/lover or something, pale and sadly beautiful, magic sea sprite, and when that's gone it'll be vapor.

I'm just another tin soldier in his battle but I could change sides. Not that he's shown me his fist—just impatience, which I ignore. I don't really care if it all falls through as long as I have somewhere to live by then. I saw Lanie, who asked affectionately after you. She took most of the evening to recover from finding me up here. All the damaged ladies in retreat from Melbourne. She's going to Malaysia next month with a chinese girlfriend.

A great slavering alsatian dog has just come to visit me, a docile animal.

Please, please find somewhere to live soon, you'll go out of your senses in that place.

all my fondest love

Caroline

1975: eat your heart out

"Fantastic, Jean-Pierre," Grant tells the camera. "Lemon crushed with just a little sugar and frozen. Fabulous. You're watching Le Bon Chat, a program devoted to proving that the two fine arts of good eating and good talk have not perished, and today I'll be conversing with two of the smartest blokes in the country—if you place any faith in I.Q. tests."

Ray regards him bleakly.

"Dr. Ray Finlay is a computer scientist specializing in the simulation of artificial intelligence, and Joe Williams is a science journalist. An important vocation in an age dominated by technology."

"You'd think so. Right now I'm a Commonwealth statistic."

After the merest flicker, Moore says, "On the dole, eh? Many people would wonder if that was proof of remarkable intelligence."

"It's not. It's proof of how shithouse society is."

"Without the naughty words, you dumb fuck." Moore grins with infectious manly zest, winking.

"It's not. It's proof of society's intellectual impoverishment."

"You think the world owes you a living?"

"I think the world, if by that you mean the economic distributive system, owes everyone a living. In return, everyone has a duty to contribute in some relevant way to sustaining the economic or spiritual well-being of the community."

"You could work in a factory."

"I doubt it. Terminal boredom tends to interfere with productivity. Besides, it'd be a criminal waste of fairly rare human resources to send someone like me off to a production line when I could be . . . Oh shit, this is . . . If I could—"

Grant waves his hand reassuringly. "Ease off, Joe, we can edit. The menu for this luncheon is something new, something straight from the great gastronomes of Europe. You've heard of La Nouvelle Cuisine, invented ten years ago by Chef Paul Bocuse at his magnificent three-star Restaurant de la Pyramide in Vienne, near Lyon." A young woman in white peasant blouse and dark skirt clears away their sorbet glasses. "The custodians of La Grande Cuisine were outraged, because Bocuse simplified and clarified a whole way of life when he began experimenting with Escoffier's famous formulas. For their pains, Bocuse and his followers were dubbed the 'gastronomic Mafia'."

Ray stares with growing incredulity at Joseph during this peroration. The camera is fixed on Grant Moore, who runs a short thick finger across the nail-brush of his upper lip. Jean-Pierre himself steps into view, bearing plates of aspic, all shot through with the hues of simple vegetables: celery, olive slices, shavings of carrot, herbs, capsicum, tomatoes. "It looks stunning, Jean-Pierre. Can you tell us about it?"

"I have adapted it from Roger Vergé's gibelotte de lapin de Provence," the chef tells them happily.

"And this is La Nouvelle Cuisine? Or is it La Cuisine Minceur, the brainchild of Michel Guérand at his Paris bistro Le Pot au Feu?"

The young man looks baffled, and swallows hard. "Well, it's neither, really. Guérand's recipes are actually designed for people who want to lose weight. I'm aiming at the kind of cuisine that came into its own at Le Restaurant des Frères Troisgros."

"The 'new-new' cuisine, as it's been called. Low in fats and oils, high in flavor and enjoyment. Let's eat."

"I could do with a knife and fork," Ray tells the hovering chef.

"No, no. With the fingers. And watch the bones."

"Oh, great." Now he sees the reason for the large finger bowls and paper serviettes. The fricasseed rabbit comes out with a sucking noise, moist and cold, suitable no doubt for the screening of this program during the coming summer. It explodes in his surprised mouth with flavors that bring him near to tears. "Oh," he says. "Great."

"I thought we were supposed to be discussing intelligence testing," grumbles ungracious Joseph.

"I thought you were starving," says Ray.

1969: joseph misses out

brunswick that athens of the South
November 69

O woe and gloom and drabble me drither—all the nature of his usual cry, mark you, marking no whit, for that matter, any matter not usual. That's how it is round this roughcut end of the earth, or so it seems.

I gather from my spies that a Postal Strike is presently or at least currently and almost without question presently also laying siege to all non-oral communication, and that when eventually it finishes (until which time, one imagines, this poor letter will languish crushed in a canvas bag, creased and cross) a hundred million pieces of mail will on the instant be funneled through the fumbling paws of posties working under stress and pressure, with a yield in losses, mutilation, hold-ups of a post-Post Strike sort.

I went to this party run by the Revolutionary Syndicalists on Saturday night with Martha and Bob. Fifty cents at the door 'for the Cause.' Drive ya to drink.

There was no spare bed to be had there so I taxied home to Brunswick from Kew a sadder & a poorer & yes a wiser man at four in the morning.

In the midst of the dull slugs who are the revolution's vanguard only two of any beauty turned up: Libby and the lovely mad Quintilla (a name she must surely have devised). They came to share our huddled corner, and when they speared off together at a comparatively early hour in Libby's mummy's car, Libby offered me a lift. To Brunswick? I cried. Why, said she, it is all one to us. I declined. Fool! How drunk was I? My sense of proportion and nuance evidently deserted me at that crucial moment. That matter shall be rectified. At least looked into.

I miss you. If you listen carefully.

Why do you insist on denigrating yourself? Antony is right: magic sea sprite sadly beautiful. Take this for reassurance—everyone at that damned party came forth with unsolicited testimonials to your warmth and excellence, and expressions of amazement at my letting you slip through my fingers. Indeed.

All my love, old trout.

kiss kiss

Joseph

1979: red menace

It's winter-dark in the Uskadar, but warm, friendly with fat soft candles and cloth hanging in folds and tucks from the ceiling. The Nitting Circle shamble and straggle into the place, peer at the Turkish menu, agree grudgingly with Joseph's plan that all are to share a set menu. For the best part of an hour and a half they gorge on tiny pieces of meat (lamb chops, slices of lamb, shish kebab, sausage), on dips glistening with oil, on the wine and beer they have fetched with them. It is carnage, and nervous Joseph abandons his thoughtfully prepared mineral water. When Cabernet Sauvignon is pressed on him, Joseph is a goner. His voice rises to the hangings. His arms levitate. A reckless note of song enters him.

There are not quite enough cars to see them all back to Marks St. Happily, several of the brights relish the stroll, setting off into the blackness with Wagner, who knows enough about Brunswick to get them there. The street smears before Joseph. Cats prowl his hallway when he clicks home the key. He's forgotten to leave the lights on; there is a degree of fumbling, an irritated hiss from Marjory Finlay. What's she doing here anyway, Joseph asks himself. She can't abide untrained people discussing the written word.

"Want some coffee, Joe?"

It's Maria Ponte, Mario's handsome, swarthy sister.

"Huh? Oh, um, yes thanks, um, Maria, I could do with something to get my mind clear."

The young woman smiles at her host and trots off to the kitchen. Joseph is touched and frightened. He battles the tape recorder for a minute, at her cleared throat looks up, takes the hot mug, nods non-commitally. Maria, abashed, sits neatly in a small chair in the corner of the living room where Joseph had the minimal wit to deploy all the seats in the house. With a sigh, he sips, puts down his mug, piles up a bundle of mixed theory and social criticism by Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault on a table beside the microphone.

The doorbell rings. Wagner and his expedition arrive with maximum rowdiness. Brian Wagner might well be as drunk as Joseph; he is extravagant, mockingly gracious to Marjory Finlay, snide to Joseph. It strikes Joseph, not for the first time, that Brian hates not being center stage. He finds his cooling coffee, drains it, nods guilty thanks again to Maria Ponte. She is looking with bemused fascination at Wagner.

"Is everyone here? Is the front door shut? I don't want the cats to get out. The lavatory is at the end of the hallway and on your left; kitchen is opposite. Feel free to make coffee for yourselves. Okay." Joseph's tongue is slightly numb. He is confused and tries to obscure the fact by dealing with simple procedural matters, step by step as he has been taught in countless laboratory experiments. "I presume you've all done the requisite reading." Fat chance with this lot, they're more into puzzles and word games than social dialectics.

"You're pissed, Joseph," Wagner informs him. "Get on with it."

"Aren't the minutes going to be read?" someone says officiously.

"If you really insist." Joseph looks around with his eyes held a tiny bit out of focus. This is a trick he learned when he first had to deliver lectures to freshman students. Despite the blurriness so induced, he is instantly terrified by what seem to be hundreds of eyes staring directly into his soul. A dollop of saliva catches in his throat.

"Boring." Brian Wagner stares hopelessly at the ceiling. "I thought you were an anarchist."

"It's more a matter of religious observance," Ray says sarcastically. "We must be teleologically correct, Joe."

Wagner, witlessly and inexplicably, presumably driven by some reflex arc of lewd association, cries: "Paleologically erect."

Joseph dismisses this with an annoyed flick. "The people who were here last month heard Mario's excellent presentation on Gödel Undecidability. Those who weren't missed out. Right now I'm going to try to explore the use of dialectical theory in the work of an avowedly marxist writer, Herbert Marcuse, who died two months ago, and Michel Foucault, who is still with us."

"You love to waste your time on these antiquated non-entities," Wagner tells him. "Worthless, all of them. Hayek, Joseph. Popper!" He squints from the corner of his eye at Marjory Finlay, whose features are utterly composed and remain so.

Joseph gazes around to remind himself who's here. "The interesting thing about Marcuse is that while great minds like Brian can't see what all the fuss was about, people like Mike Murphy sometimes can. I'm going back a long way, admittedly—let's say that around 1967 or 1968, during the Paris événements, Mike could vaguely see what all the fuss was about, but can't any longer."

Amused murmurs come from audience, entering into the spirit of the thing: "Poor Mike . . . A bit slow . . ."

Joseph grins compliantly. "Since then, of course, the nature of the fuss has changed. I stopped seeing what all the fuss was about in 1972, around . . . aw . . . halfway through Counterrevolution and Revolt, when I decided he wasn't remotely as on the ball as Michel Foucault, who of course is a Frog.' After a cunning beat, Joseph gives them a little tingle of current. Blandly, he adds, "Marcuse was not a Frog. He was a Kraut Jew, born two years later than my grandfather. So he had a few problems being accepted, but not as many as Foucault, who's a poof."

He means 'born two years earlier,' actually; at a not very deeply buried level of his unconscious, Joseph has rattled himself with what he intended as an apotropaic bite or two at any vestigial racism, ethnocentrism or homophobia in his audience. In fact, several incredulous hisses of in-drawn breath make him note that he's missed his mark again, failed to transmit his several-layered meaning, botched it, raised nothing better than a suspicion that he is himself a thoughtless Jew-baiter and queer-basher. Even as this realization washes across his brain like the dregs of an old coffee pot cast on compost, Brian Wagner has his own mouth open.

"But you're neither a Kraut nor a poofter, Joseph."

"Was this Marcuse a hike?" cries a pimply American exchange student named Kenny. He has made a point of ensuring that everyone in the room knows he once scored 176 on an accredited test instrument. "What's the salience?" He looks baffled and irritated. "And what's 'poofter' in English?"

"In English," Joe tells him, "that's 'poofter.' In American, it's 'faggot'." Have a nice day, now.

This time, the apotropaic usage seems to get through to some of them, though another stupid young bright sniggers as if Joseph were cracking a dirty joke in the school playground. Is that in fact what he's doing? The thought flashes on and off, suppressed.

Two of the magazines in his pile have photographs in them. "If you want to know what Marcuse looked like, this is a picture taken a few years ago at the University of California at San Diego, where he was an honorary emeritus prof. If you want a picture of him when he was in his filthy Freudian period we have here . . ." and Joseph widens his eyes, shows his teeth, "Herbert displaying a copy of Eros and Civilization."

Everyone cranes.Most of them have never heard of him.

"And here's Foucault, author of an on-going History of Sexuality, in all his bald glory."

"I've never heard of him."

Kenny says, "I think Delany quotes him in Tides of Lust. Or maybe it was Triton."

They peer at the sinister portrait.

Someone says, "He looks at you with slides of lust."

Joseph says snidely, "Snides of lust."

"Slides of tusk," Wagner says, not to be outdone.

Gazing carefully around the room, Joseph says in a mild voice, "Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault are very serious thinkers."

Instantly, his living room is in uproar. Volumes slip and skid as Joseph seeks a particular book. "See, the trouble, is I've got so much source material here . . ." As his voice trails away, Wagner's rises in a good-humored parody of peevishness: "It doesn't matter if I interject because of your complex arrangement of—"

"Marcuse was a figure of some importance during the antiwar protests in America and even in this country in the late 1960s, but long before that he'd been a key player in the Frankfurt School of marxist revisionist theorists, especially after they were exiled from Germany by the rise of Nazism and most especially when they reopened in New York at Columbia University in, in—"

"'34," Finlay says immediately.

"We have here an authority on the period. Ray was programming an abacus for IBM in 1934."

"Where do you keep the painting, Ray, up in the attic?"

"It's true, he don't look a day over 75."

"Like his colleague Adorno," Joseph says heroically, "Marcuse had an unusually rich concern with the tonality of culture, with abstract art and, and, and innovations such as serial music—"

"With all that tonality seriality sexuality," says bored Brian Wagner, a man who knows a word salad when he hears one. He lifts a glass of Chablis, poured from his Killawarra cask, and downs it.

Joseph is virtually trapped. He lunges for a paperback. "Which brings me back at last to Eros and Civilization."

1969: the tides of love

brunswick the golden

Sunday 30 Nov 69

Upon your distant brow.

Caroline, am I writing too often? When there's no one to talk to (most of time) I find myself grabbing paper and babbling to you. If I could sublimate this urge into writing for quipu I would be famous on six continents.

Friday: after thumping in on the thumb due to the power strike (all the trams and trains shut down, roads clogged with bad-tempered buggers—though I must admit to finding a lift with a cheerful bunch of rogues who otherwise would have had nothing in common and might never have spoken to one another) nothing happened all day. I sat around trying to look inconspicuous.

It's risky visiting the Manchesters these days. I had a splendid meal there on Friday night, but the evening deteriorated gruesomely as the numerous guests and rowdies became boozily inarticulate and Bob sang atrocious hillbilly bluegrass with the aid of his twanging ukulele. I went away most ungratefully without a word (the ghost who walks) into the sleet-like night and took a taxi home. I miss you.

My father is indeed driving me crazy. It still freaks me out to find him 'reading the paper' (the Sun, natch, he'd never open anything but a tabloid) to the high-decibel accompaniment of the most banal quiz program on telly plus the hour's pompous fascist blatherings from radio South Africa. He achieved the ultimate this morning. I got up late (well, it's Sunday) and emerged blinking and grunting to find him assiduously viewing the channel 9 test pattern. I've heard that loons do this while high on acid, but . . . Mum, of course, was muttering around in the laundry; it didn't bother her, useful tranquillizer against the old sod probably. Where did the genes comes from, I often ask myself.

Actually if this job gets any worse I might run off and join you in Sydney. I've squirreled enough money away to keep me going for maybe three months. I don't know how serious I am. But there's a limit. There are several limits.

I hope you're happy, sweetheart. I won't run through the stale rhetorical device of listing questions pertinent to your doings and welfare. You know I care, baby. Please do write, even if (like me) you've got nothing much to say—it's incredibly happy-making to come home to a letter from you.

lots of love, old lustyloon

Joseph

1975: corrosive rot

"Ray and Joe are members of a sort of exclusive global club which comprises those people who have taken a supervised IQ test—and managed to score more than 99 percent of the population."

"One in 400 actually, Grant."

"That's more than 99 percent isn't it?"

"I suppose it is," Ray admits.

"This curious tribe call themselves 'hikes' or 'brights,' and they keep in touch through the publication of amateur magazines called 'quipu,' You've probably heard of the oldest and most famous of these groups—Mensa. Now our own local brand of 'clever dicks,' as they also call themselves, is hosting the annual international Point Two Four Convocation."

"Point Two Six."

"Well I'm only off by point two. What does it mean, anyway, for Christ's sake, they don't seem to have it here?"

"Clipped on the front of the folder," the producer explains, leaning over in a veil of crisp perfume.

"Right, right."

"Point oh two, Grant."

"What? It says here—"

"Never mind. What it means is, test scores as high as ours are found in only 0.26 percent of the tested population. Just over one in 400. See?"

"Gotcha. The convocation's guest of honor," Grant Moore tells the camera, "is a distinguished British psychoanalyst, Dr. Hans Eysenck." Moore pauses to get a balky rabbit bone out of his mouth. The waitress has placed a huge wooden bowl of some antipodean approximation to wild salad in the center of the table, and a wine waiter stands by with a bottle for Moore's approval. "Hmm, a Tyrrell Pinot Chardonnay. Our wonderful Hunter Valley wines. Eat your hearts out, France." The cork is freed with a flick, wine flows golden into glasses that catch the cool sun at their brim. "Some critics allege, of course, that groups like Mensa and Point Four Six are only for the emotionally retarded and insecure."

Expansively, plucking a huge plug of savory meat from his terrine and swirling his glass in a sticky hand, Ray says, "Vergé is certainly an extremely capable and inventive chef."

The interviewer frowns. "You're suggesting that high IQ groups are the cuisine nouvelle of intellectual life, lightweight but . . . uh, inventive?"

"For a man of only 47 he's done exceptionally well, you know," Ray confides. "His Hostellerie du Moulin de Mougins received three stars last year, which makes him only the seventeenth great chef holding that honor at present."

Joseph gazes gloomily at his plate. He hates raw vegetables.

Grant Moore flips open a file, scans it rapidly, props it out of sight. "Is that right? Let me quote you something that your fellow 'hike' Mike Murphy said at last year's dust-up. This is from a man with a recorded IQ of 186. He said this: 'Hike groups are antisocial and corrosive. They damage your openness to the rest of the world and promote a fascist sense of narcissistic superiority. It's like heroin: it gets in and seeps through the person, rotting as it goes.' How do you—"

"What is truly astounding." Ray says piercingly, taking more wine, "is that Vergé got his first star as recently as 1970. Just five years, Grant. That's even more remarkable than Paul Bocuse, who had one star in 1960 and took until 1965 to get his third. Of course, it helps to have your own restaurant. Poor Guérand is still—"

"Why are you avoiding—"

"Grant, the whole world's heard of Cuisine Minceur but the poor devil's still waiting for his third star. Of course, it didn't help when the authorities went and ran a highway through his original establishment. This terrine is very nice, Jean-Pierre."

"Thank you. I shall give you fresh peaches for dessert, and black coffee."

"Great."

Grant regards him balefully. "Are you quite finished on that topic?"

Ray says very rapidly and clearly, "The international Convocation is being conducted at the Humanities Research Center by some two hundred people brought together by an entire swag of motivations. Some will listen dutifully to discussions of multi-factorial competence evaluation. Others'll mill about with their friends from here and abroad, friends they've made through a curious but painless interest in their own particular forté, which is to be clever. They will get plastered if that is their vice, and stand up in front of each other and give, we can only hope, entertaining addresses on various topics. Joseph here will talk about his attempts to pin down a kind of faster-than-light sub-atomic particle."

"Yeah, I—"

"And the common theme will be plain friendship among people whose intellectual capacities, through no fault of their own, outstrip those of virtually everyone else on this plodding and pragmatic planet."

"Look, this isn't a—"

"Grant, let me ask you one question. Are you caused to tremble in your bed if you learn of the convening of a company of, I dunno, of tegestologers all panting eagerly at the prospect of comparing their beer-mat collections? Or is it just smart people that worry you?"

Grant leans sideways across the table and pours expensive wine. "So you hikes reckon you're too smart to bother with the rest of us?'?

"By no means. The Convocation is open to anyone who takes a supervised test and scores suitably. Even those who fail are invited to join the forum discussions. You have nothing to worry about, Grant. Some of my best friends," and Ray pats him reassuringly on the hand, pauses for a killing beat, "are . . . mediocre."

The interviewer laughs explosively, slapping the table top. "You bastard! Okay, Shirl, let's have the peaches for Christ's sake." He roars again, perfectly unruffled, confirmed in his impeccable self-worth by a million viewers.

1983: dropping in

The end of Joseph's pot-holed streetlet is barred by an impressive piece of Contemporary Italian Pastrycake: all brown brick and bronze aluminum windows, row upon row of fat-calved white pillars on verandahs at multiple levels, no entrance way without its pair of barfing lions, pre-pubescent stone lads chubbily hovering over small fountains with urine only potentially cascading from their unnipped pizzles, for their water has been cut off along with the supply to the above-ground pool all crusted with tiny tiles in ornate patterns. The drought enforces equality of opportunity.

Shuddering, Brian Wagner hops from his parked car, pushes open the tired rusty gate. Joseph is not a keen gardener at the moistest of times; in this season of despair within and without, his poor array of shrubbery sags and browns, a vegetable Auschwitz.

On the verandah, out of the direct sun, Brian takes off his sunnies and considers plugging his nostrils with wads of Kleenex. The reek of unspayed tomcats cannot be ignored. He locates the electricity meter, watches the flat disc edging its round like the notorious mills of God. Running the fridge, presumably. If the telly were on for the afternoon soaps and quizzes, the thing would be whipping along at a hungrier pace.

Brian belts the door once or twice. He hardly expects Joseph to come rushing to answer his summons, but he opens the wire screen anyway and waits. Is there a flicker at his eye's edge? The bedroom curtain pushed ever so slightly aside? He lowers his head, shoves his right index finger into the dull brass letterbox flap, looks into gloom. The stench is worse closer to the ground.

"Hey Joseph, it's me. Put down that copy of Hustler at once and clean yourself up." No response. A cat mews. Another scampers, a gray flash across the end of the hallway extending down the middle of the house. Well, if they're still here and being fed, he must be alive. Brian shudders at his own instant vile conjecture: unless they are eating poor old Joseph's decaying bod.

"Wake up, you bastard. It's Wagner."

Now even the cats are silent. Could he be out? After all, he has to do his shopping some time. Still, the laws of chance deny that Joseph could have been so consistently about his own business during all three of Brian's visits to date. He must be lurking in there, feeling sorry for himself, drooping and getting drunk and reading old quipu, his obsessional anodyne when he gets into these self-destructive moods.

"Listen, did you get that SMART GENES I sent round?"

That ought to galvanize any clever dick of spirit. It fails to do so. Wagner puts his mouth to the propped-open letter slot and speaks with exaggerated care.

"I will go, Joseph, if that is what you wish me to do. However, I must leave you with one heart-warming item. The other night, I took Kathy to dinner at the Finlays'."

This is untrue and preposterous, on at least three counts: Ray and Marjory are still holidaying in trendy Pearl Beach, a thousand kilometers to the north; it is unlikely that Marj would have him in the house on so intimate a basis as dinner for four; and Kathy Schutz is deeply entranced by Jim Westcott, a part-time savate instructor. These elements of confusion and mystery may embed themselves in Joseph's unconscious, with any luck, and fester there. Anything to stir the swine into action.

"As you will know, Joe, if you have been keeping abreast of your hikeish reading, I have become very fond of that new artform, the mini-saga. The haiqu, if you'll allow the pun, of our prosy age. The epic of the digest epoch. I was inspired to record our dinner at Finlays' as a fifty word mini-saga, Joseph. If it will help improve your mood, I shall now recite this informative tale through your keyhole." He squints again into the dusty hallway. Nothing moves. Perhaps a cat snores.

He sighs. No doubt it would be possible to go around the back and clamber over the fence, although Williams Senior, half paranoid before the cancer got him, had festooned the backyard with nasty coils of barbed wire. Besides, Joe really would not appreciate such a direct assault.

"I call this work 'A Nice Night's Epic'," he cries dismally through his narrow aperture. "Are you listening? Are you poised? Not a spare syllable here, Joe. Not one phoneme wasted. For God's sake don't sneeze halfway through or you'll destroy the whole majestic flow and counter-thrust of the narrative sweep. Okay. Here it is. This one is for you, Joseph D. Williams."

Theatrically, Brian Wagner clears his throat. A blob of mucus hurtles into his mouth. As he turns to spit it into the stricken garden, he notices the interested Mediterranean faces peering down at him from the atrocious castle. He gives a jolly wave and returns to his brass hole.

"'We went to the Finlays' to dine. We drank, ate pate with bread. The meat was pink, cooking.'" Has there been some minor shift in the tension running from bedroom through the hallway to the front verandah, that inaudible psychic hum detected by the hairs on the back of the hands? Wagner has a flickering mental image of Joseph lifting his head from the pillow, turning a shabby unshaven face toward the heavy curtains that block the windows.

"'We ate paté with bread, drank. The meat darkened."' He pauses. There is no change. To his imagination comes a whiff of pork, bubbling under a grill, crisping at its thick hard edge, the rind drying into crunchy salty crackling. Does hungry, heart-crushed Joseph respond with the same mental zest? Is his dry mouth beginning to fill with anticipatory juices?

"'We drank mineral water, champagne.'" He hesitates through a cruel beat. "'The meat was burnt.'" Was that the faintest snigger from the house? "'We ate paté and bread; everybody drank,'" he concludes bleakly. "'Back home, tired, we opened a can.'"

One of the Italians has come out onto his verandah and stares down in a menacing manner. Joseph has always maintained that this is one of the strong selling features of the area, and Brian admits that it is one of the few enviable aspects to living in the non-Anglo segments of the near-inner city residential areas. They keep an eye on one another. Much less chance of getting burgled. Unless, of course, they are the ones who do the burgling (which, by and large, they aren't, preferring to obtain their out-of-pocket expenses by burning down one another's pizza parlors for the insurance).

Brian straightens, rubs at his back. He's heard none of the laughter he'd hoped to provoke. Either the bugger actually isn't in after all, or is in worse straits than anyone had guessed.

Brian trudges to his car. The faces stare down like something banal out of a Fellini movie. "It doesn't really work without the close-ups," he calls to them with an idiotic smile. "If you pressed yourself against the wall we could try some Antonioni." But they do not hear this last; he is in his car, turning the key, backing out across the damaged asphalt and the shattered spray of glass where the laughing irrepressible wog kids have smashed their drained bottles of Coke and Fanta.

1969: workers compensation

Randwick, NSW 2 December

My dear Joseph

The academic life. I'm sitting in the sun in the Roundhouse in the university at Kensington, where I have acquired a position as cleaner.

I am staying with Lanie at her brother's place. He and his wife are polite, well-off, no kids, perfectly happy with their middle-class way of life (stockbroker or something; she's an art teacher). I can stay indefinitely, so I think I'll just work here through the summer and see how I feel then.

Why am I not living in bliss with dear Antony? He didn't say a word, I had to work it out for myself. He's been offered a job at Kuringai National Park as a Ranger—collecting tolls at the gate, actually, but it appeals to some fantasy of the outdoors life. I've never met anyone (apart from you) less like the outdoors type. I'm fed up with his cowardice and dishonesty, and mean to have it out with him when he gets back from looking at the Park. The situation is unbearable—I'll have to bail out soon.

Before he hitched up to the Park, he and I and Francine went out to dinner in a trendy Paddington pub. Painful. She kept making claims on him, taking his arm, sort of shoving me out of the picture. Not that I minded really. Just so sad that she's this clingy. I drifted off and talked to lots of other people, and finally got invited to a party while the other two went crabbily home. Antony realized that he wasn't so essential to me as he'd imagined.

I feel rather desolated, don't know what to do with myself. So frustrated, reading and going to gallery exhibitions, unable to express myself in any of these arts that involve me so intensely. There's no outlet. I'm frightened of going mad again. The only solution I can think of is suicide which is so selfish but . . .

I got the bus over to Double Bay and took that John Barth book back to Henry for you. He's working on an encyclopedia at the moment and sent his sympathies for your dreary job. Maybe you could write and see if he could put some freelance encyclopedia writing your way?

I've joined a group called the Women's Liberation & Revolution Group which is beaut. I've always maintained that woman is the underdog and it's time to bite back. Read some quite interesting literature on the topic, including a thing on the Vaginal Orgasm which refutes the myth that the vagina rather than the clitoris is the site of orgasm—it's supposed to be one of the most insensitive organs in the body. If that's true, it's strange that men don't have one.

Very impressed with Mailer's Armies of the Night. The way he is allied with and simultaneously alienated from the Movement. How his ego reciprocates etc.

A movie I saw on the Black Power movement (Uptight) threw me into confusion. The notion that the Negroes have tried everything conciliatory that they can came through strongly. The only option left is violence. But even if they succeed, what then? Massacre and counter-massacre? "It doesn't matter if we are killed, we were born dead." The audience didn't appear to be greatly affected. They'd done their "thing" by going. Back to the dope and the telly. People in Australia just ignore so much—it's very exasperating.

Got a letter from Margie informing Lanie and me that a man is the answer to all our problems. How can such an intelligent woman be so naive. Settle down with babies and ignore everything.

So life goes on, week by week, hour by hour, stuffing food down our throats to survive week by week. Until my next epistle, all my love,

Caroline

P.S. Had a chance to take some LSD but decided against it.

A DOG'S WIFE

. . . eight

I suspect that what brought Fiona around in the end was the flamboyant song and dance my father laid on when the word reached him in Hollywood or at whatever banal location he was shooting his latest depredation. My desire to marry he found innately disagreeable, as who would not having entered that singular state fourteen times. (It'd eventuated that his wife was, in fact, a woman, though only just. Had the rules of entry been a hair more stringent Marcia might easily have graced the hippo category. Still.) Yet Randy discerned a redemptive quality in my choice of spouse.

"Just so long as it's not one of those godawful boys next door, sweetheart," he told me when the company finally had the telephone lines operating in the correct manner.

"He's nice," I said in the high light voice with a giggle at the corners of it that I use with Randy when I want something out of him. "You'll like him. Tee hee."

"Ah, your laugh's a tonic, Jinny." He paused and became very serious. "Just assure me on one score, sweetie. I can appreciate his interest in hunting for subatomic particles, but I must be certain . . . does he bite?"

Strange query, from the father you love. That you dote on. When you're trying to con him. After all, it wasn't as if Spot had rabies. I decided to treat the matter as a rather coarse attempt by Papa to protect his pocketbook while pretending at levity: i.e., that by 'bite' he was employing the demotic locution for 'seek undue financial advantage through abuse of personal connections,'

Coolly, therefore, I told Father, "He has money of his own, these days. His work on the correction of pitting in nuclear power containment vessels has brought us a comfortable stipend from Con Ed and certain other sizeable corporations." No call to tell Randy every detail. "Rest assured, Daddy. He won't 'bite' you."

"No, no, nothing like that," Father said, "perfectly okay. No, pet, it's just in that case I hope his quark isn't worse than his bite." And the terrible man began to shout and shriek with mirth down the line at his own excruciating silliness. Marcia must have told him about quarks, mispronouncing the word to rhyme with 'bark,' because I know for certain that Randy is no intellectual giant. His talents lie instead the direction of making money, large amounts of which he expended to make my wedding the happiest day of my life.

1973: the purloined letter

**************************

MOGADON BLUES The Journal of Pharmacological Remorse

is published at bleary infrequent intervals by Joe Williams [still here at #11, 1121 Drummond St, Carlton, gang, down the sleazy end where no one has wonderful academic parties, unless it's me] for "the usual": trade quipu, locs, a buncha stamps for the postage, and if the worst comes to the worst and inspiration fails you and you need more than Mogadon to chase down dem debbil blues, $2 for five. We have no bananas. This is MB number 6, if you're counting, and the last stencil was typed on Sunday, 23 September, 1973

**************************

OH GOD, IT WAS IN THE BREAST POCKET OF MY GRAY SUIT ALL ALONG

I just keep drifting back to Caroline when the Moggy Blues come pounding down the track, or perhaps it's the other way around. As I write this it's Wednesday the 19th, which is a sort of horrid anniversary. The usual rationale, friends: why tell you about it? Why not. It purges the soul. I strut my conscience on the mimeo stage and wait for your curses, your applause, or maybe some sage advice, commiserations, or None Of The Above—blank silence at the mailbox, embarrassment in the street if I chance to stumble across you in the Real World (Aargh!). Moggy Blues is a Journal of Record.

Five years ago, as I say, to the day, I was involved in an atrocious and unseemly fight (no fisticuffs, only bitter words) outside the Casualty entrance of the Royal Melbourne hospital, in Royal Parade, with Caro's parents. Their daughter lay in a nearly catatonic condition upstairs in the Psychiatric Ward, zonked on Largactil and barbiturates, looking white and dead and mumbling sluggishly when she could be persuaded to recognize anyone outside her own jangled brainpan. The Muirs explained to me that all this was an utter surprise, that the doctors had told them it was like a virus, coming out of nowhere, that Caroline had always been a difficult and fractious child. I was in a completely devastated frame of mind and took this as (a) a pathetic if not wicked denial of the happy-families inferno that had baked Caroline's soul to a crisp, and (b) a strong implication that I and my scurvy like were that very virus. So I told them a few things about schizophrenogenic mothers and double-binding bullshit of the kind involved in asserting simultaneously that Caro had always been an exemplary child until she met me and that she had always been a difficult loon.

Tears were shed, and Mr. Muir took his wife away to their Volvo and I got a tram home to Brunswick, where I ate a chop and several sausages which my mother placed before me without a word, and I seethed and bit my tongue and rushed back and forth to my shelf of books, pulling down Penguins by phenomenological existentialists and viciously underlined telling fragments, and finally I went to my room while my parents settled in to view Homicide, and there wrote one of the most astonishingly patronizing letters the world has ever seen.

Well, the world (until today) has not actually been privileged to witness this object.

When it was done I jammed the pages into an envelope and addressed it to the Muirs and collapsed into bed in a state combining savage catharsis and aggravated guilt, which according to all the best theories should be impossible. In the morning I re-read this denunciatory document over my Weeties and realized that if I ever wanted to see Caroline again I could not conceivably post it. So I didn't.

Why publish it now as an "open letter"?

Obviously it can't do any harm. The Muirs will never see it. Caroline will never see it. And there's some small chance, I suppose, that one or two of you who have found yourselves on the edge of this kind of ghastly catastrophe might get a hint of truth or sympathy or comfort in what I tried to tell Caroline's parents exactly five years ago but finally lacked either the courage or the ruthlessness (I still can't evaluate it) to do so.

15 Marks St.
Brunswick 3056
Thurs 19 September, 1968

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Muir,

This is not an easy letter to write, and probably will not be easy to read. Eleven o'clock at night. I have been staring at my typewriter for hours now, wondering how I can possibly express to you what I need to express. I hope you will sense that it is being written in a spirit of sincerity, concern, and, in the deepest sense (to the best of my understanding of this difficult word), love.

If what I have to say contains pain, anguish and even bitterness, I hope you will find them directed not at you but at the world's cruelty.

I must start by facing up to one ugly fact. I know you find certain distasteful characteristics in me (as a visitor in your home, as a companion for Caroline, as a human being, for that matter). Because you are civilized people, your disapproval only becomes evident in moments of utmost crisis—like the awful disagreement we had outside the hospital this afternoon.

I want to tell you both how sorry I am that my comments and attitude upset you so badly. But finally I think it was unavoidable.

I do not disagree with your assessment of my deficiencies. I know I am often cold, arrogant, and hostile, an unfinished and perhaps unfinishable person. Yes, and I can see the risks when Caroline is, as she has become, in large degree dependant upon such a person. What is worse, it is undeniable that there exist impulses in my flawed character which attempt to consolidate that dependency.

Regrettably, now that we are here, there is no simple way out of this impasse. I can only state my hope that (to the degree in which I am inextricably involved) certain other impulses might help compensate. I mean, for example, my demand for uncompromising honesty (which is brought to bear just as hard on me as on you and other people; despite appearances, I certainly don't consider myself a unique moral superman). I mean, too, a hypertrophied sense of responsibility.

Of course I realize that you find me the opposite of responsible. But responsibility can only manifest itself by reference to one's private set of values, one's general understanding of the world and how it works. I wish now to try to elucidate some of my views that have had a bearing on my relationship with Caroline and with both of you. Wherever feasible, I will borrow the concepts of specialists whose competence and experience can be acknowledged as professional and expert, where my own are (as you have pointed out) clearly amateur, limited by inexperience, and biased by involvement.

My principal source is Dr. R. D. Laing, of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London. He has written a number of influential books on the causes and treatment of mental illness. I emphasize Laing's authority because I am sensitive to Mrs. Muir's assertion of my own callowness; that, as she put it, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

We are, however, morally required to base our decisions on such information as we have to hand. Of course my interpretation of psychologists like Laing may be grievously in error. My actions may derive more from my defects than my understanding. But that is the human condition. The best that can be expected of us is sincerity guided, to the best of our intelligence, by up-to-date information.

Laing sees madness as a state of disrupted communication occurring in a social context. He lets us see that Caroline's madness is (quite literally) just another kind of lunacy in a world which is so pervasively disordered that none of us can use words and mean what we say, make plans for the future and have any genuine confidence that they will be realized.

But mental disorder is always particular. We are not all sedated in hospitals, waiting for the next electric shock treatment. We might all to some extent be deranged, but some (Caroline, sadly, among them) are strikingly so. Why are these people mad?

Laing's answer is this:

"To the best of my knowledge, no schizophrenic has been studied whose disturbed pattern of communication has not been shown to be a reflection of, and reaction to, the disturbed and disturbing pattern characterizing his or her family of origin."

I have long since overstepped the limits of propriety, but it is Caroline, after all, whom my letter is all about. As her psychiatrist has told us, Caroline is psychotic at the moment, probably schizophrenic. If this is not the case, my course of action has been gravely in error.

We can multiply 'ifs.' Perhaps Dr. Laing's account is wrong. Perhaps it is right, but I have been partly instrumental in bringing about Caroline's condition (by being, myself, one half of a 'double-bind,' an insoluble tussle).

Since there can be no question that, long before I ever met her, Caroline was well advanced into her particular unhappy state (whatever we decide to call it), at most I can only have aggravated a situation that was already serious. To be quite frank, I feel that the relationship between Caroline and me served to delay her precipitation into psychosis—if that is a true description of what has happened to her, though I hope it is not.

The first time I met Caroline, I sensed something profoundly wrong. But, as Mrs. Muir insists, I am a pessimist, I over-analyze people. Being aware of this, I did not jump to any immediate conclusion. I came to see Caroline's feyness as charming. What is more, I've noticed that because they are ipso facto 'different,' many creative, intelligent and sensitive people at university tend to be prey to prolonged bouts of depression, self-doubt and even 'suicidal' moods. However, as Caroline and I got to know one another, she very tentatively revealed more disturbing facts. For instance, that she often had visual illusions which were compelling, seductive and frightening.

You told me this afternoon that I had no right to offer opinions about Caroline, let alone her relationship with her family, that you know infinitely more about her than I ever could. I don't deny it. Yet I am quite certain that she never told you of her frequent hallucinations.

Once I knew about this, being aware of the limitations of my knowledge, I urged Caroline to tell you of her problems, and to seek psychiatric counsel. Up to this point she had been highly articulate and forthcoming about her splendid relationship with both of you and her sister. In fact, this was something that first attracted me to her; as you pointed out this afternoon I have had ambiguous and strained dealings with my own parents. Yet now she began to contradict these glowing assurances, most markedly in her reluctance to tell you candidly about her hallucinations.

On those nights she stayed with me, she'd go through prolonged episodes of agitation, trying to make up her mind whether to ring you and let you know where she was. All of this was a little peculiar, but only a little. Failing to call you is not obviously different from any thoughtless/wilful girl forgetting/refusing to let her parents know where she was, and thereby admit that they held the right to control her movements.

Not telling you about the intermittent hallucinations was more worrying, but—to be cruelly blunt about it—I could see that if you love your family very much and they have a high regard for you, then you might well feel reluctant to tell them you frequently see your dead grandfather coming at you out of the wall.

By the time I decided things were pretty serious with Caroline's state of mind, it was already (for a variety of reasons) difficult to do anything about it. Her first-year exams were close, and clearly important to Caroline. It may seem obvious now that it would have been better to stop everything, forget the exams, and call in a psychiatrist. At the time it was my considered estimate that I should do nothing beyond offering what support I could, wait until the exams were over, and then urge her to seek medical aid.

Why didn't I "do the right thing" and let you know? You raised this question today and I was unable to answer it in any terms that would not have been absolutely offensive in that place at that time. But the question remains: why did I have the audacity and stupidity to take it all into my own hands?

Perhaps because I wanted to play Svengali.

Perhaps because my hostility to my own parents transferred itself to you.

Perhaps because my cold-blooded intellect wants to test its power and theories in a 'game' with living people.

Perhaps because I am mad myself and driven by the peculiar imperatives of my madness.

Well, perhaps. I cannot and will not deny that some of these ignoble elements are implicated. But there are two fundamental reasons why I "took things into my own hands" or, more precisely, did not pass them on immediately when they appeared there.

Firstly, Caroline was plainly reluctant to broach her problems with either of you. Nor with any of her girl friends, except very cautiously and peripherally. It seemed important that she should tell someone. Trust depends on trustworthiness. If Caroline wanted to tell me things she felt incapable of revealing to you, I could not then reveal them to you. (Unless it became unquestionably imperative to do so.)

Caroline's trust enabled me to arrange for her to see a psychiatrist. That was a crucial decision in more than one way. It meant that she and I would learn if her state was as serious as I feared. It also meant (since going to a doctor was itself an objective transaction requiring the payment of fees, medical benefits and so on) that sooner or later you would learn about it without any betrayal of trust by me. If the family situation was as open and responsive as everyone except Caroline kept insisting, everything would be sorted out without too much difficulty, though, of course, not without a measure of surprise, shock, pain, resentment perhaps, and concern.

And here we are at the most disagreeable point in what I have to tell you.

My small knowledge of clinical and theoretical psychology (a mere smattering, true, as Mrs. Muir told me today; but twenty or thirty books' worth more, I have now to insist, than the great well of wisdom open to most middle-aged housewives) left me with a dilemma:

A strong materialist school of psychology maintains that mental disorder is a product of biochemical abnormalities and specific injurious learning experiences such as those Caroline suffered at times at school, say.

The main alternative school of thought derives from Freud and is less impressed by studies on rats and pigeons. It may be represented by Dr. Laing, who is uncompromising in his belief that the collapse of the experience of a human being into madness cannot be understood outside that person's crucial human context: her family, principally.

If the first school was correct, Caroline was a machine that had broken down and needed a mechanic. If the second was right, she was a person trapped in a horrid unconscious tangle. My prejudice is clear enough. I could not bring any of this out while Caroline depended on my silence.

Naturally, all these rules of thumb were abandoned at the moment Caroline broke down into psychosis. I immediately rang the psychiatrist she'd been to see on one occasion, and then I rang you. It was a ghastly situation, but I attempted to place you in possession of the facts as I saw them. You felt that I was accusing you, trying to make you feel guilt. No. I wasn't. I'm still not.

But if it has been difficult for you to pay any attention to me, an upstart youth without manners, who sponges off the government and writes for pretentious magazines, I hope you will see that I do not find it agreeable or easy to say and write things that can only reinforce your bad opinions of me.

Perhaps also I have been living too long with this tragedy as an unfolding experience to grasp the shock it must have been for you—to understand that I could hardly begin a cool and involved analysis in the unprepared moment of that shock. In the meantime, unhappily, the opportunities for understanding each other have rather diminished.

Does all this sound no better than an attempt to justify myself? It is less that than an oblique attempt to let you see in some detail through my eyes. In isolation you might consider that point of view to have little to recommend it; but we are not in isolation.

Mrs. Muir assured me that the Ward psychiatrist says the family has nothing to do with Caroline's condition, that such illnesses come utterly out of the blue. It is a tenable viewpoint, though our everyday practice denies that we believe it. I've always supposed that one of the fundamentals of our way of life is the parents' right and duty to choose the pattern of their children's education, upbringing, associates . . . Why, if not because these factors are deemed of critical importance in shaping the future character of the child? Can we abdicate from that realistic expectation if the results are not to our liking?

I urge this line of thought, despite the fact that its implications in the present situation are far from happy, not from some absurd pretention to dispense blame and guilt. I do so because if it is true we can all do something for Caroline.

If mental disorder appears in a flash from nowhere, or from the buried infantile past, then we are helpless; nothing can be done. But if it is a state of mind sustained by identifiable relationships in the present, if it is the outcome of patterns of action that have prevailed for years unnoticed and prevail still, then everything can be done, when we uncover and change those patterns.

Can you truly believe you're doing Caroline a service when you deftly steer conversations away from "depressing" topics? Or are you afraid to listen?

Do you actually think everything is bright and well and promising again when finally she gives up the attempt to communicate these profoundly important, agonizing thoughts and feelings, and bustles instead with a practiced smile chattering banalities? I've watched this performance often enough, and it makes my skin crawl.

Can't you see the superhuman effort she has made to talk about these dreadful things, to try to come to terms with them, which you—with the best will in the world, I don't deny it—neutralize with 'optimism'? Do you fail to see the gray metal gates slam into place at the very instant she becomes once more, to your relief and delight, your 'dutiful, happy, recovering daughter'?

You have never seen Caroline numb and staring blankly in the room she's renting, or weeping in a kind of hopeless loneliness at what she says is the bitter futility of it all: as she wonders yet again why to go on living.

Do my words seem nothing more than macabre fantastic rhetoric? Can you really believe that?

I suppose I've just destroyed any fragment of empathy that might have survived my earlier pages. I can only hope this is not entirely true. Perhaps you might wish to show this letter to Caroline's psychiatrist, or the Ward doctor, and get their reactions. Please do so, if you think it appropriate. Whatever happens, I hope you will give some consideration to what I've said here. This letter has not been undertaken lightly. I feel exhausted.

My love to you all,

Joseph Williams

one small step for [a] (man)

CONVEYOR BELT

Perhaps no single invention has so revolutionized humanity's war habits and methods of production, and been so thoroughly loathed, as the conveyor belt.

It has taken much of the hard physical labor out of work and replaced it with tension and ruthless monotony.

The design concept is simple. Instead of loading materials into motor-driven vehicles and taking them from place to place, the motor stays put and drives a rotating pulley. A long belt is attached, supported at intervals by rollers, and the materials are carried on the moving belt. In 1868 such a conveyor was used in Liverpool, England, to transport grain on the docks. The revolutionary impact came, however, when small machine parts were rolled past a line of workers who assembled them into larger machine components.

The method had been pioneered in 1798 by Eli Whitney, an American gun maker. A century later, in 1908, Henry Ford coupled small-part manufacture and assembly with the conveyor belt to mass-produce the Model T motor car.

The benefit depends on careful analysis of the best way to put the parts together, with the least wasted effort. Since each individual task is simple, semi-skilled workers can replace all-round craftsmen, at lower wages. With fewer skills, and therefore less industrial leverage, these workers are less likely to strike for improved money or conditions.

——————————————————————————————————

Citrus sauce: A lemon tree, my dear Watson

——————————————————————————————————

The end of the line of this technique is automation—the total replacement of human workers by machines controlled with computers. With the rise of the micro-chip, this result can be expected increasingly throughout society in the 1980s and 1990s.

1969: joseph and dzhugashvili

brunswick Sunday

7/12/69

Caroline honey

I'm sorry to hear Antony is screwing you up, but it was fairly predictable. I hope you can get everything settled without too much anguish and boredom.

Of course, by now (I assume) you've surely been seduced away all flushed with sonnets and bubbly into the penthouse apt of some lustful Assistant Professor.

At present I labor through Bertram Wolfe's Three Who Made a Revolution . . . Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin. At 400 pages (much of it read standing up in the tram, poor proletarian swine that I am) I'm only at the halfway mark. It's as stirring as last year's telephone directory. Still, I now feel competent to begin talking to our better informed comrades.

Tuesday afternoon I finally screwed together the courage to see your dentist again. He was properly indignant that I should be back to see him so soon; his professional competence was affronted. We had stabbing and jabbing and drilling for many happy minutes before he discerned that the damned thing was nerve-free, dead as a stale fart. So he patched it up and warned me of the Five Danger Signs of Incipient Abscess.

Is your pulse hammering as you learn these fascinating truths? Of such is the epic of my life composed. Perhaps I should after all produce a quipu of my own and fill it with these boredom-defying details.

So I sit at my desk and read about Lenin, a subversive activity funded all unknowing by the nation's leading capitalists. When the boss infrequently ghosts across the room I leap smartly about with a conciliatory smile and do his bidding. An example? Only too happy:

On Thursday I was invited to rule 200 pages into squares with pencil and straight edge. Having failed to master the art of malingering, I cheated laterally, inventing the cardboard cut-out template. It blew the poor bugger's mind when I completed the task some ten times faster than he'd anticipated, and he couldn't be bothered contriving any further makework. I sat paranoically for the rest of the day reading Lenin's insane life and waiting to get fired for redundancy. My God.

As for the Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm: surely sex authorities have been maintaining for years that the twat proper is as sensitive as a frozen glove. (A telling figure of speech, I hear you cry.) After all, as Reader's Digest articles assure us monthly, leading specialists relish nothing better than to perform all manner of drastic surgery to the inner vagina without resort to anaesthetics. Which just makes the mystery of female sexuality more obscure, of course. On the basis of my quite remarkably modest field research it seems undeniable that orgasms for ladies are more extended and intense, when they finally actually get around to happening, than for men, or me anyway. The clitoris is clearly rather crucial to the process. So you'd think female masturbation should be more popular than it is commonly held to be. Curious. Very curious.

At the Gallaghers' party yesterday I responded to the general gaiety as to a hammer gradually smashing my bones. Libby refused to be comforted. Mad Quintilla stayed away. The host was as repulsively obnoxious as he's grown to be.

I eventually took a tram to the Manchesters' and slept there after a pleasant enough evening. Their several guests proved to have Advanced Opinions. Not an aspirin between us, we all pussyfooted around the hungover morning sharing mild expressions of comfort, rather than shouting and hunting.

Don't you dare commit suicide. Come over here and I'll kiss it better. Space gone better close. Lots love babe.

1970: apocalypse now

JANUARY FIRST NINETEEN SEVENTY

The clocks are being smashed.

We are a generation in revolt. The old rhythms are breaking up, ocean froth before a tidal wave.

Now is not then. The clocks are shuddering and shattering. This world of us is not the world of them.

We are a generation in revolt against the sickly wistfulness of bullshit sentiment, against the evasions that stifle honesty and rage, against the dull gray smog of dull robot work and gray lifeless clothes on stiff dummy bones.

And yes, indeed, we are in revolt against that one bright feverish flame at the center of the dull gray world we were born into, the lunatic nuclear flame that is waiting to burn us out.

It is in the last ten years that we have become who we are.

We are the generation walking cool on our own feet into the Seventies but we were formed by the Sixties. That ferocious decade which has just closed was the time when we found ourselves, created in our own bodies and our own styles a rhythm shaking the worn-out world.

And it is the music of the Sixties that is our rhythm and our style, our voice, our voyage of discovery: us shaping ourselves.

Where we have been already points to where we are going. And where we are going—if we keep our nerve, if we keep our cool, if we keep our truth, if they do not destroy us first—is into the Revolution of Joy.

The music of the Sixties is our history.

It is the mad, wild, fierce truth of Dylan, and his lyricism.

The music of the Sixties is the dream fantasia of psychedelic West Coast America, the surf pulse and the good vibrations of the Beach Boys, the blatant savage adrenaline of Jimi Hendrix, the nimble black Tamla Motown beat, the White Negro voyage of Presley.

Above all the music of the Sixties is the evolution of the Beatles: the honest sexy excitement of their first songs, the nervy innovations of Sgt. Pepper, their hungry curiosity for new ways to speak and sing and their glad embrace of ancient raga from that crowded Indian manscape that previous generations had despised and crucified, the search for reality and beauty no matter the color of its skin, the discovery of the naked human body, that taming of the devouring computer to the musician's soul-plucking, sledgehammer art, the welding of East and West and Peace and Love in the strange wonderful harmonies, so vile and so hideous to older ears and eyes, of John and Yoko . . .

It is our poetry, scarring the sky and tearing apart the placid paralysis of the air, coming on strong and heavy with all the good and bad vibrations, all of them.

The music of the Sixties, if it does not fail, if we do not let it out of our hands, is an arrow into the history of the Seventies.

1971: young love is such a sweet emotion

Ray Finlay listens to strange music in the sunny autumn of 1971. Holocaust burns in South-East Asia. Gangsters less couth than usual rule in Washington. Toadies more feeble than average govern in Australia. History is flattening into foul stagnation. Eight human beings have stood on the Moon. Naked in the afternoon and conscious of his small but definite pot belly, 29 years old, Ray is fucking with his girlfriend. It is not yet de rigeur for Ray to think of her as his 'woman,' not at any rate in Australia. And Marjory Nourse, barely 20, remains legally a 'girl,' Of course this legal fiction of physical and mental immaturity would be tested more drastically were she a boy (though if she were a boy she would not be under Ray Finlay's thrusting body at this moment or any other; oh no), for if Marjory had copped a Y chromosome instead of one of her two X's, she'd be tumbling in the barrel with all the other hapless conscription marbles. By life-affirming contrast, instead of shivering in peril of some ghastly Indo-Chinese jungle trail she cries and pants and heaves her chubby glowing body against her lover's.

They are alone in their household, a rare pleasure. Jan and Peter have strolled across to mad Don's Blockhouse to plan the final deployment of their contingent in the revolution. Well, the demo. Peter and Jan seem to share an unspoken and ill-defined hope that storming Hyde Park will steamroller events directly into Revolution, though 1969's assault on the American Embassy in Melbourne mysteriously failed to attain that end. Nor, indeed, did those heart-cracking Moratorium parades, the scores of thousands marching behind Dr. Jim Cairns, socialist parliamentarian and saint of resistance. This time, though, surely the proletarian struggle will be vindicated in a great spontaneous uprising of Workers and Students, 1968 Paris in 1971 Australia, forging, in harmony, out of history and turmoil, the nation's brave future. "If it doesn't happen everyone's in big trouble," Ray has commented caustically. "Because the buggers are never going to vote for a Labor Government."

Actually Ray does not really object to this barmy myth of redemption, having concluded that some people possess a need, rather like a vitamin deficiency, to believe they can make the incredible tangible. On the other hand he'll fly off the handle if anyone asks his star sign, or calculates the mystic numeric value of the letters in his name, or tells him how they saw this enormous white flying saucer in the sky, right near where you'd expect the moon to be but twice as large.

So, while the others foment the stuff of destiny, Marjory and Ray stay home and employ themselves at a more sensuous exploration. On the stereo is a John Cage tape Marjory has brought home from the university library. A lusty arrhythmic collage disorders the air. Post-coital Finlay, Ph.D., and his lissom if well-padded student, by no means sad after, jump and fall and roll and giggle from one item of furniture to the next, convulsing in shrieks at the sheer presumptuous lunacy caroming from wall to wall.

It's one thing to practice erotic elaborations to West Coast raga-rock, and quite another to make holy sex within the cathedral mathematics of Bach. But Cage, Ray reflects (watchful as always from that quantum remove which elides only in sleep), Cage puts you where you are every day. His hands snarl on Marjory's damp, drying skin. Cage is the guts of the 20th century.

These abstractions are subliminal to vanishing point. For the most part Ray and Marjory hoot, and stop to listen spellbound, and grapple with each other. The polite rapping at the door is assimilated to the background.

The second time, white Ray pushes pink Marjory away and sneaks to the door. He flips down the mirror system that cunning Don has installed to one side of the front verandah (against der Tag, or its thwarting), and views Marjory's parents from two superior angles.

Mrs. Nourse knocks a third time. They've heard something. Denied satisfaction now, they'll be up the side in a flash, and in the back way.

Ray dives for the stereo and turns it up, tosses Marj her shift while she hunts for her panties, and scoots for the bathroom. The hot water nearly scalds him sterile, but he emerges pink and bathrobed and rubbing at his soaked hair with the nonchalance of one who's sung contentedly beneath the shower for half an hour. Tight and edgy, the parents are settling themselves at the big table while Marjory, with quite awesome composure, empties the teapot.

"Why, hello," says surprised Ray, shaking water from his beard. "Pardon my appearance, I've—"

"—just come over for a shower," Mrs. Nourse tells him in her guileless voice. "Poor dear, Marj has just been saying how the Gas Board are doing repairs in your street."

"Odd sort of music," says Mr. Nourse dubiously, knowing but wondering, his nostrils a-twitch.

"It is a nuisance. They just love digging up my road." Ray turns the Cage tape down to reasonable volume, then lowers it further. "An avant garde composer, Tom, not everybody's taste."

"Not mine, certainly. The world's gone mad when they can call that sort of din music." Naturally he doesn't believe the set-up for a moment, but he does what he can. His wife Doris, timid as a little owl, nudges a dirty teaspoon around the table in front of her and believes with all her might,

"Tea or beer, Ray?" Marjory is sluicing cups. "I think Peter left some in the fridge. He and his wife're out visiting, Mum. They'll be sorry they missed you, you come round so seldom."

"You've got your own life to lead," Nourse says. "Study and all."

Possibly this is a blow beneath the belt, but if so it's of unusual subtlety. Ray met Marjory seven years ago through friends of her parents, when Marj was a spotty and fairly unappealing thirteen year old, sluggish with her homework and in dire need of extra-curricular guidance. Not that Ray is a cradlesnatcher; it was fully five years before Marjory effectively expressed her carnal interest and managed to tussle her once and future tutor onto a rose-patterned carpet in the family dayroom.

"You should invite them home for dinner one night," Doris Nourse ventures. "And Ray too, of course."

"Tea, pet," Ray says, scrubbing at his wet scalp. "Yes indeed, must arrange that some time, Mrs. Nourse."

"One thing about Ray," Mrs. Nourse confides in her husband. She says it every time. "He's the only visitor who helps with the washing-up without being asked." Tom Nourse grunts his tired amazement at this fact.

Ray can hardly keep standing here wearing only a borrowed bathrobe. "Don't bother pouring mine," he says in a confident social voice as Marjory brings the implements to the table. As she turns back for the pot (naked, its woollen cosy long lost), she gives him a sour satiric glance. He is obliged to cover his mouth with the sopping towel.

Fortunately he has left his garments in the hall, scattered as they fell. Through the bedroom door he slides, scooping socks, closes it with a silent groan. Time is against him. He has to get back to the kitchen before Marjory blows her limited cool and starts a screaming match with her father over some modest ideological difference, such as the value of human life.

When Ray returns in jeans, tee-shirt and thongs, Tom Nourse is studying the stereo boxes in a marked manner. Marjory and her Mum push on with a vapid and only slightly strained natter about a Nourse neighbor's hysterectomy. You just can't keep sex out of these conversations. He debates leaving the Cage on. It will drive them away more swiftly and discourage their return for a few months. A more humane impulse takes him to the machine.

"It's been warm," he points out, running the spool off.

"Not too hot for these student demonstrators, apparently."

Aw, no. Ray pours tea, fetches it to the sturdy plastic garbage can where he sits during political debates. "It'll certainly be a test of their convictions," he says guardedly.

"Of their brainwashing." Evidently Nourse is in fine fettle for he adds, "Probably the only kind of washing most of them are familiar with."

Among wolves, Ray recalls, baring the throat is a sign of conciliation. Not here. His own feint having so miserably failed, he can scarcely object (though he does, he does) when Marjory relinquishes the matter of reproductive surgery in favor of its form. "Come off it!" Feral-eyed, she castrates her father with a ghastly glare. "We may not be pathologically obsessed with anal compulsions, but we've been adequately potty-trained, as I dare say you'll recall. Who the hell—"

Ray sees little value in this. "Actually," he says loudly, "all the long-haired protesters in my classes enjoy a shower quite as much as I do." His wet hair is flat against his head, pretending to be shorter than it is; he toys with a lock and says rapidly, "Are you sure you won't have some beer, Tom? Plenty of cans in the fridge. Pete got in a good supply for the uh barbecue."

"For after the uh demo," Marjory says defiantly, resenting his evasion, his duplicity.

The old man looks as happy as Ray's ever seen him, like a veteran examining a war wound that hurts excruciatingly. Doris Nourse is clearly wishing the whole scene would turn into a television commercial. "I wouldn't say no, Ray," says Tom Nourse. "A cool glass would go down very nicely today. Try and get a good head on it." As a charger of glasses, Ray Finlay is notoriously inept.

"Do you think it's wise?" Mrs. Nourse asks nervously. "You're not going to get hurt, are you, dear?"

"Of course she's not," Ray says, pouring a glass that's seven-eighths froth. "Probably," says Marjory simultaneously. "Nonsense," Ray tells them. "It'll be thoroughly organized. After all, the marchers do represent the most educated, responsible and capable—"

"Humph," snorts Nourse, regarding the botched beer.

"If the bloody cops don't run riot," Marjory says, "and beat up all the pregnant women."

Doris Nourse blanches, and her fingers twitch the teaspoon. Ray feels an irritated impulse to pat her hand. It's all right, dear, Marjory may be thoroughly and scandalously debauched but she's not pregnant. Can't say that, though. That's not the name of the charade. Our daughter may be Wild and Eccentric, but thank the Lord she has her Virtue still.

In truth he's appalled, as always. Ray is easily shocked by other people being shocked by things that don't shock him. Still, if that's the way they want it there's no gain in ramming the obvious down their throats. And maybe getting Marjory's allowance cut off. He has no ambition to become perforce her sole support and comfort. Not that it's likely. He recalls one time she went home for the weekend and left her pills lying around. "I see the doctor has given you something to regularize your periods," her mother had told her. "That's right, Mum." Ray feels an odd rush of affection.

It can't be sustained, though. Nourse is saying drearily, "Now I've got an open mind about things and I like to see both sides of every question," always the dichotomy, the mentally crippling binarization, every major and minor issue has two and only two sides, "but if you're actually suggesting that the Police Force, a splendid body of men with the rare exception, the very rare rotten apple, Detective Inspector Hubbard is one of my oldest friends, that they're wrong to protect the community from rioting over-educated little upstarts with too much money in their pockets . . ."

"Over-educated?" Of course Marjory is on her feet, actually out of her chair and yelling. "Too much god-damned thinking, is that what's wrong with us?"

" . . .manipulated by the Reds . . ." Nourse is saying, but Marjory plainly means to refute his assertions point by point.

"Too much money, for Christ's sake? It's your complacent mindless little clerks who get the money, baby!" His true love's hold on democratic principles, Ray observes, goes all to pieces under stress. Her hands grip the edge of the table while her father sits back now, relaxed, puffing his pipe. "Rioting?" she cries shrilly. "Oh the callous bastards, they're out there beating up those poor leather-jacketed club-swinging pregnant policemen. And bombing their hospitals." She exhausts breath and impetus, and walks shakily across the small room to Ray's perch on the garbage can.

"Marjory!" her mother objects in a shocked whisper. "What kind of language is that?"

"Oh, fuck off," Marj mutters. But she masks it by swilling down the last of Ray's beer.

TWO: a purchase on invention

For what we can no longer accept is precisely this Joycean faith in the transcribability of things. It is because reality cannot be recorded that realism is dead. All writing, all composition, is construction . . . There is no mimesis, only poiesis.

::Robert Scholes, "The fictional criticism of the future"

A DOG'S WIFE

. . .seven

Spot rose to his feet at the wedding reception, lurching more than somewhat, and replied to the toast. The cantors smiled, and the mullahs did the same, and the officiating Cardinal applauded, with all his conclave of nuns and monks and a brace of castrati if I'm not in error.

"Acknowledgments," cried my husband, who had been inhaling the herb. "We wish to thank the musicians. All that sawing and smiting, bowing and puffing and groaning, and why? Why, only to sooth the gusts into gaiety. Here we go. Lift those ankles and prance.

"The magicians, yes, the tumblers, whipping their endless purple, crimson, golden scarves in the spanking musical air. Fowls from eggs, great tails lofting under high crystal, green feathers, hard green, soft green. Sawn in half. Bulky bolted brass-and-leather boxes, proved empty moments earlier. Sheer magic. Good work, team.

"Some people find the libretto obscure. Not us. We're polyglot. And grateful for the poet's drawn face and crabbed manner and song, song.

"Who? The lighting people, sure. Beams like harsh metal poles furring, fogging where they splash into astonishing scales of peals of tinkles of gongings of lightning blue, satin pinks, reds, purples, and all the whites, and the rest.

"There's food on every table, here and there in silver porcelain wooden platters slipping from plates into bowls of dip and sauces laid on the tables and marble waiting surfaces: birds, slabs of crusty meat oozing juice the moon curves of mandarins, oranges, grapefruit, the gold and purple of passionfruit, slimy on the tongue but cut by tart, and tarts all slithery in berries and apricots, pale peaches with sugar crusting, melting cliffs of egg white meringue. So here's one for the chef, the cooks and helpers, the serving staff. Good eating, no doubt, no question there."

The microphone made spattering noises from this point on, for Spot was salivating with delirious stoned intensity, laughing his fool head off and biting from moment to moment at his own flanks.

"Company. The guests. eh? Doing your bit, swarming about, chattering and nattering, bellyaching just enough that we know you're taking the business seriously and yielding no quarter out of sentiment for Randy and Fiona and the lovely lass herself."

Bruce Garbage, the punk crooner whom Randy had flown in from San Antonio, tried valiantly to wrest away command of the public address system but was clearly in terror of having his leather Savile Row suit nipped. Balked, he brought up all his fingers and swung them down in the gesture which at the close of 1981 was to be featured on the cover of Time, and his ensemble seized up their instruments once more and heaved us all into a bruising bout of interactive slam dancing.

1979: things fall apart

A scratch afflicts Joseph's throat. He has been talking at the hike Nitting Circle about the theorists Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault for nearly an hour now, much of the time shouting to convey his scrambled thoughts above the incessant kibitzing and Nit-Picking of his close friend and associate Brian Wagner. He eases the irritation with a glass of light, or lite, ale, and snaps with some viciousness at Wagner, "Fucking piss off, Brian." At once, squeezing his eyes tight against his own aggression, he rushes on, "It's curious that around the time Marcuse revealed the rather startling notions of oppressive tolerance and 'repressive desublimation,' we notice that Foucault was besotted with the idea—Foucault makes this absolutely abominable claim. No, I won't tell you about that—" Instead, he picks up and displays The History of Sexuality, Vol I.

"Go on, Joe. He said what?"

Joseph sighs, rummages again. "Okay, he's discussing Nietzsche. The Frogs all love the Krauts. No wonder they—All right, he says this: 'Man, in his finitude, is inseparable from infinity. The death of God is accomplished through the death of man.' I mean, give me a break."

Wagner has a cigarette out and alight, to everyone's distaste. "He writes badly, yeah."

"It's not just that he writes badly, it's, it's almost impossible to believe . . . Here's a piece he wrote about Bataille: 'The discovery of sexuality, the discovery of that firmament of indefinite unreality—'"

'What!'

"Hang on. '—the discovery of those systematic forms of prohibition that we now know imprison it, the discovery of the universal nature of transgression in which it is both object and instrument—indicates in a sufficiently forceful way the impossibility of attributing the millenary language of dialectics to the major experience that sexuality forms for us.' I trust that's perfectly clear."

A rustle of uneasy laughter.

"See, the heightened and prophetic quality of Foucault's writing from the beginning gets more and more mannered. And his fans love him for it. It's so poetic. It's so transgressive."

This is no news to Wagner. "He has a linguistic problem, really. They all do."

Joseph waves at a wisp of smoke and sighs. "Bullshit. It's deliberate evasion of declarative, um, clarity, chosen for reasons that are probably impeccable. He's made a linguistic decision to have his words work in an unusual way. He wants to show actions and ideas interpenetrating with a degree of force inexpressible in ordinary French, let alone English. It just happens to . . . give me the screaming willies."

"I think he'd like us to feel it could only be expressed—"

RAY FINLAY (first words masked by Wagner's, above):

. . .in the log-jam of trying to work out—

JOSEPH:

Hang on. Ray, once you're onto his paradigm it shouldn't cause any problems per se. It's poetic locution made toward a cognitive end.

RAY:

Oh, I'd agree. To get the intended effect, you'd have to read straight through without thinking and—

BRIAN WAGNER:

How many treatises are you prepared to read through without thinking, Ray?

RAY:

Well, obviously you can go wrong. I've been reading Jacques Lacan in translation and—

JOSEPH:

Christ, he's even more obscure than Foucault.

KENNY:

This is the radical French psychiatrist, right?

JOSEPH:

Yep. Ray, I get the impression that Lacan has taken Freud in directions that Laing might have—Sorry, we're getting a bit—

RAY:

How much of it is the sheer difficulty of translating these poetic statements from one language to another?

JOSEPH:

Exactly! One commentator mentions Foucault's discussion of, um, the 'solar hollow' which he says is 'the space of Roussel's language, the void from which he speaks'."

KENNY:

But Bertrand Russell was English, right, not French? So he—

JOSEPH:

Raymond Roussel, the notorious surrealist. Okay, so this could of course be one playful loon piled on top of another, but what if the term Foucault actually used was 'solar plexus'? This wouldn't advance the world's knowledge a great deal, but it would be less, you know . . . random . . . than 'solar hollow.'

RAY:

That's exactly where I was headed with Lacan, Joe. I was in a study group of psychiatrists the other day—

VOICE:

Ah, they've caught up with you, eh?

ANOTHER VOICE:

But he escaped. Quite mad, but a master of disguise.

[Laughter]

RAY:

—poring over a page of Lacan. He mentioned 'the fractured terms of language's solar specter,' or something like that, and the assembled psychiatrists all fell to babbling, trying to parse this mysterious truth of the unutterable unconscious and its prophet.

MARJORY:

I suppose you set them straight. Even though you speak and read no French.

RAY:

Correct. A specter, eh? Was this the Derridean trace image of the phallocratic sovereign subject, they asked each other. Could the marxist Lacan actually have believed in ghosts and spirits? On and on it went. After a while, I suggested that maybe Lacan was simply drawing an analogy.White light is broken into its constituents by a prism. So too with language. But nobody in the room knew if 'spectrum' is or can be the same word as 'specter' in French, or if the pun would be sustainable, and anyway my interpretation was deemed intolerably reductive and scientistic . . .

MARJORY:

'Spectrum' does translate into 'specter.'

RAY:

Amazing what a training in computer science does for one's powers of extrapolation. Anyway, my point is that even if Lacan actually was making sense, underneath the poetic tosh, you'd never find much evidence of it in his earnest and laughable English-speaking interpreters, let alone his followers.

JOSEPH:

This level of evasion and fancy footwork is now a signature of all the poststructuralists, but the question is: is our own irritation and laziness as readers a product of Marcuse's repressive desublimation? Or is the opaque writing itself evidence of textual laziness?

RAY:

Pretty energetic laziness.

JOSEPH:

Exactly. Exactly.

BRIAN: Big deal. What becomes of a thinker who grows so enamored of his linguistic ability that he turns into a fool when he tries to present his subject matter?

RAY:

Take the other point of view, that Foucault and Lacan are always striving for effects they feel can't be gained with ordinary language, except with an enormous amount of—

BRIAN:

Come on, look at the medium they've chosen to work in. Psychoanalysis, the most pretentious and bogus . . .

JOSEPH:

I'm not convinced it is. They take fairly considerable pains to stress that the linguistic space—the connotative space—available to the 20th century critical theorist is in fact considerably different from that available to the classic empiricist. Marcuse's revival of the dialectic—

BRIAN:

Academic wanking. They play these elaborate games with their followers. It's a big world out there.

[A confusion of voices]

JOSEPH:

Well, sure, it bothers me, too, when Foucault tosses off this sort of merry aside: 'If mental pathology has always been and remains a source of psychological experience, it is not because illness reveals hidden structures, not because man here more easily recognizes the face of his truth, but on the contrary because he discovers here the dark side of this truth and the absolute fact of its contradiction. Illness is the psychological truth of health, to the very extent that it is its human contradiction.' He adds that psychology 'will be saved only by a return to hell'."

BRIAN:

Joe, for fuck's sake, do you actually have the gall to sit there and tell us we should be interested in the intentions of a writer capable of that sort of obfuscation?

JOSEPH: There's no obfuscation within that—

RAY: He's trying to be—

JOSEPH:—Trying to be precise—

RAY:—trying for clarity.

JOSEPH:—pin it down, multiple codes—

RAY: You try and read Finnegans Wake and—

BRIAN: But Ray, he—Why can't you—

JOSEPH: He's explicating a transparent binary contrast of the world—

RAY:Yeah.

JOSEPH:

—or apparently transparent, but he immediately, I mean the thing that comes through is the degree to which what one had stupidly thought to be fairly straightforward is multiply complex, layered with an extraordinary number of overlapping—

BRIAN:

Bullshit! What 'contradiction'? Is a broken leg the 'dark side' or 'infernal contradiction' of a straight one? This is as bad as that Nazi fruitcake Heidegger.

MARIO PONTE:

Is he asserting that these oppositions express the theorist's analysis, or is he trying to peel the surfaces back and expose the theorist's own psyche? Because ninety per cent of what anybody experiences is what he's obliged by culture to experience.

JOSEPH:

Foucault's experimenting in a critical laboratory not many people in the English-speaking world are yet acquainted with: semiotics, deconstructionist—

RAY:

The Structuralists.

JOSEPH:

The poststructuralists. Derrida, Kristeva, that lot. He starts from a proposition that Roland Barthes put forward in a book called "S slash Z"—

BRIAN:

Speculative Zonk.

JOSEPH:

Hmm. Semi-Zymurgyic. Barthes draws the distinction between the writerly text and the readerly text. The writerly text in some sense has a privileged position, aesthetically, over the readerly text. The readerly text is that which we—as far as I can make out; it's very obscure to me, and I would hope that Madame Finlay would help out on this—the readerly text is the classic text, the text which gives itself up to us in all its plenitude, and soothes our minds and massages our sensibilities and tell us all the things we want to know.

The writerly text is the creative interface between the words and the person either writing or reading (as I understand it); we readers don't 'read' the writerly text, we write the fucking thing. And the intention of the author more or less disappears, because we have no—we ought to have no interest . . . You can argue that there's no way of reclaiming the intention of the writer. although a lot of people tried to, in the New Criticism . . . I suppose . . . or do I mean . . .?

MARJORY FINLAY:

The Intentional Fallacy, but you've got it arse-about.

JOSEPH: The Intentionalist Fallacy was repudiated, then, by the New Critics.

MARIO PONTE (musingly):

Where did Gore Vidal discuss that?

BRIAN WAGNER:

Borges said it too, beautiful—

MARIO PONTE:

I read it in something this afternoon somewhere—

JOSEPH:

There's obviously a sense in which it must be true, a sense reflected in Marxist terms like praxis, where the reader engages with the text, creates the text—

RAY:

This is—

JOSEPH:

They're not saying, Here's a Rorschach blot, do what you like—

RAY:

This is quite plainly true, in a restricted sense. We do recreate the text as individuals, simply because no two individuals understand similarly.

JOSEPH:

I'm not sure you can even say you 'recreate' it.

RAY:

The text is the bedrock basis on which you work.

JOSEPH:

Yes, obviously a lot of information is actually embedded in the text proper, it possesses a predetermined structure, and so I find it hard to have all that much empathy with this view. Nonetheless, it's a position that can be defended. Foucault's obviously enormously concerned with it. I mean, he wrote an essay three or four years ago called 'What is an Author?' which often gets confused with Barthes's essay 'The Death of the Author.' Both of them see their dialectical theories as emerging from the system of discourse itself, but the more they tried to obliterate the author, the more their fame as authors grew and grew.

MARJORY FINLAY:

The Writer As Masturbator.

JOSEPH:

Well, they both make a decent fist of it . . . Ahem. Still, there's obviously a paradox at work. Their work seems to me drenched with the torment of their own lives.

BRIAN:

Big deal, Joseph. What else could writers write about, after all? Boring.

JOSEPH:

Well, about meaning. About how language means. I don't know how useful it is; maybe it's so truistic that—But Foucault has been fairly self-aware of this preoccupation right from the beginning. All of his studies, starting from his work with the insane and apparently inarticulate, have been concerned with Making Sense.

BRIAN:

With Making It.

: loitering with intent

still Brunswick yet, already

Monday 29 dec 69

well me dear old sweetheart happy new year

Melbourne is a terrible place. You were right to leave. Sunday was 101 degrees; today a grim and blowing drear.

I visited the Manchesters this afternoon. I sat and chatted and sat and waited and lounged and hungered and at length drew myself up and made for the door, only to be stayed with a nine o'clock invitation to dinner. But not stayed in fact; ran for the tram all hollow within. The chilly stupid misery of the Swanston and Flinders Street intersection, and a slow cold tram. Why can I only deal with people through the imposed distance of quipu? Ah shit.

On the edge of a new year and a new decade I am prostrate once more at your absence. Strange that I never felt this when you were present. (Um, that was meant to be a joke.) (Not funny.) I could go on at length about work, but why appal two of us? all my love, pet—stay alive

1983: talking back

A week's dishwashing awaits Brian Wagner when he wakes. There are no clean bowls left. Grudgingly, slitting his eyes against the late morning summer sun, he fills the sink and shovels everything in, scrubbing half-heartedly at a suitable vessel. When most of its crust is gone he fishes it out and lets it drain while he looks for a dessert spoon.

His breakfast muesli has gone. With a curse he clicks on the clock radio above the refrigerator and hunts out batches of makings, fat plastic bags that have to be slashed and emptied into mouse-proof jars. As he blends his special mix, he glances at the prices on the packages and thinks profoundly on inflation. It is, he decides, primarily a means of taxing everyone's capital by ensuring that interest rates are pushed so high that just to keep your savings indexed to real-terms parity you need to pay a third or more of the inflated margin out in tax: a hidden levy, in effect. It's not simply a matter of bracket-creep, ordinary wage-earners being shoved up into higher tax brackets. That can be accommodated to everyone's political advantage by regular 'tax cuts' that just reinstate the status quo. The status quid pro quo. A quid is still a pro, he hums. A pro is still a quid. No, ripping off inflation-boosted interest is far more sinister, the sole meaningful explanation for inflation in conspiracy terms (and what other kind is worth a moment of your time?) that Brian has yet come across.

The radio is muttering in a familiar slow, theatrically modulated yet inoffensive explanatory manner. Brian grinds a wooden spoon through his mixture (Natural unprocessed bran 43 cents, Black & Gold processed bran 81 cents, Morning Sun rolled oats 87 cents but that's for 750 grams rather than 500, handfuls of Sunbeam currants a whopping 91 cents for 375 grams, a curious measure on the face of it, though it's a quarter of 1.5 kilos for what that's worth, and bits of chopped dried apricot and walnuts no identifiable price since he threw the wrappers out last week). The best prices he can find, but criminally dear. He gives himself a big bowl of it, pours milk, puts it aside to soak, goes back and slices in a couple of strawberries.

While he washes the dishes, the discussion on 3LO hots up. He shakes off suds, reaches a hand to the volume knob.

"Yes, Alan, it's fair to say that the principal cause nowadays is mid-life crisis stress syndrome," avers the psychiatrist from Royal Park.

"And this is as true for women as for men, now that so many women are in the work force?"

"It goes far beyond those in the formal work force, Alan. Our whole social pattern places enormous strains of self-definition on those in the 35 to 45 age group."

Brian gets the glasses out of the way, scrubs at some of the less indurated pots. He reaches to his knees, gropes for Nifti, sprays the really crook ones with ammonia. Take that. The chemical odor bites his nose, makes him cough. Goes nicely with muesli. "We'll take the first call," says the anchorman. "Good morning."

"Hello."

A silence follows.

"Yes, you're on. How are you coping with mid-life stress? I assume you are one of us lucky people—or do I mean unlucky—in that age group?"

For an embarrassing ten seconds there is no sound but the faint whisper of the telephone system. Brian stares at his clock with a growing sense of conviction.

"Are you still there? I think we've lost him, Bill. We'll try another—"

"I can't do anything," Joseph Williams says through the radio. To prove his point he stops again.

The psychiatrist is clearly not used to such verbal reluctance in his media consultees. It is left to the compere to whip in, which he does with astonishing smoothness. "You can't do anything in general, or something in particular?"

"Anything. I don't want to leave the house."

"I don't blame you. If my wife didn't push me out each morning I'd stay there all day." He laughs to show that he means it and he doesn't mean it. "If you don't mind my asking, how old are you?"

"I lost count. It's too boring. Say forty."

"Slap bang in a mid-life crisis by the sound of it, don't you think, Bill?"

"Of course it is impossible and improper to make diagnostic evaluations without seeing someone in the clinical setting," Bill says, covering his tail. "Tell me, what do you do for a living?" Lagging in the headlong pace of the conversation, Joseph's voice says. "I don't have a wife to push me out. This is silly."

"Are you unemployed?"

"Actually I write encyclopedias."

"Good heavens," says Alan with an approving laugh, "you should be the one asking us questions. I didn't know there was a big demand for encyclopedia writers. I always imagined they had world-renowned specialists doing their entries for them."

"Britannica does. All the major firms. The small companies use freelance researchers."

"And what has your research turned up on the question of mid-life crisis?"

"I think I've got it."

Brian's muesli is going soggy, forgotten, as he crouches over the phone in the hall, flipping frantically for the 3LO talkback number. "Look, hello, it's most crucial that I—"

"You will be placed in a queue, sir. Please turn off your radio or there will be problems with feedback to the transmitter."

"I won't know what they're saying."

"We pipe it through the phone to you. There are four calls ahead of you. I'll keep count for you and let you know when you're the next one on. Now, if I could just have your name and address for our records—"

Brian deepens his voice. "I'm afraid you don't understand the urgency. The young man speaking on the radio right now is a psychiatric patient of mine. His name is Joseph Williams. There is a very real risk that he intends to take his own life, possibly on air. You must connect me immediately."

"Oh." The line goes dead. Brian leans into the kitchen, clicks his radio off. Joseph is saying something about the woman he used to live with and the doctor is making a point about the coincidence of Jungian life-stage transitions, endocrinal disruptions, and the first child of a marriage reaching adolescence. It does not sound as if they are sustaining any eternal meeting of true minds. "All right, doctor," says the woman on the switch. "I've informed the program director and she's arranging for you to be patched in. What name was it again, doctor?"

"Almeida Lima. It's Mister, not Doctor. I'm a surgeon."

"Didn't you say you were a psychiatrist?"

"A psychosurgeon, madam. Please put me through now." Lima was the first butcher to perform pre-frontal lobotomy, back in 1935. The name should give Joe a jolt to the higher centers.

"As you know, Bill," says the wonderfully calm and adept moderator, "this morning we've asked Dr. Almeida Lima, a psychiatric specialist working in a slightly different area to yours, to wait for us on another line. Can you join us now, Dr. Lima?"

"Certainly. Good morning to you all."

"I believe you have some advice for our caller? I don't think we need to mention any names," he adds with a merry laugh.

"Quite right," Brian says briskly. "All I require is the proper attitude of deference in my patients, and a sharp hacksaw."

For the third time there is a strange stretch of dead air. The producer must be wetting herself. Before the compere can speak Joseph gives a tinny scream of incredulous laughter. "Wagner, you maniac."

"Well, you won't answer your door or your mail. And your phone's always off the hook. Meet me at two o'clock in the Albion. A beer would go down very—" But an anechoic blankness tells him that he has been cut off. They probably have Telecom tracing his line back at this very instant. Grinning happily, and suddenly thirsty for his morning coffee, Brian Wagner hangs up his phone and skips back into the kitchen.

1970: 'n' the livin' is easy

9 January

My dear Joseph

I got rid of my admirer from across the road last night. Offered friendship but no sex, baby. Poor creature nearly cracked up. I was very cool and diplomatic. Amazing. Went out and feasted my eyes on Les Enfants du Paradis & loved it more than ever. It is so tragic but I didn't cry. I don't cry in movies any more.

I came upon Antony strolling along the street. Is he to be my tormentor?

The boss gave me a pep talk because I haven't been "pulling my weight," the turd. I turned on the charm as best I could and was spared the sack.

I've written to my expensive Melbourne shrink with a plea for help. Once again into the hands of the capitalists!

I've written my position paper for Women's Liberation & the girls in the house find parts of it amusing. I must have some humor left in me yet.

fondest love Caroline

P.S. Can I say I love you?

1970: getting together

U of NSW
15 Jan 70
My dear Joseph

Christ. A hectic morning at the office. Just haven't stopped. I cut the boss off in mid-sentence, so expect to be fired. He's already berated me for not mixing with the other employees, by which he means ceaseless yapping about husbands, animals, hair-dos and cactus plants. They don't, he explained, like "lone wolves."

The Meeting! Last night. Reasonably successful. Gave my paper. It went over better than I'd anticipated & even raised a few laughs.

My topic was "Women as Cheap Labor." They want me to expand it for release as a pamphlet. A woman from the Liquor Trades came up and congratulated me—I was ecstatic. Someone told me later that this woman is regarded as pretty radical and critical.

Right at the end everything fell apart.

We called for people to write pamphlets and work on committees for Abortion Reform, child-care centers and stuff like that.

Uproar. Misunderstandings everywhere. "We don't know if we want to belong to your group."

Some women started babbling that we were selling illegal pamphlets. "The law is the law." Shit. If one goes in the clink we all go. A lot of them weren't having a bar of this.

Even so, quite a number remain interested. This could become a significant movement. We're having an all-day meeting next Saturday.

In total sixty or seventy woman participated. We turned away five blokes, very diplomatically. Margie didn't come along. She thinks she's found a guy, so I guess she thinks she doesn't need Women's Liberation.

Media coverage is uncertain. We were interviewed by the Daily Telegraph and some other papers, but we still haven't decided on our line, how to present ourselves. There were individuals in the audience wetting themselves for fear that we'd say something publicly that they didn't endorse. Okay, we told 'em, discuss it with us, set up your own committees, work together with us on issues of mutual concern.

There's a preparatory meeting on Friday, so I've had no time to be mad in the head. (I haven't written to Laing yet, can't get his address—will see the Dept of Psychiatry at the Uni, they may be able to help).

I found Antony's residence and took some of his luggage around to him, and got back some of my things—including a guitar he obviously didn't intend to return. No acrimony, however. I was very cool. So that's that, thank God.

My social life? I've been out a few times with a painter (so-so) who lives in the Cross, divorced, mid-30s, he's okay. Offered me a roof over my head, to keep me, that whole deal. Couldn't come at it. Can't bear to be touched at the moment. Will get over it sometime. I guess I'll have to stop going out with guys. So it's Women's Liberation for me!

fondest love

Caroline

A DOG'S WIFE

. . .Six

And the sun poured down like honey and all the wild meadows of my body ran with long-eared hares and does and quail for my love to chase and bring down in his soft, his sharp mouth, and my soul bobbed like a woolly cloud, all my education rising from my loins to the choking of my throat with my breasts all perfume yes and yes I said yes I will Yes.

"Arf," said Spot, forgetting himself.

1970: the fox of the earth has his hole

St. Kilda Triangle of the Damned

Monday 19 jan 70

Dear Toad

Intimations of reprieve.

I've moved from Brunswick at last! Among my own kind, or a kind of simulacrum. Hooray. Now that my sepulcher is (partly) whitened, double bed and desk in, books deployed, and parents waved a fond farewell, I'm gradually putting out little new green buds.

"Prelude to the afternoon of a Faun" on the radio. I swoon.

Last night was my first true sleep At Home in Shakespeare Grove. I dreaded showering this morning—the toilet bowl is grotty to the point of revulsion—but mere sanitary considerations were the least thing on my mind; it was all quite cheery.

Socialist reconstruction proceeds apace: carpets purchased, curtains whine through the Singer, wine sings through the merry throng, showerscreens are raised, babies diapered and hushed. Various cognates of the residents, ex-lovers, ex-spouses, in one case current but estranged spouse, and their associated small offspring spring in and out, linger the night, lay one another on the newly laid carpets.

The gaping desolation is departing my own room, aided by a new quasar-like 150 watt bulb and the removal of an assortment of black and odorous items from my fire grate that I had tentatively categorized as cat turds but which, from my description, all-knowing Bob identified as used tampons in an advanced condition of decay. Nasty!

I read several accounts of the Wimmens Lib Group in the Sunday papers. Copious scorn, hostility and incomprehension poured liberally forth. (Actually, cough, cough, I still have profound reservations myself. Is it male chauvinism that needs confronting, or just plain power-rat bloody-mindedness? Is female chauvinism just going to replicate this nastiness in a new ecological niche? And so on . . .) I'm glad your speech went off nicely. Do send me a copy of your pamphlet.

"Lone wolfing" indeed. What a prick. Who do these cunts think they are.

Do come down for a visit to our little nest when you've got some bread together.

love Joseph

1970: joseph misses the tram

The artistic contingent in the magazine section has been sacked. Layout and design is now handled downstairs. The department shrinks by the week, but Joseph has been assured that his own position is safe. He has difficulty sustaining belief in this forecast, after calculating how much he is being paid as a B-grade journalist to . . .

. . .address envelopes

In the midst of his boredom and misery, Quintilla leaps into the office at a quarter to five. This manifestation produces a measure of stunned consternation, not least in Joseph.

Jesus, Joe, what are you wearing?

They make me do it.

But what is it?

It's called a "suit."

Do you know how difficult it is to find anyone in this gruesome building?

Look, there's a chair over here, why don't you—

The tie's incredible.

The tie is Day-glo orange, Joseph's attempt at modishness. He cowers at his desk, covering his throat with one hand and flapping the other.

Quintilla says: Let's go and have a drink.

Actually uh I don't finish until 5.30.

That's slavery!

Not really, I don't start until nine.

People are looking sideways. She's a friend of the Gallaghers, the merest acquaintance when all is said and done. Help! Joseph continues shame-facedly to address envelopes, at a loss to know what to do with her. Finally he persuades her to remain on a nearby chair, from which vantage she continues to disrupt the office, complaining delightfully about the trouble she's had locating him within the Beast of Mammon, the stupidity and fecklessness of all concerned, the absurdity of his job, and sundry other items of valid but tactless denunciation.

Listen, it's nice to see you, uh, but what are you doing here?

I've been in Ballarat, Quintilla tells him, as if this is sufficient explanation.

Joseph is not a hike for nothing. He works out in his head that there must be more to the case than this. He lowers his gaze to the desk, nodding, nodding. He looks up.

You came back by train.

Yep. Horrible. Nothing to look at for hours.

To Spencer Street station, then. Which is only a block away, just down the road but a full half a mile or more from the heart of the city. It makes a twisted kind of sense that Quintilla would prefer to cross the street and search here for a drinking companion than seek out a more suitable chum at a greater distance.

At 5.15 Joseph abandons his pile of envelopes, heaves against his besuited bosom the heavy new carpet he's bought during his lunch break, and takes Quintilla away. His mind is paralyzed by shock and alarm, so he trundles them home by crowded, knock-off hour tram. It does not occur to him until several days later that they might have taken a taxi, or even, after all, gone straight to a pub.

Further sensation on board the tram. Quintilla is wearing a garment that might fairly be deemed short. Wispy, it alternately hugs and billows. Its hues are not muted. Her hair of course is thick and tawny and wonderfully long, like that of the lion of the gender other than her own. They stand in the breezy open doorway of the tram, pressed by office staff and late shoppers, and while Joseph tries pitifully to think of something to say passing cars skid and honk. Two youths leer across her chest in the aisle of the tram, the better to exchange loud remarks of a complimentary nature.

Have dinner with us, Joseph offers. Martha is a fantastic cook.

They arrive to find low-grade squalor. The baby is being fed, washed, de-crapped. Martha and the others are exhausted from their day's toil. A pair of dreary visitors skulks in to use the spare room for a bout of dull illicit fornication. Magic flees.

Quintilla sits without a word in the living room for a quarter of an hour while Joseph dithers and moves his tongue pointlessly around the cavity of his mouth. Finally she pisses off. Nobody seems to care. Martha and her lawful husband grumble at one another and prepare for an evening of fun.

Joseph stares at the living room wall with its crayoned outline of a Douanier Rousseauvian jungle all aglint with eyes and feral teeth he knows will never be completed, and finishes the night babysitting two torpid infants while their various parents cavort at the boozer.

1970: conferenceville

Randwick Saturday 24 Jan

My dear Joseph

Sitting with a cuppa & a ciggie, I ponder yesterday's Activists' Conference. Three or four hours of hot discussion. People from Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide and Sydney. We started by explaining to the audience why, at this stage, we are having closed meetings—due to our socialization, the presence of men inhibits us from free expression. A major conference is planned for Easter.

A couple of Melbourne radical women from the Bakery started out with Maoist skepticism but ended wildly enthusiastic when they realized it was not a paranoid anti-male faction. I gather that even some of the ladies in and around your household are interested—that should topple a few gods!

Subsequently we learned that the Anti-Vietnam activities over the road (in another part of Resistance) had wound up in a harangue about the divisiveness of us Women's Liberationists.

The whole left movement is in uproar. How dare we hold an independent conference that clashed with something the Holy Males had decided was more important!

At the end of our session a few of us went across and found these amazing scenes of yelling and denunciation. There was no absence of men's voices in our defense, I add. We jumped in and declared this the inaugural mixed session of Women's Liberation. Meanwhile Albert Langer, Hero of the Student Revolution, was going out of his mind over the Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm—not political, he claimed. I jumped up and said this was a bullshit objection. Psychosexual factors are certainly critical in attaining liberation for men as well as women. Bob Gould, who owns a radical book store, defended us, although he says he's still proud to be a male chauvinist. He informed us that it is a distinctly painful personal change to have to get your own cup of tea, and do your own washing—and your lady's to boot!

Albert thinks we're splitting the left. He fails to see that in Resistance no woman opened her mouth. We will come back to the active Left far stronger for an absence while we gather strength, consolidate our true identities. And come back not in a supportive role but as an equal force.

Poor old Albert sat mopping his brow between fits of hysteria.

And don't think I'm letting you off the hook. Before you and your cool logical quipu friends go into similar outbursts of reflex condemnation . . . think, observe, listen. Then state your opinion. We shall see what we shall see.

I went off looking for a temporary teaching job, but you need a degree. I can't even get a reference from the last place I worked at—they thought I was unstable. Have to forge something.

Went to see a psychiatrist I was referred to from Melbourne. He was okay, supplied me with Stelarzine and sleeping pills. Told me to come back in a month for another peer.

Lanie gets back in four days and she, I and Sarah (one of the Liberation committee) are renting a house together in Rozelle (nice little lesbian set-up, I hear you mutter.) You can come and stay as long as you like, if your job vanishes—except when we're having closed sessions, naturally.

fondest love

Caroline

1983: a nice chat

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

DUD BASH is a special issue (but then, so is every issue) (though hardly ever a March, 1983 issue) of ATYPICAL QUIPU,

not A Typical quipu by any means,

a catch-all bucket as our computing cobber Ray would say for the piles of letters that spill from my crusty desk. Edited & published by Brian Wagner, the Miss Lonely Hearts of Melbourne hikedom. Can be had for love or money, from the address listed on the back. A large X means you're on my shit-list and this is the last issue you see unless you Act Fast.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

::Kicking off with a lament, Joseph Williams (yes folks, you read it here first) the last lark of summer—::

goforit! goforit! goforit! goforit! goforit! goforit! goforit! goforit!

Your unsought advice to the socially bankrupt, broadcast on national radio and followed up across four or five beers in a particularly unsavory Carlton pub, got put to use this afternoon, Wagner. I suppose you'll want to dine out on this sorry tale, so stick it in your rancid sheet. Who has pride? Oy vey. (By the way, did you know that Antonio Egas Moniz, who invented the lobotomy performed by his surgical colleague Almeida Lima, was murdered by one of his post-operative patients whose impulse control had been removed along with his frontal lobes? No shit, as you might well put it, Brian.)

Get out of the house more, you told me. Go to the Lemon Tree and order strange drinks. Chat up the lady advertising executives hanging about there in low cut blouses. Follow them to hot tub rorts in South Yarra. Smoke marijuana and lean against a wall at a dark party. Seek out sleaze bunnies and have my body oiled and pummeled by jaded housewives in search of bent thrills.

Luff, luff, you said to me in your Peter Lorre voice. Ve haf conquered science, vot do ve need of luff?

It's easy for you to say that, Brian.

My life works by a completely different principle. I will give you an example, because it is still smarting.

I'm pedaling back from Readings bookshop in Carlton, right. Very hot day. Slogging along Drummond St., which has a median strip and not too much traffic. The lure of the library tugs me to the right at Newry St. (I have tickets to something like seven municipal libraries and generally keep them in heavy use, as we encyclopedists will). The door is shut. Wrong afternoon. I wheel the bike up a block, get a carton of coffee-flavored milk and two blue plastic straws. You never know when one of them will develop a dysfunctional kink in it.

On the other side of Rathdowne St. is Curtin Square, which has trees, grass, public toilets marked BOYS and GIRLS, a "recreation center" of sinister mien, and a sandy patch full of clapped-out steel equipment for kids to slide and jump about on. I go the other way, having a fear and hatred of children whatever their size or age, perch my bike against the bole of a tree, and sit down in its fairly defective shade.

In this same corner of the parkette is a group of four: two women reclining, two half-naked youths booting a soccer ball around in their near vicinity.

I drink the milk, stare at trees, regard with quiet pleasure my remaindered John Fowles' Mantissa ($4.95 hardcover). Shortly I decide that what I witness is not, after all, a foursome, unless it's composed of mothers and sons. (I'm short-sighted. No I'm not, I just don't pay close attention to the non-print world.) The boys are now discerned as being about 14 or 15 (but why aren't the little swine at school? It's not a public holiday, even though the library is shut. And it's only about 2.30 in the afternoon.) One of the women is maybe 40ish, the other five or ten years younger.

As you can tell by sticking your head out the window, it's been bloody hot. So these women are taking the sun, and dressed accordingly. (So am I, for that matter, in shorts and sweaty shirt.) The boys tire and leave. The women ignore me, but that's okay. I'm fifteen or twenty feet from them, behind and to their left. Neither is wonderfully sexy, though both are displaying their legs and shoulders to a marked extent; the younger woman, resting on her elbows and reading, has hoiked her dress up to her bum and waves her feet in the air in a careless manner.

After a time, one of the hazards of Curtin Square puts in its regular appearance. A gaggle of thirty or so council oafs heigh-ho past, brooms at the camber.

"Haw hullaw," they cry. "Yuk yuk snort." They bash one another about the back and shoulders, bugging their eyes at the revealed flesh, grabbing manly arses of opportunity and beating their hands up and down for each other's information and amusement in the vicinity of their crotches. Adding to this sport, one rogue hollers, "Watch that bloke on the grass perrrrvin' on yuz, girls. He's up to no good."

This was all your doing, Wagner.

The whole thing irritates me while it happens, primarily because stupid people scare me and secondarily because the charge is vaguely justified. So I become acutely uncomfortable.

In fact none of this ugly buffoonery attracts attention to me from the women, either favorable or the reverse. "Piss off, arseholes," yells the younger woman in a gravelly voice. They continue their studies (several unidentifiable books, Cosmopolitan, a Women's Weekly for godsake).

I crush my carton and toddle across the grass to deliver its remains dutifully to a bin, then find a bubbler and fire some water in after the milk, wash the coffee stains off my chin and the sweat from my brow. I stroll back to my bike.

Now it is important that you understand the next point, Brian. My emotion is not, and has not been, predominantly lustful. It is your failure to grasp this general fact that makes your sex-drenched scenarios so irrelevant. The propinquity of these wenches has lulled me with a soothing boojwah sense of God in his Heaven and ratepaying Carlton wives lethargic in their municipal park.

However, since I have been called on perving, and in line with your advice to strike up conversations with nameless strangers whenever possible, I decide that I ought to be civil and address my person to these ladies.

So up I hop. The older of the two is in shade, meager though it is. I'd prefer to speak to her (the direct rays of the sun tend to roast my skull, precipitating migraines and burning my nose) but that would call for an extra couple of steps and a self-conscious about-turn. So I sit down on the grass near her friend, who is facing me reading an enormous black academic volume. She has got to about page xi.

"If you started in the middle," I say, "you'd get through it twice as fast."

Certainly she's registered my arrival. There is no reaction whatever. But I cannot just get up and leave. I feel like a flustered flasher. After a loooong pause she looks up and says, "I beg your pardon? Did you say something?" You sniveling boorish turd.

This was not the way you described the procedure, Wagner.

Trapped. The other woman has not turned, or even lifted her head. Lamely but doggedly I say, "Well you see, I noticed that your book is still hardly broached."

But by now she's back to studying the black marks on the pages with fierce scholarly intensity. After another stomach-crampingly attenuated interval she looks up and says, "I'm sorry. What did you say?" And is instantly back to staring at the page.

There is no overt hostility, no piss off arsehole, not even a killing snigger or shared look of disdain between them.

I sigh. "I see that you fully intend to disregard my specialist speed-reading advice." No response at all. I groan slowly to humiliated feet. "Aw shit," I say, "and a very pleasant afternoon to you both."

To my bike, through the fence, across the footpath, over the lefthand side of Rathdowne St, up and across the median strip, on to the other lefthand side of Rathdowne St, boiling with rage, and away.

It was a great plan, Brian. Next time I'll just stay home and blow the top of my head off.

::Joseph, Joseph, what a heartbreak old nervous nelly you are. Leaving aside the question of your abysmal dialogue, which no doubt you polished to a gleaming edge during those Edwardian longueurs while you gazed at the leaves and the spare unsucked straw in your Big M carton, hardly crucial since, if it were, the jocks who mumble their lips as they read would have been snookered out of the Darwinian Pool Game long since in favor of those of us or some of us at any rate with rather more advanced horsepower, no the trouble Joseph is that you waffled off there at the end instead of standing your ground.

::Suppose you'd hit your dreary interlocutor with a line like this (and you could have spent some time getting it straight, since she was patently as tongue-tied as you, and it hardly matters whether by genes or design):

::"Surely you're not actually a mental defective," you could have told her. "Your head looks too big."

::Naturally, this tack could lead to nasty bruising.

::Why not the blunt, candid approach: "Don't be a bitch. I'm just being friendly."

::Actually, old chum, as you say it was my mistake. You're a natural bleeder, Joseph. We need to toughen you up.

::Seriously, Joe, it's good to see you back to quipu activity. You've been hiding in your tent too long.::

1970: a flying fuck

Rozelle
Chez Contentment
11 March
My dear Joseph

Thank you for the plane trip back to Sydney—it was better than acid. And a lot better than hitching all that way.

Alone in yet another house (not Lanie's and mine, I mean) and quite happy to be alone, listening to the ABC—nuclear power stations, state of engineering, and now the gentle abyss of musical notes . . .

I'm staying in Alan's peaceful old terrace, sitting on the balcony regarding the breathtaking view of the harbor. It won't last, though I would be glad to live here alone forever. But Alan will not be in America forever, and in fact his wife Jane will be moving back in here next Saturday. Nothing like the arrival of strange bird of alien plumage to bring the estranged wife flapping back to the nest.

So really I'll be glad to leave. Alan's domestic upheaval is only now starting to bite. There's nothing placid about Jane—she's rung here twice in his absence.

My room at Rozelle will make me happy. It's small, narrow, with a sink and cupboard under a window looking down over the backs of shops. I hope for peace and good study. Lanie has the best room, fireplace and balcony, but noisy with street clatter. We haven't moved in yet—get the key on Saturday. Sarah's not coming in after all. We'll have to advertise in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Actually my trip to Melbourne devastated me. A butterfly with maimed, scorched wings. Will I ever be able to fly? Why why why. It was okay the first couple of days. A little tense. I suppose it all fell in on me when I got back from my parents. They do it to me every time. It's so dreary and boring—I'm sorry, Joseph, I'm really sorry. I hate what I do to you, what I make you. It's pointless seeing me. I'm dreary, draining, dragging-down dead-end person—also I'm becoming extremely ugly—at the best of times wretchedly plain. This is literally true, not paranoid. The moth who used to be a butterfly.

Sorry about all this but I don't care what I say with you, I have no pride, in fact I don't give a flying fuck. That was good, lying on your bed reading to the rhythm of your typewriter, gazing out the yellow curtains, looking at you typing some silly thing for Brian's quipu and you not knowing and not caring and the air warm and touching my skin, the ceiling high and the door closed just you and me and that typewriter holding us together.

You thought I was bored and wanted to go out—it wasn't so. I'd have liked to dance for an hour maybe with you, with music blasting from all sides. You should try dancing, it'd help loosen you up. You're not as clumsy as you think. So what else is new?

I've started at university and still don't know anyone there. This pleases me. To be a shadow is a good feeling. To be lost is to my liking.

The lectures are disappointing, if you can be disappointed about something you expected little from. The staff are drab, humorless conservatives, "academic" scored all over their blank, flabby faces (thinking they've walked out of C. P. Snow). So what's new?

Spent an evening with Antony and his new lady, Iris. Dinner, tuneless talk from both of them about people I'd never heard of. He played two of his own pieces on Iris's guitar, pleasant enough. I started talking about how devastated & excited I'd been by the Pram Factory performance I saw in Melbourne (Antony knew one of the actors) and he responded with reticence. We used to talk so freely. His humor was stale where once I found it fresh and inventive. Iris, though, is a likeable person who tried very hard to make me welcome. I wish I was free to like her. So much for that evening.

Well, my dear, that's it. There's no point in sending this letter (or any of my previous ones) but I will, because there's no point in not sending it.

11.42. You are a ghost afar.

Most of the time you are real, and I believe we have lived together. Other people are smoke always, once I haven't seen them for a few days.

I'm not depressed or suicidal. I am living amazingly realistically. I don't cry, I don't lie around dreaming, I don't clutter the room with continuous stupid remarks—I'm very alert most of the time, always on the ball in company.

I am beginning to adjust to reality. To really watch my face in the mirror and not deny it's me, to affirm it is, that it always will be. This physical change is strange too. I can't express it yet but I'm not lying about that either.

I visited a business friend of my father's over the weekend—they'd rung him up, I suppose, fobbed him on to me, make sure I was eating. We talked and talked about the 1940s, had omelettes and claret and talked some more until 1:30 in the morning. Very satisfying. I slept well that night. Would they believe that, understand it?

Well distant star adieu until another night.

Caroline

J.—

Can we turn our faces to the wall and die?

Can we turn our faces to the wall

Can we turn our faces

Can we turn

Can we?

C.

1971: pack-raped by political bikies

In a tone of gentle logic Tom Nourse tells his daughter, "The police don't start these things. They're just ordinary family men with an unpleasant task. The only reason they're out there in their hot uniforms on a Sunday afternoon is to protect the public's order and property." He puts his empty glass precisely on the wet ring it had left on the table. "I'm sure they'd much rather be at home with their kiddies, tending their gardens."

Ray fills the glass and pours one for Marj. He sees violence in her. "As far as you've gone," he says rapidly, "you're right, of course. None of us thinks the cops are psychopathic bullies who thrive on sadism—"

"Like hell," says Marjory.

"—or if we do get that feeling about some of them, we know it's due to the larger context." Curiously, the older man raises no objection; he looks on benignly. "You know and I know that some cops are thugs. It's always been that way. One reason for having a police force is to give the hostility of brutal men a social function, buy them off if you like. That's a truism, surely. But what role is the police force playing tomorrow? Look, this is Australia, not South Africa. Public protest goes back to the goldfields and beyond. Teachers make their primary school pupils memorize it all. It's legitimated, almost part of the parliamentary process."

Doris Nourse is less happy to hear this than her husband. She is clearly agitated, but says nothing. Ray argues: "If demonstrators did rush about this country looting and raping and killing, one might understand the law being out in force. Heavens, you've just got to watch the TV. When trouble does break out, the principal reason is that a few police have lost their heads and done something inane like riding horses into a crowd. And pretty minimal crowds at that, usually. You'll have noticed that the politicians kept the police under tight restraint during the big Moratorium marches."

"Ray, you're a grown man. You know as well as I do that the police have to be on hand in case anything does flare up."

"Flare up?" Marjory shouts. "We're all too bloody comfortable. Are a bunch of bourgeois students and middle-aged unionists going to tear up the paving stones outside Parliament and burn down the Stock Exchange? You're as out of touch as the baby Maoists."

Is Tom Nourse a trifle discomfited? "It's not that. You have to remember, they're constantly being manipulated by the communists and the anarchists." Ray and Marjory stare at him. "Those people'd stop at nothing if the police weren't there to intervene. Look what they did in Czechoslovakia."

"That's exactly right." Ray notices how calm he is. My God, he thinks. "All those communist students and workers coming out of the offices, factory-hands with flowers in their fists up against invading tanks. Really amazing. But surely you're not saying that we too should—"

"No, no, I meant—"

Marjory begins very noisily explaining her dislike for Stalinists of the kind in power in the Soviet Union and its satellites; that she has read a number of history books; the distinct immunities to duped brainwashing that are imparted by a tertiary education of the post-Cold War variety.

She goes on in this vein for some time. Hungry and now post-coitally sad after all, Ray broods on the meeting at which Jan and Peter must even at this moment be drawing up their tactics by reference to Lenin and Mao and Debray. He shrinks on his garbage lid at the sincere dishonesty of what Marjory is saying. Vietnamese are burning and starving and being shaken apart by concussion, and the binary fallacy rides myopically in old Sydney town.

Beside, he thinks, she's responding blindly to blindness. Marjory's father is a stockbroker, competent and well-regarded by his peers. How can one reason, Ray asks himself hopelessly, with a person whose entire way of life has conspired to deform his values?

"Marjy," her father says patiently, "these young bucks we're talking about are still impressionistic, still going through the adolescent phase of revolt."

"Terrific," Marjory says scathingly. "Really terrific. You've been keeping up with the Heart-Balm column. Look mate," and she leans toward him, stabbing her chest with a finger, "I've just done three solid years of psychology, on your money."

Nourse takes no exception. Placidly he tells her, "Then you'll know what I mean. They're impressionable, open to suggestion and manipulation from communist—"

"What god damned communists?" It's a shriek of baffled rage. "Do you have the Maoists in mind? Or could it be the Russians? Perhaps you're thinking of the four or five Trot splinter groups. A couple of rowdy union bosses and a handful of local government stirrers. The communists are a bloody farce in this country."

Tom Nourse jerks forward with his first show of emotion for some time. "You support the communists in Vietnam, don't you? Even though our boys are dying over there. I never thought I'd see the day! And you reckon you haven't been manipulated!"

"The communists you're talking about are Vietnamese in their own country. We're the aliens there, we're the foreign invaders."

With a thudding, deliberate ponderousness, Ray says, "I thought even the Wall Street Journal agreed by now that the war has to stop, if only by the most self-serving calculation. We're not interested in communism. What we want is an end to an insane, brutal exercise in technological carnage and imperial realpolitik."

While this lead balloon is plunging into the earth, Marjory acidly echoes her father's earlier words. "Our boys! Listen, bad luck, the poor bastards happen to be on the wrong side. Did you feel a little warm glow of sympathy for all the German mums and dads who supported the Nazis because 'their boys' were working the late shift on the gas ovens?"

"They couldn't do anything else, dear," Doris Nourse explains nervously. "They'd have been shot, wouldn't they?"

"You think we should be shot for marching?"

Tom Nourse puffs his pipe, but his cheeks are veined with purple. "Nazis, rubbish. No-one's stopping you from marching and clamoring and protesting day and night. But the rest of the community needs some protection from the hotheads who don't realize how thankful they should be for the privilege of living in this wonderful country." He looks out the window at the small, rather squalid portion of it in Marjory's backyard. "And for having the protection of our great ally, the United States of America. You'll find as you get older that there's an important distinction between intelligence and knowledge," he adds, not one to be cowed, "the sort of knowledge you get only from experience. It's hard won, you can't pick it up from books."

axes to grind

INTELLIGENCE

Fully-grown human beings are remarkably similar to one another when compared to any other living creatures. Even so, in a number of ways they also differ from one another quite considerably. Men and women are physically distinguished by their role in reproduction, though the significance of this fact has been over-emphasized in many societies, to the disadvantage of women.

Human groups have been divided into "races," usually for evil motives, on the basis of their skin color, hair type, minor variations in shape of nose, eyes, lips, and so on. Other aspects of human variety have had less drastic consequences.

Some people are much shorter than average, others are much taller. Those who have had excellent nutrition all their lives tend to be heavier and more immune to disease than those who have been on the borderline of starvation. Yet nobody speaks of the "race" of tall, well-fed people (though "upper-class" or "privileged" individuals do tend to have these characteristics).

This line of thought helps us deal with some problems arising from such notions as "intelligence," "imagination," and "creativity."

It is obvious that some people seem to be quick-witted, able to cope competently with tasks that confront them, knowledgeable about the world and the details of their society. These tend to be called "clever" or "smart." Others seem slower, less able and persistent, without much interest in anything outside very narrow limits. These tend to be called "dumb" or "stupid." Most of us fall somewhere between, being quite good at some things and not so good at others.

A convenient but dubious shorthand way to refer to these mental abilities is to speak of a person's "intelligence." After all, we say that a clever person acts "intelligently." It might seem that surely this is due to some abstract quality or gift the person possesses, just as a tall person possesses marked "height." But notice something strange: it does not explain why a person is unusually tall to say she has great "height." That merely repeats the same fact.

(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((

Barely measurable: A limen trait, my dear Watson

)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

Around the turn of the 20th century, a number of psychologists who were studying the structure and operation of the human mind looked into the question of mental abilities. At first it was thought that measuring the size of the skull might give a clue to a person's cleverness, since it was thought that a large skull contained a large brain and a large brain would be better at thinking than a smaller brain.

This seems ridiculous to us today, because we know that (except in extreme cases of brain disorder) the size of the brain has no bearing on ability. However, it gives us an indication of the kinds of errors we can fall into if we think of mental abilities as definite "things in the brain" that clever people have to a greater extent than less clever people.

The next step in measuring ability came when the scores on tests in vocabulary, reaction times, skill in recognition and manipulation of shapes, and so on, were condensed into an average score. This work was pioneered by A. Binet (1857-1911) in France, C. E. Spearman (1863-1945) and C. L. Burt (1883-1971) in Britain, and L. L. Thurstone (1887-1955) in the USA, though their interpretations of the results were drastically different.

The simplest method was to devise a large number of tests and place them in order of difficulty. Young children would usually succeed on the early items but fail on the harder ones. With each extra year of age, children tended to succeed at more items. Dull children (not surprisingly) did less well than other children of their age, but so too did "slow developers," who caught up in later years. Smart children were likely to do as well as children several years older than themselves, and this advantage usually persisted. Clever children grew up to be adults more mentally able than most.

How many highly intelligent people, in this sense, are there in the world? Tests are designed so that as test scores increase, it becomes progressively harder to perform at a given level. It is as if the hill being climbed gets steeper and steeper, so there are fewer people in each category. One in 10,000 people, according to standard measures, show an IQ of 160 or greater. Yet only one in 30,000 can reach 164, and just one in 160,000 scores 170 or above. No more than 6000 people in the whole world are eligible to join the high IQ fellowship Mega, and most of those live in China or India unless they have migrated to the West.

In summary, though, the notion of "intelligence" as a single factor (termed g by Spearman) should not be taken too seriously. The influential psychologist J. P. Guilford isolated test results into at least 120 separate factors, all independent. Given the cruel and unnecessary discriminations (even including sterilization) imposed on innocent people in the 20th century by naive or malicious I.Q. testers and their political advocates, there is every reason to be extremely wary.

However, it should be admitted that there has emerged recently some remarkable evidence that revives some of the hopes of I.Q. enthusiasts, such as the members of organizations of high-scorers like Mensa, Point Two Six, Four Sigma and Mega. Certain measurements of the speed of electrochemical reactions in the brain suggest that clever people are "high-speed" thinkers, due to more efficient connections between their neurons (brain cells). Those with lesser endowments are prone to a greater number of transmission errors in the central nervous system.

If this proves to be true, it could be seen as evidence of the g factor championed by Spearman and Burt (who is now known, however, to have forged most of his pro-I.Q. data). The general intelligence factor would then be comparable to the speed and reliability that, in part, distinguish the capacity of one computer from another.

1983: epistle of marjory to the galatians

April 11, 1983

Dear Joseph

I am writing to you in a tiny corner of time created by a stinking cold. So forgive me if this turns out slightly incoherent. About the only thing I'm capable of reading when I have a cold like this is quipu, and you'll understand how far my resistance has dropped when I mention that I've just ploughed my way through Wagner's latest HOT AIR, no hang on I mean ATYPICAL QUIPU (why do you buggers feel this need for uncontrolled proliferation of titles?) Anyhow, this is how I came upon your sad story of being beaten up in the park by two women, and Wagner's really sensitive and intelligent suggestions for how you should have coped.

First of all, Joseph, what I am about to say is strictly off the record.

While I sympathize with your problem(s), I have to say that it amazes me when I see you taking them to Brian Wagner for advice and comfort. But then, you know my opinion of Wagner. I haven't gone out of my way to hide my contempt for his utter self-absorption, his manipulation of others, his waste of his own talents, his rudeness, brashness, callowness and general nerdishness. I realize that you've known him a long time, but I think perhaps you should update your Wailing Wall, confessor, whatever he is. His comments on your story are so typical of Brian's reflex nastiness that I would just hate it for you to take them as a guide for yourself.

I've just had another two aspirins. I'm trying to follow the first day's play at the National Economic Summit from Parliament House, but the ABC keeps losing the line. It really does sound like a cricket match. They've just gone out for morning tea, at last report. Prime Minister Bob Hawke as Captain of the First Mixed Economy Eleven. Oh dear.

Look, love. To start with, you had no business approaching those women. Despite all your protestations of sexual innocence, your text gives you away over and over; all that dithering detail about their naked shoulders and legs, really Joseph. Obviously you were entertaining that typical male masturbatory fantasy, of the wondrously compliant hot eager women lying about just waiting for you to give them the nod and they'll smirk like the plastic dollies on the cover of Penthouse and rush over and grab your cock.

It isn't like that, kiddo.

Look at the real situation. It's a hot day, in Carlton where nobody has a backyard to sunbake in because real estate prices are so exorbitant. Two middle aged women, undoubtedly with husbands, kids, lovers, blah blah fill in the details yourself, or maybe they're lesbians and enjoying each other's company, are relaxing in a quiet corner of the park. Suddenly the place turns into a zoo. Two teenage boys rush around in that very corner of the otherwise isolated park (if I read your description correctly), booting a ball in a rather attention-seeking fashion. Well, that's not too bad, women are used to having children jumping around in their shadow. Then you wheel your bloody bike in, for God's sake, and prop yourself behind them where you can perv up their legs without meeting their accusing gaze.

Right. That's merely the setting.

So far there's no true imposition, from their viewpoint, though they are undoubtedly aware that you're hanging about in a suspect manner. You can forget about the yahoos. The dreary repertoire of sexually offensive cat-cries from such creeps is no news to any woman. They dealt with it directly, in its own terms.

The real point is, mate, you had no business at all going up to them and forcing your boring attentions on them.

I've offended you, have I? How dare I call your attentions boring? You're a really fascinating character, aren't you, a polymath of information in this dull television age?

Big deal. So what. You went into their turf and they had not given you the slightest, most remote hint of an invite. And you can forget about that puerile bare legs crap, we've dealt with the weather already.

How can a woman respond when some galah mooches up and sits down next to her in a public place?

She is constrained by manners, to her own detriment.

Yes, she can tell him pre-emptively to piss off, arsehole. This, of course, is rather dangerous at close range. Would you say that to some enormous oaf who sat down near you in an empty park and I don't know started playing a 30-watt per channel four speaker ghetto blaster in your ear (yes, I've read DOG'S WIFE—and quite liked it, which will surprise you I imagine). Of course not. Why antagonize some monster who has just demonstrated defective social sensibilities?

She can get up and move, maybe twice, with a threat to summon the authorities if he persists in following her. Joseph, we're tired of all that. Sick to the stomach. The way the blacks were. Jesus, you should grasp that much. No, the woman is going to stay there, where she put her blanket and her books and magazines (and how dare you mock the chosen reading matter of these women you are doing your best to smarmy up to? My God, Joseph, you Y-chromosome creatures are so pitiful so much of the time.)

So she is left with two choices, only one in practical terms. She ignores the unasked-for intruder and hopes he'll take himself off, or she humiliates him in terms posited by his own intrusion. Simply ignoring him places the burden back onto her. She has to cringe there, twitchy with adrenaline as the worst case, distracted and annoyed as the best case, waiting for someone else to make a decision that affects her more than it does him. Amazing!

Or she fights back with her stolid, armored indifference, her denial of him, her blank face. In your case this was clearly highly effective, because it turned your attempt at wit back on you, left you beached in your own impertinent visibility. I cheered when I read your victim's response, Joseph—not because I relished the pain you were feeling, because I like you, but because she was representing me in the non-stop fight against all of you damned stupid impertinent thick-witted overbearing insensitive pricks.

Then you might pay some heed to your wonderfully witty gambit with this unfortunate woman. She is minding her business, reading what you describe as a substantial and demanding book. In you come with your grotesque insult. Of course (the frame of your merry little jab tells us all) women in general and she in particular cannot read properly. You have been watching her, and you're here to let her know that if she were only lucky enough to be you, to be a man, she would be proceeding through the pages at a much faster rate. When she ignores this with the contempt it calls for, you actually have the vulgarity to go on and spell it out, repeat the sub-text in explicit form, rub her nose in it.

And all this in the context of a cheery voice, I have no doubt, a contextual assertion of friendly interest, an invitation to stop reading and have a conversation. One founded in her agreement that what she is reading is less important (and instantly perceived as such, the moment you arrive in all your glory) than your whim, your merest fancy to have a chat with an available woman, whoever she is, knowing nothing about her. And, as we've seen, requiring from her a blithe acceptance of her role as the butt of your joke, her agreement that she is a silly thing who, in any case, cannot read properly and is panting for your instruction in this matter.

Joseph, you fool. In a situation as blatant as this, you then have the stupefying audacity to feel hurt by her "indifference"!

Then we have Brian Wagner's profoundly stupid advice.

Far from facing up to any of the discourtesies in your assault on the peace of these women, Wagner takes it for granted that you have every right to slam yourself down in their midst and harass them to your heart's content.

What's his remedy to their (entirely justified) rebuff? No prizes. Abuse and persiflage. Execration or moaning complaint. ("Aw come on, girls, give a bloke a break or I'll vomit all over you.") Wagner is a fuckup, Joseph. I don't think he's responsible, but that doesn't mean I have to put up with it. If you let yourself get turned into a Wagner winebar protege, you can kiss your last chance at integrity and self-esteem goodbye.

It's nice outside, right now. Warm and blowy. The rain this morning, and through the last couple of weeks, has spruced the grass up in the yard. Well, the weeds at least. And the cracks in the ground seem to closing up at last. (You can view this paragraph of virus-driven babble as pointed metaphor if you wish.) See you at the next convocation, if not before. I understand it's being planned for the Pontes' farm. We can get drunk together and I'll explain in detail how much finer the world would be if all the men died quietly one night.

your cross Friend

Marjory Nourse

1970: sorry sorry sorry

Rozelle

13 March

My dear Joseph

I can't sleep (it's 4 a.m.), thinking about that foolish, self-indulgent letter. Can you accept my apology? It won't happen again. It's very bad to do things like that to people, I know. I'm truly sorry.

Watched television last night at a friend's—Baby Jane, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. It was astounding. One sister causing the other to go mad with jealousy. Incredibly horrifying.

I started a job today. Driving a Kombi van, delivering clean diapers and carting off crappy nappies to the laundry. Some difficulty driving, a terminally crapped out can. I mean "clapped out van," this must be your influence. The gear-stick knob flew off, the horn fell out, the gears stuck—Christ, U-turns on precarious dirt shoulders, backing blind, trying to avoid ditches. Nearly got bogged in French's Forest. It's very beautiful country, all the houses dispersed, like Eltham a few years ago.

7.30 a.m. to 3.00 p.m. for 2 weeks, perhaps longer. $50 a week. Came home after an English tutorial on top of that, flaked. Vague, indirect tutor, around 30, wouldn't answer any of my questions about Romanticism. I'd been thinking about Ernst Fischer, wanted to see how he fitted in. (This was hardly arbitrary—Romanticism is the period we're doing.) I tried to explain what I meant, the early expression of industrial alienation through identification of the image of "I" with nature & not man . . .

First, he said, he'd better explain what Romanticism was (having vaguely nodded his head at what I'd said), then just abandoned it. "No, no, it'd take too long, I can't really." Waffled off onto something else. I know he's not meant to supply us with answers, but some preliminary discussion was surely in order, so we could place the novels and poetry in some context. I felt very strange afterwards, as if I'd been told I shouldn't ask questions. But without probing, how else can one find out? Reading, yes, but aren't tutorials the occasion for ideas to be brought together and rubbed on each other? I have to do a paper on Lear for the next tute, and feel very insecure—so what's new!

Lanie and I shift in tomorrow, a great relief. Living at Alan's is making me neurotic.

The nights are chilly and the breeze during the day is cool. Summer's over, and I think I'm having a reaction to the change of season. Somehow I got it into my head that winter would never happen up here in Sydney, a thousand kilometers closer to the equator than Melbourne, that the air would always be warm and brilliant. I forgot . . . A letter would be nice—please.

My love to you,

Caroline

1970: censorship of the repressed

Mad Scientist's Benchtop

Monday March 16 70

petalfrog

The brainstem continues to operate on a vegetable level, and gets me here to work only half an hour late on the average. You may make yourself free in admiration for the quality of paper, design and letterhead printing on this classy sheet of paper. One of the boss's little coups, garnishing his empire as it sinks into the blood-red sea.

What of your house, have you moved in yet? Your affair with the American? Your drudgery? The slings and slurs of earning that brittle crust? For Christ's sake write me a note, even if just a brief one, to say what your present phone number is. If you have one available to you.

In an amazing splurge I rushed into Myers the other day and blew fifty bucks on a Casa Pupa bedspread. And voila! The room is now livable, which it wasn't during your stay I fear. I seized up a black cupboard from the kitchen (now replaced with an authentic crockery cabinet) and lugged this thing into my room and placed it beneath the window with a horrid red metal filing system on its ebon top and thought myself a clever little fellow indeed. My grandmother's battered suitcase which once held my every worldly item is now redundant and hidden beneath the bed and my room is a prospect of luminosity and wonder. All it needs is a pair of sprawling Norman Lindsay nudes. AND WHERE ARE THEY, I CRY?

With my long-whetted interest in Roth's "Civilization & Its Discontents," you can imagine how eagerly I ripped out of the hands of Wagner the celebrated quipu publisher a copy of Portnoy's Complaint, that wicked banned document, in (of course) a plain paper cover. Jeez, funny! I could of cacked meself!

I'm not altogether convinced that it lives up to its reputation as a dirty book. For improper porno proper, one might better turn, for example, to Image of the Beast by a guy called Farmer (also banned by the Australian censor and smuggled in by Wagner), which I've just read with many a shudder. The first chapter kicks off with an al dente account of a man who is (a) strapped to a Y-shaped table with leather thongs, and has his prick (b) sucked off, and then (c) gnawed off with (d) stainless steel dentures.

The women of this house are indeed interested in Wimmens Lib. Converted in part by Bakery reports. And perhaps your sense of excitement. But if any of you bites off anyone's dong I'll never speak to you again. Must do some of what I'm paid for.

love and licks

your frend J

1970: without tablets

Rozelle

Sunday 22 March

My Dear Horse

Lanie and I sitting at the dining room table, radio blasting, omelettes eaten, drowned in cups of tea. 9.15 p.m. Just finished writing up an experiment for Beh. Sci. on observation and recall. The wonders of a truly educated tertiary mind!

We scour secondhand furniture shops, bargaining wildly. Lanie thinks she's still in Asia, where it's de rigeur. Will we still be scouting around Op Shops when we're 64? 'Fraid so.

A beautiful, gentle camp guy answered our ad. He'll move in soon.

Driving the Kombi on the North Shore means I travel alongside the coast and can stop for lunch by the sea, walk along the beach or just sit on the sand breathing salty wind—really beautiful. I'm beginning to sleep without tablets which makes me happy. Alan has returned to his wife, thank God. It was getting me down. I'm going to cut out some letters about Portnoy from the uni paper. They'll give you some idea of what I'm dealing with. Without exception, they denounce the foul obscenity of it all. (Actually, I don't think I could slog through the whole book. The bits on masturbation were hilarious.)

beautiful thoughts,

Caroline

A DOG'S WIFE

. . .five

Our bags were packed for Australia when the gentlemen from the government called by to announce that we might not emigrate after all. Their arguments were Byzantine and sturdily documented with sheafs of paper each of a different unusual size. Their case for refusing our exit bore every indication of hinging on Spot's deficiencies as a human being, a bigoted and politically unpopular stance; carefully masked, therefore, by technicalities of a veterinarian nature.

It quickly came home to me that these manifestations in turn were intended to deflect attention from the true reason for our durance, namely, Spot's peerless gifts as a nuclear theoretician. The government wanted my husband to make bombs for them.

"The di-quark hypothesis," he told me. We had no secrets from each other. Although I am not certain that I followed him in every detail, it seemed that rather large bangs could be elicited from small amounts of fairly rare stuff using another variety of extremely unlikely fizzy material, which failed to add up to zero when you checked the niobium spheres.

1970: checks and balances

Melbourne Monday 30 March 70

McPossum

Easter Monday morning and I sit at my desk at work, city empty, boss on holiday, troll secretary on holiday, adman on holiday, hurray, clad in hairy pullover and lairy flares of huge green & white flowers, lighting up my nth Kent for my leathery morning throat, tired and shaky for no real reason having spent a dull afternoon yesterday—ah yes, I did, I did—at the Easter hike convocation—I can't seem to stay away, but all they do is compete and show each other the size of their intellectual dongs . . . I sit here, as I say, and consider your various unanswered letters. Thank you for writing them (Another Person in Another Place is saying Hello).

Your hung-up letter was pretty sad, but I am not sorry you sent it anyway. And shit, don't apologize—it was more real than anything I've ever written to you.

Your job sounds arduous and repulsive. Everyone at Chez Triangle of Death sends commiserations, while envying the lunches by the sea-cliff (I used to think St. Kilda was by the sea until I moved there).

My Big News is that I resigned on Friday and will only have to stay in this behavioral sink for another week, or until the boss can replace me. This is regarded as a remote prospect by some here (no professional would touch it, $100 a week or not). Hence, it was with a wild surmise that I suggested to Wagner that he might care to supplant me. He cackled and drooled, the poor blind fool, so I'll put him up for the position when the boss gets back tomorrow.

In order to finance this extravagant madness, I may have to defer paying my university debts yet again. I've now got enough to live on at $25 a week (ample I hope) for 18 weeks, and I can scrape up some more here and there. In say 6 months perhaps you'll be able to pay me back a bit of that loan and I can always look for a more congenial job. (But for Christ's sake don't worry about paying me back before then. Grinding the face of the poor into shitty nappies is more than my stomach could tolerate.)

Various souls from our house took themselves to the Launching Place "Miracle" (peace, love, joy and $30,000 profit to the organizers), fanging off with high hopes on Saturday at lunchtime with bags and tents and lamb chops and singers and instrumentalists, and returned muddy and bedraggled and saddened and hungry Saturday evening.

Mud and rain and drunken yahoos and portable lavatories blown over by the howling torrent and amps failing in the middle of songs. Wendy Saddington smiled sweetly, it seems, at the end of her bracket, and took the mike angelically, and said with all her might: "I'd like to send a big cheery get fucked to the organizers of this farce," and there were cries of approval, and away everyone raced into the gloom for home and hot chops done on a gas stove like God meant and hot cross bums.

Our evil rooting cat is pregnant, having failed to avail herself of her Malthusian Belt the fuck-wit.

I got a call from Libby the other day, saw her for drinkies. Bumped into her in town a week later, window shopped, arranged lunch for last Thursday. By half past one I was hungry, frustrated and furious. I bought some sandwiches at two thirty. No call even yet. Wicked, wicked Libby. Or could there be something wrong in my approach to women?

Back to Portnoy and self-service.

I'm not really obsessed by the lower things, you know. I have an advanced political consciousness. As I stood bored and devastated at the convocation, several people rushed up saying, "Oh come see, a great marvel, a little-known luminary from America."

"How sublime," I cried. "By what wonder is it that we should be blessed to have an actual living American here amongst us, here in our unpretentious island continent."

"Why," they told me, their faces glowing at this stroke of luck, "it was made possible only because he happened to be in Melbourne on R & R."

Jesus Fucking Christ, I thought, this is Easter Sunday not Napalm Sunday. "What does he do in Vietnam," I asked.

"He's a Computer Programmer."

"Oh, he doesn't actually burn the people himself," I mumbled into my paper cup of Coke, "he just arranges the schedules?"

Blank looks. "Well anyway, come on, I'll introduce you."

"No thanks," I said, and walked in the other direction, pursued by looks of scorn and incomprehension. But Jeez, he's a famous little-known genuine American quipu editor and international clever dick, they told one another.

I suppose I'd better do some work now, sweetheart. Even if I do plan to leave as much as possible to my hapless successor.

lots of love

Joseph

1975: truth is no stranger to fiction

((((((((())))))))))

Special LEST WE FORGET issue of HOT AIR

which is published, typed, and fairly often completely written by your correspondent, Brian Wagner, but usually mimeo'd and collated by my kind friends at our famous Monthly Collation Party. Last stencil (this one, dummy) is being typed November 10, 1975, the evening before Remembrance Day. With all sincerity, I bow my head and pray: may they not have died in vain. A million dollars every two minutes is the last estimate I read of the arms expenditure of our peaceful world. HOT AIR is available at my whim, or for trade with your quipu. No subscriptions.

((((((((())))))))))

Because so many of you have been asking me for an authoritative account of how our Government and our Loyal Opposition got themselves into the current lunatic deadlock, with the Senate under Opposition control denying Supply to the Government we elected just a year and a half ago, I am going to tell you, instead, the strange and until now hidden tale of my conversion to hikedom.

Yes, dear friends, there is no longer any sense in paying attention to politics, to the commonweal, to common sense for that matter. Our masters are all fucked in the brain. Whether Gough or Mal wins in the current battle, it is we who are certainly the losers.

I am aware that Joseph Williams, for example, will not be startled by this point of view. Against his nihilism, I have argued in support of Ballots, Involvement, Close Attention To The News and all that stuff which I gather my American readers imbibe in, er, "Civics Class."

My faith in due process is now fairly shook. Even during the Vietnam war I never entirely lost hope in rationality. When Gough Whitlam became Prime Minister of Australia in 1972 and pulled the troops out of Nam, I felt my faith was justified. Now that we seem to be on the verge of a coup (and what else can you call it when a wealthy minority Opposition gets ready to throw out the elected Government?) I have changed my mind. The world is a nest of fantasy. There is no truth in it.

So I have decided to tell you something that is true, for which I can vouch from my own intimate experience. I will tell you how I encountered my first Quipu, and how this pivotal moment in my life explains the absence thereafter in my bed of all the numerous beautiful women who once thronged that place. Okay?

It was in the early 1960s. I do not care to be more precise, lest I incur the jeers of callow newcomers. I sat in my penthouse apartment above Collins Street. My green martini olive gazed like a bland eye. I swirled the glass lazily, set the insouciant fruit bobbing, and winked sardonically back at it.

I felt at peace with the world that year and that day, and with good reason. The conservative parties ruled the land. No one had heard of Women's Liberation. (Seriously, Marjory, just joking. If you don't believe me I'll send you my I AM A HUMORLESS FEMINIST badge.) In the kitchen a luscious long-legged model named Asquith Lancaster was humming softly. With some satisfaction I congratulated myself yet again on my good taste and good fortune.

I stretched, and every muscle in my lean athletic body tensed and relaxed, even though aerobics had not yet been invented. My silk pyjamas rustled. Recessed lamps suffused peach light, and the conditioned air was intimate with Asquith's perfume.

Only unwarranted modesty would permit me to deny that my apartment, twenty floors above the scuttling lights of the inner city, was a testimonial to my exquisite taste. Worth Avenue had supplied most of the interior. My decorator had flown to Australia specifically to do the place out. The bric-a-brac I'd picked up in my wanderings perfectly complemented the Lanfranchi decor.

From above the marble fireplace, a samurai sword cast a paradoxically gentle wash of light into my eyes. It always amused me to recall how it had come into my possession. The small, astoundingly nimble old Japanese martial arts expert had found me besottedly engaged with his unmarried daughter. With terrible rage, but awesome control, he suggested a method whereby our mutual honor might be satisfied. It was a frightening moment; as the saying is, my cojones were on the line. When his naughty daughter giggled merrily, however, I knew that the outcome was assured.

Three times I heard hajime, the call to begin, and three times it was not I who at last called for quarter. There is much to be said for a strict diet of animal proteins. On the following morning, in the bright Tokyo sun, the old gentleman presented me with the precious heirloom that mere hours before had threatened that portion of me by virtue of which, ironically, the sword was forfeit and satisfaction contrived.

When Asquith glided into the room with our coffee my gaze moved as if by metaphor from the ancient polished curve to her own graceful form. Her heart-stopping beauty momentarily stopped my heart, as, delicate and daring beneath the luminescence of her floating peignoir, her incomparable beauty subdued to a mere backdrop the apartment's elegance.

Without a word I placed my half-finished martini on the cherrywood table as she put down the silver tray, fumes of coffee rising, and I took her into my arms, her face nuzzling my chest, my own lips moving across the ebony of her hair. The doorbell rang.

"What is it now?" Asquith asked nastily. "Your secretary?" She looked at her tiny Swiss watch. "Special delivery from Fortnum & Mason's? Perhaps your interior decorator?"

Though I fumed, I allowed no trace of my annoyance to show. The bell rang again, and I drew a monogrammed chinese gown about my shoulders. "I'm truly sorry, my dear," I told her with a boyish smile. "I left unequivocal instructions with the porter that we should remain undisturbed tonight." I went across the thick pile of the carpet.

A demented, unshaven man stood with his finger on the bell, dressed in shoddy, grubby clothes. At his feet was a sturdy wooden case, plastered liberally with injunctions concerning its handling. I looked again from box to face. My first impression had been correct. It was the face of a complete fool.

"Joseph, what are you doing here?"

"Hello, Brian." Joe Williams had never been to my apartment before. I watched a sequence of expressions as he gazed through the half-open door. All involved a measure of greed or lust. "I've been in Peru working on the Paqari-tampu dig. I've got a present for you."

"Is he coming in?" Asquith asked. I was gratified in my proprietorial enthusiasm by the convulsive spasm of Joseph's throat. As I shook his hand it was his head he shook numbly, staring at her. After the thin high air of the Cordillera Oriental, he had stumbled on heady perfumes too rich for his parched sensibilities. "No. Plane flights. Very kind. Tired. Finlay."

"This is Joseph Williams," I told Asquith, and gave him her name in return. "He's been doing some archeo-linguistic work with my friend Ray Finlay. He appears to be letting us know that Ray sent this crate to me, and I would hazard from this inference that it contains something too delicate or precious to consign to commercial carriers. Would that be the gist of it, dear fellow? Are you sure you wouldn't like a drink?"

Asquith was at Joseph's elbow, a narrow enough squeeze in the doorway, with a long scotch. He took it and a hearty snort without demur. We wrestled the crate inside while Asquith topped up his glass. I helped him lever the top off. Splintering, the metal-lined wooden top laid bare an enormous supply of packed cotton waste. Joseph drank down his second scotch.

"We thought at first it was a Psammead." He sniggered and leered at Asquith.

"How lovely!" She beamed and clapped her hands. "A sand-fairy! And in the mountains of South America! I thought they were mythical beasts."

"Science has learned much in recent years," Joseph told her as she refilled his glass. I removed a large wrinkled leathery object from the box and held it out with some distaste.

"Ugh. An ancient Peruvian soccer ball?"

"Certainly not," said the syntactical archaeologist. "It's an egg. A fossil egg. Raymond thought it might grace your collection of objets trouvés." He leaned over to point out a salient feature and fell on his face. The massive pile of the carpet spared him any lasting injury.

"Another?" murmured Asquith, presenting decanter and ice.

"Nope. Must be off. Your hospitality." I noticed that he was peering fondly into Asquith's décolletage, and steered him into the gloom of the corridor.

I set the egg in a silver bowl on the mantelpiece, contemplated it for a moment with intense fascination, and cleaned away the cotton waste and shreds of crate. Asquith made fresh coffee. We drank it fresh and sweet, from a single cup, gazing at each other. I took her to bed.

"Twice or thrice had I loved thee," I cribbed from John Donne, "before I knew thy face or name." Asquith breathed warmth into my poetic mouth. Her moist tongue touched the edges of my teeth. A cool flame licked at my dazed mind. I crushed her savagely against me and bit her earlobe, remembering as a sort of prospective metaphor the endless night on the combat mat in the Tokyo dojo. A vivid noise detonated in the living room.

There was a slow pungent exhalation of air six or seven thousand years old.

My heart leaped like a wounded thing. Asquith stiffened, which was a great deal more than could be said for me.

"My dear," I said, "can you reach the lights." In the darkness there was an irritated bumping as my beauty twisted the rheostat. Even as the lights came up there was a ghastly squawk and such a scratching of horny feet on painted ceramic tile as I had never heard even from game-cocks in a crisis of murderous rage.

Asquith did not stint herself. She screamed her head off.

I catapulted off the bed like a marionette jerked by some higher agency, following with my eyes the line of Asquith's shaking finger. On the fireplace tiles in the living room, surrounded by torn leathery shards, blinking beady eyes in the light from the bedroom, a small crabby creature preened its wings and tore at the carpet with its feet.

"Oh my God," Asquith said. "It smells awful."

"It's been in the shell rather a long time," I pointed out.

"You know what it is, Brian."

"It is difficult to believe." I went closer, holding one of my new love's hands behind me. The anatomy was indubitable. This was no Psammead. "It's a genuine paleomorph," I said. "Let us hope it is the domesticated and not the feral variety. Truly incredible." I think I was lost from that moment, enchanted and committed.

You know how it is with cats. No one owns a cat. It is a condition of mutual respect. It is impossible to con a cat with insincerity. By the same token, cats are incredibly jealous. Watch the way a man's cat acts when a beautiful woman enters the room. If you're attune to it, the air is singed with unvoiced antagonism.

Just about the worst thing a woman can do, in such a situation, is to praise the cat, ruffle it dutifully, and then pretend it isn't there. Almost inevitably she will be edged out of your life, and you'll never know quite what it was about her that you disliked.

Asquith did not do that worst thing. She pulled her hand out of mine and stormed across the room. In her white face, her cheekbones held two burning points of anger.

"This is no better than a mad-house," she told me. Carefully avoiding the engrossed creature peering up at her, she pulled her long dark cape over her shoulders. Her voice was high, not in the least pretty. "I don't know why I came here in the first place." She found her purse. At the door she turned. "You can sleep with your bloody horrible old mythical creature."

A small, fierce gout of flame singed the edge of her cape as she swept from the room, and the Kwee-poo (for such it was, dear friends) yawned a jagged mouth of teeth and came meaningfully across the carpet toward me.

1977: kidnaped

Without a radiator (the Finlays do not run to luxury), wrapped up against the icy air in skivvy, pullover, cord trousers undone at the waist, and blanket, Joseph Williams lies in his guestroom bed, watching gray and white images on the 14-inch screen and waiting for the phone to ring and tell him his father has died at last.

Cliché encompasses everything vital in our lives, he thinks. Leave aside the drama, at once heightened and flattened, on the silly television set. All that he has read (and most of what he has read is trivial, fatuous, palliative), all of it has given precise accounts of just this burning emptiness in his viscera, this needle thrust, this ache behind the eyes and in the antrums. When his mother died, when Caro left him, he wept without hesitation, swallowed by the spontaneity of his grief. For his old, parched, eaten father he feels no empathy, no true link, not even any longer the irritation that used to enrage his mornings and evenings. His father is dying of lung cancer, stinking in his hospital bed, and Joseph can do nothing more cogent than stare at the Finlays' spare monochrome TV set. As usual, he hasn't even got anyone to talk to. Ray is away for the weekend at an AI conference, Terry the geologist is off in the center of the Dead Heart belting the deep crust with shock waves and listening for the cry of oil, Marjory is presumably delving into linguistics in her study.

Joseph's hand slips down under the blanket, reaching for his lonely prick.

There is a tap at the door, which opens immediately.

1976: an invitation

26 October 76

DEAR JOSEPH

I AM WRITING IN BIG LETTERS IN CASE YOU SEARED YOUR RETINAE INTO BLISTERED LAVA DURING THE EXCITEMENT OF THE ECLIPSE.

On second thought, that is not likely, since as a person of Tested and Accredited Genius you would be conversant with the dangers and risks of the Scientific Method.

Our dog did not Howl, even though we showed him the Eclipse on Telly. Perhaps he has lived too long with Man, and his Feral Nature has been covered over by a Thin Veneer of Civilization.

Actually he is not our Dog but Terry's. Terry is the geologist who shares our Home. Actually the Dog is not a He but a She.

My Husband Ray's two Cats were very bad the other night. They ripped the Chicken Remnants out of the Garbage Bag, tunneling through the plastic with their Teeth and Paws. Bad Pussies! It might have been the Eclipse.

Where was I? Ah yes, thinking about something Ray said tonight. He told me that you were feeling really pissed off with life but (like Mike Murphy) at least prepared to write about your misery. What he actually said, if I remember correctly, what that in your confessional self-revelations was the true heart of Australian hikedom, appallingly vulnerable, defensively brittle or silly, sprung from a hundred familial herniations into a tenuous, desperate recension of the same unbearable dynamic (paradoxically), yet finally risking that huddled core of wounded self in a most unsure and uncertain hope of resurrection. I'm pretty sure I've got that right.

In short, me and the hubby would like you to pack your bag and come across on the tram and stay with us for a week or so. We've got a spare room and a spare cat, so get your arse into gear and take a week off from your depressing surrounds. No excuses will be tolerated.

your Friend

Marjory Finlay

1977: repeat offensive

22 August 77

Dear Joseph

We haven't seen you for a long time. Have you gone mad and been destroyed under the Rabid Dog's Act? Think yourself lucky, at least, that you do not share the parlous condition of the brain-swap bloke I watched last night in The Revenge of Frankenstein. He'd been bludgeoned a number of times across the cranial wound with a stout chair. It was likely, the criminal surgeon mused, that this had damaged a brain cell.

I notice on my calendar that it's now ten months since we offered you a room and a cat for a week or so. It's no wonder you persist in your Slough of Despond when you refuse to take up these unparalleled opportunities to taste my crook cooking. We expect to see you on the doorstep before the week is out.

sternly,

Marjory Finlay, M.A.

1977: won't you dance

Guiltily, Joseph snatches his hand from beneath the blanket and stares fixedly at the television screen.

"Worth watching?"

"No. Quite amazingly cretinous, in fact. It makes you wonder." What is this he's babbling? He would be hard pressed to identify the channel, let alone the program. His erection has subsided; he looks across at Marjory, who settles herself comfortably on the end of his single bed.

What he sees causes a series of distinct physiological alterations in his body-chemistry, each as banal and stereotyped as the mood of pent mourning for his dying father had been two minutes earlier. Thankfully Marjory is not looking him in the face. His skin warms, then cools.

A mad surmise leaps in his chest.

She has arrived in his bedroom, when all is said and done, as close to naked as it's feasible to be, given the chilly air. Joseph has never seen either Ray or Marjory in their night wear, and on a subliminal level has supposed that, like him, they go naked in summer and leave their underwear on in winter. Evidently Marjory is more conventional than that, for here she is in a strikingly translucent nylon nightdress, high at the throat and falling to her ankles but hardly hiding her wonderful full breasts and the bifurcation of her lower limbs.

Cliché or not, Joseph's heart squeezes in syncope, a long pause, a lollop, a bloodless moment for his brain. His erection surges back.

"Feel free to change the channel," he says. If she does that she will be obliged to learn forward, which will cause her breasts to move free of her ribcage into the line of the blue radiation burning like ice on the screen.

Jesus, Joseph thinks. I am reacting like a smutty schoolkid who's never seen the curiously arousing weird forked hairy thing he scribbles so drivenly on lavatory walls, behind the doors, in the back of his homework book. Some ludicrous censor in my mind is interposing itself on the raw reality of what I wish, like the psychic manifestation of a Victorian chaperone.

Marjory leans placidly against the wall. She has said something about whatever he's watching suiting her. When a ghastly commercial capers across the screen she gives him a quick smile of complicity.

It was Marjory who asked him here, after all. Neither of those letters had Ray's mark. If anything, she insisted. Badgered him. It seems impossible to believe, but could she even then have had this in mind? Or is he inventing the whole thing, the musky tang in the air, the straining forcefields between them across the Invicta blanket he's tugging to his chin.

"Marjory," he gets out, interrupting something she's started about his work, his parents, whatever it is.

"Joseph," she says in turn, after a moment, with a touch of mockery. It is almost enough to bring him unstuck, to nail his tongue. He waits for the trembling in his legs to come under control, certain that she must feel the humiliating tremor through the frame of the hard-sprung bed.

"Well, it's just that, Ray isn't here, and I'm all alone after all, and I wonder if we might not more profitably employ ourselves at some more sensual task than watching replays of last Saturday's football."

The door is closing in a blur before he can untangle what happened. Was that a strangled laugh? An incredulous snort cut short too late? Joseph covers his head with the blanket, cold as ice, shaking with fright and self-detestation.

The images tumble pointlessly on the screen. The door opens again. In comes Marjory puffing ostentatiously on a cigarette. She rarely smokes, considers it a habit foisted on people by unscrupulous capitalists. She chucks the opened packet to him, matches from the other hand. A heavy dressing gown covers her chubby flesh, closed with a safety pin across her ample breasts.

"I'm sorry," Joseph tells her finally.

"No, no, don't be silly. It's just that—" She puffs in breaths laden with carcinogens and calm. There is no ashtray, so she drags over the stencil-filled trash basket. A stench of singed wax floods the room when she stamps out her butt, lights a second cigarette and lobs in the smoking match. "You've always been like a brother to me, Joseph."

He mutters resentfully, "And you're not into incest."

She grins at him, forgiving, friendly. "One of the few sins not on my charge-sheet." But neither of them has much appetite for banter. The moment the show finishes on the screen, she hops off the end of the bed, gives his cloaked foot a sisterly squeeze, and retires to her own chaste fastness.

Stereotype or not, Joseph lies back on his pillow and bites at his lip until the blood runs.

1979: joseph loses faith in human kind

JOSEPH:

The artist as criminal and victim. The victim as mutilated—

BRIAN WAGNER [rising, leaving the room]:

No reflection on your talk, Joseph.

JOSEPH:

You notice that the subject of truncation has caused Wagner to move to the lavatory.

[Laughter]

Now this struck me as interesting, because in those days, in 1966, when I was lying in my enormous bed . . . I had built myself a very large bed in 1966 in the house I was sharing with some friends. I made it out of three separate single beds; I then built a gigantic bookshelf all around it, and this construction filled almost all the room. I had my record player near the window. One day when I came home I found the window open and the record player gone. I felt mutilated and violated, and this wasn't a good feeling. At that moment I lost faith in human kind. I wanted nothing more than the immediate instigation of a cruel universal regime of surveillance and punishment.

THREE: Plato's essence

The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality . . . The temptation to reify is powerful. The idea that we have detected something "underlying" the externalities of a large set of correlation coefficients, something perhaps more real than the superficial measurements themselves, can be intoxicating. It is Plato's essence . . .

::Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man

1978: getting to grips with the All

//////////////////////////////

THE MAGAZINE OF GRAND OVERARCHING THEORY

is a special number of Ray Finlay's .26APA regular,

STANDARD DEVIATION,

and is dedicated to the sixth anniversary of the marriage between Marjory and me, an event which not one of you will remember, you drunken swine, on Saturday, April 1, 1972. If that was Saturday, this must be Saturday too. Yes, folks, by the miracle of the Gregorian calendar, I type this colophon on April Fool's Day, 1978, under the helm of John Malcolm Fraser and his splendid band of illiberal Liberals. Maintain your rage, Brian.

/////////////////////////////

[] 1. It takes a worried man to sing a worried song.[]

I don't like what's happening to this country. It is being turned into a strip-mine and hauled across the ocean, and nobody seems to care too much. We might have ceased burning the skin off Vietnamese kids but the people who brought you My Lai and Hiroshima are still running our elected representatives. All the flashy baubles of the fifties and sixties have gone back into the boxes. My Marxist colleagues have a happy gleam in their eyes. The spreading recession and rocketing unemployment might shock those who thought the Boom would never expire, but not my mates. It's the long-predicted collapse of monopoly capital, you see.

The prospect of ever-increasing misery, here and in places where misery is taken for granted, does not cheer me, however.

[] 2. Everyone wants to go to Heaven, but nobody wants to die.[]

It's said that these are the necessary conditions to crack the shell of capitalism. I hate that thought. For starters, I don't see the problem as restricted to capitalism, monopoly or otherwise. It looks to me as if global technological rationality is the villain. Red, or Red White and Blue, it's the machine mind that's killing us. It's no longer fashionable to quote Marcuse (Hi Joe) or Theodore Roszak, and I wonder why that is. I suppose their ideas must have been exploded. That must be it.

[] 3. When I was a fascist.[]

Social science is a mess right now. On the left, we have a morass of unintelligible Krauts and Frogs garbling on about hegemony and hermeneutics and poststructuralism, all form and no substance. On the right we have, if Australia's madly rightist Prime Minister John Malcolm Fraser is to be believed, Ayn Rand.

A good many years ago, when the rough and tumble of clever dick debate occasioned the disclosure of one's political hue, I cheerfully used to say I was a fascist.

Of course that was rhetoric, shock tactics, rather like Joe Williams telling us he's an anarchist when actually he's just lazy. I was hopelessly vague on most of the historical events and processes that had occurred between the end of the second century A.D. and the middle of the 1950s, but I knew about the Jews in the death camps. I knew enough to loathe real fascism.

So, in terming myself a fascist I was not espousing the cause of jackbooted psychopaths (or jackbooted civil servants). I was using adolescent exaggeration to express the belief that had been instilled into me: that most people are incapable of managing their own affairs without the firm guiding hand of a specially gifted elite. Imagine how happy I was when my scores came back and I was invited to join Two Six.

Like our Prime Minister today, I held the works of Ayn Rand in high regard. Although her style wasn't a million miles from pulp best-sellerdom, I was made euphoric by the integrity of her individualist philosophy. Had I received a thorough bourgeois education, perhaps I'd have thrilled instead to Nietzsche. As it was, I found in Ayn Rand an intoxicating denunciation of the collectivist hive society, and a bracing promise of freedom through the ethic of pure selfishness.

I was prepared to tolerate the crude dichotomies embodied in her heroes and villains. Still, even though this was well before all the uproar over sexism, I didn't like the sadomasochist sex enjoyed by Rand's supremely individual protagonists. For a while I figured this was a personal hang-up of Ms. Rand's. Later I saw it was the obscene, loveless essence of the radical right.

So I don't call myself a fascist any more. And a quick glance around the world suggests a few skeptical thoughts about Marxism. What we need is an updated look at how It All Fits Together. Go back to basics. Think it through again. That's what I've been doing lately. Here are some of my thots.

[] 4. Everything you wanted to know about Everything but were afraid to ask.[]

We can kick off with three axioms about the nature of the Being of the universe (as opposed to the Nothingness that its existence excludes, and don't give me any trouble, Meyer):

Let's agree that, ontologically, the universe must be [i] autonomous (i.e., self-generating and self-sustaining), [ii] monistic (all one thing, not split up into mind and matter, say, or matter and energy), and [iii] coherent (internally consistent, all its bits governed by (and expressions of) a single principle, though this might take different forms under different conditions.

These axioms can't be tested. The first two, as Kant showed, refer to features of the Ding an Sich (the thing-in-itself) which in any meaningful empirical sense is incorrigibly "behind a veil," beyond description or analysis. The third is a necessary act of faith. Heisenberg and Gödel indicate the impossibility of "proving" this postulate from within the system, which is where we are and where we will remain.

We know a lot about the universe that we didn't a century ago. This inundation of information, especially from the empirical sciences, is the result of close, careful investigations into specialized "fields of study." Breaking your questions up is expedient, because it works so well, but it has created a de facto proscription on any attempt at overall perspective, of the kind religions once provided.

More crucially, this view has a de jure status among many philosophers of science. The method of systematic doubt, coupled with the relativity of the involved observer, seems to leave no invulnerable standpoint from which you could get a general perspective.

Partial systems have been built within the limits allowed by the general prohibition. No matter how fragmentary they are, no specific studies can proceed in a conceptual vacuum. The very use of procedural rules implies a measure of methodological unanimity.

So partial theorists are, as it were, agnostics rather than atheists.

Marxists and a variety of other cultural determinists fail on similar grounds, covertly relying on smuggled-in teleology to extrapolate history by "rules" that turn out to be merely a celebration of the status-quo.

This celebration of the prevailing order (which does not, of course, preclude condemnation of aspects of that order) underlies—and undermines—the epistemology of the partial theorists themselves. Neo-Marxist critics have been at the forefront in exposing the derangements of theory afflicting post-positivist doctrines.

Regrettably, the therapeutic benefits of neo-Marxist critique are marred in turn.

Not the least of its problems is the hoary "dialectic." Since Hegel's day, and Marx's, logical tools have been available more sophisticated and coherent than the extraordinarily open-ended "negation of the negation."

A crucial weakness in the dialectic as a tool for thought was asserted by Karl Popper: it is either a brutally binary, polar discrimination, or else so sloppy that it's useless when applied to science or history. (I shall come back to this.) "Yes/No" is not a summary of the universe. We must have the possibility "Neither/Either/Both/Some." Joseph Williams tells me this insight has been forced on science in the form of a "quantum logic," as micro-physical states are always described in probabilistic terms.

A weak reed, the dialectic points nonetheless to the true and crucial proposition that any event contingent on other events is a "fact" only in so far as it "suppresses" all the alternative facts that might have been generated by other combinations of the events on which it is contingent. Few facts are inevitable.

Yet strict bounds limit (and express) the number of variant "realities" available as recombinations of a given set of facts. An example from mathematics is the use of group theory to map out the exact kinds and number of subatomic particles that can exist if everything is built up from a limited set of quarks and leptons. Thus a "fact" suppresses only its generable alternatives, not everything else in the universe.

Facts are not singular and isolate. A clue to the solution was suggested by Arthur Koestler, who invoked the non-fragmentary principle of hierarchy. Koestler coined the valuable term "holon," which is matrix, mosaic and unit all in one. His Janus-faced polyoptional holons provide a key to a field-understanding of the data that specialists have torn bleeding from the universe.

At one level of perception, a given holon is a whole system; at another, it is merely a small feature of a more complex holon. A molecule may be part of a protein, which is part of a living cell. Yet it has its own integrity, as have the atoms of which it is composed, as have the nucleons at their heart.

The role of the synthesist, the grand theorist, is to put back together, in qualitatively ascending ranks, the holons that partial theorists have studied locally.

Because holonistic systems are self-regulating, communicating up and down between levels along a variety of feedback loops, the synthesist has a finite task. Once he has isolated the holons and their structural laws, he can depend on them not exploding in his face.

On the other hand, since holistic systems transmute quantitative change into qualitative jumps, his enterprise re-introduces into science (not merely as a wishful hope from religion) a rigorous link between "facts" and "values." It offers the possibility of choices outside the status-quo, options that are repressed into neither the reactionary eschatologies of metaphysics nor the one-dimensional totalitarianism of ideology.

And we'll have more on this gripping topic, if you can bear the drone of my voice, in the next STANDARD DEVIATION, sports fans.

A DOG'S WIFE

. . .four

Father interceded at once, bless him. An entire battery of lawyers tussled around the clock with their opposite numbers in the Administration. Randy had lost his entrée to the Pentagon, unfortunately, following the release of that film.

Possibly with a view to comforting me, Mother called by. She patted my hand. "Rover will be just fine. You'll see." I kicked her ankle. She hobbled out.

1970: exhumations

Rozelle

Friday 3rd April

My dear Joseph

Friday night dinner: tea & bread & cheese, friendly shadows on the wall, peace.

English tutorial this evening, with an arrogant turd big on 18th century Romantics. He got totally crapped off when I introduced 20th century concepts of the novel—I cited D. H. Lawrence and Patrick White as using similar plots to far more devastating political (social?) effect. Irrelevant. Oh. How about John Barth's Sot-Weed Factor? That was more to his liking. He babbled on about Fielding's invention of structured plot.

Why must I waste my time with these two hundred year old dodos? Literary merit? But what do they tell me about today? I mean, when the bastard won't even allow them to be compared with current work? I should chuck it in after the half-year exams, take some semester credit points and piss off uo north to Darwin in my little car. I have a Statistics exam in 2 weeks and still haven't even bought the text book.

Still hot up here. I struggle with nappies—christ they can get heavy. It's good, though, out in the fresh air. Always trees.

Strangely, I was pleased that you've thrown in your job. Another proof that you are not selling out like everyone else. Just make sure you don't stay home all day, you'll suffocate. Get out to the art galleries. I find some sensational things—occasionally.

At the university library tonight I tried to order a book they don't have in the catalogue. I couldn't have it purchased, being an undergraduate. Broad education. My harangue was interrupted by a little scuttling mouse spinning and twitching in circles. The librarian was not amused. The place is full of them. She plans to set some traps.

Sydney Uni Fisher library's no better. It's like Prahran market on Saturday morning just before noon. I spoke to one of the Women's Liberation members who works in the stacks there. Big drama—she asked her boss for permission to wear slacks (there's no regulation covering the matter), and it's to be brought up at the next staff meeting. Slax in the Stax—is this the start of the revolution?

Saw Zabriskie Point. Worth seeing for the beautiful girl, a robust Eve, fabulous. Starts well, the middle's a drag with some okay bits & pieces, ends brilliantly. Worth $1.75.

When your hair grows out again, will you get someone to take some photos for me? I know it's despicable and corny; my bourgeois upbringing.

I bought a new hot water bottle today.

Caroline

1970: pumping irony

Primate Typewriting

St. Kilda

28 April 70

dear bobbles

Much frenzied running round for the Vietnam Moratorium. Our household contingent of Liberated Matrons is preparing jollies for the May Day march. Wimmen's Lib at the Bakery are constructing earnest sober placards to hoist aloft. They roundly and hissingly rejected the suggestions from our own sprightly groovers, who now plan to march in their own wee bloc under such motifs as CHRIST WAS A WORKING GIRL, NO COPULATION WITHOUT REMUNERATION, SPURN THE SPERM and so forth. Outrage on every side.

Mum rang last night to warn me of the dangers of taking part in the silly business, breaking the law by sitting down in the streets and interrupting decent working people, following that silly fellow Cairns, you weren't thinking of going in it were you Joe, oh well, it's your own life, just don't expect your father to bail you out because we won't.

Looked into hiring a mimeo to run off my own quipu. $5 a week. They must be joking. Have to try to get Wagner to do it for me.

I decided to spend a month Improving Myself. Learning to touch-type. Take driving lessons. Start at a gym. I got as far as seeing the proprietor of the local gym, who swore he could cure my asthma in three months with a program of squats (sic), which consists of just that, hundreds of times, with increasingly monstrous weights hung across one's spindly shoulders or deltoids.

Ha.

$30 for three months, in advance. Build the body beautiful as well. He'd start me off with a general program that thoroughly (and no doubt excruciatingly) exercises every muscle in the bod, eventually concentrating on those parts in greatest need. (A hugely muscular penis?) Two factors deter me. One is that the gym, though conveniently situated, lacks a sunlamp. How jejune to bulge pastily. The second is that the gentleman who gave me this good oil is fat as Falstaff, with well-watered beer pot, a man gasping under his own weight.

By the way, the crippling asthma I got in Sydney persisted for a couple of days after I got back, then vanished. It seems I am doomed to dwell forever in gray grimy Melbourne. Or keep off sex.

keep warm, & love to yr cohabitators

Joseph

1970: family life

Rozelle

2 May

My dear Joseph

Life hums. I clatter nappies.

Moratorium street theater is losing impetus. I'm pessimistic about the whole thing. Still, one must not think but act, my policy henceforth.

I saw Polanski's Cul de Sac: sick humor, drawing out sadistic vibes from oneself and the others in the audience. I always feel disturbed after that type of film. My sister.

Antony is silent since I wrote denouncing him. I'm crabby. I suppose I'll have to venture there in a week or so for a grand confrontation, to be thrown out bodily, no doubt, in a stream of abuse.

Everyone here at Cockroach Follies enjoyed your stay and welcomes your return anytime. Lanie was astounded by your frivolity, having taken you previously for a grim monster of High Intelligence. You've cracked that social barrier at any rate.

She's discovering the chains of liberation. Took a boy from work to dinner and to bed. Nice. He asked her to live with him. Horrors! Make an honest fella out of him.

I am incredibly sane.

How are the local ladies? Make a move, my boy. I am investigating electric blankets—one body is not sufficient these chilly nights.

The grass grows without cease. The bathroom window is still broken. The living room floor is subsiding. The stove is in A-1 condition after springing a gas leak which nauseated us all for two days.

thinking & Dreaming Sometimes

Caroline

P.S. Suppose life is a man carrying flowers in his head.

1975: but a good kwee-poo is a smoke

ooooooooooooooooo

WORD SALAD :: Lettuce from my chums

oooooooooooooooooo

::The great Ray Finlay broke his dogmatic silence only for the express purpose of doubting my word. My word. ::b. wagner::

Congratulations on your timing, Brian. Impeccable as usual. On the very night that the nation totters into constitutional crisis, with our non-elected demi-monarch booting out our elected leader and instating a wealthy grazier more to his liking, what is the editor of HOT AIR telling us? Urging us to the barricades? As it happens, no. We find him at his mimeo cranking out [a] Mike Murphy's incoherent mumbles about the rapturous time he had at the Canberra Convocation worshiping Leon Kamin from afar (why didn't you just go up and talk to him, Mike? It's only Governors-General that bite without warning), followed even more boringly by [b] the editor's own piece of tripe. If we wished to waste our few spare moments on the works of E. Nesbitt, Brian, we'd trot off to the nursery and read the originals, which contain less heavy-handed tributes to the jackoff material you presumably studied so closely as a pimply youth.

::I could just recommend that you take a flying jump up your own botty, Ray, but I am a man of classy reserve. Instead, I am resolved to pay you back in the coin you so gratuitously besmirch. We shall come back later to your interesting suggestion that the coup against the Labor Government failed to attract my attention, you shitface.

::As it happens, more than one dazed and fascinated subscriber to HOT AIR has insisted on elucidation. To be brief, they clamor to learn what became of my beautiful if ill-tempered lover Asquith Lancaster and my curious hatchling, the palaeomorph Kwee-poo. For all these faithful readers, I add this postscript to my tale—

::I surveyed the Kwee-poo from a safe distance. "So much for orthodox science," I muttered, remembering with new respect that Scientologist who tried to join our number after having his IQ raised and his thetan cleared. This incendiary creature was like no beast whose bones graced the world's museums. It strutted and crowed about my penthouse, thoroughly at home, emitting at irregular intervals fat little puffs of bluish flame.

::I confess that I was at a loss to know precisely what to do. I edged about the room making friendly noises and keeping one eye prudently cocked on the fire extinguisher. Eventually I blundered into the couch and collapsed heavily, brooding regretfully on Asquith's abrupt departure. The Kwee-poo snuffled in amicable fashion about my suede-slippered feet. I cautiously drew my legs up under my chin. For a moment the Kwee-poo searched inquisitively before sitting on its haunches with its snout between its claws, watching me with bright-eyed interest.

::Naturally, I laughed. I smote my knee with delight, and laughed again.

::The Kwee-poo bounded back several feet, smouldering a small area of carpet, and began to cry.

::I was shocked. An unwonted and unwanted sense of solicitude for the small beast crept into my breast. I tried to stifle it. Why was the wretched animal howling, anyway? God knows. Well, why do babies cry? Because they are hungry, or because their nappies are wet. I looked carefully. This Kwee-poo had no nappy. Ergo, it was hungry.

::Tentatively, I stroked its horrid head. The unhappy howling did not abate. I stood up, fetched a Ming bowl from its stand. Into the venerable vessel (though perhaps no more venerable than this shelled creature) I emptied the contents of the newly opened decanter of scotch. I stepped back a discreet distance and adopted an attitude of scientific dispassion.

::The Kwee-poo ceased its sniveling and edged forward. A bright purple tongue slipped out and lapped. The entire snout disappeared into the whiskey. There was a violent guzzling. The whiskey disappeared into the snout.

::"And such a young Kwee-poo," I thought, disapproving on principle.

::The effect was delayed but worth waiting up for. Supine for several minutes, the creature abruptly bounded backwards into the air. There is not a great deal of airspace even in a luxurious penthouse. Wings snapped and caught. The animal soared, cleared the chandelier, sailed to ground in a nose skid that brought it grinding along the carpet to my feet. Blindly, it tucked in its wings and claws and went to sleep.

::The following morning I rose early and telephoned my butcher. He sent up ten pounds of excellent minced steak. It was the least I could do for a Kwee-poo with a hangover.

::Of course, Asquith maintained her grudge. She considered it obvious that the Kwee-poo disliked her and that it was her duty to reciprocate. To me, nothing was obvious but my continued enchantment with her beauty and her spirit.

::Two weeks later, suave in cobalt silk nightshirt, monogrammed in silver thread, I stretched on my couch and sipped the evening's first ante-meridian nightcap. Asquith was outrageously attractive in a soufflé of a garment that revealed only her face and her mobile hands. She sat at a bedroom mirror brushing her hair. Rather brash jazz, of a kind I detested but suffered on Asquith's account, tooted from concealed speakers and blended with the Samurai sword to lend the penthouse a neo-colonial air. The Kwee-poo purred at my feet, and I scratched its cold nose with a negligent toe.

::Humming softly to the music, Asquith came into the room and turned down the lights. She went to the windows and opened one wide. A cool breeze came up from the street and played around my bare feet. I joined Asquith at the window.

::Hundreds of feet below, the city was a scattered hoard of jewels. So ugly close to hand, the river cast cold light up between the dark geometry of office blocks and the more organic outlines of old Victorian buildings. I placed my arm gently around Asquith's shoulders and we gazed on the world that was ours. We went softly to the couch in the darkness and Asquith slid downward, her lips soft but waking with hunger that—

::"God Almighty Christ shit!" I had not heard her shrew voice before. "This bloody reptile!" She swung her delicately molded leg with public-school trained accuracy and agility at the Kwee-poo dozing curled on the couch.

::The beast hurtled into the air with an angry squawk. With a thunderous noise it wheeled, clawing at Asquith's face. In two weeks it had grown substantially. Undaunted in her fury, Asquith raised a cushion and beat blindly at the Kwee-poo's head. I tried to intervene, but she was propelled by pent-up hatred.

::"Filthy—" she cried, "misshapen—," swinging the cushion, "monstrous—," collecting the Kwee-poo's snout, "beastly b-b-beast." She burst into self-pitying tears as the cushion came apart in her hands, spraying the room with kapok.

::I snapped the lights up and tried to pacify the Kwee-poo. It gave me a look combining misery and contempt and fled through the open window.

::"Oh my God," I cried. I leaned out the window. I couldn't see a thing. Leaping back into the room, I flipped off the lights to the accompaniment of fresh gales of angry grief, and went to the window again. It took some seconds for my sight to adjust. I was horrified to find the Kwee-poo pointed head downward, departing vertically along the face of the building. Even as I watched it gave a thin derisory squawk and vanished into an open window.

::I turned back into the room, frantic. Asquith blundered toward me, make-up smeared over her face, seeking comfort and support. I was not in the mood. "Why did you have to do that?" I shouted. "Now the poor thing's gone. It's probably lost for good."

::Tears forgotten, eyes wide and jaw slack, Asquith stood for a moment staring at me, her arms akimbo.

::"Poor thing?" Her voice rose. "What about me? Don't I have any feeling at all? Is that it? And you actually expect me to marry you?"

::She had a very good point. I went once more to the window and looked into the darkness. Far below, the Kwee-poo's head protruded from a window. It was gazing upward with a reproachful, hopeful look. I gave a cry. Asquith ceased her denunciations for the moment.

::"Thank God," I said. "Asquith, I think it's coming back."

::She crossed the room with tremendous speed for someone burdened with a fire extinguisher. Before I understood what she was doing, she leaned out the window and held the device upside down, freeing its noxious foaming chemical retardants. Froth boiled into the blackness, falling like acid to blind the hapless Kwee-poo. I realized in that ghastly, fateful instant, an instant that lingered it seemed for an hour, an instant that clutched my heart with a frozen hand, that a choice lay before me, a decision of the most profound import: that I must choose between the most beautiful woman I had ever met, all my worldly possessions (for a Kwee-poo is a hungry, remorseless beast), my very peace of mind . . . and a single scaly horrible orphan monster.

::And you know what I did, Ray, for we all have made this choice one way or another.

::What I did, Ray, in my boring, E. Nesbitt fashion, what I did was lean back, take a firm balancing grip on the back of the couch, and with all my karate-trained strength boot Asquith Lancaster through the window.

::I watched for a moment as she plunged toward the ground. My Kwee-poo turned its head to follow her passage, then raised its eyes and climbed straight back up to the penthouse. I got down the Ming vase and opened the decanter and we settled in to our companionable drinking.

::And that's how it was, Ray. Consider yourself warned.::b. wagner::

1975: tying the knot

Unsatisfied and tense, Marjory presses her hands to her breasts for comfort. His back to her, Brian lies on the alien sheets, curved into himself, naked in the air-conditioned warmth of the Raymond B. Cattell Hall of Residence. At this moment, across the courtyard and through the trees, her husband is moderating a panel before one or two hundred people in the A. D. Hope building's Reading Room, principal venue for this astonishing event, this historic anomaly, the first international Point Two Six Convocation held in Australia: one of the few, in all truth, to leave its imperial American and British homelands. None of this gives her an abiding sense of security. Ray's careful logical being is as subject to random interruption as anyone's. If he trudges over here now, seeking a handkerchief or a celebrated quipu to cite, they will be in major explicit crisis with no notice.

Her body aches with the deception done upon it. You bastard, Brian, she thinks. You selfish pig.

It is not even as if she likes him particularly.

He rolls over and his wry pale eyes catch her gaze, and he grins apologetically and puts his arms around her, and she recalls with a visceral shock the words, the truthful unguarded words that he'd once quoted to her from the dean of Australian quipu writers. Will he remember them now? Will they express her own ambiguity to him, penetrate his barriers of buffoonery and bigotry and egotism?

"Why Do You Publish Quipus?" she quotes, straining her neck away from his nuzzling face.

He looks up at her, really looks at her for a single moment.

"Yes, I know Marj."

Because I'm lonely.

Marjory shivers, darts her hands down and tweaks his balls, sits up quickly as he jumps in surprise and releases his own hold. She crosses to the tiny apartment's shower (good thing Ray had first grab at a tutor's unit, rather than one of the shared-facility student one-roomers), turns the jet on full, stands in hot steamy clouds under the sluicing spray. A highly effective ventilator removes the steam with dispatch, clearing moisture from the mirror.

Through the hum of the fan, she distantly hears Wagner say, "That's "kwee-poo," singular and plural."

She dries herself swiftly with a towel brought from home, leaving the hotel linen untouched. "Crap, Brian. "Kee-poo" singular, "kee-poos" plural. Check your dictionary."

Unwashed Brian has his clothes on when she steps from the bathroom.

"Hike usage hasn't made it into the dictionary yet, Marjory. "Kee" or "kwee," it's "poo" whatever the number. I'm making some tea. Want some?"

"You'll find the teabags are rather repulsive."

"Less so than the coffee sachets. Speak up, woman."

Dressing, she nods. Her nerves are relaxing. She doesn't even know very much about him, after all these years. He's Ray's friend really, they all are. Marjory pulls up the sheets, straightens the blankets, bashes the pillows into shape. It is Ray's honorary position as assistant to the Chairman of the Convocation which is paying for this room. Brian Wagner, like many of the Melbourne brights, commutes each day and sleeps at home, or crashes on someone's floor. In Brian's case, she reflects, it could well be someone's bed he crashes in. If he can find a willing partner. Until now, there's been little enough spare to go around. At least the size and magnitude of this event has attracted interested and curious non-hikes, by the score. Healthy young librarians, teachers, Public Service clerks. Opportunities for them all, for hapless Mike Murphy with his self-destructive bouts of inappropriate fixation, for Joseph, for all of them. Maimed and half-formed, for all their authentically prodigious gifts. Calibans.

Because I'm lonely.

The tea is wonderfully hot. Marjory sits in a Fler chair and looks at her partner in infidelity.

"Brian, why don't you find some woman and get married?"

"Shame on you, Marj. There are strict penalties for bigamy."

She regards him in astonishment. They fill the pages of their quipu with endless nonsense and leave out all the important stuff.

"I didn't know you were married."

"Well." He slurps at his tea, an attempt at comic distraction.

"Give. What's her name? Anyone we know?"

"Hardly likely. Alice."

"Where is she now, Brian?"

"I think they deported her."

Marjory spills her own tea into the saucer. Should have brought some mugs. "They can't do that, Brian. What, you don't mean she—"

"Alice was Chinese, from Taiwan or Hong Kong or somewhere. She wasn't very fluent."

Despite herself, Marjory is laughing out loud. "Brian, you imbecile. What rubbish is this?"

"Happens all the time. Her parents wanted to marry her off for a tidy sum to a Taiwanese gent back home but Alice wanted to stay here. She had some cousins in Brisbane who ran a restaurant. It was all part of some half-crazed family Triad feud. I've never been good with these tonal languages. I was talking to some guys in a pub. I'm not even sure they really were her cousins."

"Are you telling me you married a girl from a Chinese take-away and you couldn't even pass the time of day with her?"

"She was a student, actually. The Department of Immigration planned to ship her back home when she finished."

"But surely if she married you—"

"Yeah, that's what we thought. What her cousins thought."

"You did this out of the goodness of your heart?" That is harder to believe than the story itself.

"Are you nuts? They paid me a thousand dollars."

"Good God, and you took it?"

"They were stinking rich—racehorses as well as restaurants. I was broke. This was well before Joe Williams got me his old job and I became a paid-up member of the Australian Journalists Association." Wagner sits himself on the edge of the neat bed and sprawls back on it, pulling up both pillows behind his head.

"How bizarre. What happened?"

"We all fronted along to the local registry office and got married, at least Alice and I got married. Then, just for the form of the thing, we went off for the honeymoon to this bloody great luxury hotel on the Gold Coast. It pissed on this joint." He waves expansively at Marjory's borrowed accommodation. "Her cousins came with us, of course."

"What? They disturbed the sanctity of the wedding chamber?"

"They did indeed. Most insistent. After all, they had to make sure we didn't have it off with each other. That way it could all be legally annulled after a suitable delay, and she'd be available for re-marriage as unmarked goods."

"You're a sexist pig, Brian."

He widens his eyes and tilts his head. "I merely describe the world, my dear. I didn't invent it. The slant-eyes have lived this way for five thousand years, don't take it out on me."

"And a racist pig." She does not smile. Brian sighs, lies back on the bed. After a time, Marjory rises and switches on the jug again. "You can't stop now."

Instantly bouncing back, Brian says, "All four of us sat around the bridal suite for three days. We played cards non-stop and drank. At least the cousins and I played cards, along with various friends of theirs who dropped in at all hours. Alice just rang up room service and asked for tea every half hour. The cousins were pretty sharp cardplayers, better than fans."

"Oh, Brian. You lost your money."

"The thousand dollars was gone by the end of the first day. So they lent me some to keep the ball in play, and I won a bit back. It was just like playing Monopoly. All these meaningless large-denomination notes kept changing hands. Sometimes I had a great stack of it, at other times I had nothing and had to borrow some more."

Without benefit of room service, Marjory fills their cups with more tea, sugar, milk. She hands Brian one. Hikes are different than you and me, Ernest. They're crazier.

"Thanks. Well, at close of play on the third day I had $500 in front of me. I think they must have arranged among themselves to let me keep that much. We all shook hands, and I went out and bought a new suit and an air ticket to Melbourne. The rest went in the bank. You could buy quite a bit for five hundred bucks in those days, before the ruinous inflation of the socialists had brought us all unstuck. It was strange, Marj. I could barely credit anyone being stupid enough to exchange these bits of paper for a packet of cigarettes, let alone a new woollen suit."

"Did you ever see Alice again?"

"Never saw any of them again. Six months later two bloody great Commonwealth wallopers came to my front door and asked why I wasn't living with my wife. I said we'd had a quarrel. They wanted to know if I'd read reports that Australians were being paid to marry Asians so they could stay in the country in breach of the immigration regulations. I told them I never read the gutter press. A couple of months later I saw a little news item on page 7 or 17, well back anyway, about Alice and a few other men and women being deported."

For a moment Brian looks so doleful and distant that Marjory's heart softens. She puts down her cup and saucer and sits beside him on the bed, taking his slack hand.

"Brian, that's a sad and sordid tale."

His mouth tightens, then relaxes to a sardonic grin. "You're too innocent, Marj. It was all quite amicably arranged." He gives her a swift, hard kiss and goes to the door. He stands at the boundary to the corridor. "The only sordid bit was that it had to happen at all."

1970: marching

Cockroach Delighthouse

Rozelle

Sunday 10 May

My dear Joseph

Trauma and hysteria, hatred & tears. No, not me, baby—the musical Antony.

I found myself last night at a Peacock Point party—great music and dancing, I was in high spirits—and Antony & his entourage turned up. Time to remind him of some unanswered mail.

It was quite late when I confronted him. I was civil and cool (hadn't had a drink all night). No, he wouldn't talk to me, he was going home. Come off it. Oh, all right. We went outside and he became quite uncontrollable, so emotional, ranting and weeping, I hate you, hate Joseph, hate, hate—You destroyed me utterly, that letter, so horrible, so cruel it made me cry . . .

So it went. Excuses of his pitiful upbringing. I mentioned that this was not totally germane to the matter of his debts to me. How about some money? Screams and shouts again. Really bitter, fuck.

"You used me as an escape from Joseph, never loved me"—all this crap. I told him, "Yes, you hate me, you hate Joseph because you couldn't destroy my love and admiration for him."

"That's right, I couldn't & I hate him, I hate you, your insanity destroyed me, and then you abandoned me, just pissed off with Alan . . ." He really believes his lies, Joseph, I really think he's convinced himself that he didn't turn his back without a word, that I goaded him into coming to Sydney—it's all so incredible.

Of course Iris and Francine rushed to the rescue. Leave him alone! Antony in tears (admittedly he was a bit drunk) kept justifying himself, appealing to Iris: "You know how upset I've been, I can't sing when I'm like this." Crap crap crap.

I let him go. He staggered off, a broken man, into the night—it was both a good act and pathetic, such a pathetic sight. I guess I don't get my money back.

This torrent of hatred for you amused me. I'd humiliated him, and he knew you are not vulnerable to me in that way. He'd have killed me . . . enough of that. Sorry to bore you, but thought you might care to know how it all turned out.

Passed psych. More exams in 6 weeks or so. Have done no study.

Work is shitting me to death. So to speak.

The moratorium was a great success. Did you see our street theater on telly? Cheers and applause at Sydney Uni. Crippled frightened little Vietnamese. Five people as the War Machine in stark white face, black clothes, dead black stocking Balaclavas—we looked vile, quite horrifying. Then we led the march! Thousands of students with linked arms behind us—Americans, Australians, Vietnamese, screaming and whipping, kicking and abusing, genuine tears from fatigue and emotion, pleading, the War Machine chanting and droning.

We went on stage again at the Town Hall but the police blocked off most of the view. The cops were bored, really crapped, because there was no violence. When a communist guy got up to speak he was drowned out by the crowd yelling "Peace Now!"—incredible, how can anyone suppose that the Moratorium was a "communist front"?

Because we were up on the platform we could see how many people were there. And the street march in Melbourne! 75,000 people . . . it must have been devastating. Saw a bit of it on telly. Tell me about it.

I've had an average of 4 hours sleep the last week. Now the Moratorium's over I can recover.

Write and give me strength.

with the usual dreary spirit of love

Caroline

1971: political science

Day ebbs from the sky. Ray gets up, turns on the light. He refills the kettle and carries the pot to the sink. Frustrating as this conversation is, infuriating, it intrigues him.

Living as he does in an Annandale terrace with three other socialist atheists of comparatively like mind, involved the rest of the time with tutors and students, he is out of touch with the world at large. The Nourses must be close to the norm for a middle-class couple of their age-cohort. Shut Marj up and reason with them. She's too close to them, too full of personal bile and bias. Christ, listen to the woman—she's being just as absurd as they are. No, not just as absurd, that'd really be pushing it. But pretty intemperate.

"Look," he breaks in, leaning on the back of Marjory's chair, "just tell me one thing, Tom. Why do you have such a low opinion of activists?"

No hesitation. "Louts with no respect for their elders. Just because they're lazing around at university they think they should be running the country. When I was their age I was working my guts out making a place for myself in the world. They expect it all to fall into their laps."

"Must've been tough," Ray says sympathetically. "Growing up in the Depression, war breaking out, low wages."

"It was awful," Doris Nourse says. "You young people have no idea."

"But the economy's more buoyant now. More options're available. Isn't that part of the freedom you fought for?"

"They ought to be studying for their exams, not wasting the taxpayer's money disrupting the community."

"Exams! Exams are a mystification," Marjory announces, a proposition, Ray sees to his gloom, that is a prime exemplar of the evil it denounces. "As it happens, a survey by the Political Science department has shown that most of the radical activists do better than average in their exams."

"Tom, it's not that we have too much," Ray says. "The point is that we have enough. We're not all forced into the rat race quite so soon, or so urgently. And that's an epithet your generation coined, 'rat race'."

"You need to get your nose out of all those books and into real life."

"Oh God," moans his daughter. Ray digs both thumbs into her back but she shrugs irritably. "You're the one who's so strong on reports and figures and statistics. I can show you a whole armload of U.N. reports giving the details of ecological destruction and world poverty and suburban neuroses and waste in our community and—"

Ray jabs her again. She subsides into sub-vocal muttering.

"Look, Tom," he says, "every day in our academic work we're faced with real facts about human misery and other real facts about how little our community's doing to relieve it. And further real facts, if it comes to that, about how much of that misery we actually cause."

He raises his voice as Nourse starts to speak. "I agree with you—academic abstractions are often remote from everyday reality, universities are often diversionary. I imagine we'd differ on the details of that criticism. But one by-product, Tom, one by-product of our training in the ivory tower is the capacity to gather data together, and frame solutions to general problems on the basis of that data."

"What's this got to do with the real world?"

"Well, let's take an example. The real world contains four billion people. Each year millions of them literally starve to death. Another real fact: our own society is the richest, most technically advanced in history. We have the answers. But we won't use them. It's a matter of deliberate choice."

"Piffle. Australia sends millions of tons of wheat to Asia."

"A pittance and you know it. An effective solution's going to need more than shipping off our surplus grain on time payment. There's just not enough caring. That's why we march. Tom, it's your generation that's been brainwashed. You'd rather spend billions on weapons and useless pollutive gimmicks than on saving half of mankind from hunger and disease."

"Be realistic," Nourse says, stoking his pipe. "They'd just go on breeding like rabbits and starving in even greater numbers."

Ray Finlay can scarcely credit this. Is the man literally deranged after all? But abusive invective wins no converts. "Indeed, that's possible. If we keep them so poor they can't spare resources for education. If we cut off their markets, distort their economies, force them to sell their oil and produce dirt-cheap by pointing a gun at their heads—"

"It's the way of life they've chosen, Ray. Look at Japan, a miracle."

"Propped up with American money. But yes, Japan shows what can be done if we're prepared to spend the cash."

"Why should we?"

"I could mention 'Love thy neighbor'."

"Be practical, Ray." Nourse squints at him with amusement. "Anyway, I thought you were rather proud of giving up your religion?"

"Religion crap," Marjory says angrily. "It's simple justice. Listen, we did it to them! Just like we gave the aborigines poisoned flour and poxy blankets. We've got rich on their backs. We sailed in with gunboats and smashed up their economies, we gave them the elementary techniques to cut child mortality without allowing them to industrialize properly . . . I mean, these are clichés, for God's sake, truisms—"

"You're both talking like bloody communists."

"Facts, Tom. No interpretation necessary. Left and right can exploit those facts but they didn't create them. We have dues to pay," Ray says, conscious of his overwhelming moral superiority to this dreadful barbarian. "Our first duty is to get our damned sticky fingers out of what remains in the pot. Instead, we toss the change from our pockets into the crowd and put our fortunes into military dictatorships."

In the tired silence, Marjory rouses herself to pour fresh tea. Ray lights a cigarette. Have to give them up. Useless pollutive gimmicks indeed. He coughs.

"You see, Ray," Tom Nourse says, "I'm sorry, but that's the way the world is. There are no simple solutions."

"Nixon thinks half a million troops is a simple solution. The Pentagon and the Kremlin think there's one buried in concrete silos, waiting for someone to light the blue touch paper."

"I don't think anyone is going to use nuclear weapons," Nourse says judiciously. "We all agree that's a very bad way to fight a war. Some of my friends in the Defence Department are working on chemical methods that are much more humane."

And Marjory flares finally. Ray feels his skin tighten. It is almost terrifying. It is like magnesium igniting in a darkroom.

"Yes," she says in a funny high voice, "that's the difference isn't it. Between us and you. We just can't get it into our silly heads that one way of killing people is more humane than another. It's sad for your balanced evaluations, but we have a strange notion that war is absolutely filthy and utterly unjustifiable. We reject the whole thing and the whole society that wants it right from its stinking foul premises."

An intolerable desolation darkens Ray's spirit.

What she says should be true, but where does morality lie? Confounded in a bad pun. He knows he will rejoice when and if the revolutionary warriors march victorious into Saigon and Phnom Penh. If there are bloodbaths of reprisal, likely enough, despite the bland assurances of the spokesmen for the left, he can see that he will shrug them off in calculations of justice and realpolitik. It is a matter of estimating consequences, his old bugbear. Like Joseph Williams, he yearns for tachyons to carry messages from the future. Or the realization of his dream of a calculus of systems, an authentic basis for sociological prediction, a scientific theory of history that works on the fine grain. But where then would be freedom? In the absence of utopia, he knows there is no simple pacifism. He has read Fanon, who teaches that the black man can regain dignity only by killing his white persecutor.

Tom Nourse takes no offence at his daughter's quivering outburst. "It's man's nature," he explains. "There's no sense in getting angry about it. The whole universe is competitive."

It is a point Ray will concede, in his bleaker moments. Is it not the impulse behind his fascination with I.Q. tests, with the Burt dogma of inherited gifts? Marj, true to form, can't see it that way.

"Oh, right. Human beings are just another stack of statistics. Punch them into a Balance of Payments computer program."

"You'll understand when you get older," Nourse assures her. "But don't misunderstand me. The difference between the society we enjoy and what you propose is that you want us to give up our high standard of living. My friends want India and those other countries to have the same high standard of living. Level up, not down, you see." It is dark outside now. Time for dinner. Nourse gets to his feet. "It's been nice seeing you again, Ray. Come round and visit, Marjory. If there's a program you want to watch on the television."

Doris Nourse, hiding at the edge of the table, gathers her things together and gives Marj a kiss and a hug. "Now don't get too near those mounted policemen," she warns. "The horses sometimes get frightened by all the people."

At the door, Tom Nourse turns and extends his hand. "And thank you for the discussion. I might be an old square, but I always like to hear both sides." The door clicks shut. There is a hysterical silence. Ray Finlay dumps cups and glasses into the sink and hopes Marjory will wait until her parents have reached the street. Behind his shoulder, he hears a strident, torn, high-pitched laugh.

1970: foreign aid

Blessed Saint Kilda

May 12 70

Look love it's like this:

A certain quantity of money has come into my hands. I've got more than $1300 in the bank right now and my need is not great. So herewith, five hundred bucks so you can stop shoveling shit.

I'm being awfully presumptuous, and if you'd rather not, just send it back. But I thought it'd be pleasant if you had the option to piss your job off and study full time, or at least work only one day a week (say) waitressing. I assume you can get the full $200 student loan mentioned in the handbook. I won't want this back for a long time, and if worst comes to worst I can always use my degree to get another job.

The Moratorium here, as you will have read, was luverly. Vast and very peaceful. Bumped into a bunch of first-year kids, recognized one of them (lives up the street from my parents, I coached her brother in physics last year), went sadly away full of yearning for the coming force of Wimmens Lib when the silly creatures started an excited conversation about palmistry (some buffoon on telly, evidently): who they were fated to marry, when and where. Looking into the future was apparently, for them, limited solely to that blissful and inevitable consummation. Hell's teeth.

This household is giving me the shits—just sitting around, I mean, reading a bit but bugger all else. Martha's seriously considering giving up teaching, which I find a vile prospect: the baby home all day too, mewling and puking. Absurdly, I can't think of anything else to write about. There's been nothing dramatic or tragic for miles in any direction. Visitors from Sydney; big deal, you see them all the time, or don't know them. Karen's given up screwing for two weeks until her twat heals after some unnameable operation. Gray gray and nothing's afoot. So I'll bid thee good night for the nonce and to bed.

love to all

J.

1970: taking it

May 16

My dear Bandersnatch

The check was all a bit much. My spontaneous reaction was to send it back, but, thinking about it . . . I haven't. Probably because I'm so stuffed, feeling dreadful. I'm at the end of my tether & I've got exams in June & my only real hope of scraping thru is to chuck the job.

I have friends in Paddo who are opening a shop where I can sell stuff I make—they have a sewing machine, maybe I can make clothes or toys out the back of the shop. Any orders?

The Socialists' Scholars Conference begins on Thursday so if you're coming up I'll expect you Wednesday.

Got the photos I took of you. They're pretty bad, you're so tense you look as though you're about to crack in two.

Hope to see ya. Any of the Shakespeare Grove people are welcome, but will have to bring blankets & sleep on the floor.

Terribly tired.

Caroline

boxed in

IRON LUNG

Certain diseases and injuries can paralyze the muscles of the chest to such an extent that breathing is impossible. Since respiration is essential to life, machines have been devised to take over the job of the muscles for such patients.

The iron lung is a large, air-tight container with a pump or diaphragm allowing internal pressure to be increased or decreased in a regular cycle.

The patient's body, with the exception of the head, is totally enclosed within the iron lung. As the internal pressure builds, the air inside the patient's lungs is forced out. When it drops, the chest expands and draws air in.

Naturally the machine has to opened from time to time, to permit washing, excretion and medical attention, and during these intervals the patient's head is enclosed by a dome or mask attached to the pump.

PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP

Bitter salad: Alum entree, my dear Watson

ddddddddddddddddd

The iron lung was invented by Philip Drinker, an American, in 1929. With the control of poliomyelitis (a severe paralyzing illness) by the Salk vaccine, the machine became less important in medicine.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of its use is that people can tolerate such an existence. But the human spirit can flourish in infirmity. Indeed, one Australian woman doomed to spend her life in an iron lung has actually conceived and given birth despite her affliction.

1970: civilization and its discos

5 Rozelle

June 2nd

Dear Pog,

A day late, I just finished a 3000 word essay (rang them with the news that I'd had a minor car accident) on Conflict in Societies. I'm awash with it. Got in my bit on glorious western civilization (My Lai) versus controlled hostilities in savage tribes. I was so bold as to say that egalitarianism is fascist—you're familiar with the argument. Pretty old hat, but still . . .

Cockroach Tavern is full of loonies and screaming nutters and boring turds and interesting passers-through. Aggression and bad vibes resound in the halls.

After the few days visiting with you in Melbourne I felt nothing but happiness. Contentment, warm inside. Hope you felt the same. I came down almost immediately with violent bronchial flu. I know, I know, you warned me—so? I don't care, I'm happy sharing your yoghurt and licking your spoon.

A local photographer has offered to use some of my crocheting in a color spread for POL, when I have enough of it done. My God! Lanie nude in Chance (maybe, if she gets her nerve up) and me in POL!

I visited Martin Sharp's exhibition this afternoon. Exciting, very phallic stuff, brilliant colors, cartoon twists and satiric images splashed over traditional prints. I wandered around exhilarated by the pumping music and zany words scattered and resounding. All of that was rather shrouded, I admit, by the blaring black prices—$50 for a print poster in an edition of 10 or 20, $1200 for a painting, $1100 for a collage—Christ, he'll be the wealthiest hippie in London!

Evidently his prices were lower at first until he discovered the impact he's made in Australia, the charisma sparking from his name. So he bumped the prices up. Can't blame him. While I was there I spotted him wandering through the crowd, the artist in full bloom. You'd have enjoyed his satiric obscenity.

Margie has found a new gentleman friend and is thoroughly In Love. From this I deduce that he's neither tugging her pants down nor biting her boobs.

no more, no more,

Caroline

1983: pants and boobs

On Brian's express orders, Joseph accompanies him to a Saturday afternoon barbecue. Everyone there is glossy with social competence. No red sauce runs down their chins, no sausage leaps to the dried-out grass from seared fingers. How is it that Wagner knows people of this stamp? Good God, one of them is Howard, editor and appliance-fancier from Science Today Publications. All those years ago. Balding, bland, cheerful.

Nice to see you again, Joe. You'll have some Chablis?

It's true. Howard remembers everything and knows the meaning of nothing. Rather like Joseph's own case, put that way.

Must go on my hostly way, Joe. Glad you could get here.

Joseph retreats to the farthest extent of the yard, gazes down on the pool and its sagging nylon cover, safety net for leaves, dust, pensioned-off spiders.

Hello, I'm Mandy.

She is plain, short, female.

Brian tells me you used to work with him.

Not exactly.

It's too difficult to explain, so he smiles at her instead.

Come away with me Mandy, and we shall all the pleasures prove. But his ears redden, how can he carry this sort of thing off?

Naughty.

She's scribbling on a piece of notepaper.

Call me about the middle of next week. I'm just too exhausted right now, just got back from Bali.

I like your suntan, Joseph tells her in a frenzy of hope.

He inveigles Wagner into accompanying him by taxi (Wagner's car is on the point of death) to Mandy's apartment on the following Friday night. Trembling and full of preposterous terror.

She gives them coffee. A very plain young person, when all is said and done, but she's been to interesting places. In her car they dash into town for a bit to eat, a movie. Wagner insists on a monstrous and pretentious pub in the middle of the city. Joseph is rather shocked. He has always assumed that the inner metropolis is dedicated entirely to nasty department stores and yawning glassy caverns of finance. Beaten copper, Aztec patterned carpet, dark wells of snug seduction.

Mandy asks for a Harvey Wallbanger.

They stock up well enough on pepper steaks, brandy, creme de cacao. Appallingly expensive.

Peter O'Toole is screamingly funny.

As they go about finding her car Mandy makes several jokes that send Joseph to the pavement, cracking his knees.

Getting out of hand.

Brian is obliged by a previous engagement to leave them. Blur of careful driving.

You might as well stay the night, you'll fall under a tram in that condition.

But she keeps her pants on under her shortie nightie. And the bed is only a single. They lie extended like nails. Joseph quivers.

It's that time.

What?

Very bloody.

An old-fashioned and absurd objection, Mandy. Haven't you read The Female Eunuch?

Of course she hasn't, that was ten years ago at least. Cosmopolitan seems to have turned against menstrual sex. It must be the New Romanticism.

She shows him the trick she uses to build up her chest. You press your palms together, elbows out like a plucked chicken's wings, and push like buggery for a count of ten. It doesn't make your boobs bigger, but the underlying pectoral muscles increase in size and this plumps out the chestal area.

The chestal area?

Yes, haven't you heard that hilarious Woody Allen record?

Joseph has missed out on many of the last decade's more salient cultural events. Now he makes good his ignorance. Mandy pops the tape on. It is screamingly funny, but only while it lasts. Mandy turns her back and goes to sleep. Joseph lies beside her, his spine like a stake through a vampire's heart, and waits for sunrise so he can skulk home.

Mandy's apartment faces the Royal Park Golf Course, and beyond that the walls of the Zoological Gardens. As the early summer sun whips the lid off the sky, bleary Joseph hears the lions roar for their breakfast.

1970: eaten inside

University of New England,

Armidale.

June 10, 1970

dear grub

Without the decencies of modern mechanical transduction, in chilly Armidale, forced to take up the archaic pen (tried using Paul's typewriter but it possessed so many astonishing faults that I gave it up), here, alive and well, or approximately, looking into the sky for the secrets of Time and Space. Maybe, one day, anyway.

I would have written earlier but so much sudden organizing has disrupted my habits. After you returned home to Sydney I dithered with my flu for a few days and decided at last that the only sensible thing to do was plunge in, put my bloody theory to the test, so I flew up to Armidale. If Paul and I do find any time-reversed tachyons in our mess of pottage I'll use them to signal my former self and spare both of us all this hurry up & wait.

My body has been rebuking me. The day before I was due to catch my plane north, there came a crotchety gnawing at the entrails. As luck would have it, Martha had prepared one of her glorious carnivorous curries, a splendid trencher of lamb and beef and spiced vegetables and coconut snowed across the lot, and her famous yoghurt, and spliced bananas and diced apricots and small pieces of tomato and onion and cucumber, and chilly beer in each fist, and my metabolism rebelled, overloaded, croaked it.

In mid-munch I hied me to my bedroom, guts growling and snarling with unknown pains, where I capered in the semi-dark acrobatically seeking some posture that might supply relief. No way. All the shades of gray and blurting blurry trumpets. In and out of consciousness I went. I might have been having a miscarriage (yes, I thought of your pain), had the plumbing not been otherwise.

Reluctantly, fearful of paramedical scorn (amazing how these high-level social responses surmount our most bitter and unmediated pangs) I made the great trek back to the dining room where everyone ate happily of pudding, and consulted our resident nurse. Quaffing her prescription (copious milk and aspirin) I went back to die in my room.

Horrid, frightened night. Next morning to the local quack, a ponderous oily sweating man with a Hitler moustache who prodded and poked and ruminated and thank god saw no cause for a barium meal. I must abandon nicotine. I must exercise like a decent Christian. Above all, I must eat only of the fruit of the blandest tree in the garden. The list he provided is horrendous: custards & milk shakes & no booze & nothing of a fibrous or irritant nature.

No ulcer, at least. Stomach cramps due to tension and lack of god-fearing sport. So for a week now I've been dining breakfasting and lunching on gloop. There is no end in sight. It does help a bit, true. He suggested three months. I shall certainly go mad. I know you will not credit this, but I have cut down to four or five ciggies a day though it's creeping up again. I spend most of my conscious hours sneaking up on the clock, watching the hands creep: my rule is one smoke every three hours. Dementia. And the man speaks of tension as a cause.

I got to Armidale just under a week ago. As I think I told you on the phone, I'd arranged with Paul Ramsden to have the tachyon detector wired into the SQUID by his lab tech buddy in the physics department. My precipitate arrival was greeted with less than the total enthusiasm due a man who was going to share the next Nobel Prize; in fact, Paul berated me for a reckless spendthrift, but took me in and gave me the spare bed in his study. Cats lie on my face at night. (Martha is looking after mine, never fear.) There are no suspicious squeaks from the, ahem, master bedroom. Either Paul and Tom have got past that sort of thing, like my parents (and, to be honest, as you and I did for fair stretches) or they go about it with great delicacy.

Without the detector and its computing interface, I disport myself about the house in rather the way I've become accustomed to at home: dipping into physics journals, making endless inconclusive calculations concerning the boundary conditions we can expect to obtain in a universe closed at both ends by a Big Bang and a Big Crunch, both connected by swarms of shuttling tachyons, reading novels, wondering how I can turn all this into usable quipu form. And eating bland (yuk) meals.

Tom Truczinski, Paul's friend, is very good about this. He won't have either Paul nor me in the kitchen, except to wash up, and he insists on giving me what the doctor ordered. A few years ago he had a genuine ulcer, none of your crypto-bellycramp bullshit, and takes it all fairly seriously—knows what to warn me off.

Other than that continual kindness, we have a highly ambivalent relationship. He's quite aware that I'm not queer, that on that level I'm no threat to his er "marriage" with Paul. He strikes me as absurdly insecure, given his proven accomplishments in particle theory; I take it that he'll be the youngest person to have a high-energy physics Ph.D. in the history of the State. Still, he resents my presence ferociously because I distract Paul from total preoccupation with him.

I'm taking all this subliminal flak with as much cool (but warmish cool, if you see what I mean) as I can sustain. Since this sort of confused subfusc meta-communication unnerves me and makes me hostile by turns, I can only hope the damned detection apparatus is up and on-line soon.

It looks as if I'll be stuck here a couple of weeks at least. Don't know what darling Tom will think of that . . . (Yes I do.) So meanwhile write to me here.

lots of tachy love

Joseph

A DOG'S WIFE

. . .three

For some days we hid out in a Lina Wertmuller festival. Without disrespect I must reveal that she is not my ideal auteur, but Spot always makes taking in a movie such fun, and I was terrifically excited when he told me how much I had always put him in mind of Mariangela Melato, whom Lina employed with some wit.

"Hang in there, baby," Randy told me from the West coast, his voice oddly interspersed by bleats of telemetry from the space shuttle preparations. "We'll have the kid back on the bomb bay floor by New Year's." For a fleeting moment I wondered if Father's lawyers had misunderstood the quandary facing my husband, and were in fact directing the enormous resources of the studio to the task of getting Spot into rather than out of the weapons research program. Such things had been known to happen.

1970: following orders

Caroline loiters on the stairs outside the English Department, hoping to worm some clues from her tutor for the forthcoming exams. Woe & gloom, her mood. Rising tension, her bodily state. Crabby, her demeanor. He rounds the corner, a man in his mid-twenties with the face of a handsome stoat.

Oh. Come in.

The bastard doesn't know zilch.

Actually, Miss Muir, I haven't even seen the exam paper.

I thought you all had to—

If you must know, they rejected my suggested questions.

She does not speak.

What topic were you worried about? I have a busy schedule today.

Drama. The course you teach us.

Actually, I have to confess that drama isn't really my "thing."

Caroline is flabbergasted.

Why are you tutoring in it, for God's sake?

Well, you have to do as you're told. He smiles enchantingly and pushes back a lock of hair. You know, tote your barge.

Caroline presses her teeth together. Her belly knots. Fool, turd. She says nothing. She picks up her big bulging bag and turns away to the open door.

Oh, while you're here.

Yes?

He's glancing at a sheaf of paper from the department secretarial office.

I see you have two extra essays to hand in before the exam.

What? What?

"Death of a Salesman" and "Mother Courage."

But you didn't—In panic she delves into her bag, spills paperbacks, brush, an orange. A sheet of paper flutters. She snatches at it. Look, here, there's no mention of—

Really? No, sorry, I haven't had a chance to tell your group before this, I've been terribly rushed.

But how can I possibly—I'll need an extension.

No, I'm going to have to be firm about that, Miss Muir. It's a departmental decision. We can't accept them after that date. Sorry, sorry, just passing down the orders.

Caroline sits in the union. She sips a stewy cup of tea. Infinitely slowly she takes out a fresh sheet of paper, finds a pen, and starts a letter to Joseph.

1970: view from a distance

Twitchy Cloisters

Rozelle

12 June

My dear Joseph

Kiddo, you gotta watch yourself. An ulcer can't be wished away. Do what the man said—go to a gym, put up with the effort and the embarrassment. But let's face it, when have you ever listened to me about anything?

Had a rotten time with my tutor today. Wish you were here to give me a cuddle. The house is full on and off with dreary, dreary people.

Here's my big exciting news: I have bought an electric blanket. One depends on these trivialities.

Downstairs the other happy members of our ménage delight in Scrabble, while I stare from the window of my little room. It might be winter but the view is very pretty. Everything is pretty from a distance. You even find me pretty from a distance.

love Caro

1975: the end of the universe

Joseph looks from his podium at the several hundred hikes and hopefuls gathered here, in the Reading Room of the Humanities Research Center on the top floor of the A. D. Hope building in the Australian National University in Canberra, waiting to hear him speak. Mastering the tremor in his arm he takes water, rattles the glass back to the table. They stares at him benignly. He recalls the Bhagavad-Gita:

On all sides That has hands and feet;
On all sides eyes, heads and faces;
On all sides in the world it hears;
All things it embraces.

They are waiting for him to begin. He begins.

"Fellow Australians, international guests, it broadens my bosom, as they say in The Thousand Nights and One Night, to join you at this wonderful convocation. 1975 is a year I shall surely remember all my life. Since I don't have a terrifically good memory for faces, I'd like you all to hold still for a moment, smile, and say 'Cheese'."

He cannot focus his gaze on any one of them. Are they gaping in confusion, smirking at the tremolo in his amplified voice, or perhaps smiling in complicit anticipation as he takes from his soft leather shoulder bag, hung on the back of his chair, a Canon complete with theatrically protuberant fisheye lens attachment. He raises it to his eye, pans across the room, sets the f stop, and hits the shutter button. Light blazes from his flash, rips the color out of their cheeks in that instant.

"I've always been interested in capturing important moments on film, on tape, on paper," Joseph tells them, losing the mike for a moment as he turns to slip the camera carefully back into his bag. "That's why I am a quipu hike, I suppose. Still, this must seem remote from my announced topic, which is a brief account of my experiments over the past few years. Those experiments, as some of you will know, concerned the possible existence of a class of elementary nuclear particles dubbed 'tachyons.' Sadly, the experiments failed. I think you might find some intellectual pleasure in hearing about the train of thought that led me to invest so much of my time and effort in such a strange quest."

He sips again at water, feeling a little more assured, a touch more fluent. Despite the presence in the audience of several accomplished physicists who will find his simplified presentation puerile, unrigorous and absurdly rudimentary, he keeps his inner focus set on the rather larger number of brights who, for all their deftness with numerical puzzles, possess no special mathematical or physical training: the taxation clerks, housewives, historians, bus drivers, hedonistic layabouts like Wagner who certainly sits smirking down there in the front row.

"Why the camera? Because it symbolizes my goal. In a way, it became my ambition to take a photograph of the End of the Universe." They look up at him. Moist stones.

"I'm not speaking of the physical limits of the Universe, mark you. I had no great interest in quasars, those monstrous flares burning at distances that must be reckoned in the billions of light years. What we know of them are merely images of galactic cores long perished, images that are mere streams of photons coming into our telescopes no faster than three hundred thousand kilometers a second, messages to us from the extinguished boundaries of early time.

"No, I became fascinated by quite the opposite problem. I wanted to get a snapshot of the other End of the Universe. The Big Crunch, when everything falls back under gravity and is swallowed by the gigantic Black Hole that will be all of the Universe at the end of time."

He can hear them rustling now, can imagine the frowning brow, the cocked ear. These people are not without imagination. "That's right. I wanted to take a picture of the future."

1970: cheap shots

Armidale

Tuesday 17 June 1970

Hi kid

Energy might well travel faster than light, but matters here proceed slowly. Paul and I await the arrival from the workshop of our wonderful computer-compatible noise-compensating signal-enhancing cascade-detecting tachyon monitor Mark 1. Can't do nuthin without it. Can't give up smoking without it. Tom growls and stamps about the house, or goes off in trizzy fits to get plastered at some poofter pub or club. Hard to comprehend that this is one of the prime minds of our generation.

I can understand his anxiety and jealousy because I'm stealing so much of Paul's spare time (work time too, once the bloody machine is up, so the prospect is worse than the prevailing case). The irritating thing is the way he whines and carries on precisely like a spoilt child whining for endless attention. While it's sad and affecting, in a pathetic sort of way, this is just the kind of behavior guaranteed to piss Paul off in the shortest span of time (unless their relationship, heaven forfend, actually bases itself on that sort of pathology).

So the threesome is rapidly becoming intolerable. Still, I'm reluctant to go home before we've had a chance to test the theory with some appropriate hardware—and, if I'm honest, I don't wish to leave Paul to the possible glory and authority of doing it himself in my absence.

If I did go it would certainly remove the immediate strain from Tom, but I suspect it'd leave no more than an illusion of tranquillity. But for all I know, success in our endeavors might introduce a fresh wonderful regime of harmony, prosperity, honor, advancement and sexual joy into their lives.

Later:

Just had an evasive, elliptical discussion with Tom. I wondered obliquely if perhaps he wished me gone, and that this might not be the worst idea in the world, and he alluded to his intermittent feelings of paranoia that were always followed by remorse and self-flagellation if he'd made a scene, and how he'd apologize under such circumstances if his pride would allow it, which of course it wouldn't. None of this, naturally, was expressed in such brutally crisp and unambiguous terms, but in even more rococo cynical self-sendups from both of us. We scientists are noted for the clarity of our communications. Accordingly, tensions are somewhat eased, though doubtless the central problems remain unsolved.

I rang Shakespeare St. the other day by a curious communications expedient known only to engineers—breaking the university switchboard defenses against long distance calls. This demands iron finger tips and a spectacular natural sense of rhythm . . . you bang the hanging-up doovers (as they are known technically) a certain number of times to simulate the clicks of a long distance prefix (03 in the case of Melbourne, ten clicks, then three) and this fools the silly creature into letting you through for the price of a local call. However, the timing is critical, and the noise made in whacking the aforementioned doover is not inconsiderable. So I can't use this method at will; one must wait for an empty office. Another method, involving a bent paperclip, is currently under development, and should permit calls from public boxes.

At any rate, they told me there's a letter from you languishing on my shelf. Forwarded, it might well arrive tomorrow. I hope you're okay, me dear, that the impending exams are not too hopelessly daunting. I rush to the late mail box.

luv

The Cosmic Detective

1970: classroom iconoclasm

Friday night &

Saturday morning

dear ornithopter

2 o'clock in the wintry morning and snug in my lecky blanket.

Upheaval in the household. The transients are on their benighted way, taking one of our number with them alas. Patricia Lamb moves into the spare room (remember her? very autonomous, extrovert) which is fine by me. The last two months have been atrocious. I've really hated living here in this ha "commune." Difficult enough to find peace and consolation behind my closed door.

Next week the exams. Burning dreams of the first weeks of cracking up—how long now? '68.

Ambiguous pleasures of dealing with my 18th century English novel tutor (not the dreary turd I had for Tragedy). Though hesitant and suspicious, he seems to approve of my attitude. I turned in an essay condemnatory of Jane Austen, which attracted the predictable tute shit-storm. The tutor, though, scribbled this on it:

Interesting committed approach. Way outside that permitted or understood within the conventions of a university course, but why not? Is it more important to tell the truth about Jane Austen or about society? I might come down on your side, I imagine, but that is not what university courses are about, nor, I think, can they ever be. Your approach foreshadows not just the destruction of literary studies in their present form, but the collapse of English literature altogether—which is okay by me. But why on earth are you doing the course in the first place? Or is your aim avowedly subversive? (Which, again, is okay by me.)

I'm taking the bloody course, fella, because it's part of the syllabus, an obligatory prerequisite to study of present-day work.

. . . No, Joseph, I was not that direct, even with someone who permits criticism of the "great J.A."

This guy makes it plain that he finds me more than a little eccentric, but he does not fail to seek my opinions in every tutorial, which is flattering. Is this the Caroline who never dares open her mouth in your presence? I'm converting my co-students to Women's Liberation. A formal group has been established at the university. It's not doing much yet because of the pending exams—but we look forward to some tough self-analysis!

My chances of passing some of the less appealing courses are about 40/60.

I can't understand the first thing about tachyons. Are you writing anything about it for a quipu? If so, give me a look at it first (come on, a photostat isn't that expensive)—I feel quite excited by the aura you've created, and I can't bear to have to wait to find out more.

Maybe I could visit you in Armidale when the exams are over? I wouldn't mind going to Melbourne the long way. That is, if Paul and Tom don't object to females (yetch!) around the house.

write with words of comfort

Caroline

1975: faster than light

"It is well known," Joseph tells the assembled hikes, "that the theory of Relativity shows time slowing to a standstill for a particle accelerating ever closer to the speed of light in vacuum. From the viewpoint of the particle, of course, time ticks along at a reliable rate but space shrinks. The universe literally closes up ahead of it. The wavelength of incoming radiation becomes indefinitely short, as more and more troughs and humps are squeezed together by the compressed time of the particle."

It might be well known, but it remains a perspective to stagger and incapacitate the mind. He has lost some of them already.

"Given that this is true, it seems intuitively plausible that the arrow of time might be reversed by traveling faster than light. Sadly, it is axiomatic in Relativity theory that nothing can go faster than light." For a moment he pauses. "Or is it?"

"Of course it is," comes a muffled cry from the floor.

"Actually, it's not," Joseph tells them, relaxing back into his chair. "There's a loophole. Certainly it is impossible to push a particle with proper mass through the light-speed boundary. But mathematicians realized more than a decade ago that there's no prohibition on particles with imaginary mass."

Unexpectedly, there is a burst of laughter. He is nonplused for a moment. Oh shit, they think it's a droll jest. Joseph holds up a hand.

"Yes, appealing to a particle with imaginary mass might seem like a gambit from Alice in Wonderland. Let me assure you, however, that in mathematics a number is dubbed 'imaginary' if the result of multiplying it by itself is a negative number. That is, if it has a negative square."

Oh Christ. There goes half the remainder. Nothing for it but to push on with scholarly background stuff.

"The era of the imaginary particle was fully launched, after some early discussion by the Russian Terletski, by three Rochester University physicists, Bilaniuk, Deshpande and Sudarshan. It should be clear to anyone who's ever read the contents page of a professional physics journal that no one with a name as commonplace as 'Joseph Williams' could possibly discover anything significant." Good, friendly laughter. A nice touch, he hadn't really expected it to play.

"That was in 1962. They described in detail how pairs of imaginary particles might be captured and emitted by particles of proper mass, the sort we're made out of. Five years later, Gerald Feinberg published a powerful paper on the proposed particles, which he dubbed 'tachyons,' from the Greek tachys, meaning swift. That made three general categories of particles in the universe: 'tardyons' or 'tardons' or 'bradyons,' depending on which college you went to, which comprise ordinary atoms; 'luxons' which are massless and whip along at the speed of light; and 'tachyons' which never go slower than light.

"It was plain from the outset that they are dreadfully annoying things, if they exist. Feinberg notes his original paper that 'a state which contains no tachyons according to one observer will be seen by another observer to contain a large number."'

"It's like the number of holes in your argument," Brian Wagner yells powerfully from the floor, cupping his mouth with his hands. "It depends whether you're counting or I am."

A flock of startled laughter bursts up into the smoky air. Annoyed Joseph forces himself to grin down.

"You're a horrible fellow, Wagner," he says, "and no respecter of True Science."

Amid the giggles, there is some sympathetic hissing at naughty Wagner's expense. Joseph flips on the overhead projector. A nice clean drawing in several colors is abruptly there, fetched from the aether on strings of light.

"This is a Minkowski diagram," Joseph tells them. "It is a convenient spacetime chart for plotting four-dimensional 'world lines' by compressing all three spatial directions into a single horizontal x-axis, and representing time as the vertical y-axis. By traveling up the diagram, a marked point moves forward in time. Traversing the diagram laterally represents a compressed view of motion in three-dimensional space."

He flicks the controls of the projector. A new diagram appears, slightly more complicated. "Under certain conditions, the motion of tachyons would imply movement backward in time, that is, back down the chart. Tachyon theory," he says, conscious of an access of bleakness, "appears to invoke a determinate future. One where consequences cannot be evaded because, from the four dimensional perspective, the future can loop back and provide causal inputs to its own past. To avoid logical paradox, this kind of looping can only be sustained if the future that's doing the looping is directly coupled to the past it is affecting. Everything, from the point of view of the Minkowski diagram, has already happened."

The hike audience sits very still, regarding the geometric runes.

"Do you grasp what I'm saying? It's quite horrifying, you see. Even if a message could be transmitted to us now, to this very moment, from the future, using tachyons, we wouldn't be able to use that information to extend our volitional choices. We could not alter the future. Why not? Because in the future that sent us the tachyon message, it has long since been received. Whatever has happened as a result is what will happen. We are trapped in a block of rigid spacetime and nothing can ever get us out."

1971: the last refuge of the incompetent

Sunglare infiltrates the broken slats, abrading Ray Finlay's eyes. He groans, pushes his face into the rumpled valley between pillows. His jaw persists in sliding off the hard edge of the rubber pillow, dumping his nose and mouth into the suffocating fluffiness of Marjory's kapok monstrosity. Foul breath comes back at him. He gags. He sags drearily between near-conscious pain and near-sleeping asphyxiation.

At length he stumbles off the low bed and gropes three codeine tablets out of their guaranteed-not-to-tear foil. A pair of mosquitoes lies embalmed like a quote from Yeats on the surface of his bedside glass of water. Grimacing, Ray staggers to the bathroom and sloshes the glass clean. He douses his face and finds all the towels gone. My God, he thinks. That girl has the constitution of an ox.

They had grown maudlin over beer, eventually, and dragged out a bottle of Scotch from Peter's room, and become very drunk, falling onto the bed in confusion and love, exhausted with the incomprehensibility of the world and their own inadequacy. Now Marjory is down at the laundry and Ray, a decade closer to death even before he started, creeps back to bed.

When next he wakes the September sun glazes the window from eleven o'clock. No Marjory. Marjory at the laundromat. He lies in the sweaty bed and considers the day's agenda. The concrete stage. No rain, at least. Sun instead. Media cameras. Circus and purpose in one rousing package. He is, he understands, afraid of mass emotion. It is too potent. It is a vehicle for too many disjointed hostilities. Yet what alternatives for persuasion are so accessible? And it is not true, he admits finally, that Peter and Jan expect the apocalypse. Their instinct is valid. One must fight and fight and fight, be there, hold up banners and take the thumps of the cops and the sneers of the poor gulled buggers who haven't worked it out yet. Nothing is given; not despair, not faith and hope.

With a crash the bedroom door flies open. Don the Red puts his beard around the jamb.

"Get your clothes on, mate. I've got the van out the back."

Ray is not delighted to see him. Don the Red sees himself as Australia's Che Guevara. On weekends he practises with his automatic rifle in the hills. Like Che, he suffers from chest conditions; it is a link he cherishes.

"Seen Marj?"

"They were coming back from the food co-op. I brought them round, they're stashing the veggies away."

Ray climbs unsteadily into his underpants. "Lodged your route?" Protest organizers have an informal arrangement with the authorities. They present tight advance route-schedules to the City Council and the police. It helps minimize stupidities on both sides.

Don follows him to the bathroom door. "The obstructionist bastards are still quibbling. We've changed the route."

"You're not going straight to Hyde Park?"

"No way. We're going through the Cross to Rose Bay, to the American Embassy."

Oh, wonderful. Hold a demo in the middle of the red light district. Good thinking, Don.

"I thought the idea was to show the flag in town, attract ordinary people to join in."

"Just as many ordinary people in the Cross, mate. The media'll love it, sex and riots."

"Do you think the permit'll come through?"

"Not much they can do except deploy the pigs along the gutters. Oh, it'll be a nice clean useless little ritual."

Ray looks up at him, face dripping, eyebrows raised.

"Wait until you see what I've got in the bus, baby." Don laughs and goes back into the kitchen.

Ray towels and dresses, suspicious and angry. As he's pulling on his boots Marjory skips in, gives him a hug. "Hi. Still smashed?"

"I'm all right." She blinks at his tone. "Marj, what's he got out there?"

She's startled. "Placards, bike helmets, loud hailers, a box of marbles, you know." Lines crease between her eyes. "I know you don't like marbles, Ray, but it's better than getting trodden on by horses."

"It's one way to guarantee that someone gets trodden on, even if it's someone else." He brushes past her into the kitchen. Jan is mixing a spicy salad. It curdles the saliva at the back of his tongue. Peter slices ham, looking unhappy as Don harangues him.

Jan is jolly, a kid looking forward to a picnic. "Good evening, O Lochinvar. Marj has told all about your brush with the fascist olds."

Ray ignores her, as he usually does. "What's it going to be, Don? A Lee Harvey Oswald? They got him too, you might recall."

Don grimaces, excited and contemptuous. "It's going to be beautiful, baby. Direct action, revolutionary force. The time has come. We've played their game too long on their terms." Don has not read Marcuse for nothing. "Demonstrations," he explains, "are just another assimilated ritual. Just one more reinforcer of what a tolerant democracy we enjoy. It's time for violent dissent, baby, muscle in the message."

"Plastique, Don?" Ray is so furious he can barely speak. "Napalm? Are you planning to napalm a traffic cop? That'd be very colorful on telly, don't you think?"

Peter, clearly uneasy, says, "Actually I agree with Ray. Sporadic violence is adventurist, Don, it's unmarxist. Demonstrations are meant to change the consciousness of the masses through their praxis. I mean, we're trying to elicit sympathy. We want to show them how many people are against the war. Violence from us just produces backlash. Fascist reaction."

Don's eyes roll. "What are ya, a fuckin' media executive? Democracy's a sham. They've all been conditioned by the fascists who own the Press and the armies and the churches. The only way we can reach them is by violence. We have to give them a piece of what their bloody so-called democratic government is doing in Vietnam."

They've all trailed Ray out to where the van is parked. He climbs in the back as Don's exposition continues and starts shoveling through the hardware. One styrofoam cooler holds red glass containers filled with murky liquid, evidently under pressure. Another has similar bottles coded with green. Ray tugs one out, raises it to eye level. It is heavy and very cold. Don jumps in beside him. "Jesus, have a care," he yells. "If you smash two of those bottles together in here—"

Ray grabs his sweatshirt front without replacing the green container. "What is it, Don?"

The revolutionary strikes away Ray's grip but it is plain that he does not wish to fight in the back of the van. He jumps down into the long green grass. "Cool it, man." He rubs at his upper arm. "If you insist on the details, it's a CNS cholinesterase inhibitor in binary form."

Ray puts the bottle down very carefully. "Nerve gas," he says. "Oh you fucking fuckwits."

"That's just labeling," Peter tells him. "You're being superstitious. It's non-toxic. Mix the two fluids together and you get a light suspension of vapors that absorb through the moist membranes. We'll be all right, you just need a filter mask and we've got half the Chem labs' supplies in the vans."

"Christ," Marjory whispers.

"Bern and I made it in the labs," Don says. "It'll have the pigs puking their guts out. We'll keep it in reserve till the last moment, then take over the Embassy while everyone's running round like headless chooks. Once they see we mean business, people will—"

Without having the faintest premonition of his own impulse, the muscles and sinews in his arm driven by central nervous system chemical transmitters originating in some deep center of his limbic system, Ray lashes out and belts Don heavily in the gut. With a numb fist he does it again, then chops hard on the side of the man's neck as he falls forward. His hand feels swollen. Physical violence is hardly his forté: the jolt of the blows is painful and exhilarating, a revelation.

Marjory hesitates, then squats beside the unconscious man. Ray slams the back of the van shut. "I'll park it round at your parents' place," he tells her quietly.

"Maybe we'd better leave just the bottles there. Bern and the other organisers'll be looking for the van. They need the hailers and the helmets, Ray."

"They'll have to do without."

Jan and Peter are on their knees in the grass beside the prone Don, silent in a kind of unbelieving shock. Don starts to come round. He groans, touches his bruised neck, twists his head around. "I think something's dislocated." His eyes dart in outrage and betrayal.

"Listen, you crazy bastard." Ray helps him to his feet, teeth clenched. "What the fuck do you think you're playing at, you tin-pot Lenin? Haven't you got the faintest idea about social feedbacks? Do you really want to trigger off a goddamned pogrom?"

"Oh, leave him alone." He looks up to the reproach in Peter's face, in Jan's. Marjory glances away, her hands working together.

Jan stares at him. "At least he's not just all talk. At least he was trying to do something."

"You're all mad," Ray says, walking away from them. "You're all bloody insane."

He starts the van and backs it out into the narrow, cobbled laneway. Marjory has remained with the others. He feels nauseated, and hungry, and alone.

1970: the poetics of science

Armidale Madhouse

23 June 70

broccoli

My sympathies. Still, with the odious household throng routed things can only look up. I wish you well for your exams. Take heart. Surely you must be among the few who've bearded the Great Tradition in its den and got away unscarred.

The SQUID is up and in detecting mode, but now we have to debug the extraneous shit that flies through the air and the ground and from the inherent radioactive isotopes in our damn clothes and fingers. Calibration and collimation. The computer will have to create a profile of all this background noise before it can look for the little splurts of tachyons with the exact cross-section we predict. Needles and haystacks, you know. Meanwhile I dine on pale slop and hope that edgy Tom doesn't decide to rid himself of my presence by poisoning me at table. Nothing new. Did I mention that I saw Antony's ex lady friend Francine just before I came up here? I had brief lascivious fantasies of sharing my bed with her (fat bum or not—see, I remember these snide asides), but she declined to stay overnight.

I've been considering what is called the lure of the limerick. Herewith, some instances:

A clever-dick fucker named Fisk
had a pelvis astoundingly brisk.
So fast was his action
The Fitzgerald contraction
foreshortened his dick to a disk.

(An Einsteinian conceit. All will be made clear in my quipu contribution on tachyons and relativity Real Soon Now.)

Here's one for Paul and Tom and the gang in the Puce Room (I laughed so hard at this that I caused a false reading on our printer):

Said the limp-wristed Sheik of Algiers
to his harem assembled, "My dears,
you may think it odd o' me
but I weary of sodomy;
so tonight's for you ladies." (Loud cheers.)

P.S., op. cit., et al: about the Jane Austen essay, kiddo: look around you, abandon your sweet gentle illusions, that's the way it is, babe, you are in a Sausage Machine that wants processed products. The university is not in the business of commitment and original truths. Maybe some of the science faculties but I wouldn't bet on it—we've been catching a lot of dubious looks around here with our Tachyon Quest, it's outside the standard paradigm so it doesn't exist, and if it does it shouldn't so it doesn't anyway. So what can you expect in a realm like the English department that manages to lack simultaneously any empirical basis for testing and remedying its hypotheses, and any source of imagination independent of middle-class quid status quo? That degree you're aiming at is a teaching or public service meal ticket, no more, no less—exactly like they say on the prospectus.

it's a nasty place, the world

Joseph

the eighth photograph

Only the contingent fact that she is speaking, and the decision of the photographer, highlights Caroline in this portrait of a group of women. Her dejected face is drained of expression, color, hope. She slumps into her chair, hands folded on her lap, eyes lowered. Three women lean forward, angry and worried and speaking simultaneously. One wears overalls and no cosmetics; her long hair is pulled back tight at her nape. A second is altogether softer, fussy hair floating about her face, her limbs rounded in wool. The third is Jane, wife of Caroline's one-time lover Alan. It is difficult to be certain of the object of Jane's animus, but one hand reaches across her knees toward downcast Caroline like a small concerned animal. The other women form a seated circle in the room, somehow heraldic, archaic: a company of warriors paying discreet homage to one of their number wounded in a clash with the endlessly pressing foe; a tribal group seeking nurture in the earth, comforting an exhausted hunter. One of the women feeds an infant at her breast, her face turned away slightly from Caroline's woe. Near the door, Lanie gazes with a sweet smile at the mother and her child.

the ninth photograph

It is not immediately evident that the pile of jumbled clothes and bedding is Caroline. The eye tracks aimlessly for a moment around the photograph of her room, picking out her desk, piled with books, the small pictures of birds, the colorful chair, the window of sky. An arm dangles out of the blanket, hand resting on the floorboards. Several empty bottles with their labels torn off lie nearby. The cap from one of the bottles has rolled halfway across the floor, and now rests, a small fat wheel, against one leg of the chair. Caroline's stringy hair, among her pillows, seems no more human than a bundle of drenched wool.

the tenth photograph

On the Casualty trolley, under bright lights, comatose Caroline has been placed in the left lateral position, left arm tucked under her chest, right arm brought over, left leg extended, right knee up, crossing her bare left thigh where the stained and disheveled dress leaves her uncovered. A pillow behind her back keeps her chest expanded. The registrar, a neat handsome man in his mid twenties, indicates to the still younger intern a point of interest concerning the wash-out tube, thick as a garden hose, that rises from Caroline's gullet, emerges through her slack mouth and drops over the side. In the trolley's shadow, a thread of irrigating liquid laden with synthesized neural poisons falls under gravity into a plastic bucket. Beyond the trolley a flustered nurse readies an electrocardiogram monitor, one hand pushing the machine's plug into a power point, the other holding out a handful of wires.

the eleventh photograph

On the ECT trolley, anaesthetized Caroline is stretched full length in her white cotton nightdress, feet bare. Two nurses stand at her left, one at her right. Their hands touch her lightly. They watch her toes, curled in muffled convulsion from the current that has shrilled her brain. Gooseflesh lightly covers her exposed skin. From the back of her right hand a scalp-vein needle and its narrow plastic tube loop from a blood vessel that has carried into her body Brietal to render her unconscious and Scoline to relax her muscles. The anaesthetist stands at her left shoulder, one hand lightly on her carotid artery, holding the oxygen mask to her mouth and nose. The gas rises through its rubber tube from a large black cylinder behind him. On Caroline's right, the psychiatrist is removing the bilateral black electrodes from her scalp. They look like ear-phones, orange switches let into their dark shiny surfaces. The ECT machine is a box behind her, neat, with a green light, and several switches. Its current has passed into her head for the shortest time, less than a second. Had the photographer clicked the camera an instant earlier, the picture would show a yellow light on the machine. Caroline would be seen in electric convulsion. It would not have been a very dramatic photograph. Her body would be contracted slightly, shoulders drawn up. As it is in this shot, her face would remain half-covered by the oxygen mask, blanked in chemical sleep.

1970: the incredible culture

still Armidale

Thursday June 25 70

old dear

I mentioned to Tom and Paul the possibility that you might motor through and maybe could you stay over?? . . . Tom indicated that he'd rather you didn't. He explained rather pointedly that he might sort of go crazy (he's given to random hysterical turns, it seems) which would embarrass both him and you. Might be best if I wrapped things up here as quickly as possible and met you back in Melbourne—it's pretty crazy having you drive all the way up here in any case.

I sympathize with your nerves, but try not to get too hung-up about the exams. Think Zen thoughts. It's all a Game.

Speaking of Jane Austen, as so many people presumably are these days (though hardly ever around the physics department at the University of New England, mate), I'm reading John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, which evidently has become an even more swollen best seller than The Magus. Formally it's unlike his previous work—he adopts a slangy variety of 19th century diction interrupted by Brechtian bursts of "Hoy, listen, this is fiction you're reading, you know, it's all invented," and "The Victorians, unlike us, did, thought, felt, believed X, Y and Z." His philosophy remains game-theory existentialism, but the protagonists are even more alienated from the incredible culture they move through. He's clearly done stacks of research into Victoria England and projects the milieu quite brilliantly. An agreeable book, one I mean to treat as a bridge back to the actual novelists of the time. (Yeah, and I know Jane Austen was 50 years earlier, but her emphasis on propriety, duty, form and so on permeates the book. I say this authoritatively on the basis of what you've told me, never having read J.A.)

run run run to the mailbox

Joseph

FOUR: the unbearable light

Because we know that the unexpected happens continually in the history of science itself, fiction now has a license to speculate as freely as it may, in the hope of offering us glimmers of a reality hidden from us by our present set of preconceptions. In the future, realism and fantasy must have a more intricate and elaborate relationship with one another.

::Robert Scholes, "The fictional criticism of the future"

1970: there are endless possibilities

Rozelle Cloisters

30 June

My dear Joseph

Calm at last. Four out, one in. I loll at home, wallowing in silence without yelling bastards and neurotic women. I wonder how long this wonderful regime will last.

Perhaps I'm just ratty with exam fever, but Lanie is giving me the shits. Don (one of the bold New Left revolutionaries) is due to arrive for a few days—his wife has booted him out, hurrah!—and maybe Lanie will get the fuck she's anguishing after. She's in dire need, she claims. To gauge from her foul moods I'm not going to deny it.

If Lanie is in physical need, mine is mental. I ache for someone to converse with, just talk. (Not about my hang-ups or pocked mind—some cerebral exercise.) Politics is the sole topic in this hole. It's interesting, but hardly the kind of thing to grip the soul, to dissolve into.

Two exams down, very shaky. English was passable. Psychology wasn't. I think they used the same principles in designing their horrid multiple-choice quiz that we apply to rats in mazes. The optional answers were identical to within a whisker. It was more like a test of interpretive semantics than a measure of our knowledge of psychology. You would have loved it, it was exactly like one of those bloody Two Six IQ tests.

Of course I got there late (caught in a traffic jam), so I missed the reading period and five minutes of writing time—and had to fill in batches of useless fucking forms before I could start. My tutor agrees that if enough of the others were as confused as me, they'll have to adjust everyone's marks upward, which is the only way I'm likely to get through.

Exams finish in nine days, so if you wish to come down here for a day or two on your way home from Armidale to Melbourne, please wait until after that date. It might be nice. The sun shines every day. We could walk and talk in the sun, perhaps drive to the beach or the mountains—who knows, there are endless possibilities.

I've developed a friendship with the woman next door. Architect's wife. He's shot through, pays for the house and some small contribution to the kids' food and clothing. She's been struggling along with three small kids for the past year. A pleasant, kind woman—it's an unstimulating but very comfortable relationship.

Still—although her friendship is generous, and the kids are interesting to one without any (and without any prospects of ever having any—I don't want to produce a repeat performance of my mother's wonderful little mad brood), it could lead to emotional dependency. She wanted me to move in with her when everyone was leaving this place. But why shouldn't I be prepared to offer emotional support to a person needing strength? I haven't a care, not a distraction, no responsibilities to anyone or anything. Yes, come to Sydney.

Caroline, with love

1975: bursting in air

"So we have these dreadful conjectural things," Joseph tells his highly intelligent audience. "If they exist they probably decay almost immediately on production, burning off their substance in Cerenkov radiation. To slow them down from infinite velocities is fairly easy, but braking them to anywhere reasonably near the speed of light takes ever-increasing amounts of energy. This is the exact reverse of the situation we good Relativists confront when we try to push ordinary particles toward the light cone boundary from this side. But that doesn't mean tachyons don't exist. Just to prove my case, I've invented a little limerick for you. Are you ready to hear an elementary particle limerick?"

Joseph allows his eyes to roam, unfocused, across the impressionist spatter of faces and bodies. Brian Wagner's voice rises from the silence: "We're with you, Joe."

"A ringing vote of confidence. All right, here it is:

"Tachyons, faster than light,
are detectable only in flight.
They're conjectural, true,
and orthogonal, too,
so in cases like this, might is right."

In the numb air there is a minor burst of tittering. Joseph frowns.

"Look here, friends, if that's the best you can manage I'd better try again. I'll tell you my limerick about black holes. I am not going to explain it, though."

"No, no, not that," Wagner cries in pain and terror.

Joseph grins. "I've changed my mind."

"Thank God."

"I will explain it."

Wagner's theatrical agony cascades through the sillier members of the assembly. As always, Joseph is a sucker for this manipulation. Beaming, he leans into the microphone.

"Black holes have very little to do with tachyons, except their outrageousness. Oh, and this—nothing can get out of a black hole . . . except very very fast tachyons. Okay. The key to this illuminating verse is that physics requires only three quantities, listed hereunder, to define any black hole completely. There's no way of testing the hole interior to check on other quantities. It has, in brief, no hair. Here we go:

"Black holes are astoundingly small.
They're not really there, after all.
They've momentum and charge,
and their size (rarely large),
but no hair on their wee sterile ball."

This time the laughter is wonderfully rewarding, surfing through the large room, rebounding, filling Joseph's hungry heart. He taps the table finally.

"To return. We've listed some major physical and philosophical reasons for supposing that tachyons are just figments of the crazed mathematical imagination. That's never stopped scientists, let alone out-of-work scientists like me. Particularly when there's a chance of getting a snapshot of the End of Time."

Here it is. He has to explain his vision, his magic, his precious. He cannot convey it. All he tells in his encyclopedia entries are facts. Groping. Keys to their ears from Sunday supplements.

"Think of the Big Bang. The moment when the universe gushed out of Nowhere, time started ticking, space began spreading out from zero. All that heat and light and pressure shone out into the new spacetime nowhere and cooled down and by now is spread everywhere, a black body hiss at two point seven degrees of temperature above Absolute Zero. You can hook up a radio telescope and aim it at that hiss in the sky and take a snapshot of the start of Everything.

"Now look forward. Fifty, a hundred thousand million years. All of space and time has reversed its colossal explosive expansion. It's crashing in toward its fate, which is to be crushed out of reality into the greatest of all Black Holes. The universe will scream with the violence. Some of that violent protest will be tachyonic, if there are tachyons. They'll erupt backward through time, sleeting into our history, raging toward the First Cause. On their passage past our momentary blink, our fragile slice across the spacetime diagram, some of them will track through detectors set up by curious scientists. Those will be halted, leaving their fossil spore. Fossils of the implosion at the End of the Universe. Autopsy reports."

Joseph takes a staggering breath. He is in a mood close to religious exaltation. With a harsh effort he drags his tone back to a banter, a canter into all the wasted, weed-choked weeks and months of the early seventies.

"Lots of the guys have tried to find them. Around the time I was looking in the bowels of my Superconducting Quantum Interferometry Device, or SQUID for short, a couple of fellows over in Adelaide Uni were checking the heavens for signs."

He touches a control, flips the slide carousel another jump. A diagram pours down the wall behind him, secondary and tertiary radiant cascades, clumps and knots of particles.

"When very high energy cosmic rays strike the upper atmosphere," he says, "they smash into atmospheric nuclei. In that small-scale catastrophe, 'air showers' of other elementary particles burst toward the ground. Most of these particles decay almost instantly to more stable states. Two Australian researchers, Roger Clay and Phil Crouch, thought there might be some tachyons there as well."

Another slide, speeding yellow luminal and sub-luminal bullets blazing at the earth, red road runners racing ahead of them.

"Close to the speed of light, the air shower crashes twenty or so kilometers to the ground in under a fifteen-thousandth of a second. Since tachyons move faster than light, they'd get there appreciably more quickly. They don't hang around scuffing their shoes like the other stuff.

"So you leave your detector running an endless tape loop. A big shower stops the tape. If there's a consistent pattern of hail spattering in ahead of the rain, maybe you have some tachyons. Clay and Crouch could discriminate the arrival of particles hitting the detector 100 millionths of a second prior to the main shower."

A photograph of the detector.

"Did it work? Well, between February and August 1973, they detected 1307 high-energy showers. In 1176 of these, the apparatus recorded one or more particles in the appropriate energy range apparently arriving faster than light. These could have been stray bradyons having absolutely nothing in common with the air shower, but the guys ran some tests and decided that air shower 'forerunners' were quite distinctive."

He slips a 1974 copy of Nature under the epidiascope. There's the paper, expanded on the screen. "Possible Observations of Tachyons Associated with Extensive Air Showers." Nothing in science to beat presentation of the evidence, and this photograph is Joseph's evidence that he's not a raving unhinged obsessional loony.

"They were wrong." He makes them a droll, gloomy face. "Bad luck. Subsequent tests showed that this evidence was a glitch, just an experimental artefact. Seems incredible, but then most claims of breakthrough are just wishful thinking and strange accidents. My own experiments, which I'll describe very quickly now, never even got to that point. I should add that to date, as of mid-1975, lots of other eager experimenters have run through all the likely and most of the unlikely places where tachyons might show up, and the cupboard's been bare. In fact, someone's stolen the cupboard. There are no tachyons transmitting to us from the future."

I hope and pray, Joseph tells himself. He does not really believe it. He is frozen, bolted into the endless marble pillar of his spacetime world line, just the ink from the pen that is sketching his path on the Minkowski diagram.

1970: the wonders of science

Armidale

July 4, 70

my god, just one year ago we were all storming the barricades and rolling marbles under the coppers' horses' hoofs, and getting jumped on; one day we will all join the Returned Servicemen's League as Honored Deserters and tell tall tales of How We Dodged The Draft

hello lovely

I dunno. Jeez. (One of the many things I dunno is whether this letter will ever get delivered. I gather that a new postal strike is snarling up Redfern Mail Exchange again.) Lemme tell ya. The machine is running day and night, except when it gets temperamental and isn't. We have a wonderful 24-hour background noise profile on computer file. Its sensitive twitching cats whiskers are scanning the heavens even as I sit here scribbling with this goddamned hard awful pencil, sniffing for messages from the far ends of time and space. Bloody hair-stirring, actually. On the face of it, however, we are getting zero. Zip. Zilch. Random scratches and blurts. Cosmic rays. No tachyons. Maybe they're out on strike in sympathy with the postal workers.

So much for the wonders of science. Life here in our little wooden house (well, not "ours" exactly; throat-clearing noises) is not getting any more charming. Truczinski keeps up a random barrage of offensive noise. Tonight it was amazingly direct. "He's going on Thursday, isn't he?" This while gazing with a sort of baleful opacity at me, Paul working at his own desk in the living room behind Tom's right shoulder. "You'd better get your results in by Thursday, because you won't be here after that." And so on, in the same remarkably creepy vein.

Odious. Naturally, I shall indeed be out of here by Thursday. If there's any last minute recovery in the Tachyon Stakes I'll nip off down the road and get a room at a hotel, or somesuch. Absurdly extravagant, given my finances, so the positive evidence would have to be something fierce.

Otherwise, my fallback plan is to bypass Rozelle and go straight home. You can visit me in Melbourne if you wish and use Shagspeare Towers as a base for your other dutiful-daughter wanderings. Write to me here if the strike is finished, or send a telegram. Okay?

I need a walk.

see you, broccoli

Joseph

1970: the madhouse number

Rozzel 7 July

My dear Joseph

No strike. Your letter got through the next day.

I'm rather relieved you've decided against stopping off here. I do want to get to Melbourne as quickly as I can after the exams.

My parents are visiting Sydney this week, staying at a classy Vaucluse place. Nothing but the best for them. I've spent much of the weekend with them—pleasant, really, and amusing. My father is a dear. He took us to a quite expensive restaurant, and left me with a wonderful Grange Hermitage when he dropped me off in Rozelle. We shall drink it on some suitable occasion, such as my learning that I've passed every subject with High Distinction.

Mother went like a dog for a rat to the episode of my crack-up. We were obliged to go through the madhouse number all over again. Every sinew in her cries out for continual reassurance that my madness isn't her fault, and that to the extent she was responsible she was innocent because she didn't know, how could she know, there was no way she could know, I was always difficult. And so it went on. I dare say it'll go on until I'm 40, my mother gnawing at my madness and my father forgetting about it the instant the drama is over.

Don's moved in, and will stay for a few weeks. Is Lanie smiling? Or smirking? Too soon to say.

Mother was again struck with pain and silent outrage that I won't be staying with her and the loving family. I couldn't find any way to justify it to her, so simply left it as a fact. Ho hum. Until I arrive on your doorstep—

Caro with love

1978: snakes & ladders

//////////////////////////////

STANDARD DEVIATION August 1978

//////////////////////////////

Joe Williams did not approve of my efforts at Overarching Theory. He complained in part:

"You can't freeze your cake and heat it too. The neo-marxists you appeal to for intellectual support undermined your position before you got to it. Take the Frankfurt School of critical sociologists (since you still seem impressed by Marcuse, that tired old warhorse). Theodor Adorno has shown that sociology cannot be derived from psychology. He was thinking of Freudian attempts, some of them by Sigmund himself, to see political disorders as intrapsychic fuckups writ large, acted out on a wide screen. It doesn't work except as crude metaphor. The realm of societal interactions is qualitatively distinct from (and in no way reducible to) the realm of individual intrapsychic transactions."

Well, Joe, I'm glad to hear that you and Herr Adorno now know how the universe works. No arguments required from you, just a bland assertion that minds and societies are absolutely unlike. Did it ever strike you that societies are, after all, tools brought into being by the interaction of individual minds, and that individual minds are structures drastically shaped by societies, and that these feedbacks imply the most profound mutual interdependency?

Besides, Adorno was making a propaganda point: that behaviorist sociology, which he was attacking, is corrupted by its ideological adherence to a repressive and alienated status quo. A holonistic analysis starts from the assumption that the status quo has no privileged position of value, being merely one possible arrangement of its elements. Adorno's dogma is valid only as it stresses that the realms of mind and society are not mutually reducible in one dimension. Pressed dogmatically, his complaint reveals the inevitable Marxist habit of falling back into Hegelian Idealist eschatology.

Of course holonic analysis is not four-dimensional: it has no freedom to know the future. Popper is correct in arguing that the future contains discontinuities, if only because science keeps generating paradigm-destroying insights. However it does offer what Popper claims is impossible: a real understanding of change. If this is so, human morality becomes a possibility at the political scale.

Of course a total atom-by-atom overview is impossible. By a stroke of luck, it is not required. Structurally unique constellations are differentially defined precisely by the quite limited sheaf of options that is available to each of them. In Koestler's terms, one starts by "de-particularizing" phenomena (stripping them down to their defining structures) and locating the codes that establish both their individual character and their functional relations to other levels in the total ecology. The aim is a definitive discrimination between those characteristics of a phenomenon that elaborate the dynamic of the status quo, and those that permit alternative choices without rupturing identity.

So, returning to Popper's assertion that an understanding of change cannot be predictive: yes, there is inevitable distortion and loss of register in the de-particularizing process (skulls are more alike than faces). Yes, the complexity of computation limits our implementable capacity to deal with high-level polyoptional systems (even so simple a system as the world's weather patterns). This is not really so paralyzing, since the optional range of a phenomenon at a given level is brutally restricted by the choices/specifications that have already been made at lower levels (daily forecasts might be a bit iffy, but you're not really likely to get snow in the Central Australian desert; and witches don't really give birth to cats or bats).

But each "fact" in the universe is an actualization of select elements in the structure of (to coin a phrase) its "event ecology." It represents, in a figure-on-background manner, the suppression of other elements or conformations.

Yet those alternative "virtual" elements do not disappear. The actualization of "facts" must be seen as a continuous tension between antagonistic elements, just as nuclear particles are liable to collapse into raw energy and re-emerge as quite different particles, conserving only their abstract "quantum numbers."

Holonistic theory (based, for example, on von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory) promises a structure/function model in which polyoptions serve the valid roles of those tired old work horses, "essential characteristics," and in which the descriptions of a phenomenon's holonistic deployment (within its contextual "field") might achieve the benefits sought and obscured by confused metaphysical notions of "essence."

Does any of this matter?

Well, apart from the intrinsic beauty of developing a coherent vision of the universe, the moral significance is paramount.

"Values" were classically taken to be prudentially contingent on "facts." Moral theory must accord with what is possible. Only if we can predict the outcomes of our actions can we make moral choices. The breach between fact and value can be healed within the holonistic perspective, for facts are significant only so far as they relate to each other (and to the "theory" by which they are perceived/created)—since it is primarily the code of relations and transforms that defines each holonic hierarchical level. Values are precisely the preferred options within a field of possible relations.

* * *

That's quite sufficient for you soi disant freelance intellectuals to chew on for one meal. We'll come back to this in the next rousing issue, which you will be lucky to see before the end of the year. From here, 1979 looks like a nice relaxed 365 days.

1970: throwing up

St. Kilda

23 July 1970

well old gastropod here it is thurday and I presume you're back home tucked into your electric blanket and I've done my duty and despatched your left-behind luggage off on a train to Sydney with much irony to boot, the cost of doing so turning out to be in excess of half the concession fare you'd have been up for, so you've saved about four bucks by hitching your hike in the cold and dismal amid undoubtedly threats to your person and virtue.

then again it may well be that you have in all truth been raped and murdered repeatedly, since I haven't yet heard from you, that last datum I hasten to add not being by way of a complaint but merely the last datum.

scientists, even foolish tachyon-besotted amateur scientists, dote on facts. here is a fact:

after you left on Monday night, I awoke at 3 in the morning (when you would have been where? albury?) and skidded to the lavatory where I chundered with piercing pains and tears and groans, and did it all again at 5 in the morning with amazing velocity and quantity into my carefully positioned little yellow bedside plastic bucket, and felt no better for it.

reasons for this are murky. Martha has also been puking vigorously, but blames this on her post-parturient condition, namely blood-letting at fortnightly intervals rather than the customary four weekly rate. Bob was stricken almost simultaneously with a bout of prodigious shitting.

isn't this wonderfully earthy and non-abstract and gastro-anal, none of your damned pseudo-intellectualisms around this house, cobber.

let me know how the exam results turned out.

frail-ly, Joseph

1970: caroline's trip

And there she is on the road again, thumb out. It's three rides, then, to Benalla, the cold biting. This great roaring monster brakes, and she swings her bag and then her body and is in the seat with a grin.

Sydney? that's my way, he says.

Settling in: Cigarette?

No thanks.

She draws out the Drum tobacco.

Are you fair dinkum?

Sure. She rolls one, takes a long drag and blows smoke into the windscreen, watching it shoot back at her.

The guy is young & hot-blooded. Caroline feels good, relaxed, watches the countryside.

They talk a little. He tries to con her. Leaps on her, one foot on the accelerator, arm stretched to the wheel, left arm pulled her toward him.

What would you do if I kissed ya?

Couldn't do much but we wouldn't get to Sydney.

Ah, okay, I'll forget it.

Shit, Caroline thinks. Four hundred miles.

She crochets, talks, watches the towns and creeks whiz by. It is good, warm and thundery from the motor, a good way to travel. She drops off, sleeps.

And wakes sick.

Vomits and dry-retches for the remainder of the journey. This driver is a saint. Five hours. They hit Sydney at 3.00 a.m. He takes her out of his way, drops her near Callan Park. Caroline walks up Darling Street.

Home is cold and dark. It is a bit strange. She turns on the electric blanket, goes downstairs and makes coffee. Her throat is terribly sore. Caroline takes the mug upstairs. Her room and the warm blanket welcome her. She runs to the bathroom for a final voiding. She chucks into the basin, gargles water without swallowing it, goes to her bed and sleeps.

In sunshine Caroline wakes and feels bad. But that sun is so good. She leaves the crumpled bed, walks outside feeling sad. Suddenly it is okay. She's glad to be back, suffused in her own warmth and the joy of her home and the freedom she has.

She closes her eyes and turns her face to the sun and watches purple light on the inside of her warm eyes, and thinks of purple sheets in Melbourne with a warm body next to her in the Melbourne winter, and cups of milk coffee and long talks with no time limits while toes are roasted at the radiator and funny Joseph laughing at and with her while he tries to touch his roasting toes and her albatross dead wings outstretched tell Caroline in the silence of the dead that she can too fly.

1970: writing science

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CASH NEXUS

a politico-duodenal beanspilling and last minute dash for August .26APA mailing by Brian Wagner (the singer, not the song). You know the rest.

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Just under four months ago, a little after Easter, my friend Joseph Williams, B. Sc. (Hons) did a heinous thing. He gave me his job.

That, at any rate, is his claim. Actually all Joe did was whisper in my receptive ear that he was giving up science journalism for the loftier pursuit of science itself. Given the pay rates that applied to his job (B-grade, negotiable downward) he pointed out that his boss was not likely to be trampled by maddened journos with higher degrees. As I lack even a lower degree, I saw at once that the job would surely be mine for the asking. I carried in a bundle of quipu to prove my prowess with concept, word and typer.

Ah, Joe, Joe. One day I will find a suitable revenge. I think that it will call, in part, for the insertion of a trained maggot.

Gentle readers of CASH NEXUS may judge me uncouth and ungrateful. Your opinion will alter when you learn to what pass this fiend Williams has brought me. Read on.

It was not until he was safely in Armidale conducting preposterous experiments that Joe owned up to the details of his major role at Science Today Publications (a division of that wonderful oligopoly that brings us all the news that's fit to read over the brekkie table). What was this august role? Typing envelopes. Ruling up sheets of paper. At a time when Poseidon mining shares were going through the ceiling only to collapse into catastrophic ruin, Joseph Williams was dithering his brain away. Now you see why he left this lucrative position.

It's funny, you know. I never asked why he was leaving. It must have been the money he dangled before me; it dazzled me, corrupted my otherwise infallible shit detector. If Joe said he was leaving to advance the cause of human wisdom, who was I to carp?

Joe, Joe, my day will come.

I shall tell you all about my day at work. Not some hypothetical average day. Were I to do that you might suppose I was stacking the cards (actually that is what I was doing, as you'll see). No, I shall deal with the events of a particular day. Today, in fact.

Like Joe, I spend much of my working hours typing envelopes and painting my nails. Unlike Joe, I do it on a C-grade salary (no degree, remember). But a new wrinkle has been invented.

This time last year, Science Today Publications launched an enterprise. You must understand that we like one-offs here. Annuals are okay, and much of my envelope-typing has to do with posting questionnaires to people who are requested to provide update info on technical details from last year's issue of, as it might be, 1001 Uses for a B-47Q Thermionic Valve or The Interocitor Yearbook. But these all began as one-offs, and it's essential to keep stirring the pot. Like the immune system: you must maintain a supply of mutated antigens on hand for use when the next flu plague gets here from Hong Kong. (This insight into the nature of flu epidemics is my sole Science item for the issue. Go and talk to Joe if that's the sort of thing you crave.)

The new enterprise that my predecessor had been involved with, and which I helped see through the birth process, was a little bouncing gem called HEARING AID. I instantly suspected Joseph of slipping a quipu title onto some grave and weighty periodical, but no, this was his (and now my) boss's witty means of alerting news agency browsers to the existence of a specialist guide to Hi Fi equipment. (Joe's rejected suggestion, I report, was SOUNDS GOOD TO ME, almost as lame.)

Bound within HEARING AID was a clever innovation, one of the prime selling points of this journal. A tear-out free-post card invited readers to enquire for further information about any of the sound systems they fancied in its pages.

These cards have been inundating the place in their thousands. We humble staff have the joyous task of recording names, addresses and species of hi fi equipment so that this data may be dispatched to the various manufacturers.

In essence, it's the self-same high level vocation as typing envelopes, except that sorting is also required. The boss has invented a way of typing these things directly onto an unending roll of paper, which at least obviates the dismal business of shoving new sheets in all the time. Ironically, since he is faster at it than me, he's decided to do most of the typing himself (an effective use of a Super-A salary, Meyer). So I have the rather easier task of sorting the cards into jolly little piles. It pleased me to hear him groan at the horror of typing such nonsense all day. I doubt, though, if he appreciates that this is exactly what I have been agonizing through for some months.

Joseph, Joseph. I shall begin by rasping the nerves of your teeth.

After luncheon at my club, then, this afternoon, as I sat sorting these incredible HEARING AID cards, I was washed in despair beyond the power of reason at the thought that if I was going to be a thorough-going tool of the devil anyway, then why wasn't I in an advertising agency earning twice the salary?

In this mood, I stumbled on a card inscribed with a bitter little note from a purchaser. Here is what it told me:

"This magazine is an outright fraud. All the 'articles' evaluating the equipment described are nothing more than advertisements." And so on.

Now this of course is the exact truth. Science RipOffs, Inc. put the book together by inviting all the industry manufacturers and importers to supply their own self-praising copy & pix, if possible made-up according to standard style (a convenient saving in overheads, especially with our art department slashed), then printed the collation and charged the supplying companies fifty bucks or so per page, THEN put the fucking thing on sale for a dollar a throw to the gullible public.

When some hi-fi-loving jerk sees this wretched document on his friendly neighborhood news agency rack, he naturally assumes that it is full of hard-hitting objective scrutiny (well, at least no less so than your average tabloid test-drive, and I agree that's not saying a big mouthful.)

So I sat at my desk, a stone's short lob from my superior's own, and I read this item of mail aloud.

For a moment there was no response. A slight stiffening of shoulders indicated perhaps that he thought I was offering an observation from my own deepest convictions. At length, though, he spun his chair. "Say that again, Brian?"

"First rational reader I've come across so far." I read it out in full, and he asked for the card.

A full minute later, mottled with quiet passion and grief, the Boss said, "I shall write that gentleman a letter."

I worked at my sorting.

"He has no right to say that. He can have his money back if that's the way he feels."

The AID book, you see, was Howard's very own brain-child.

"At no time," he explained to me, turning up the volume and boosting the bass, "do we ever state, anywhere, on the cover or within its 128 pages, that this is not a book of collected advertisements."

I cleared my throat.

"A catalogue we call it," he explained, "and a catalogue it is."

I considered this idea as I sorted more cards. "Howard, when people pay a buck, they don't expect an orgy of advertisements. Unless it's Graphis. Um. You know."

"We make no claims which are false!"

"True," I agreed, "that's where it's at."

"Now look here." The executive desk was puzzled but hearty. "I consider that I'm as well equipped with a set of ethics as the next man, Brian, and I don't see anything objectionable—"

"Oh my God!" I cried in horror. "I should glue my lips shut. Here I am, seeming to be impugning your ethics—"

"No, no," said Howard. "Of course I didn't take it that way." He has wonderful gold link shirtsleeve restrainers, and he pushed them higher on his biceps where the white linen gleamed under the fluorescents. His watch is also very pretty. "My good fellow, you must say what you feel. Brian, that's what's wrong with the world today. No-one dares to speak up. You're frowned upon if you do. Someone is standing by with a little book, ready to take down any remarks critical of the Establishment, putting all our hard-won privacy and integrity in jeopardy, turning us all into mere digital pulses in a great computer."

I was feeling very weak.

Some cards later, I said, trying really hard with the deepest frown of concentration you've ever seen to get my finger on it, "You know, that's what we're doing here."

You could tell Howard doubted it.

"After all, these poor buggers think they're gunna get extra information from Science Today Publications when they send in their post-free card. That's not how it works though, is it? Their names go straight to the sales divisions of all these companies. On to the computer tape. Forever and ever. Badgered and harried."

"Well, Brian," the Boss said shrewdly, "I thought of that. So I extracted a promise from all those companies that the information was to remain confidential and no high-pressure tactics would be used as a result of our little service."

I looked at him, then went back to sorting cards.

Howard shook his head ruefully. He sat and thought for a while. I swear before God to you, one and all, that these were his final words on the topic: "Brian, perhaps I've been a bit trusting."

1980: apocalypse apocalypse apocalpse then

DECEMBER ELEVENTH NINETEEN EIGHTY

The 1960s died on the 11th day of the twelfth month of 1980 when, outside his New York home, five bullets were pumped into the body of John Lennon by the music critic Ronald Reagan, who was later released after questioning by police.

The 1970s died much earlier, on the 19th day of the eighth month of 1969 when half a million children pitched their sad loony tents in a field outside Woodstock, in upstate New York. A recorded interview was later released to the media.

It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Picture a skinhead bootboy with razorblades at his toes and safety pins through the flesh of his cheeks, stamping on his own face forever.

No. Picture four scrubbed and patched middleaged Swedes rampant on a field of armwaving eight year olds argent, droning the theme of the decade: "Money money money."

No no no. Picture Linda Ronstadt and Governor Jerry Brown on undecorated sheets in a single bed, Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta flicking and sliding in the mirror above their heads on squares of pure light.

No. Alice Cooper eating a live chicken. The Kiss in their six year old fantasy greasepaint and ten thousand decibels. Sid Vicious in spoiled brat psychopathic rage working out the punk dreams of his generation in the murdered flesh of a convenient woman.

The seventies was waking into the hungover spoils of the party. Everyone had died during the night.

Jim Morrison was dead in whiskey, caught by the snake.

Hendrix was dead, all his flashing crying chords jangled.

Joplin was dead, swallowed up and chewed into lard and blood.

Presley was dead, fat and banal, in alcohol and spangled spansules.

Marc Bolan was dead, gnawed by Tyrannosaur's jaws.

The Beatles were dead, John by an assassin's gun, Paul by his own hand.

Abba were born dead.

Disco was a corpse plugged into a fibrillator.

Like old pre-industrial gods, the remnants of the pantheon took themselves into eclipse and changed their wigs, were reborn, shook it again in the video clips: David Bowie falling in endless rebirth, Lou Reed transformed, Carly Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Brown; Heavy Metal clashing by night, Tangerine Dreaming their remote electronic buzz; and Dylan was Born Again.

Robert Zimmerman was Born Again.

The music of the Seventies was a pike gaffed into the belly of the Eighties.

1983: the time machine

It has not been a reprise of the glorious, heart-filling Vietnam Moratorium marches led by Dr. Jim Cairns, poor muddled bleeding love-besotted deputy Prime Minister Jim Cairns, so soon thereafter to go down in disastrous sex scandal muckraked ruin but not until he had achieved more than any other single man in the decade, had Got The Boys Out; but now there is no rough charisma to light up the mass gatherings in the Treasury Gardens, only gray serious bureaucrats of state and church leading a Palm Sunday parade against nuclear weapons, the Premier, the Anglican Archbishop, the Lord Mayor. Melina Mercouri, visiting fireperson, might have brought some flash and wit to the occasion but the rigors of Greek Melbourne has been too much for her, has hurled her fainting to the ground like some St. Paul of Science and Culture in a brainleeched buzz and whirl.

No, fourteen years after the Moratoriums, with the doors slammed shut on the sixties and their music muffled by the gray tunnel of the seventies, a third of the way for godsake into the eighties, fourteen years later and virtually a whole new generation of kids on the streets with their cockatoo hairstyles all spiky with gel and hard dyes,

"Wadda we want?"

"Disarmament!"

"Whenna we want it?"

"NOW!"

but it just hadn't taken of, had whimpered out as they strolled with careless propriety, all sixty or seventy thousand of them, most of the length of Collins Street, through the very atrium of Big Business Melbourne, around the corner politely to the urging of the loud-hailers, into the Flagstaff Gardens with its hanged guy, a cloth rapist put down by feminists, its couple of Portaloos and patient lines of pent pissers, and its dull speech-making, no policehorses, no broken heads, no adrenaline, not even any terrible quaking fear of The Bomb. Perhaps that is the way to do it.

Here, though, in the Nourse living room, there's been no decline gently into that good night.

"I see one of your professors has a bit of sense. Still, I suppose even in universities there must be a few people who know something about the world."

Marjory actually curls her lip. From the corner of the sofa she shares with her mother she says with distaste, "I don't know what you're talking about."

Ray Finlay flicks his eyes back to Jesus of Nazareth, then with an effort of will lowers them to Tom Nourse's cranium. It is almost totally defoliated. The neutron bomb has purged all life from it, leaving a seared rubble. Only a few mutated bristles manage to cling precariously to the lower slopes. Broken veins trace thin laval streams on his face. What's worse, the nuclear bombardment has provoked subterranean chain reactions that will boil forth soon in a convulsion of volcanic spleen. Mere minutes remain before eruption. Duck and Cover, Ray wants to cry. He blocks his mouth before a snigger can get out, bringing the wrath of the Lord upon all of them.

"Oh yes, you know well enough, my girl, or are newspapers too lowbrow for people with university educations?"

"If it was in the Sun I probably missed it, that's true."

"Oh, I'm sure they would have reported it in the Age. They gave enough coverage to that disgusting anti-American mob parading through the streets last Sunday."

"I suppose you'd prefer to see us all blown to hell by nuclear weapons. That will be good for business, won't it?"

Ray returns to Jesus. A gold sphere rests in one oozing hand. The other, visibly perforated though not yet flyblown, gestures with gloomy confidence to his heart, which floats a few inches in front of his robe, dripping blood, torn by a vicious plait of thorns. Dr. Barney Clark, first Mormon with a plastic heart, has finally thrown in the towel and died, Ray recalls. An age of botched miracles. Ray wonders if the incipient volcano across from him suffers heart trouble. If so, Marjory is certainly doing her best to bring on an attack. The Man from Nazareth looks steadily down, serenely untroubled by his own cardiac condition.

"Joe Camilleri is the one who wants us blown to pieces, by the Russians," Tom Nourse is explaining loudly. Dr. Camilleri is a sociologist and activist at Marjory's university. According to the brainless Age reporter, Ray remembers with another barely contained hoot of laughter, Camilleri is a spokesperson for People Against Nuclear Disarmament. God, it's no wonder we're all going to get dusted into the sky.

Marjory has made her own telling retort. Tom Nourse leans forward in his leather lean-back armchair. Once, Ray reflects fondly, Tom was quite placid during these intellectual exchanges. Now the sting of mortality and truth is nipping his hindquarters, bringing the foam to his lips.

"It was in the Age, you can check it. One of your top men in nuclear physics said we should have our own bomb for defense."

"That's just bloody Aronside. He doesn't know what he's on about and anyway he's a fascist."

This seems to calm Tom down a trifle. "I can't see that wanting to protect your country is being a fascist, even Hitler wanted to do that and in any case he wasn't a fascist he was a Nazi. And if a professor of nuclear physics doesn't know about atom bombs I don't see how you can claim to."

"Protect the country! How is having a bloody nuclear bomb going to protect your precious country, frighten the Martians away?"

"If you haven't noticed, there are people closer than Mars who would like a bit of Australia."

"Maybe there are, but how do you expect them to get here? There's all that water in the way. Who are you expecting, more boat people on rafts? The Japanese, or do you love them now, seeing they haven't turned communist? Or is it the yellow hordes of China that are going to turn the whole place into paddy fields?"

"What would you know about the Japanese, or the Chinese for that matter. Your precious Whitlam was quick enough to let them in the front door, and there are a thousand million of them."

"Whitlam? Don't talk to me about Whitlam, maybe you didn't see it in the Sun but he's just got himself a nice plum position on a couple of bank boards. Anyway, it was your hero Richard M. Nixon who let the Chinese into the United Nations, or have you forgotten?"

Ray listens to his wife. At least she's given up farting in bed. It's all a matter of cycles. Holons.

There is a pattering of rain on the window and Ray turns his head to look at this unusual sight. All of Melbourne is cracked and parched, walls are fracturing as the earth slips, drying out; plaster falls in the night. And now the rains have returned. Locales burned to black ash a couple of Wednesdays ago have already been flooded by freak squalls further down the coast. God's providence.

The bugger's going to blow up completely any second. Doris can see it coming too, poor old biddy, she'd prefer a harmless conversation about the footy much as she loathes the game. I should say something conciliatory, Ray tells himself. Change the topic. Fat chance.

"Jesus Bloody Christ! You're a real live savior on a stick come to deliver us from the yellow peril! It's a pity all you know about politics is the shit put out by the Festival of Light, isn't it?"

That's done it, Ray acknowledges, that's really done the trick, perfect. She's taken the Lord's Name blasphemously in vain and called Tom a fool into the bargain, with some scatology in the same breath. Here it comes: the lava welling, churning beneath the surface, the skin on his hands white and peppered with large spots, ready to bash his daughter's head in.

Ray and Marjory and Doris Nourse sit mute now. Marjory has damned her soul to perdition, she is beyond absolution. Her ways are those of the devil and there can be no salvation from the depths to which she has so wilfully cast herself.

The pattern in the heavy brown velvet curtains is starting to go where the silverfish have been at work. Jesus and His Mother and a mixed batch of saints and Popes gaze on from gilt frames, constant, compassionate, beyond blasphemy, shielded by glass.

Ray lets his thoughts slip away into contemplation of poor dead Jean-Paul Sartre's error in asserting an unbridgeable metaphysical gulf between the Pour-Soi and the En-Soi, Being-for-itself and Being-in-itself, volitional consciousness and inert matter. It is the assertion of this gap that caused Sartre to deny Darwinian evolution, a denial as absolute and ludicrous as any churchman's refusal of Galileo's telescope. But evolution is a reality; rationally it cannot be denied or ignored that some of the structural elements of consciousness are the creation of selection pressures in the brute universe. So human praxis is to some extent canalized by the pratico-inert aspect of our being, just as the movements of our limbs are constrained by the metrical laws that constitute gravity and inertia. But Sartre's intuition of freedom, Ray thinks, that remains largely valid. The holonistic structure of consciousness generates an enormous optional range of actualization.

Yet the Pour-Soi has limits, and those can only be unearthed by positivist, reductionist science, Sartre's bane. Is the world a clock, after all? Out of the cradle endlessly ticking.

The only moving thing in the room is the ornate sweep hand. It presses on with its simple gyrations. There is no blood in the clock's veins to quicken or falter as the souls of the dead drown in the burning seas of hell. Ray considers the sweep hand skimming the gothic numerals, crossing the two key holes (one for the main spring, one for the chimes). The clock stands solid, a lighthouse in the high tide of anger swirling about it. Marjory is sunken and withdrawn in her corner of the sofa, eyes signaling her rage and contempt. Ray's body seems quite dead. None of the sensations of life ticking over on standby are available to inspection. He wishes he were dead. He lets his gaze drift upward again to Jesus, the Man sharing his torn-out wounded heart with the room, a perfect case of the triumph of the Pour-Soi over the En-Soi.

To his horror, Ray's eyes well with burning tears.

He is taken up and out of the room, into another place. Light pours into him. Cream, thick and sweet, into the cracked jug.

Why now? Oh shit. Not me. Aw fuck.

He chokes, coughs, stares at the painting, horrified, sick with belief. It is the flood after the drought, too much, too suddenly, smashing into the ashes and hurling them in a foaming muck to smear the broken charred stumps of incinerated trees, the crisp-skinned rotting corpses of animals too slow to escape the flames and now too dead to care about their drowning.

The old man's rage is love shouting at his deaf, stupid, brilliant daughter.

Ray goes out of the room, stepping on Doris Nourse's arthritic toes as he stumbles by. Father and daughter look at him in surprise. He rips down his jeans, strikes the cold rim of the lavatory bowl, no time to lower the seat, and voids his liquid bowels. It is the love and truth of God pithing him. He finds himself grinning. He wipes his stinging arse, using sheet after sheet of floral absorbent paper. The stomach cramps subside. All his bitter shame. He flushes the lavatory and washes his hands happily, trying to believe this dreadful, ill-timed ambush.

In the living room, he tells Doris of his attempt to cook one of her casserole recipes. Oven temperatures and pyrex, carrots and stewing steak. His own heart is pumping. Marjory leaves her redoubt on the sofa and sits on the arm of Ray's chair, putting her arm around his neck, her hand coming to rest against his collarbone, inside his shirt. She is trembling. Ray disengages himself, gives her hand a squeeze, goes to the kitchen on the pretext of checking a detail in Robert Carrier. The volcano follows him, passes him in the hall, heading for the workshop out the back. Ray returns, wondering what he is going to do with the rest of his life, and sits in an unoccupied chair, leaving his wife on the arm of the one he has vacated.

1975: against interpretation

ooooooooooooooooo

WORD SALAD :: Diatribes from Maenads and LoCs from my buddies

ooooooooooooooooo

::A rebuke has arrived on my desk from Mrs. Ray Finlay, do beg my pardon I mean of course Marjory Nourse, now that she has reverted for political occasions to her maiden, that is her father's, surname. Marjory comments on my phantasia of the last ish and its forerunner. ::b. wagner::

Can a writer be discerned in his fiction? Does he give himself away in his choice of plots, characters, methods of telling his story, what he leaves out and what he puts in with great care?

These are questions I pondered at length when I was drudging through my Master's recently, having shifted up from rat psychology to human psychology, and although I was then applying my high-powered research methodology to authors of the caliber of Jane Austen, George Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and Henry James, the same questions automatically arise whenever an item of quipu fiction, no matter how stilted and putrid, comes to my attention.

You will have guessed, Brian, that I've been reading your doltish and offensive "memoir" in HOT AIR.

There is no question at all that you reveal your innermost self most blatantly in your tale of the "Kwee-poo" and the romance with the highly imaginary "Asquith Lancaster." For you are one of those writers whose conspicuous narrative voice drenches the dialogue, the interior meditation and the description of events.

Such writers are not always negligible. While Flaubert and Tolstoy reflect all the richness of the world (within the limitations imposed on their perception by culture and period), other authors like Greene and Dostoevski present everything in terms of their own personal tics.

Is this to be decried? Of course not. But the formalisms embodied in such writing must to some extent strip naked the anonymity of the creator's private self.

I have been reading these little fables of yours for some years, Brian. Obviously enough, none of the participants in your invented life (and that includes "you") is drawn directly from your own skin and bone. Yet in a general sense, all of them are.

They are distorted pigmy Wagner clones, split off from each other and from the original somewhat in the manner of the Transactional Analysis picture of us each comprising Adult, Child and Parent.

Can such a method work, or is it just irresponsible cartooning? It can't work as pure naturalism, of course. Not even like the sort of confessional revelations that Mike Murphy used to regale us with, when Crushing Blows descended on his shoulders.

Even so, your games with the reader are obviously a way of exploring ethical and emotional problems in a schematic frame. So it is not surprising that you turn to the literary form best adapted to that aim—fanciful fable. And at once, the question of the writer's presence in his work becomes acutely painful. For it is plain that you are indeed a man living in an emotional vacuum, preying on women for sex and ego support, preferring the onanistic satisfactions of churning out undemanding quipus rather than risking your equanimity and ego in a genuine loving relationship.

Yes, your fable is amusing, so far as it mocks the sort of "dirty" magazine writing which preceded today's more explicitly exploitative pornography. I have read old copies of Adam and Man Junior (my older brother used to hide them under his bed), and to the extent that I remember the style correctly I can only admire your skill in replicating it. I am paying you the compliment of postulating that your intention was satirical at the level of style. I could be wrong, I suppose, and you actually think this the height of sophisticated imagination!

Unhappily, the comic touches are utterly spoilt by rant and venom that seem to have their source outside the fictive universe of the fable.

"Asquith" is shown as a bitch and a sex object right from the outset. Whenever she reacts reasonably to the incredibly pompous and pretentious and loathsomely smarmy narrator (called, strangely enough, "Brian Wagner"), modifiers such as "irritably" and "shrew" spring in to undermine her right to be offended.

She ends, appropriately, being defenestrated. Not only that, she is kicked brutally "with all my karate-trained strength." And the narrator relishes this insanely horrible unprovoked crime, for he "watched . . . as she plunged toward the ground." I am surprised that you did not go on to supply some more precise and gruesome details—you could have pictured her broken on the ground with a dislocated shoulder, say, half her ribs cracked, and one eye gouged out. How did you restrain yourself?

This hammering misogyny of yours is hard to take, Brian. The fable can be seen as an interestingly cynical portrait of the deforming influences that make grown intelligent men (and some women) devote their energies to avoiding real contact and producing quipus instead. In the final analysis, though, your story is a rotten piece of shit and I hope you get run over by the next bus.

::Well, hush my mouth.

::I do declare I am quite put about, Marjory. Here I was, a humble scribbler jotting down the True Events of my lackluster life & times, hoping to bring a tear to the eye and a sigh to the breast, and all along a Masked Wolfman was actually hot-wiring my writing arm and spewing out Awful Libels against the gentle sex.

::Truly, you can't appreciate how mortified I feel.

::Why, I am so put about by your penetrating accusations that I just cannot bring myself to notice your laughable self righteousness, or hoot at your preposterous impertinence, or even wonder how much of this rancid gibberish is due to your heightened feminist consciousness and your deep literary training (a Master's degree in it! Impressive!) and your pulsating meaningful real love and caring for all creatures large and small, and how much to the fact that I've declined to give you another fuck since that boring Canberra afternoon of infidelity at the Convocation five months back. ::byron wagner::

1970: hermeneutik und ideologiekritik

24 July

a gloomy toad

dear Horse

Sitting in the Student Union after a day of tears. Petrol strike. Someone milked my dilapidated car. Getting up steam to hitch home.

Fronted the English Department and demanded to know why I'd only got a bare pass. They sent me in to the Prof. My interpretations, it seems, had been provocative but failed totally to address the questions on the paper. I was profoundly shocked. When I pushed for more details, I learned that the one question I hadn't got round to answering had been the only one where I and the Department saw eye to eye! There must be something defective about my brain. Those electric shocks have left me damaged.

I didn't just crumple up, though. I explained that in my view questions about literature are subject to interpretation, that I had described (perhaps too briefly) my aim in taking an unorthodox approach. I failed to convince him, and went away bent and burdened. Why do I seek out these situations? I could be a happy cretinous little housewife like all the others. On the grass I just vomited out tears, full of gloom and hatred. Defeated. Convinced that I should give myself up to a nomadic life. That's always the temptation, calling me to the sea shore or the bush or the desert, anywhere that there's no stupid people.

After all this self-pitying convulsion was done I took stock and decided simply to drop English. Pottered up to the Psychology Dept (hidden behind sunglasses) and spoke to a kind woman. It can be done, though I'll have to persist with some Eng Lit to keep my credit points.

Two more years. Many many psychology courses. My head is stuffed with rejected sawdust. I think about you and your tachyon detector a lot. Don't understand it, except the beautiful awe and wonder of perhaps picking up signals from the future death of the universe. How extraordinary and poignant.

I had quite a long talk with Lanie last night She knocked on my door and brought in cups of tea. We sat huddled by the radiator. She's fed up with politics and people spinning without getting anywhere. Depressed by the dreariness of it all. She hasn't found a gentleman she can stand. Life in Sydney is all a bit grim if one is not a beer-swilling, one-night-stand pick-up person—though Lanie's taste for gamboling youths has not abated.

The sunsets from my window still feed the soul.

All my love, Caroline

A DOG'S WIFE

. . .two

To relax, we stayed in Daddy's Tudor apartment in Washington Heights, and strolled every day to the Cloisters to view the Unicorn Tapestries, for which I have an abiding passion. So sad and limpid. Spot put his ears back and growled, which made me reconsider.

The day's high point, its unmitigated delight, was our romp through Fort Tryon park, where one step carries you from endless megalopolitan Upper East side to genuine woods, and a further five minutes shows you the Hudson. By this time the shores were past their highest colors, but reds burned like coals in the midst of all the turning hues of green and yellow and russet.

I say unmitigated, but in all honesty I must grant that I never relished the business with pooper scooper and leash. Fiona had gifted us with an elaborate device with plastic bags and a heat-sealer, a sentimental relic from our squashed poodle Phiphi, but while that was to be preferred to the fold of ScotTowel favored in the Heights it never seemed to me altogether dignified.

One was forced to admit, though, that the menacing glances of elderly Jewish folk walking their own Dobermans and Borzoi, pan or towel dutifully in hand, was ample deterrent to a more insouciant delinquency.

1970: the open classroom and its enemies

Shakespeare Pier

tues 28 July 70

dear woggie—professors, as I have cause to know, are almost always shits. but baby, the trouble is you're one of the original innocents. nothing wrong with your neural sawdust, just your idealism lobe.

sickening and heartbreaking and vile as it is, kid, you've got to get it straight:

THE UNIVERSITY IS AN ARSE AND THOSE WHO PASS THROUGH AN ARSE ARE SHITS.

one corollary being:

THE WORST SHITS ARE THOSE CONSTIPATED TURDS WHO REFUSE TO BE EJECTED.

these are known as The Staff, of whom the ripest are The Professors.

another corollary is SPHINX OR SWIM. pardon me. that was rather sophomoric don't you agree?

leave anything you value outside the gate, particularly your soul coz it's gonna get maimed and molested if you allow anyone in there to cop a feel of it.

so maybe it's not a bad idea to give English up—if you care deeply for it.

needless to say, you'll find similar difficulties cropping up in Psych, but at least there you do have certain empirical studies that can be attacked on factual and procedural grounds, whereas in literature as far as I can see the whole thing is ingrown, incestuous and totally subjective.

moreover, it takes a moral hero of unearthly stature to buck the system and come out on top. who can measure up to such a demand? you're showing incredible grit in just surviving, baby. hold high the candle and plod on.

love, houndstooth

firepower

MACHINE GUN

The history of modern warfare has been to a great extent the story of ever-increasing power to kill and maim applied to larger and larger numbers of victims with ever-decreasing personal involvement on the part of individual warriors.

During World War Two, entire cities were firebombed, or blasted by nuclear weapons dropped by remote aircraft. More recently, villages were incinerated by flaming napalm dropped from helicopters, and terrorists mutilate unseen victims with hidden explosives.

Perhaps the beginning of this horror (with world nuclear or bacteriological destruction as its possible end result) was the invention of the machine gun.

For the first time, killing power came from a weapon in a spray of savagery that required no accuracy of aim to rip bodies apart.

Attempts to design firearms capable of continuous operation were two centuries old when the American inventor Richard Gatling perfected a revolving battery gun in 1865. Gatling was an M.D. who never practiced as a doctor. In the American Civil War, though, his invention provided considerable scope for the skills of his fellow medical practitioners.

In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, the French mitrailleuse was introduced, firing 37 barrels at once. Later, an American, Hiram Maxim, devised an automatic gun after moving to Britain, and in 1901 was knighted for his contribution to civilization.

His brother Hudson, author of The Science of Poetry and the Philosophy of Language, perfected the powerful explosive maximite in the same year.

During the First World War the machine gun came into its own, pleasing military planners with its capacity to pin down and slaughter hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers. Although cavalry charges into virtually defenseless infantry was thus made a thing of the past, warfare became a still more brutal contest of firepower and expendable soldiers.

HHHHHHHHHHHH

Horsemeat in Cup: A lame entry, my dear Watson

HHHHHHHHHHHH

Light machine guns were designed for portable use, delivering bursts of ammunition. Heavier types could be mounted on tripods and fed with endless streams of ammunition on belts. The heavy Browning was adopted in 1917 by the US Army, and by the Second World War the air-cooled .30-caliber and the water-cooled .50-caliber Brownings were standard American issue. In Britain, the favored light machine gun was the Bren.

Following the Korean War, American forces received the semi-automatic M16 gas-operated rifle, firing 750 rounds of 5.56 mm ammunition per minute, effective at half a kilometer, and weighing less than three kilograms. Four times as heavy was the M60, firing 550 rounds of 7.62 mm ammunition and effective at more than a kilometer. This is turning my stomach. If you're still enthusiastic to know more up-to-date details about this filth, I suggest you turn yourself in to the nearest psychiatric center for a good spring-clean.

1970: visions before midday

No-one else is home. Caroline wakes early (she's set the alarm) for a day all her own. Bliss. She makes up a fine bowl of stewed apple with cinnamon.

Mary, in trendy Balmain, has been sick with a winter cold. Caroline walks slowly up Darling Street to visit.

Billy's there already, hairy and boisterous, drinking tea and Southern Comfort. Mary sniffles into Kleenies but declines the bottle.

Brought your stash, Bill?

Sure. Hey, that'll clear your head.

All the arcana; the selection out of seeds, the rolling, done without attention, in Zen oneness.

Whoop. Hey. Uh uh uh. Wanna hit, Caro?

She hasn't thought about dope for a long time. But today she's in fate's hands.

It might improve my mood.

Here y' go.

After a time she wanders outside and sits in the cool sun, relaxed, watching pretty fluorescent images.

Caroline opens her eyes to the clouds.

Heads. A beautiful lady of peace, quintessence of quiet calm. Men's faces, then, strong at first, then horror & pleading and pain & terror. That passes. Noble beasts: lions, bears, a great elk, an incredible scorpion with a magnificent twisting tail (for the clouds move).

All goes.

Caroline closes her eyes in exhaustion. After a time she looks at the clouds again.

The beautiful lady gazes down upon her. The men, the grandeur, the pain, the heraldry. Caroline pities a crucifix, a poor cross stuck in the hill of the sky at 60 degrees, canted, fading, fading so gradually into a pale pale image, an image Caro must strain to see, of a fine man's face.

The cloud has totally disappeared & there's only blue.

Mary's visitors have come to sit in the sun.

You sleeping? God, Caro, you look exhausted.

I'd better go now. Get well soon.

Mary waves, cloaked in a rug in the cooling sun, laughs at a joke from Billy. Caroline wanders down Darling Street, looks in the craft shop window. Bray's bookshop is shut. Wanders on. Pleasant again.

She drops in on Antony's house. Everyone has left. In an empty room she finds a sleeping man & two chairs.

They moved out, he tells her, rubbing eyes that have been watching lunchtime dreams.

Whose are these? She sits on one of the two small but fine chairs.

I dunno.

Could I have them?

Yeah. Come on, we'll chuck 'em in the back of my van.

1970: working girl

28th July

My dear Joseph

4 o'clock, the sun is shining in my window. Sitting on a new acquisition, a bright chair to match my bright desk. Strange circumstances.

Today is the first time my mind has been calm in a week. The university makes me unhappy. I guess I'll get over that—it's my projected emotion.

I started a waitressing job at a sleazy place at Circular Quay last night. Lots of Navy guys. Take-away chips, chicken rolls, hamburgers, greasy or dried out, & sit-down snacks and meals. The guy in charge is okay but the clientele are vile. After 10, the drunks from up the road. It won't worry me for about 3 weeks, then I'll throw it in. 5-12 p.m. four nights a week.

Have a courter at present I could do without. Quite nice but . . . he won't be allowed to share my lecky blanket.

fondest love & hugs

Caroline

1970: problems of legitimation in late capitalism

Shags peer

aug 2 1970

The gay, wild pace just never lets up. A party here yesterday at which Melbourne's leading draft dodger and fervorous Messiah put in an appearance, along with various marxists from Latrobe university, the new hotbed of academic revolution. It was meant to be a traditional Saturday bar-b-q but rain sent us all inside. One notable revolutionary kept niggling Wagner, who'd come at my specific request and was all too obviously chatting up this post-puritan fellow's lady wife. At one point the merrymaker poured beer all over Brian's hapless head. The wife was not to be found.

Finally, around 9 p.m. (drinking all the wet arvo, you'll recall) it got too much for Brian, and he hurled a mucky plate of old spaghetti at his tormentor. The wicked communist leaped up in a murderous rage, Wagner ran into the hallway, into Martha's bedroom. Instead of turning the knob his antagonist attempted to smash down the door, wooden panels crashing out, screams and abuse, his wife returning from the pub at the crucial moment, deflecting his rage. Incredible screaming vituperation in the hall, me quaking in my room where I'd fled for solitude before any of this had begun. Wonderful rhetoric overheard. Brian was characterized as "Zarathustra," or more germanely if less germanly as "that fat, overweight, hermaphrodite stuffed with X chromosomes." A highly cerebral approach, as befits a brawling intellectual. Also, I imagine, highly projective: he went on to berate his wife for fucking some tycoon socialist all last year in the back of a Bentley. Finally everyone went off in a huff, including most of the people who live here. I lurked and made notes in a cowardly fashion. When the coast was clear I went in and rescued Brian, who was taking his ease on Martha's bed reading the Marquis de Sade in a banned American paperback edition.

Our mouser has had 4 pretty kits. I watched the last one being born and got all overcome with amazement and cluckiness.

your Friend

Joseph

1970: vicious rumors

sidders

2 August

Whatever happened to R. D. Laing? Someone on Old Mole told me his colleagues had committed him! Tell me true—I appoint you chief investigator.

your Mad Cobber

1970: the decline of charismatic rationality

seaside resorts, inc.

8 aug 70

dear fowl

I have my international agents, via several LoCs to British quipu, on Laing's mad trail. Are you putting me on? Are they putting you on? Is Laing—nothing would surprise me less—putting us all on? I would not be astonished if the reports prove accurate. I recently read not one but 2 dubious pieces by that shrunken shrink and sage: one a report in The Listener of a radio talk in which he describes how he found god; the other in the mole I think—where he argues in favor of that lunatic and discoverer of "orgone energy," W. Reich.

Read Mailer's 2nd novel Barbary Shore. Pretty good, scary, crazy McCarthy-era anticommunist fascist FBI nasties monstering ex-stalinist turned true-revolutionary hero. Collapses at the end as a novel (too much political speechmaking) but a stirring work. Universally panned in 1952, always a good sign.

Had dinner with a couple of hikes the other night and kept pushing the notion that people (workers, students, whatever) should control their own places of work, reach decisions collectively. Of course I was scoffed at as an idealist—the workers are all too stupid, I was told, too tractable. Oddly enough, the night before I had been adopting that same skeptical attitude in a devil's advocate role when Bob was forcefully arguing for worker's control. Actually I'm inclined to think that it's the only way we can get out of this shitheap. I recently read and recommend a book by Herbert Kohl on The Open Classroom that takes this line in education. It certainly vindicates your approach to literature studies.

in all foolish hope

Joseph

1970: eros and syphilization

King's Cross

16 August

dear beast

Control by the workers indeed. A consummation to be craved but not on the agenda this year. After slaving for nine hours today as a true proletarian and meeting the workers face to face once more I can inform you—it's a long way off.

As you see I've changed jobs, to the Cross. The first night here proved astonishing. Having time to kill before six I wandered into shops in the X. One was a men's wear store (thought I'd buy you a decent tie) where I fell to talking with an elderly French gentleman. We struck up conversation easily as I inevitably do with random strangers and he invited me to coffee. He had been living the past 20 years in Noumea, traveling the world between times. He arranged to meet me after work.

So we dined and wined and I didn't get home until after three in the morning. He was a lovely man, saddened when I would not share his bed. Through a quite fascinating evening he told me of his travels and of brothels and prostitutes in many lands. He compared and contrasted in detail the lives of the women, the houses, the rackets, the erotic films; the massages and prolonged fucking that follows them; the wonder and evil, beauty and ugliness of it all.

Keep in mind that this man has had thirty years of exotic experience. He provided me with a detailed description of how to "play," to which I gave amused serious attention. His dildo collection. Bottles of pills, mainly from Germany, that stimulate desire. He is becoming an old man, he said ruefully, and when one sees these beautiful geisha girls, once is not enough! He gave me some of these pills and urged me to swallow them then and there, but I refused. I was exhausted from my first day of work at the hotel and wanted my chaste bed.

When his son was nearly 18, he took wife, son and daughter and a "paid lady" out to a lavish dinner. After the meal he left his son with the lady. He said it was worth the $50 he'd arranged to pay her, for she initiated his son fully, teaching him how a woman may prepare a man and a man ensure a woman's pleasure.

I felt very tempted to "play" with this wise, sweet man, and regret not having taken the opportunity. I'm sure it would have been exciting and memorable. However, too late—he went back to Noumea today.

Later—

You said you might come up? You didn't sound very convincing, but make sure to let me know in good time if you do decide to visit.

fond hugs

Caroline

1983: joseph's redemption

As clever dick Deep Thought Weekends go (and it has been, by design, an easygoing affair, with a minimum of formal programming), it has gone well enough, in Joseph's estimation, considering how close they all are to 1984. No forces of double-thinking righteousness have broken down their doors, torn the marijuana from the lips of those so banal as still to indulge, snatched paperbacks from back pockets and incinerated them with a gush of flaming napalm, stamped on faces forever. Perhaps it is the bucolic air of the place, the Pontes' hobby farm. Cows lowing in the morning, sheep bleating and blatting horribly, fowls yelling their sex-crazed heads off. Pity about the plumbing though.

Joseph fights his way through the crowded main room to the lavatory set aside for the men. Three riotous fellows are crammed into the stall, firing downward shoulder to shoulder. Bladder pressing his belt, Joseph heads for the broad outdoors. I love a sunburnt country, there's so much space to piss. There is an outside dunny here, relic of days before septic tanks but free of country flies in the cool night air. It stands like a sentry box at the end of the Pontes' yard, surrounded by fuel tanks and pipes. A bar of light shows under its door. Another applicant with prior claim waits his turn. Bugger it.

Joe leans one hand on a fence, unzips, listens to the hiss of his piss. He is more than half drunk. His vocal cords are sore from singing. Funny, you'd never believe how many of the words you know until a whole bunch of other people hop in and give the lead. The sky beyond the lights of the Pontes' enormous ramshackle farmhouse is monstrously black, empty, starless. He zips up as the door of the sentry box opens. Marjory steps out. The waiting shape springs for the door. Joseph hums "They're changing Guard at Buckingham Palace." Marjory comes straight toward him and puts her arm about his waist.

"Not palely loitering, Joseph?"

"I like to get a bit in each night, Marjory."

"Ah, don't we all. And how rarely do we succeed in our ambition. Sorry, that was coarse and untrue. Come and have a drink with me." She seems as drunk as he is.

The lights are off when they get inside; Duck Soup is screening on one whitewashed wall. Joseph finds a bottle on a table of magazines. He keeps his arm around Marjory. They share the beer. Or is it cider? Surely beer. Hell, you're drunk, he tells himself.

Oh Jesus, this woman with her breast against my hand, her hair in my face. I have known her too long and not enough—not at all. I can't see her face in this light and her hair all over the place and her tongue in my mouth.

Marjory takes his hand from her back and leads it up under her sweater. It develops a sense of direction, traversing the hollow of her armpit, interposing itself between her brassiered breast and his own chest. After a warm, shivery time, Marjory turns into him, kisses him fiercely, disengages from his hold and draws him to the corridor.

"Have you got a room by yourself?"

Joseph's tongue locks. He nods his head in the semi-darkness.

"Let's stop quickly at my room and get something to drink."

She knows her way about the place. She leaves Joseph in the hallway, nips inside, half-closes the door, flips on the light, rummages, is out again in a trice, light off, door closed. "I thought Ray might have crashed. He must be in there watching the Marx Brothers." There is more than exasperation in her tone. "What room are you in?"

He tells her, taking her hand in both of his."Have you and Ray had a falling out?"

"You haven't been reading the papers. That was some years ago."

"Well, yes, I mean—"

They step out again into the night, cross pebbles, locate one of the small rooms that Mario Ponte has refitted from the original farmhouse stables for such large-scale social occasions as hike convocations. Ivy hangs above the lintel. Three doors down, light spills from an open door; there is a room party warming up, shouts and laughter. Joseph has not bothered to lock his door. Quickly he closes it behind them, snibs the catch.

"Um. I don't know if I have any glasses."

"Bugger your social graces, dear boy, I'll tear the top off with my teeth and we'll hop straight into it."

Joseph regards his friend with some concern. She has lines about her mouth he has never noticed before, and a heavy crease between her eyes. "About Ray, Marj—"

"Ah, yes, Ray. He had a Night of Fire, you see."

It takes him a long moment. "What, the Blaise Pascal of Melbourne town?"

"The same."

"You're not serious. God spoke to him from a burning bush? To Ray?"

"From a painting purchased prior to Vatican II from Pellegrini's, actually."

Joseph's erection cannot decide whether this is good news or bad news, and stays at halfmast, pushing with moderate force against his zip. "I thought he was dead set against eschatologies and teleological metaphysics. Or has he become a Taoist?"

"No, a Christian. He's been born again."

Joseph is aghast. He wishes to shriek with mirth but feels it would impugn the gravity of the case. "Not actually taken the plunge into the briny?"

"Come off it, Joseph. Ray might be mad but he's not stupid."

Sulking, Joseph makes a production of opening the bottle. "I had heard that it's part of the satisfaction of the thing."

"No, essentially Ray's is a cognitive conversion. With ethical side effects. He's most apologetic for the way he's been treating me."

"How has he been treating you?"

"Like shit. Look, shut up, Joe." She finds a switch for the small lamp beside the bed, taps it on, rises, flicks off the room light, crosses her arms over her sweater and turns it inside out over her head. On the end of the bed, bare to the waist, she has one boot off and pulls at the other while Joseph is stepping from his own heap of clothes. He gives her shoulders a shove and she rolls back, arms akimbo. The boot comes away in his hands, followed by her slacks and high-waisted white panties. Over his shoulder they go.

"The way of the cloth is not that of the flesh."

"Very funny."

"It's one of Brian's," he footnotes dutifully.

"Sod Wagner. Kiss my breasts."

There's no confusion in his erection now. Shrilling with lust, his central nervous system cascades with adrenergic neurotransmitters. He fears loss of control, pulls back to the forms of tender banter. "So you've finally progressed to incest."

"To what?"

He is crushed again. "You forgot."

"It seems so."

"That night I stayed at your place. Years ago. '77."

"You silly," she says, hugging him down on her. "Do you suppose I'd forget that? Rather a wasted opportunity in retrospect."

"You said it would be like incest."

"Never mind. If that's what turns you on, I'll call you Daddy." A quick involuntary shudder runs through her, and Joseph sees the edges of her mouth draw back. "I wish I hadn't said that."

The bed is not wide. They roll across it, hit the wall. Joseph caresses her, finds her dry and closed, wets his fingers and sends them down. After a time she sighs. He enters her. Marjory's legs lock across his buttocks. She twists violently, rolling sideways. He fights to keep his center of mass above her. She bites him, flexing like a cat. They fall from the bed.

Joseph's shoulder cries out, rapping the floor boards, and Marjory's weight crushes the wind from his lungs. Dazed and angry, he finds Marjory no longer with him. He belches stale beer. Suddenly Marjory is above him, taking his prick in her mouth, the dark, moist sporran of her pubic hair coming down toward his claustrophobic mouth. He gags, extends a hesitant tongue, reaching up to hold her broad buttocks with his hands. She is making the most extraordinary grunting noises, driving his penis deep into her throat. It is the reverse of erotic. Rolling hard, Joseph knocks her to the floor and spins above her as fast as his drunken reflexes allow.

"Oh shit," Marjory mutters in despair. "Another missionary."

Light flickers from the bedside lamp as he catches his rhythm, rising and falling, the light spilling, not spilling, held back, so many years. On to the death. Only a tight light. Oh Marjory, the speed, the speed, the need for speed. We'll die in our tracks. Marjory, the Night is Dark and we are Far From Home. Can you see in the dark, little fox?

Her fingers needle his back. As he winces, she goes to the side and rolls him under her once more, raising herself above him on her elbows, her breasts falling to his chest, beyond reach of his lips. Joseph lets his head rest on the dusty, rumpled piece of carpeting, closes his eyes. Marjory can dictate the pace. A quickening pulse heralds his coming. Desperate, drowning, he heaves himself above her again, comes without making a sound, capsizing to the floor. Marjory labors over him, her hand tightly gripping him, racing his dying organ to her own climax. With seconds to spare she collapses across his drenched chest.

Blind eyes. Limp hands. Her back, her buttocks. She breathes, matching his quick, slowing inhalations with her own. His head presses something hard: the door jamb. Amazing. Marjory stirs, blows a stream of air in his face. Joseph opens his eyes.

"Hello, Marj."

"Hello, Joseph love." The lovely scent of her.

"We've fucked our way right across the room."

"On a return ticket, I trust."

1970: believe it or not

Shakespeare Investigations

21 August 1970

Here's what I've heard about Laing. A, harumph, gentleman friend of Martha's visited the house a few afternoons ago in Bob's absence. I spoke to this guy briefly and it turned out that he's a trainee trick cyclist. He's heard that it's well known in the trade that Laing periodically freaks out and puts himself away for his own good, though actually he wasn't certain—it might have been Laing's offsider David Cooper who does this. Ronnie is said to play bizarre roles even when operating as a psychiatrist, such as wearing all green matching clobber down to green fingernail polish. This has evidently been accepted by his clients as part of his brilliant new methodology (and for all I know it may well be). Such roles are liable to alternation without notice, up to several times a day, so that he conveys a different personality each time to the non-professional eye. This is all a very rough rendition of utterly unauthenticated rumor, and could well be the sort of scurrilous flak attracted by critical innovative-thinkers like Laing, but it fits unnervingly with what you reported hearing. I suppose rumors tend to have that feature.

Queensland staff and students have put out a huge book titled Up The Right Channels that criticizes each department and evaluates each staff member and offers arguments for student control.

Bye,

Joseph.

1970: systematically distorted communications

Rozelle

Sat 29 Aug

Dear old Horse

I write letters in my mind, I write on paper, tear them up and cry. I started crying in the lift the other day thinking of you. I have a new job waitressing in a hotel, taking meals up to rooms. A ghastly thing happened—I went to get "an inch" cut off my hair & they cut off four or five inches. I came home and wept for hours. I really did feel castrated. I can't do anything about it. The bastard pulled my hair to the back so I couldn't see how much he was cutting off, though I had told him. I don't want you to see me like this which is ridiculous but I feel so unhappy about it.

a sad beast

Caroline

1970: the flight of the emu

Kings Cross

Tuesday September 8, 1970

My dear Joseph

I thought I was going mad again but I wasn't. It's all right now. There are tears ahead for both of us, but that's nothing new. At least this way there's a fresh start.

I had a dream that I was a flightless bird. A big fat emu with lice, stuck on the ground, running in stupid circles. Nothing very subtle about that. When I woke up I was crying. Lanie heard me and knocked at the door. She hopped in the bed with me, because she is a dear kind creature, and I told her how absolutely desperate and fucked up I was feeling. She said that she'd been in exactly the same state when she'd decided to just piss off, take all the money she had in the bank and buy an air fare to Malaysia and GO. It was like magic in my heart, Joseph.

Just go. Why not? I owe you that money, but I don't give a stuff about debts to anyone else. They have just slammed me down, broken my bones. So now I have made myself a promise. I am the only one who defines who I am, what I do, where I go, when I do it, with whom, how I feel about it . . . I'll get you your money, don't freak. Then I'll buy my ticket and fly, fly, fly.

Lanie and I saw a documentary at the co-op on the weekend about India. Like my naked heart torn open and displayed to the sun. Joseph, I wanted to go there and see all that amazing humanity, and it didn't occur to me that there was nothing I needed to do but just go. Now it has. So that's what I'm doing. Lanie will probably come with me, possibly only for a holiday or maybe for good. We will take Australian seeds and plant them in that strange soil, and find a guru and learn mysteries. I am not coming back. You hang about my neck. You are my burden, my cross if you like. I know that you saved my life when I went mad the first time, but now it is your turn to be my oppressor, my slave master, the tyrant caging my free heart. You are a black saint.

Those splotches are tears, yes, how banal. I do love you, Joseph, even if you have never really loved me and never really loved yourself. My mother and father loved me too, and look what that did to all of us. Distance is a knife for cutting through love. The distance between Melbourne and Sydney is not sharp enough.

The documentary was about Bangalore. It's the sixth largest city in India, the capital of Karnataka state. The weather is said to be pleasant. You've heard of it, I suppose, because it was the British headquarters for fifty years from about 1830. Its name means "village of boiled beans." I think I'll go there. Definitely non-trendy. I've never even heard of anyone who's been to Bangalore in search of truth and mystery. I won't write, Joseph.

Not ever. This is it, kiddo. Hence the messy tears. I tried it the other way and look what's happened. (I'm not blaming you, only the situation. The way it is with me.) So I'll scurry about the King's Cross hotel and make my stash and buy a ticket and say goodbye my love, my silly, my stiffnecked horrid hateful lovely love—

Caroline

joseph and the cow

I stood on the podium in the enormous Hall, looking down past the microphones into the gathering of hikes. They shuffled their feet, easing their legs and backs. Some munched on sandwiches or drank chocolate-flavored milk from Big M cartons. Behind me, drastically enhanced by an epidiascope from the small gallery reproduction on the stand, a great artist's work loomed in light.

I tapped the microphone. Heads came up.

"Roy Lichtenstein gave everyone a nasty shock back in the sixties," I told them, "when he blew True Love comic frames up to the size of walls and, by simple gigantic replication, transformed them from kitsch to fine art."

The acoustics of the system were excellent; there was none of that momentary delayed feedback that rattles the mind through the lag at the ear.

"Pop Art made the medium the message," I said. It did not bother me that this phrase was an icon of a school of mediating interpretation gone to dust half a generation earlier. "Printers' half-tone dots in the cartoon were amplified to endless ranks and files of painterly flattened spheres big as fingernails."

The lights in the hall flickered for an instant. I glanced over my shoulder. The epidiascope was still casting its great lucent shadows on the wall, the image unscarred by the momentary power surge.

"During the seventies," I went on, "Lichtenstein extended his subversion to so many media—Surrealism, Futurism, trompe l'oeil—that he began to seem the Bill Blass or Trent Nathan of the decorator art biz. Yet his instinct was good," I added, after the polite chuckling subsided. "More than a decade later, his 1972 gags are still startling enough to kick the air out of you in a belly laugh if you come on them unwarned."

I gestured above and behind me. They had not come upon this work unwarned. It was the luminous representation of a vast canvas triptych in yellow, white, Benday dots, diagonal stripes.

The first frame showed a farmyard animal browsing contentedly. In the next, the beast was breaking up into strabismus charts. By the third, it had been rendered into a comic-book reduction of a Mondrian.

"The title," I informed them, "is 'Cow Going Abstract'."

Among the burst of good humored laughter there was a splatter of applause. I waited, smiling slightly.

"Yes, good joke." I leaned forward on the podium and when I spoke again, it was with an abrupt return to impassivity. "The real point of the piece, of course, hits you a moment later, when you notice that the cow in the first frame is already totally abstract. It is a flat array of diagrammatic elements only marginally more representational, in the illusory or mimetic sense, than the mock Mondrian."

Like stick figures, the brights looked back up at me in the frozen postures of dream. "We are talking about Joseph Williams," I told them pitilessly. "It ought to be clear to you by now that Joseph Williams is a Cow Going Abstract."

FIVE: something borrowed

For fiction offers us not transcriptions of actuality but systematic models which are distinct from reality . . . They know that reality can be neither captured nor escaped, and their response has been to redefine the aesthetic act itself and argue that all works of the imagination are plagiaristic.

::Robert Scholes, "The fictional criticism of the future"

the twelfth photograph

Taken from the first or second floor of a building across Darlinghurst Rd, with zoom lens, TRI-X 35 mm film pushed to 800 ASA, and barely adequate early sunrise light, the photograph angles on airborne Caroline. There is no resemblance to a bird in flight. Nor does the shot possess the stillness and layered one dimensional tranquillity of Magritte's famous painting. Violent turbulent buffeting is bashing the boundary where Caroline stops and air begins. She is immersed in air, but its liquid does not smooth her path. Her eyelids are peeled back by its force. She has fallen already scores of meters and her intersection with the palpable air disposes her legs and arms awkwardly, contrary to the expectations of gravity and muscle. The pressures of her fall from the open window, grainy and crepuscularly open at the top of the shot, has torn her dress up over her shoulders, covering her throat and mouth, leaving visible only her husked eyes. From this angle it is evident that she is innocent of underclothing. Recently she has shaved away her public hair, so that her naked limbs and belly present a strange duality, innocent and lubricious at once. No one gazes out from the window to witness her plummet onto the painted metal of the fire hydrant below. It is an impossible photograph. Who could have taken it?

the thirteenth photograph

In this photojournalist's routine and unpublishable Nikon pic, Caroline's broken body is being removed from the blood-splashed King's Cross concrete footpath by two ambulance staff. Their faces are rigid with the necessity to deny any direct connection between this torn meat and their own tired morning flesh. Caroline's clothing has been drawn into place, but it is clear from the shape of her corpse that the hydrant has failed to show her any respect. At the very least, its crunching impact has dislocated her right shoulder, shattered half her ribs (broken and oozing through her uniform like a defrosted rack of lamb), and, most horribly, torn out her left eye.

the fourteenth photograph

This Kodak VPS blow-up could be a sample from an advertising campaign, either for the company's range, for the Mamiya 645 camera, or perhaps in support of funerals. Details are crisp, definition superb. Although it is raining, an awning has been arranged for the protection of the principal mourners. Onlookers have fetched their own umbrellas, not all of them black. The open coffin, beside the deep, muddy grave, attracts the interest of a horde of emotional adults and children. Caroline is at the center of the photograph, her repaired face tanned with cunning cosmetics, eyes only lightly closed, lovely in a white lacy dress from the turn of the century. Mr. and Mrs. Muir stand prominently in the front of the gathering, distraught and still apparently in shock. Caroline's father's large hand rests on the edge of the open coffin, touching the silk, above his daughter's shoulder. Almost out of the shot, at the rear of the crowd, drenched Joseph leans toward Lanie. His eyes are smeared with rain. Lanie wears a dark plum dress, muted and melancholy, under an incongruous transparent plastic raincoat. Her hand hangs limply beside Joseph's. They do not touch.

ambit claims

Dead? O hell-kite! All? What! all my pretty chickens and their dam At one fell swoop? Was there no end to this damned visceral manipulation? Was not Caroline at this moment somewhere safe in Bangalore, full of beans or at least hardly defunct, seeking the meaning of life in a landscape no less alien than the right hemisphere of the brain to its left partner and rival? Ha! Dead! Impossible! It cannot be! I'd not believe it though herself should swear it. (Henry Carey, more or less, 1693?-1743)

I edged myself into this question with a paradoxical conceit, a waggish antinomy.

Humans were the only animals capable of knowing truth, and compelled by its quest, I proposed; they achieved this end by lying.

Certainly deceit was a gambit in the broad evolutionary repertoire, but by and large it was chicanery of an essentially passive kind, baffling perception. Chameleons were adroit at dissembling, stick-insects (Diapheromera femorata, say) at outright mendacity. Yet even the predator, actively straining for stillness under the skittish gaze of its prey, employed a passive falsehood.

People, though, tricked one another with deliberation and intent. The mismatch of stimulus and perception was wilful, informational, communicative. Map, ho hum, no longer reflected territory.

The implicit assumption in that line of thought, I noted, was that Territory did equal Reality. Yet how could that be? Only eidolons were known, schemata, those structures into which perceptions were slotted, out of which they were built. True, it was economical to posit a coherent, consistent Noumenon that gave rise to those patterned inputs from which minds constructed Phenomena and their experienced qualia. But it remained logically impossibly to know whether those features of the soi-disant Noumenon that were abstracted and represented in cognitive maps were even remotely relevant, let alone central, to the true fundamental structure of the Noumenon.

So in the first instance the map a lie misrepresented was another map. Of course, if that original map were in error, the available means of modifying it lay in positing yet another, inconsistent map—in terms of the primary map, to "lie"—and let the two compete for traffic.

Thomas Kuhn had described this procedure as the construction and competition of rival paradigms. I was prepared to be less fancy, and recognize a lie when I saw one. (But which one was the lie?)

Didn't this leave out the moral intentions of the act, and the degree of commitment your true liar had to the propositional system—its data and their internal relations, as he accepted them—that he attempted by his falsehood to subvert? For surely a lie was a prudential evasion (unless motivated by sheer pathology) uttered within a covert meta-affirmation, its goal being, say, the attainment of power, or the avoidance of aversive consequences, in principle describable on that meta-level in exactly the same terms by both liar and lied-to?

Besides, there were more varieties of truth than one. Did not even this unorthodox definition apply only in those part-axiomatic realms where the Falsification Test held sway: viz, the austere universe of scientific discourse? While a scientific theory could reasonably be construed as a lie by the honest lights of its antagonists, I might hardly implement the same rubric in dealing with the rich ambiguities of fiction, of art in general: ambiguities that bid to resolve, with benevolent, dialectical prodigality, the contradictories of linear imposition.

Well, I bought none of this. I was convinced of the deep identity of science and art, if only because they both pertained to the same class of neural algorithms. It was the same brain that did the sums as did the petit-point, the oratory, the hunting&gathering, the nuclear physics, the philosophy and the dishes. It was the same brain, overloading, leaking ions and neurotransmitters, and running its programs haywire, that sent Caroline Muir into the madhouse and delivered unto Ray Finlay the mystical trance which passeth understanding.

The mysteries of Art! I laughed. The Muse! How unlike the crass operationalism of science, according to some. Regard the Reader, withdrawing attention from signals at skin, muscles, deep gut, delegating all that inconceivable mental power and complexity of cerebral function to a phantasmic, prompted construction of human and environmental replicas, previously schematized with almost total incompleteness by the Writer who, in a comparable state of inwardness, had employed similar hierarchies of abstraction (sub-routines all of a human brain with its grievously fallible memory, absurdly limited attention span, constipating dogma, barbarously blatant stereotypes, ploys old before Homer) to mime out an interior shadow play.

Yet the undeniable delight of this process, I told myself, was of heightened, not diminished, not reduced, not denuded, but magnified and robust experience.

In part, I mused scientifically, it was due to the compression of time. An initial practitioner (the Writer) spent days, months, years engaged in the programming and interrogation of his or her sub-routines, modifying them, checking for parity errors, testing them for consistency, pith, even "validity"—and distilled the results into an input meant to be experienced full-bore by the subsequent practitioner (the Reader) in mere hours.

Add to this the artist's specialties—verbal facility, perhaps; peculiar insight, or simply peculiar views; keen eye, ear, fancy—and the Reader obtained the frisson of living inordinately beyond his or her means. Next to this gratuity, the simple traditional pleasure of storyhearing—wish-fulfilling content—ran a beggarly second. Tinker, tailor, rich man, poor: what booted it, if the tale were well told?

So, I realized, by my earlier accounting I had here two lies. The first was the Writer's: that these lay figures lived, that this schematic was more than a rudimentary sketch of a map of a map. The second was a lie shared by all the Writer's Readers: that they were not gazing at lines of print but witnessing other lives entire; that, in the worst case, they were no longer themselves but someone other, in a denser, more selective universe.

I rebuked myself. This critique was philistine, asinine! To equate Art with Deceit was to reach for your Luger. What else could humans share except abstractions? The touch of a hand and one's emotional joy in it (or fear!) were finally electrochemical abstractions borne to and within the brain by jostling neurotransmitters. If these abstractions were decked out with our elaborations, shading them the colors of our choice, where was the metaphysical burden? What else was feasible?

I sighed, putting the last of the photographs back on the missing hike's study desk.

1983: the mystical tree

"It looks much prettier from up here."

"If you discount that brown furry stuff they seem to have hung over the front of the city offices."

Coming up to the fourteenth floor in the slightly grubby lift, crepitating from the lobby of the Queens Lodge Motor Inn, seeing Grant Moore and his portapak-toting cameraman to the opened window of the main function room, Marjory has no love left for Melbourne in December.

"Don't be a grouch. Look, stick your head out. You're not agoraphobic, are you?"

"You mean acrophobic, Grant. I have very few fears, none of them irrational."

"What the fuck are they doing down there?" Grant puts his arm lightly across her shoulders. On one of the playing fields fifty meters below them and beyond the roaring traffic, several teams of brightly clad brights swirl and flow, step and halt, interpenetrate and coil apart like some Tai Chi kindergarten ballet.

"It's a simulation game of Ray's. Like Dungeons and Dragons, but more cerebral. Like chess but more fluid. I hope your team on the ground is getting some of this, it won't be worth a peso from here."

"They better be, or I'll have their balls." He squeezes her trapezium slightly with his thick, smoke-browned fingers. "You'd be surprised what we can get from up here. Good as a chopper, except for panning. Bill has his zoom right down the front of their dresses." He gives a booming chortle. "Wanna smoke?

"I've given them up."

"The other sort. We'd have to go down to my room of course."

"If that's what you have in mind I think you'd have to extend yourself to something for this itching I have in my nose."

"It's probably just your nasal septum losing its footing," Grant tells her. "I can probably get some from Mark when he comes up after he's shot as much of this as he can stand. What are they doing, a Rite of Spring number for Big Brother?"

"Hardly original, Grant."

"Only four more weeks to 1984, Marjory."

"Yes, that's been mentioned a few times in the press. See that group in the middle? They're flipping their scarves around so you can see the green or red lining."

"The footy season's over."

Corning upon them from behind, Joseph explains, "They're quarks and gluons."

Bill the cameraman grunts, changes his focus slightly.

"Fuck. Do tell. Hey, I know you."

"We met at Jean-Pierre's bistro nine years ago."

"During that big bash you buggers had. You're . . . Joe Williams."

"Joseph."

"Right." The function room is virtually empty; all the hikes not participating in the simulation are down on the playing field watching. "They're being atoms, are they?"

"Subnuclear particles. The constituents of nuclei, of protons and neutrons." Everyone on the grass spins, coalescing into groups of twos and threes, merging, rebounding, their scarves twining and folding, red flipping to green, yellow to red, green to yellow. It is like a mating of insects with three sexes.

"The gluons transmit what we call a 'color' charge. That's what bonds the quarks together. It gets stronger the further apart they are. Close up, as you can see, the quarks and gluons are free to jostle each other about."

He's right; it is as if the triads are governed by an invisible cattle fence. Their members roam and flutter, switching scarves, never moving beyond arms' breadth.

"Who are those guys in white caps? They're breaking the rules."

"Photons are allowed to," Joseph says.

"If you're gunna be like that."

"The colored ones get together and make up heavy particles called hadrons. Photons are particles of light. Well, waves really. They transmit the electromagnetic force holding electrons in orbit around protons." Abruptly the scarves come off, are tossed wadded through the air. Several small children dart from the edge of the field, collect them, run off. The dancers take striped caps from their pockets. To unheard music, their choreography modulates to a higher blocking. Bunches of checked caps form. Individuals in merry cherry bands run at them, hands waving; slow; touch, grope, rebound, bond.

"We'll have a bloody newkyular explosion if they keep that up."

"No, the Simulation randomizer has changed the matrix. That's a small segment of a brain you're seeing now."

"Hey, this is good," the cameraman says too loudly. Grant taps his own unencumbered ear. "Oh. Listen, see if you can get some sound for yourself. Skyhooks."

"Shit, I should have thought of that," Marjory says. She dashes from the room. After a moment the function hall's acoustics come alive with thundering rock.

"They're brains?" Grant yells

"Neurons. And neurotransmitters going back and forth between them. This is a simulation of drug action. Those people with the bright red hats represent brain chemicals like norepinephrine and acetylcholine that control messages to the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems."

"What, inside your head?"

"And your body. It's a pity we're not down there, you can't get the fine detail from this distance. There are codes for the different transmitters—dopamine, serotonin, GABA, the endorphins, ACTH."

"Good Christ!" Grant turns from the window, digs into his shirt pocket for a Camel, blows horrible smoke in Joseph's eyes. "Last time we met you were on the bludge. What have you done, a brain surgeon's course?

"If you must know, I've been teaching myself Samoan."

"Go on. Say something."

"My pronunciation's probably terrible."

Grant grins. "I won't let on."

"E a pe a ta sisiva." To his shame, Marjory returns at this moment. She smirks at him.

"What's it mean?"

Joseph blushes, looks out the window at the dancers, in time to see the psychoactive drugs coming in from the outer boundaries of the mind's fleshy world, through the blood-brain barrier, into Caroline's poor battered brain to soothe the whirling violence of her own hopelessly fucked-up interior communications. Neat and ordered as a commercial. Hugging the cross-checked receptors beyond the synaptic cleft, the major tranquillizers block off the buzzing, eager transmitters.

The manic Skyhooks record stops dead; Lou Reed drones. Oh Jesus, she was Caroline, too.

In go the antidepressants, spinning and slowing, gripping hands together in a barrier at the vesicle source of the transmitters, norepinephrines and serotonins straggling back from their journey across the synapse, exhausted, seeking oblivion but blocked against absorption by this tricyclic wall. So away they go once more, jittering clowns juggling their messages of phoney glee across the abyss. And now their return journey is hazardous with monsters, bizarre Chinese masks a decade out of date.

"Shit, Grant," the admiring cameraman reports, "there's three bloody Chairman Maos down there."

The transmitters quail, menaced by MAOs. Not a moment too soon the Marines arrive, Green Berets to inhibit these impertinent interlopers. Joseph smiles at Wagner's lunatic contribution to the simulation schema. Who else would embody monoamine oxidase inhibitors so grossly? And the neurotransmitters are free, carrying their wretched counter-revolutionary messages across the gulf of the synapse and into the brain, into the soul, into the damaged crazy heart. If this is true, Joseph tells himself at last, if this is true, if all that jabbering Freud and Laing and Lacan is finally just the froth on the churned soup of neurotransmitters, the tread on a tire whose wheel and axle are broken from the motor, why, then Caroline was the victim of her neurochemistry after all, as are we all, nudged and pushed by peptides a few dozen or hundred atoms long, atoms made of dumb whirring quarks and their color-drunk gluons, everything skeining in a vacuum of babbling lacy rushing hiss, no tachyons, no block universe of destiny and destination, a gabble of GABA, a hawking of quarks, transmitters with no senders and receptors governed only by the clever mechanisms of inert chance. You can go anywhere in a universe like that, Joseph tells himself in a blazing rush. Caroline was right. You can get a ticket and go. Just go.

"It means Feel like a dance?" he tells the interviewer, balder now than in 1975 but chunkier, more macho if such a thing is possible.

"Not with you, mate." Grant places his hand once more on Marjory's shoulder. "Not with you."

"Ua lapo'a le pe'a i lo le mogamoga," Joseph mutters. "Aua tou te fa'amasino atuina ne'i fa'amasinoina outou." He leaves them to it.

A DOG'S WIFE

. . .one

On the evening of our last day together, Spot and I ventured into Puerto Rican midtown. Drugs dealers conveyed their wares and their opinions to others of their kind on every corner. One in every four of these corners held a dilapidated French restaurant striving to sustain identity and solvency. Young men struggled past us under the load of their gigantic quadraphonic portable sound systems. Spot danced with pleasure; this milieu was not alien to his roots. It pleased him to strut beside me, a streetwise kelpie in Hell's Kitchen.

"Ghetto blasters," he told me, as one kid bopped past in a drench of Hispanic pop. It was a phrase I had never heard before. The acoustic values were sensational. "Third world briefcase," he said, with a yip of amusement. The Walkman craze had not breached the barrio; it came to me that these unfortunates genuinely needed the joint benefits of conspicuous consumption and enhanced personal presence. A news report roared in our ears, simulcast from two swarthy youths passing us in opposite directions, creating a disturbing illusion of dopplered spin.

Whining abruptly, Spot crouched with his ears pricked, swinging his head from side to side in a manner which recalled (I say with some shame) the mascot on His Master's Voice recordings.

"Los astronautas Joe Engle y Richard Truly visitaron ayer el trasbordador espacial Columbia y dijeron que todo luce 'bellisimo' y en perfecto estado para el lanza miento de mañana," the reporter said rapidly, "siempre que el tiempo lo permita."

1983: punctuated equilibrium

Joseph takes the slow elevator, puts his life in risk crossing Queen's Road. At ground level Melbourne is disgusting. Early summer tawdry, old Heralds blowing along the gutter, a miasma of stoned gloom seeping from Fitzroy Street with its hundred child prostitutes, its five hundred hapless twitching junkies, its drab poets and drunks and dreary fuck movies and greasy souvlakia joints and the flat sea at the end of it. Just go.

At the edge of the oval he watches, sun crushing down in his eyes, as Ray's astonishing simulation segues through its modes, its holonistic transforms. The hike dancers are glazed with sweat but some impulse keeps them there, some intuition of a primal order in things. Joseph's admiration for the wit, even the splendor of the strange game cannot disguise from him his final severance. Now the core dancers have become B lymphocytes, primary genetic source of antibody resistance to invasion. Funny how that theme comes up over and over. Viral intruders surge in, each with its antennae, its color coding of antigen proteins. Now they clash, they do one another cruel damage, and at last the sinister doomed mating is consummated, a single fated stochastic lethal romance between antigen and antibody, the antibody one of a million variants laid up in advance by a lottery of internal genetic shuffling, and now the victorious antibody clones its own message, defender of faith and home, and transmits itself a hundredfold, in symbol at least on this tired plot of grass, a thousand, a millionfold, a carnivorous beast of hungry proteins unleashed by host against dying overwhelmed invader.

And the randomizer clicks; the drooping dancers reach for Cokes, for rolls thick with rancid ham, fatty burgers and souvlakia dripping with yoghurt, lukewarm water in plastic jugs, anything to keep them to the simulation under the sun. Already, barely refreshed, they are into a new and higher level of the life spiral, the contest of the genes, selfish and altruistic, shuffling their cards in a game of stable Mendelian strategies, the theory of games worked out in a dance of murder and parish-pump sociality, God damn, the swinging equilibrium between dove and hawk, strategies vying and falling in their embodied genes and genes in their embodied bodies, levels on levels, holons out of holons, retaliators gentle as doves unless attacked, then brutal as hawks, bullies passing themselves as hawks but fading at the test, the scientist of genes, the venture capitalist of genes, the prober-retaliator . . . How much of this makes sense to the watchers, let alone the viewers who'll get five minutes if they're lucky on Four Corners or Sunday Magazine or 60 Minutes or whoever bloody Grant Moore is pulling his fifty thousand bucks from these days, and all they'll make of it is a bunch of stupid bastards who waste their time with that bloody stupid elitist Mensa rubbish.

Marjory's scent reaches him as her arms go around his waist from behind. "I think it's just about over."

"Yes." He touches her hand, squeezes her fingers lightly. "Ray should be tickled pink, it's gone off beautifully."

She releases him, stands at his side leaning on the wooden fence. Music blows across the flattened grass. The sound system down here is not nearly as effective as the acoustics in the function room. "What did it mean, Joseph?"

"The Samoan?" He looks her in the eye. "An old proverb. A flying-fox is bigger than a cockroach."

"Oh." She blinks, looks across the field, waves to her husband as he comes toward them from the middle of the oval. The simulation has finished. Hikes wander off in twos and threes, picking up their trash, their discarded clothing. The field is littered with fragments of color coding. "That's a big step for a man from Brunswick."

"Have to go sometime, lovely."

"Yes." She turns and kisses him fiercely on the mouth. "We'll give you a big send-off. And the other bit?"

"What?" Joseph is confused. From the corner of his eye he sees Ray Finlay's frown, his slow smile.

"It couldn't all have been about cockroaches, they'd spend the whole day talking."

"I can't tell you, it'd excite Ray's Christianity."

"Whisper it in my ear."

Joseph whispers it in her ear. "The greatest of these is love."

A DOG'S WIFE

. . .lift-off

My breast became suffused with awful foreboding. I had seen that look in Spot's eye before, under a dust of stars hurled into heaven with a mad jeweler's abandon.

"Space," he cried. "Boojum, the final frontier."

"Please don't call me that," I begged him, down on my knees on the broken, urine-dank sidewalk, arms about his straining neck. "If you must employ a diminutive, I much prefer 'Jinny'."

"The spirit bloweth whither it listeth," said my husband, as he quivered and shivered in the epiphany of his hunger, and I knew that I had lost him at last, lost him to the call of the wild.

caroline's flight

Late spring, her jet roaring into the bright afternoon, nearly summer, rising, turning above the undisturbed bottle-green landlocked harbor waters, long white ribs of surf seaward of the heads.

In her seat, next to Lanie, she grins.

Look at the bloody roofs.

Yeah.

The plain of domesticity yields to the Blue Mountains, to the endless primary yellows and reds. Hour after hour. They hang in the long bright padded aluminum tube reading Time and drinking free brandies and tonic. The dinner trolley reaches them.

Plastic food, Caroline says, gagging.

This isn't the Town House, my dear.

She trances out, looking down ten thousand meters for the unknown land of her birth.

Hey, it's gone.

That's the Timor Sea, Lanie tells her.

Its white streaks.

And clouds, the day's first.

In the gathering twilight Java is dark green. Abrupt, between cloud banks. The engines drop an octave. The long glide to the sweating Singapore night.

In the taxi they sit half dazed, watching the bicycles, the towering blocks of flats Band-Aided with washing, the milling Chinese and Malay faces. Crazy with his horn, their driver brakes and surges through the crowds. They zip inches from bird-thin Chinese in tattered singlets perched over bowls of soup at street stalls. Cauldron steam glows incandescent under the pressure lamps.

Christ, it's humid.

It is the tropics, you know.

At the dark end of a minor street they stop. Four shillings each a night, they've been told by the student travel agent. The Chinese hotel is clean, simple, proof of the paranoid righteousness of Lee Kwan Yew's capitalist utopia.

While Lanie goes to the lavatory down the hall, empty Caroline fishes a leather pouch from her waist. Passport, health certificate, book of traveler's checks. Photograph.

Joseph sits at his desk, indoors, at night, his typewriter pushed to one side, playing with one of his cats. Kitten, really. Caroline shifts the photograph into better light. Her arm still aches from the cholera shots. The kitten sits on an open book, blurring a paw at Joseph's admonitory finger. Half in darkness, half in light, his lips smile with mock rebuke at the animal. In her mouth and stomach, Caroline tastes tangible loneliness.

Hungry?

Not really.

Still, Lanie insists, we should have a look at things

Hand in hand they take the high, cluttered pavement past shuttered shop fronts and tiled walls until the way is blocked by a pile of bicycles, a mother feeding her baby. Instead of a gutter, they must jump a two-meter-deep trench. Dodge trishaws, motor bikes, pass plaited bamboo garbage bins, to the brighter end of the street.

Noodles?

Okay.

There are two street stalls.

We could sit in the café.

Fans like plane propellers turn slowly over circular marble tables. In one corner a fire burns in an earthenware pot, and over it in a shallow iron bowl a fat Chinese woman turns and mixes fragrant alien food. A few customers sit here already, staring without seeing at the besuited politicians on the walls, listening without hearing to the radio and the street noise.

Fried rice, please, Lanie tells the fat woman. And beer.

The order is relayed into a recess. A boy fetches beer and two glasses half full of ice. A few minutes later the rice arrives, with forks and spoons. Lanie pushes them away, takes wooden chopsticks from the glass in the middle of the table.

I never learned how, Caroline confesses.

On her first attempt she scores six grains and a bean shoot. The second wins her three grains and a fragment of meat. The third nets only rice. It makes her hungry and cross.

It's easy. Look at him. Eating like a native. Lanie sniggers.

A stick man in rubber sandals and shorts sits at the next table. His legs are crossed beneath his chair, livid with varicose veins. Caroline watches his fingers, flickering like the antennae of some huge inquisitive mantis. She abandons her misery to the art and technology of inconspicuous consumption.

1984: on the road goes ever on the road

Here we are, then. New Year's Day, 1984, Joseph tells himself under the appalling sun. Surely there must be some significance in that, some triumph. But in this place they plot the launch of the year on a different trajectory. He swings north, thinking of Caroline standing in this dusty road. Joseph cannot believe, for long stretches at a time, that this is actually happening. It has the weight of some metaphysical imposition. A Sisyphean task. The Augean stables, all the crap in his head. Pretty stupid metaphors in this country the Greeks never got on their maps.

Guided by an old paperback printed in London at the arse end of the flower- and/or play-power regime, he sleeps cheaply in the hotels that for centuries have served itinerant Chinese merchants. He sleeps for free in the Sikh temples that play host to any man who promises not to shave on the premises. His beard thickens.

At George Town he calls at the Post Office on the way to the wharf. There is a copy of Ray Finlay's irregular quipu REBUFF waiting for him, and a friendly postcard from Marjory. He tucks the card into his shirt pocket, jams the quipu unread into his rucksack.

zarathustra

Brian Wagner rolled a clean stencil into his heavy manual machine and squared it up, sat down in his solitary splendor and hummed a line from Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat." He sensed a mini-saga coming on, and felt confident enough in his prowess to type it straight onto stencil without a preliminary count.

[bq]FALLING OUT

Tired of drudgery—drab files, study, waitressing—honey hair to her bum, eyes kohled, calves hirsute in feminist zeal, Caroline sought a fresh start.

Inside the reactor vessel, legs splayed, brush poised, she heard her geiger counter drone.

At early retirement, she consigned her mutant babies to jobless, hairless tedium.[/bq]

Wagner scrolled up the stencil, checked the number of words (spot on), narrowed his eyes at their content and wondered for an instant if Marjory Finlay might not be right to suspect his attitude to women.

caroline in the red light

Half-drunk, belching from the fried rice, the women decide on a circuitous route back to their hotel.

The dirty, slow-flowing water of the canals carries a cargo of rubbish at random through the quarter.

They stroll slowly up a major thoroughfare. Cars and trishaws bluff one another murderously. Pedestrians glide through the mêlée.

I think this one runs parallel to ours.

Might as well try it.

A brightly lit alley leads off at right angles. Caroline is suddenly frightened. They move in a slow stream of men and boys.

Listen, is this safe?

Of course it is. The police are sudden death here.

Small stalls obstruct them every few meters. They stop at the first. In its puddle of light from a pressure lamp, Caroline sees a sorry collage of good-luck charms, pen knives, cigarette lighters, horoscopes, trinkets. She lifts her eyes.

Oh. Lanie, I think we're in the wrong street.

On the other side of the alley, open doors are oblong pink wounds in the peeling whitewash. Women sit inside in the grimy pink light, listlessly showing their thighs. Caroline is astonished by their impassivity; the whores read or sew, chat together or simply sit. The boys, the hairless men, laugh and point, and the women sit.

Hey, lady girls, you Americans? You want good money?

Piss off, Lanie says. We're tourists, not hookers.

Look, here is my money. He brandishes a fistful. Caroline's attention slips, somehow. She hears the tinkle of a passing tricycle bell, the mournful cry of its owner sounding incongruously like agape, which, as she looks at his wares, must presumably be a kind of soup or noodles. Turning, she bumps into a stall. Bright capsules and pills gleam in lamplight.

Shit, Lanie. For God's sake.

She recognizes the brand names instantly, the familiar prescription-only antibiotics. No clinical white shelves of hospital or pharmacist, only a Disneyland of physical corruption and magic science. Caroline feels, as perhaps she is meant to, sick to the stomach.

Jesus, the pictures!

They have been clipped or torn ragged from medical textbooks, pinned framed and unframed, the sharp triumph of the colorgravure printer's art. Cancers spill from the wall, decaying, suppurating organs, children with hideous developmental defects, cleft palates, anencephaly, botched, blotched skin, a dozen diseases and poxes of penis and scrotum, genitals eaten and stained and leaking and rancid with gangrene, legs swollen with elephantiasis and fingers truncated by leprosy.

Do they really think a few antibiotics will cure this sort of thing?

Come on, Caroline. Let's just go.

It's horrible.

Of course it is. Yes, it really is. Lanie smiles at her, and Caroline sees how tired they both must be. Touching her face lightly, her friend tells her: We'd better get you to bed, Caro, before you keel over with culture shock.

The alley ends. Whores conduct their endless trade at Caroline's back. A trishaw pings as they cross the street to their hotel. The lobby looks like a box. In their room, Caroline falls on to the bed in exhaustion and kicks off her shoes. The huge propeller of the fan turns and turns in the room's cloying air, like the coughing prop of an old airplane she'd seen lumbering down the runway as her own sleek jet landed.

It turns and turns above her, trying to drag the ceiling to the floor.

Caroline sleeps, and dreams of India.

faust

Relenting, Brian Wagner ratchets the stencil out of his machine, platen whirring, and spins another in. Clean and yellow-white. Waxy as a classical scribe's tablet, waiting for the concussive incision of words. Fifty words, plus title.

[bq]LEAPING[/bq]

he types; stops, broods, bursts into tattoo:

[bq]Caroline, ready for world, love, mystery and truth, abandoned the castle.

Her cropped head, her face pale from the wimple, took the sun in a hot tremulous kiss.

She turned her feet to and fro, admiring the edge of sky on her mirrored toes.

Caroline shivered, already half in love.[/bq]

1984: joseph

He walks slowly down the short main street, his feet aching, buys a bunch of bananas and eats two, stowing the remainder in his knapsack. A small black and white flag flies over a low concrete structure on the outskirts of the village. Joseph opens the garden gate and approaches the temple.

A girl of seven or so is playing on the lawn with her sister. She rises, greeting him with a grave smile. "Come with me."

He follows the child to a small house behind the temple. A turbaned Sikh with thirty centimeters of beard returns Joseph's salute, pressing the tips of his fingers together in front of his chest. The girl translates his Punjabi: "Where do you come?"

"From Australia."

"Where do you go?"

"To Europe."

"For you a long way to go, lah."

The temple guardian nods to his granddaughter, who leads Joseph to a high, bare room at the side of the temple. Half a dozen beds are all the room's furniture. They are no more than rope nets stretched taut across wooden frames. An old fellow has upended one, and stands twisting a new net on to the frame.

"This old man he comes from Calcutta to see us."

The man from Calcutta nods to Joseph and continues weaving his bed.

"Thank you."

The child departs. Joseph spreads his sleeping bag on a frame and leaves in search of food. Over a meal of chicken and rice that all but cauterizes his throat, he opens and reads Ray Finlay's most recent or post-revelation quipu. It is largely taken up with a transcript of a speech to be delivered by Dr. Finlay at the Commencement Week Ecumenical Service. This happy event is scheduled to take place at the university where Ray looks inside computers for the secrets of artificial intelligence. Joseph's mind drifts to lewd images of Marjory. A burning brand of curried fowl retracts his mind to Ray's new understanding of the human if not indeed the cosmic condition.

[bq]I am a born-again Christian.

I know the truth about the universe, the sublime truth that creation is the planned and loving work of an eternal and all-powerful Lord.

This truth has set me free, as truth must, from the snares and delusions that surround me, has liberated me from unsatisfying rationalizations.

The truth is that the world is more than an accident. It is more than a breeding place of animals, no matter how lofty their natural estate.

The truth is that humans are more than animals that are born and die and vanish forever and must live their meager lives in a frantic race for self-gratification before death steals the sweetness of experience forever away from them.

The truth is that men and women are more than social insects or hairless primates, however moral, however scientifically and socially enlightened. For we are made more than the material world about us, made with the capacity to escape corruption, made with the potential to become one with the Maker.

I know that God, in Their eternal and infinite generosity, has desired to share Their own happiness with others, and has created humans for that purpose.

I know that Jesus Christ, the second Person of that Trinity, came into this universe and gave us the opportunity to become part of Himself, to enter and share the divine life of our creator.

I know that I am part of that great fellowship, part of Christ, part of the God-head, and that the basic force in the universe is Love, for it was from Love that the universe came and it is by love that we shall each be fulfilled.

Nor is this knowledge simply that of faith. God has given those of us fortunate enough to attend this university intelligence beyond that of most of our fellows, and They expect us to use it in the crucial business of saving our souls. It is no good crying for the simple faith of the peasant. What we must learn from the simple is not intellectual simplicity but humility, abjectness to the will of God.

Truth and its pursuit are part of the very fabric of humanity. We can only love what we know, and we can only know what we learn. Yet, lest our life of faith become too academic, too abstract, we must remember that our ultimate aim is not merely to know truth, but to love and become it. [/bq]

Joseph begins to laugh. He gets curry all over his face. Throttling back, he pays for his meal and returns to the temple. The old man from Calcutta lies asleep on his completed bed. Joseph sits in the doorway to the sleeping room and scrutinizes Finlay's piece again from the beginning, by the light of the bulb on the outside wall. He can not control himself. He begins to laugh helplessly again. When the Indian rolls over, stirring, he gets up and moves outside.

"What are you reading?" The two children hold hands.

"A qui—" Joseph says, and stops. "A magazine."

"It is a funny magazine?"

"Funny, yes."

"Give me the magazine."

Joseph hands the quipu to the girl who scans it intently in the light. Her little sister solemnly regards Joseph.

"It is too hard, lah."

The document is returned.

"You speak good English."

"Also Punjabi and Malay."

"And your sister?"

"She learns."

"Learning is good," Joseph tells them.

The little girl says, "Give me paper."

Joseph passes her Finlay's credo, which she examines studiously upside down.

"Now give me back the paper," he says.

The girl prolongs her scrutiny of the inverted pages, running her finger along the lines.

Joseph tries again. "When you said, 'Give me the paper,' I gave it to you. Now when I say, 'Give the paper back,' you must give it to me."

Evidently a stranger to situational learning, the little girl runs off without warning into the garden, holding the quipu above her head. Her sister, casting Joseph a look of suffering, gives chase.

Propped in the temple doorway, Joseph watches the two children chase each other around the darkened garden.

At his back, the man from Calcutta snores on his bed of rope

[bq]http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/science/13prof.html

At 20, [Terry Tao] finished his Ph.D. Now 31, he has grown from prodigy to one of the world's top mathematicians, tackling an unusually broad range of problems, including ones involving prime numbers and the compression of images. Last summer, he won a Fields Medal, often considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics, and a MacArthur Fellowship, the "genius" award that comes with a half-million dollars and no strings . . .

The Taos had different challenges in raising their other two sons, although all three excelled in math. Trevor, two years younger than Terry, is autistic with top-level chess skills and the musical savant gift to play back on the piano a musical piece—even one played by an entire orchestra—after hearing it just once. He completed a Ph.D. in mathematics and now works for the Defense Science and Technology Organization in Australia.

The youngest, Nigel, told his father that he was "not another Terry," and his parents let him learn at a less accelerated pace. Nigel, with degrees in economics, math and computer science, now works as a computer engineer for Google Australia.

"Journeys to the Distant Fields of Prime," by Kenneth Chang, The New York Times, March 13, 2007[/bq]

Acknowledgments

An earlier and very different limited edition version of Quipu appeared in Australia under the title Transmitters, published handsomely by Russell and Jenny Blackford at Ebony Press, and generously supported by a grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council. I am delighted to have the opportunity now to reimagine and broaden the background of my characters.

I have never been a member of Mensa nor any other of the well-known high I.Q. social organizations. Quipu is not a roman à clef. Ingenious readers might attempt to match up my hapless characters with real people; it is a fruitless endeavor, for my benighted rogues are constructs, like the quipu world they create and inhabit. Bad luck, Brian. Even so, I gladly acknowledge my absolute debt to the horde of fanzine writers, editors and illustrators who've enlivened my mailbox and my life over the past 40 years.

I am delighted to witness here the inclusion of certain passages (something borrowed, you might say) written in their first draft by my good friend and frequent collaborator, Rory Barnes—Valencies, Zones, Stuck in Fast Forward, The Book of Revelation, Transcension,The Hunger of Time, I'm Dying Here—which appear here with his kind permission. These appropriated passages were originally offcuts, in fact, from the Ur-manuscript of our first joint novel, Valencies, and I could not bear to let them go undisplayed when they fit so wonderfully into my emerging scheme for this novel. Thanks, cobber.

Robert Scholes' essay "The fictional criticism of the future," from which I draw several of my chapter epigraphs, first appeared in TriQuarterly 34, Fall 1975, pp. 233-47. Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, from which I draw another, was published by W. W. Norton, New York, 1981.

San Antonio, Texas, May 2009

THE END

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Quipu

Table of Contents

Quipu
ONE: em-cee cube
TWO: a purchase on invention
THREE: Plato's essence
FOUR: the unbearable light
FIVE: something borrowed
Acknowledgments