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.
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Citrus sauce: A lemon tree, my dear Watson
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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.