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FOUR: the unbearable light

Because we know that the unexpected happens continually in the history of science itself, fiction now has a license to speculate as freely as it may, in the hope of offering us glimmers of a reality hidden from us by our present set of preconceptions. In the future, realism and fantasy must have a more intricate and elaborate relationship with one another.

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

1970: there are endless possibilities

 

Rozelle Cloisters

30 June

My dear Joseph

Calm at last. Four out, one in. I loll at home, wallowing in silence without yelling bastards and neurotic women. I wonder how long this wonderful regime will last.

Perhaps I'm just ratty with exam fever, but Lanie is giving me the shits. Don (one of the bold New Left revolutionaries) is due to arrive for a few days—his wife has booted him out, hurrah!—and maybe Lanie will get the fuck she's anguishing after. She's in dire need, she claims. To gauge from her foul moods I'm not going to deny it.

If Lanie is in physical need, mine is mental. I ache for someone to converse with, just talk. (Not about my hang-ups or pocked mind—some cerebral exercise.) Politics is the sole topic in this hole. It's interesting, but hardly the kind of thing to grip the soul, to dissolve into.

Two exams down, very shaky. English was passable. Psychology wasn't. I think they used the same principles in designing their horrid multiple-choice quiz that we apply to rats in mazes. The optional answers were identical to within a whisker. It was more like a test of interpretive semantics than a measure of our knowledge of psychology. You would have loved it, it was exactly like one of those bloody Two Six IQ tests.

Of course I got there late (caught in a traffic jam), so I missed the reading period and five minutes of writing time—and had to fill in batches of useless fucking forms before I could start. My tutor agrees that if enough of the others were as confused as me, they'll have to adjust everyone's marks upward, which is the only way I'm likely to get through.

Exams finish in nine days, so if you wish to come down here for a day or two on your way home from Armidale to Melbourne, please wait until after that date. It might be nice. The sun shines every day. We could walk and talk in the sun, perhaps drive to the beach or the mountains—who knows, there are endless possibilities.

I've developed a friendship with the woman next door. Architect's wife. He's shot through, pays for the house and some small contribution to the kids' food and clothing. She's been struggling along with three small kids for the past year. A pleasant, kind woman—it's an unstimulating but very comfortable relationship.

Still—although her friendship is generous, and the kids are interesting to one without any (and without any prospects of ever having any—I don't want to produce a repeat performance of my mother's wonderful little mad brood), it could lead to emotional dependency. She wanted me to move in with her when everyone was leaving this place. But why shouldn't I be prepared to offer emotional support to a person needing strength? I haven't a care, not a distraction, no responsibilities to anyone or anything. Yes, come to Sydney.

Caroline, with love

 

1975: bursting in air

 

"So we have these dreadful conjectural things," Joseph tells his highly intelligent audience. "If they exist they probably decay almost immediately on production, burning off their substance in Cerenkov radiation. To slow them down from infinite velocities is fairly easy, but braking them to anywhere reasonably near the speed of light takes ever-increasing amounts of energy. This is the exact reverse of the situation we good Relativists confront when we try to push ordinary particles toward the light cone boundary from this side. But that doesn't mean tachyons don't exist. Just to prove my case, I've invented a little limerick for you. Are you ready to hear an elementary particle limerick?"

Joseph allows his eyes to roam, unfocused, across the impressionist spatter of faces and bodies. Brian Wagner's voice rises from the silence: "We're with you, Joe."

"A ringing vote of confidence. All right, here it is:

 
"Tachyons, faster than light,
are detectable only in flight.
They're conjectural, true,
and orthogonal, too,
so in cases like this, might is right."

In the numb air there is a minor burst of tittering. Joseph frowns.

"Look here, friends, if that's the best you can manage I'd better try again. I'll tell you my limerick about black holes. I am not going to explain it, though."

"No, no, not that," Wagner cries in pain and terror.

Joseph grins. "I've changed my mind."

"Thank God."

"I will explain it."

Wagner's theatrical agony cascades through the sillier members of the assembly. As always, Joseph is a sucker for this manipulation. Beaming, he leans into the microphone.

"Black holes have very little to do with tachyons, except their outrageousness. Oh, and this—nothing can get out of a black hole . . . except very very fast tachyons. Okay. The key to this illuminating verse is that physics requires only three quantities, listed hereunder, to define any black hole completely. There's no way of testing the hole interior to check on other quantities. It has, in brief, no hair. Here we go:

 
"Black holes are astoundingly small.
They're not really there, after all.
They've momentum and charge,
and their size (rarely large),
but no hair on their wee sterile ball."

This time the laughter is wonderfully rewarding, surfing through the large room, rebounding, filling Joseph's hungry heart. He taps the table finally.

"To return. We've listed some major physical and philosophical reasons for supposing that tachyons are just figments of the crazed mathematical imagination. That's never stopped scientists, let alone out-of-work scientists like me. Particularly when there's a chance of getting a snapshot of the End of Time."

Here it is. He has to explain his vision, his magic, his precious. He cannot convey it. All he tells in his encyclopedia entries are facts. Groping. Keys to their ears from Sunday supplements.

"Think of the Big Bang. The moment when the universe gushed out of Nowhere, time started ticking, space began spreading out from zero. All that heat and light and pressure shone out into the new spacetime nowhere and cooled down and by now is spread everywhere, a black body hiss at two point seven degrees of temperature above Absolute Zero. You can hook up a radio telescope and aim it at that hiss in the sky and take a snapshot of the start of Everything.

"Now look forward. Fifty, a hundred thousand million years. All of space and time has reversed its colossal explosive expansion. It's crashing in toward its fate, which is to be crushed out of reality into the greatest of all Black Holes. The universe will scream with the violence. Some of that violent protest will be tachyonic, if there are tachyons. They'll erupt backward through time, sleeting into our history, raging toward the First Cause. On their passage past our momentary blink, our fragile slice across the spacetime diagram, some of them will track through detectors set up by curious scientists. Those will be halted, leaving their fossil spore. Fossils of the implosion at the End of the Universe. Autopsy reports."

Joseph takes a staggering breath. He is in a mood close to religious exaltation. With a harsh effort he drags his tone back to a banter, a canter into all the wasted, weed-choked weeks and months of the early seventies.

"Lots of the guys have tried to find them. Around the time I was looking in the bowels of my Superconducting Quantum Interferometry Device, or SQUID for short, a couple of fellows over in Adelaide Uni were checking the heavens for signs."

He touches a control, flips the slide carousel another jump. A diagram pours down the wall behind him, secondary and tertiary radiant cascades, clumps and knots of particles.

"When very high energy cosmic rays strike the upper atmosphere," he says, "they smash into atmospheric nuclei. In that small-scale catastrophe, 'air showers' of other elementary particles burst toward the ground. Most of these particles decay almost instantly to more stable states. Two Australian researchers, Roger Clay and Phil Crouch, thought there might be some tachyons there as well."

Another slide, speeding yellow luminal and sub-luminal bullets blazing at the earth, red road runners racing ahead of them.

"Close to the speed of light, the air shower crashes twenty or so kilometers to the ground in under a fifteen-thousandth of a second. Since tachyons move faster than light, they'd get there appreciably more quickly. They don't hang around scuffing their shoes like the other stuff.

"So you leave your detector running an endless tape loop. A big shower stops the tape. If there's a consistent pattern of hail spattering in ahead of the rain, maybe you have some tachyons. Clay and Crouch could discriminate the arrival of particles hitting the detector 100 millionths of a second prior to the main shower."

A photograph of the detector.

"Did it work? Well, between February and August 1973, they detected 1307 high-energy showers. In 1176 of these, the apparatus recorded one or more particles in the appropriate energy range apparently arriving faster than light. These could have been stray bradyons having absolutely nothing in common with the air shower, but the guys ran some tests and decided that air shower 'forerunners' were quite distinctive."

He slips a 1974 copy of Nature under the epidiascope. There's the paper, expanded on the screen. "Possible Observations of Tachyons Associated with Extensive Air Showers." Nothing in science to beat presentation of the evidence, and this photograph is Joseph's evidence that he's not a raving unhinged obsessional loony.

"They were wrong." He makes them a droll, gloomy face. "Bad luck. Subsequent tests showed that this evidence was a glitch, just an experimental artefact. Seems incredible, but then most claims of breakthrough are just wishful thinking and strange accidents. My own experiments, which I'll describe very quickly now, never even got to that point. I should add that to date, as of mid-1975, lots of other eager experimenters have run through all the likely and most of the unlikely places where tachyons might show up, and the cupboard's been bare. In fact, someone's stolen the cupboard. There are no tachyons transmitting to us from the future."

I hope and pray, Joseph tells himself. He does not really believe it. He is frozen, bolted into the endless marble pillar of his spacetime world line, just the ink from the pen that is sketching his path on the Minkowski diagram.

 

1970: the wonders of science

 

Armidale

July 4, 70

 

my god, just one year ago we were all storming the barricades and rolling marbles under the coppers' horses' hoofs, and getting jumped on; one day we will all join the Returned Servicemen's League as Honored Deserters and tell tall tales of How We Dodged The Draft

 

hello lovely

I dunno. Jeez. (One of the many things I dunno is whether this letter will ever get delivered. I gather that a new postal strike is snarling up Redfern Mail Exchange again.) Lemme tell ya. The machine is running day and night, except when it gets temperamental and isn't. We have a wonderful 24-hour background noise profile on computer file. Its sensitive twitching cats whiskers are scanning the heavens even as I sit here scribbling with this goddamned hard awful pencil, sniffing for messages from the far ends of time and space. Bloody hair-stirring, actually. On the face of it, however, we are getting zero. Zip. Zilch. Random scratches and blurts. Cosmic rays. No tachyons. Maybe they're out on strike in sympathy with the postal workers.

So much for the wonders of science. Life here in our little wooden house (well, not "ours" exactly; throat-clearing noises) is not getting any more charming. Truczinski keeps up a random barrage of offensive noise. Tonight it was amazingly direct. "He's going on Thursday, isn't he?" This while gazing with a sort of baleful opacity at me, Paul working at his own desk in the living room behind Tom's right shoulder. "You'd better get your results in by Thursday, because you won't be here after that." And so on, in the same remarkably creepy vein.

Odious. Naturally, I shall indeed be out of here by Thursday. If there's any last minute recovery in the Tachyon Stakes I'll nip off down the road and get a room at a hotel, or somesuch. Absurdly extravagant, given my finances, so the positive evidence would have to be something fierce.

Otherwise, my fallback plan is to bypass Rozelle and go straight home. You can visit me in Melbourne if you wish and use Shagspeare Towers as a base for your other dutiful-daughter wanderings. Write to me here if the strike is finished, or send a telegram. Okay?

I need a walk.

see you, broccoli

Joseph

 

1970: the madhouse number

Rozzel 7 July

 

My dear Joseph

No strike. Your letter got through the next day.

I'm rather relieved you've decided against stopping off here. I do want to get to Melbourne as quickly as I can after the exams.

My parents are visiting Sydney this week, staying at a classy Vaucluse place. Nothing but the best for them. I've spent much of the weekend with them—pleasant, really, and amusing. My father is a dear. He took us to a quite expensive restaurant, and left me with a wonderful Grange Hermitage when he dropped me off in Rozelle. We shall drink it on some suitable occasion, such as my learning that I've passed every subject with High Distinction.

Mother went like a dog for a rat to the episode of my crack-up. We were obliged to go through the madhouse number all over again. Every sinew in her cries out for continual reassurance that my madness isn't her fault, and that to the extent she was responsible she was innocent because she didn't know, how could she know, there was no way she could know, I was always difficult. And so it went on. I dare say it'll go on until I'm 40, my mother gnawing at my madness and my father forgetting about it the instant the drama is over.

Don's moved in, and will stay for a few weeks. Is Lanie smiling? Or smirking? Too soon to say.

Mother was again struck with pain and silent outrage that I won't be staying with her and the loving family. I couldn't find any way to justify it to her, so simply left it as a fact. Ho hum. Until I arrive on your doorstep—

Caro with love

 

1978: snakes & ladders

 

//////////////////////////////

STANDARD DEVIATION August 1978

//////////////////////////////

 

Joe Williams did not approve of my efforts at Overarching Theory. He complained in part:

"You can't freeze your cake and heat it too. The neo-marxists you appeal to for intellectual support undermined your position before you got to it. Take the Frankfurt School of critical sociologists (since you still seem impressed by Marcuse, that tired old warhorse). Theodor Adorno has shown that sociology cannot be derived from psychology. He was thinking of Freudian attempts, some of them by Sigmund himself, to see political disorders as intrapsychic fuckups writ large, acted out on a wide screen. It doesn't work except as crude metaphor. The realm of societal interactions is qualitatively distinct from (and in no way reducible to) the realm of individual intrapsychic transactions."

Well, Joe, I'm glad to hear that you and Herr Adorno now know how the universe works. No arguments required from you, just a bland assertion that minds and societies are absolutely unlike. Did it ever strike you that societies are, after all, tools brought into being by the interaction of individual minds, and that individual minds are structures drastically shaped by societies, and that these feedbacks imply the most profound mutual interdependency?

Besides, Adorno was making a propaganda point: that behaviorist sociology, which he was attacking, is corrupted by its ideological adherence to a repressive and alienated status quo. A holonistic analysis starts from the assumption that the status quo has no privileged position of value, being merely one possible arrangement of its elements. Adorno's dogma is valid only as it stresses that the realms of mind and society are not mutually reducible in one dimension. Pressed dogmatically, his complaint reveals the inevitable Marxist habit of falling back into Hegelian Idealist eschatology.

Of course holonic analysis is not four-dimensional: it has no freedom to know the future. Popper is correct in arguing that the future contains discontinuities, if only because science keeps generating paradigm-destroying insights. However it does offer what Popper claims is impossible: a real understanding of change. If this is so, human morality becomes a possibility at the political scale.

Of course a total atom-by-atom overview is impossible. By a stroke of luck, it is not required. Structurally unique constellations are differentially defined precisely by the quite limited sheaf of options that is available to each of them. In Koestler's terms, one starts by "de-particularizing" phenomena (stripping them down to their defining structures) and locating the codes that establish both their individual character and their functional relations to other levels in the total ecology. The aim is a definitive discrimination between those characteristics of a phenomenon that elaborate the dynamic of the status quo, and those that permit alternative choices without rupturing identity.

So, returning to Popper's assertion that an understanding of change cannot be predictive: yes, there is inevitable distortion and loss of register in the de-particularizing process (skulls are more alike than faces). Yes, the complexity of computation limits our implementable capacity to deal with high-level polyoptional systems (even so simple a system as the world's weather patterns). This is not really so paralyzing, since the optional range of a phenomenon at a given level is brutally restricted by the choices/specifications that have already been made at lower levels (daily forecasts might be a bit iffy, but you're not really likely to get snow in the Central Australian desert; and witches don't really give birth to cats or bats).

But each "fact" in the universe is an actualization of select elements in the structure of (to coin a phrase) its "event ecology." It represents, in a figure-on-background manner, the suppression of other elements or conformations.

Yet those alternative "virtual" elements do not disappear. The actualization of "facts" must be seen as a continuous tension between antagonistic elements, just as nuclear particles are liable to collapse into raw energy and re-emerge as quite different particles, conserving only their abstract "quantum numbers."

Holonistic theory (based, for example, on von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory) promises a structure/function model in which polyoptions serve the valid roles of those tired old work horses, "essential characteristics," and in which the descriptions of a phenomenon's holonistic deployment (within its contextual "field") might achieve the benefits sought and obscured by confused metaphysical notions of "essence."

Does any of this matter?

Well, apart from the intrinsic beauty of developing a coherent vision of the universe, the moral significance is paramount.

"Values" were classically taken to be prudentially contingent on "facts." Moral theory must accord with what is possible. Only if we can predict the outcomes of our actions can we make moral choices. The breach between fact and value can be healed within the holonistic perspective, for facts are significant only so far as they relate to each other (and to the "theory" by which they are perceived/created)—since it is primarily the code of relations and transforms that defines each holonic hierarchical level. Values are precisely the preferred options within a field of possible relations.

* * *

That's quite sufficient for you soi disant freelance intellectuals to chew on for one meal. We'll come back to this in the next rousing issue, which you will be lucky to see before the end of the year. From here, 1979 looks like a nice relaxed 365 days.

 

1970: throwing up

 

St. Kilda

23 July 1970

 

well old gastropod here it is thurday and I presume you're back home tucked into your electric blanket and I've done my duty and despatched your left-behind luggage off on a train to Sydney with much irony to boot, the cost of doing so turning out to be in excess of half the concession fare you'd have been up for, so you've saved about four bucks by hitching your hike in the cold and dismal amid undoubtedly threats to your person and virtue.

then again it may well be that you have in all truth been raped and murdered repeatedly, since I haven't yet heard from you, that last datum I hasten to add not being by way of a complaint but merely the last datum.

scientists, even foolish tachyon-besotted amateur scientists, dote on facts. here is a fact:

after you left on Monday night, I awoke at 3 in the morning (when you would have been where? albury?) and skidded to the lavatory where I chundered with piercing pains and tears and groans, and did it all again at 5 in the morning with amazing velocity and quantity into my carefully positioned little yellow bedside plastic bucket, and felt no better for it.

reasons for this are murky. Martha has also been puking vigorously, but blames this on her post-parturient condition, namely blood-letting at fortnightly intervals rather than the customary four weekly rate. Bob was stricken almost simultaneously with a bout of prodigious shitting.

isn't this wonderfully earthy and non-abstract and gastro-anal, none of your damned pseudo-intellectualisms around this house, cobber.

let me know how the exam results turned out.

 

frail-ly, Joseph

 

1970: caroline's trip

 

And there she is on the road again, thumb out. It's three rides, then, to Benalla, the cold biting. This great roaring monster brakes, and she swings her bag and then her body and is in the seat with a grin.

Sydney? that's my way, he says.

Settling in: Cigarette?

No thanks.

She draws out the Drum tobacco.

Are you fair dinkum?

Sure. She rolls one, takes a long drag and blows smoke into the windscreen, watching it shoot back at her.

The guy is young & hot-blooded. Caroline feels good, relaxed, watches the countryside.

They talk a little. He tries to con her. Leaps on her, one foot on the accelerator, arm stretched to the wheel, left arm pulled her toward him.

What would you do if I kissed ya?

Couldn't do much but we wouldn't get to Sydney.

Ah, okay, I'll forget it.

Shit, Caroline thinks. Four hundred miles.

She crochets, talks, watches the towns and creeks whiz by. It is good, warm and thundery from the motor, a good way to travel. She drops off, sleeps.

And wakes sick.

Vomits and dry-retches for the remainder of the journey. This driver is a saint. Five hours. They hit Sydney at 3.00 a.m. He takes her out of his way, drops her near Callan Park. Caroline walks up Darling Street.

Home is cold and dark. It is a bit strange. She turns on the electric blanket, goes downstairs and makes coffee. Her throat is terribly sore. Caroline takes the mug upstairs. Her room and the warm blanket welcome her. She runs to the bathroom for a final voiding. She chucks into the basin, gargles water without swallowing it, goes to her bed and sleeps.

In sunshine Caroline wakes and feels bad. But that sun is so good. She leaves the crumpled bed, walks outside feeling sad. Suddenly it is okay. She's glad to be back, suffused in her own warmth and the joy of her home and the freedom she has.

She closes her eyes and turns her face to the sun and watches purple light on the inside of her warm eyes, and thinks of purple sheets in Melbourne with a warm body next to her in the Melbourne winter, and cups of milk coffee and long talks with no time limits while toes are roasted at the radiator and funny Joseph laughing at and with her while he tries to touch his roasting toes and her albatross dead wings outstretched tell Caroline in the silence of the dead that she can too fly.

 

1970: writing science

 

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

CASH NEXUS

a politico-duodenal beanspilling and last minute dash for August .26APA mailing by Brian Wagner (the singer, not the song). You know the rest.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

 

Just under four months ago, a little after Easter, my friend Joseph Williams, B. Sc. (Hons) did a heinous thing. He gave me his job.

That, at any rate, is his claim. Actually all Joe did was whisper in my receptive ear that he was giving up science journalism for the loftier pursuit of science itself. Given the pay rates that applied to his job (B-grade, negotiable downward) he pointed out that his boss was not likely to be trampled by maddened journos with higher degrees. As I lack even a lower degree, I saw at once that the job would surely be mine for the asking. I carried in a bundle of quipu to prove my prowess with concept, word and typer.

Ah, Joe, Joe. One day I will find a suitable revenge. I think that it will call, in part, for the insertion of a trained maggot.

Gentle readers of CASH NEXUS may judge me uncouth and ungrateful. Your opinion will alter when you learn to what pass this fiend Williams has brought me. Read on.

It was not until he was safely in Armidale conducting preposterous experiments that Joe owned up to the details of his major role at Science Today Publications (a division of that wonderful oligopoly that brings us all the news that's fit to read over the brekkie table). What was this august role? Typing envelopes. Ruling up sheets of paper. At a time when Poseidon mining shares were going through the ceiling only to collapse into catastrophic ruin, Joseph Williams was dithering his brain away. Now you see why he left this lucrative position.

It's funny, you know. I never asked why he was leaving. It must have been the money he dangled before me; it dazzled me, corrupted my otherwise infallible shit detector. If Joe said he was leaving to advance the cause of human wisdom, who was I to carp?

Joe, Joe, my day will come.

I shall tell you all about my day at work. Not some hypothetical average day. Were I to do that you might suppose I was stacking the cards (actually that is what I was doing, as you'll see). No, I shall deal with the events of a particular day. Today, in fact.

Like Joe, I spend much of my working hours typing envelopes and painting my nails. Unlike Joe, I do it on a C-grade salary (no degree, remember). But a new wrinkle has been invented.

This time last year, Science Today Publications launched an enterprise. You must understand that we like one-offs here. Annuals are okay, and much of my envelope-typing has to do with posting questionnaires to people who are requested to provide update info on technical details from last year's issue of, as it might be, 1001 Uses for a B-47Q Thermionic Valve or The Interocitor Yearbook. But these all began as one-offs, and it's essential to keep stirring the pot. Like the immune system: you must maintain a supply of mutated antigens on hand for use when the next flu plague gets here from Hong Kong. (This insight into the nature of flu epidemics is my sole Science item for the issue. Go and talk to Joe if that's the sort of thing you crave.)

The new enterprise that my predecessor had been involved with, and which I helped see through the birth process, was a little bouncing gem called HEARING AID. I instantly suspected Joseph of slipping a quipu title onto some grave and weighty periodical, but no, this was his (and now my) boss's witty means of alerting news agency browsers to the existence of a specialist guide to Hi Fi equipment. (Joe's rejected suggestion, I report, was SOUNDS GOOD TO ME, almost as lame.)

Bound within HEARING AID was a clever innovation, one of the prime selling points of this journal. A tear-out free-post card invited readers to enquire for further information about any of the sound systems they fancied in its pages.

These cards have been inundating the place in their thousands. We humble staff have the joyous task of recording names, addresses and species of hi fi equipment so that this data may be dispatched to the various manufacturers.

In essence, it's the self-same high level vocation as typing envelopes, except that sorting is also required. The boss has invented a way of typing these things directly onto an unending roll of paper, which at least obviates the dismal business of shoving new sheets in all the time. Ironically, since he is faster at it than me, he's decided to do most of the typing himself (an effective use of a Super-A salary, Meyer). So I have the rather easier task of sorting the cards into jolly little piles. It pleased me to hear him groan at the horror of typing such nonsense all day. I doubt, though, if he appreciates that this is exactly what I have been agonizing through for some months.

Joseph, Joseph. I shall begin by rasping the nerves of your teeth.

After luncheon at my club, then, this afternoon, as I sat sorting these incredible HEARING AID cards, I was washed in despair beyond the power of reason at the thought that if I was going to be a thorough-going tool of the devil anyway, then why wasn't I in an advertising agency earning twice the salary?

In this mood, I stumbled on a card inscribed with a bitter little note from a purchaser. Here is what it told me:

"This magazine is an outright fraud. All the 'articles' evaluating the equipment described are nothing more than advertisements." And so on.

Now this of course is the exact truth. Science RipOffs, Inc. put the book together by inviting all the industry manufacturers and importers to supply their own self-praising copy & pix, if possible made-up according to standard style (a convenient saving in overheads, especially with our art department slashed), then printed the collation and charged the supplying companies fifty bucks or so per page, THEN put the fucking thing on sale for a dollar a throw to the gullible public.

When some hi-fi-loving jerk sees this wretched document on his friendly neighborhood news agency rack, he naturally assumes that it is full of hard-hitting objective scrutiny (well, at least no less so than your average tabloid test-drive, and I agree that's not saying a big mouthful.)

So I sat at my desk, a stone's short lob from my superior's own, and I read this item of mail aloud.

For a moment there was no response. A slight stiffening of shoulders indicated perhaps that he thought I was offering an observation from my own deepest convictions. At length, though, he spun his chair. "Say that again, Brian?"

"First rational reader I've come across so far." I read it out in full, and he asked for the card.

A full minute later, mottled with quiet passion and grief, the Boss said, "I shall write that gentleman a letter."

I worked at my sorting.

"He has no right to say that. He can have his money back if that's the way he feels."

The AID book, you see, was Howard's very own brain-child.

"At no time," he explained to me, turning up the volume and boosting the bass, "do we ever state, anywhere, on the cover or within its 128 pages, that this is not a book of collected advertisements."

I cleared my throat.

"A catalogue we call it," he explained, "and a catalogue it is."

I considered this idea as I sorted more cards. "Howard, when people pay a buck, they don't expect an orgy of advertisements. Unless it's Graphis. Um. You know."

"We make no claims which are false!"

"True," I agreed, "that's where it's at."

"Now look here." The executive desk was puzzled but hearty. "I consider that I'm as well equipped with a set of ethics as the next man, Brian, and I don't see anything objectionable—"

"Oh my God!" I cried in horror. "I should glue my lips shut. Here I am, seeming to be impugning your ethics—"

"No, no," said Howard. "Of course I didn't take it that way." He has wonderful gold link shirtsleeve restrainers, and he pushed them higher on his biceps where the white linen gleamed under the fluorescents. His watch is also very pretty. "My good fellow, you must say what you feel. Brian, that's what's wrong with the world today. No-one dares to speak up. You're frowned upon if you do. Someone is standing by with a little book, ready to take down any remarks critical of the Establishment, putting all our hard-won privacy and integrity in jeopardy, turning us all into mere digital pulses in a great computer."

I was feeling very weak.

Some cards later, I said, trying really hard with the deepest frown of concentration you've ever seen to get my finger on it, "You know, that's what we're doing here."

You could tell Howard doubted it.

"After all, these poor buggers think they're gunna get extra information from Science Today Publications when they send in their post-free card. That's not how it works though, is it? Their names go straight to the sales divisions of all these companies. On to the computer tape. Forever and ever. Badgered and harried."

"Well, Brian," the Boss said shrewdly, "I thought of that. So I extracted a promise from all those companies that the information was to remain confidential and no high-pressure tactics would be used as a result of our little service."

I looked at him, then went back to sorting cards.

Howard shook his head ruefully. He sat and thought for a while. I swear before God to you, one and all, that these were his final words on the topic: "Brian, perhaps I've been a bit trusting."

 

1980: apocalypse apocalypse apocalpse then

 

DECEMBER ELEVENTH NINETEEN EIGHTY

 

The 1960s died on the 11th day of the twelfth month of 1980 when, outside his New York home, five bullets were pumped into the body of John Lennon by the music critic Ronald Reagan, who was later released after questioning by police.

The 1970s died much earlier, on the 19th day of the eighth month of 1969 when half a million children pitched their sad loony tents in a field outside Woodstock, in upstate New York. A recorded interview was later released to the media.

It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Picture a skinhead bootboy with razorblades at his toes and safety pins through the flesh of his cheeks, stamping on his own face forever.

No. Picture four scrubbed and patched middleaged Swedes rampant on a field of armwaving eight year olds argent, droning the theme of the decade: "Money money money."

No no no. Picture Linda Ronstadt and Governor Jerry Brown on undecorated sheets in a single bed, Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta flicking and sliding in the mirror above their heads on squares of pure light.

No. Alice Cooper eating a live chicken. The Kiss in their six year old fantasy greasepaint and ten thousand decibels. Sid Vicious in spoiled brat psychopathic rage working out the punk dreams of his generation in the murdered flesh of a convenient woman.

The seventies was waking into the hungover spoils of the party. Everyone had died during the night.

Jim Morrison was dead in whiskey, caught by the snake.

Hendrix was dead, all his flashing crying chords jangled.

Joplin was dead, swallowed up and chewed into lard and blood.

Presley was dead, fat and banal, in alcohol and spangled spansules.

Marc Bolan was dead, gnawed by Tyrannosaur's jaws.

The Beatles were dead, John by an assassin's gun, Paul by his own hand.

Abba were born dead.

Disco was a corpse plugged into a fibrillator.

Like old pre-industrial gods, the remnants of the pantheon took themselves into eclipse and changed their wigs, were reborn, shook it again in the video clips: David Bowie falling in endless rebirth, Lou Reed transformed, Carly Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Brown; Heavy Metal clashing by night, Tangerine Dreaming their remote electronic buzz; and Dylan was Born Again.

Robert Zimmerman was Born Again.

The music of the Seventies was a pike gaffed into the belly of the Eighties.

 

1983: the time machine

 

It has not been a reprise of the glorious, heart-filling Vietnam Moratorium marches led by Dr. Jim Cairns, poor muddled bleeding love-besotted deputy Prime Minister Jim Cairns, so soon thereafter to go down in disastrous sex scandal muckraked ruin but not until he had achieved more than any other single man in the decade, had Got The Boys Out; but now there is no rough charisma to light up the mass gatherings in the Treasury Gardens, only gray serious bureaucrats of state and church leading a Palm Sunday parade against nuclear weapons, the Premier, the Anglican Archbishop, the Lord Mayor. Melina Mercouri, visiting fireperson, might have brought some flash and wit to the occasion but the rigors of Greek Melbourne has been too much for her, has hurled her fainting to the ground like some St. Paul of Science and Culture in a brainleeched buzz and whirl.

No, fourteen years after the Moratoriums, with the doors slammed shut on the sixties and their music muffled by the gray tunnel of the seventies, a third of the way for godsake into the eighties, fourteen years later and virtually a whole new generation of kids on the streets with their cockatoo hairstyles all spiky with gel and hard dyes,

"Wadda we want?"

"Disarmament!"

"Whenna we want it?"

"NOW!"

but it just hadn't taken of, had whimpered out as they strolled with careless propriety, all sixty or seventy thousand of them, most of the length of Collins Street, through the very atrium of Big Business Melbourne, around the corner politely to the urging of the loud-hailers, into the Flagstaff Gardens with its hanged guy, a cloth rapist put down by feminists, its couple of Portaloos and patient lines of pent pissers, and its dull speech-making, no policehorses, no broken heads, no adrenaline, not even any terrible quaking fear of The Bomb. Perhaps that is the way to do it.

Here, though, in the Nourse living room, there's been no decline gently into that good night.

"I see one of your professors has a bit of sense. Still, I suppose even in universities there must be a few people who know something about the world."

Marjory actually curls her lip. From the corner of the sofa she shares with her mother she says with distaste, "I don't know what you're talking about."

Ray Finlay flicks his eyes back to Jesus of Nazareth, then with an effort of will lowers them to Tom Nourse's cranium. It is almost totally defoliated. The neutron bomb has purged all life from it, leaving a seared rubble. Only a few mutated bristles manage to cling precariously to the lower slopes. Broken veins trace thin laval streams on his face. What's worse, the nuclear bombardment has provoked subterranean chain reactions that will boil forth soon in a convulsion of volcanic spleen. Mere minutes remain before eruption. Duck and Cover, Ray wants to cry. He blocks his mouth before a snigger can get out, bringing the wrath of the Lord upon all of them.

"Oh yes, you know well enough, my girl, or are newspapers too lowbrow for people with university educations?"

"If it was in the Sun I probably missed it, that's true."

"Oh, I'm sure they would have reported it in the Age. They gave enough coverage to that disgusting anti-American mob parading through the streets last Sunday."

"I suppose you'd prefer to see us all blown to hell by nuclear weapons. That will be good for business, won't it?"

Ray returns to Jesus. A gold sphere rests in one oozing hand. The other, visibly perforated though not yet flyblown, gestures with gloomy confidence to his heart, which floats a few inches in front of his robe, dripping blood, torn by a vicious plait of thorns. Dr. Barney Clark, first Mormon with a plastic heart, has finally thrown in the towel and died, Ray recalls. An age of botched miracles. Ray wonders if the incipient volcano across from him suffers heart trouble. If so, Marjory is certainly doing her best to bring on an attack. The Man from Nazareth looks steadily down, serenely untroubled by his own cardiac condition.

"Joe Camilleri is the one who wants us blown to pieces, by the Russians," Tom Nourse is explaining loudly. Dr. Camilleri is a sociologist and activist at Marjory's university. According to the brainless Age reporter, Ray remembers with another barely contained hoot of laughter, Camilleri is a spokesperson for People Against Nuclear Disarmament. God, it's no wonder we're all going to get dusted into the sky.

Marjory has made her own telling retort. Tom Nourse leans forward in his leather lean-back armchair. Once, Ray reflects fondly, Tom was quite placid during these intellectual exchanges. Now the sting of mortality and truth is nipping his hindquarters, bringing the foam to his lips.

"It was in the Age, you can check it. One of your top men in nuclear physics said we should have our own bomb for defense."

"That's just bloody Aronside. He doesn't know what he's on about and anyway he's a fascist."

This seems to calm Tom down a trifle. "I can't see that wanting to protect your country is being a fascist, even Hitler wanted to do that and in any case he wasn't a fascist he was a Nazi. And if a professor of nuclear physics doesn't know about atom bombs I don't see how you can claim to."

"Protect the country! How is having a bloody nuclear bomb going to protect your precious country, frighten the Martians away?"

"If you haven't noticed, there are people closer than Mars who would like a bit of Australia."

"Maybe there are, but how do you expect them to get here? There's all that water in the way. Who are you expecting, more boat people on rafts? The Japanese, or do you love them now, seeing they haven't turned communist? Or is it the yellow hordes of China that are going to turn the whole place into paddy fields?"

"What would you know about the Japanese, or the Chinese for that matter. Your precious Whitlam was quick enough to let them in the front door, and there are a thousand million of them."

"Whitlam? Don't talk to me about Whitlam, maybe you didn't see it in the Sun but he's just got himself a nice plum position on a couple of bank boards. Anyway, it was your hero Richard M. Nixon who let the Chinese into the United Nations, or have you forgotten?"

Ray listens to his wife. At least she's given up farting in bed. It's all a matter of cycles. Holons.

There is a pattering of rain on the window and Ray turns his head to look at this unusual sight. All of Melbourne is cracked and parched, walls are fracturing as the earth slips, drying out; plaster falls in the night. And now the rains have returned. Locales burned to black ash a couple of Wednesdays ago have already been flooded by freak squalls further down the coast. God's providence.

The bugger's going to blow up completely any second. Doris can see it coming too, poor old biddy, she'd prefer a harmless conversation about the footy much as she loathes the game. I should say something conciliatory, Ray tells himself. Change the topic. Fat chance.

"Jesus Bloody Christ! You're a real live savior on a stick come to deliver us from the yellow peril! It's a pity all you know about politics is the shit put out by the Festival of Light, isn't it?"

That's done it, Ray acknowledges, that's really done the trick, perfect. She's taken the Lord's Name blasphemously in vain and called Tom a fool into the bargain, with some scatology in the same breath. Here it comes: the lava welling, churning beneath the surface, the skin on his hands white and peppered with large spots, ready to bash his daughter's head in.

Ray and Marjory and Doris Nourse sit mute now. Marjory has damned her soul to perdition, she is beyond absolution. Her ways are those of the devil and there can be no salvation from the depths to which she has so wilfully cast herself.

The pattern in the heavy brown velvet curtains is starting to go where the silverfish have been at work. Jesus and His Mother and a mixed batch of saints and Popes gaze on from gilt frames, constant, compassionate, beyond blasphemy, shielded by glass.

Ray lets his thoughts slip away into contemplation of poor dead Jean-Paul Sartre's error in asserting an unbridgeable metaphysical gulf between the Pour-Soi and the En-Soi, Being-for-itself and Being-in-itself, volitional consciousness and inert matter. It is the assertion of this gap that caused Sartre to deny Darwinian evolution, a denial as absolute and ludicrous as any churchman's refusal of Galileo's telescope. But evolution is a reality; rationally it cannot be denied or ignored that some of the structural elements of consciousness are the creation of selection pressures in the brute universe. So human praxis is to some extent canalized by the pratico-inert aspect of our being, just as the movements of our limbs are constrained by the metrical laws that constitute gravity and inertia. But Sartre's intuition of freedom, Ray thinks, that remains largely valid. The holonistic structure of consciousness generates an enormous optional range of actualization.

Yet the Pour-Soi has limits, and those can only be unearthed by positivist, reductionist science, Sartre's bane. Is the world a clock, after all? Out of the cradle endlessly ticking.

The only moving thing in the room is the ornate sweep hand. It presses on with its simple gyrations. There is no blood in the clock's veins to quicken or falter as the souls of the dead drown in the burning seas of hell. Ray considers the sweep hand skimming the gothic numerals, crossing the two key holes (one for the main spring, one for the chimes). The clock stands solid, a lighthouse in the high tide of anger swirling about it. Marjory is sunken and withdrawn in her corner of the sofa, eyes signaling her rage and contempt. Ray's body seems quite dead. None of the sensations of life ticking over on standby are available to inspection. He wishes he were dead. He lets his gaze drift upward again to Jesus, the Man sharing his torn-out wounded heart with the room, a perfect case of the triumph of the Pour-Soi over the En-Soi.

To his horror, Ray's eyes well with burning tears.

He is taken up and out of the room, into another place. Light pours into him. Cream, thick and sweet, into the cracked jug.

Why now? Oh shit. Not me. Aw fuck.

He chokes, coughs, stares at the painting, horrified, sick with belief. It is the flood after the drought, too much, too suddenly, smashing into the ashes and hurling them in a foaming muck to smear the broken charred stumps of incinerated trees, the crisp-skinned rotting corpses of animals too slow to escape the flames and now too dead to care about their drowning.

The old man's rage is love shouting at his deaf, stupid, brilliant daughter.

Ray goes out of the room, stepping on Doris Nourse's arthritic toes as he stumbles by. Father and daughter look at him in surprise. He rips down his jeans, strikes the cold rim of the lavatory bowl, no time to lower the seat, and voids his liquid bowels. It is the love and truth of God pithing him. He finds himself grinning. He wipes his stinging arse, using sheet after sheet of floral absorbent paper. The stomach cramps subside. All his bitter shame. He flushes the lavatory and washes his hands happily, trying to believe this dreadful, ill-timed ambush.

In the living room, he tells Doris of his attempt to cook one of her casserole recipes. Oven temperatures and pyrex, carrots and stewing steak. His own heart is pumping. Marjory leaves her redoubt on the sofa and sits on the arm of Ray's chair, putting her arm around his neck, her hand coming to rest against his collarbone, inside his shirt. She is trembling. Ray disengages himself, gives her hand a squeeze, goes to the kitchen on the pretext of checking a detail in Robert Carrier. The volcano follows him, passes him in the hall, heading for the workshop out the back. Ray returns, wondering what he is going to do with the rest of his life, and sits in an unoccupied chair, leaving his wife on the arm of the one he has vacated.

 

1975: against interpretation

 

ooooooooooooooooo

WORD SALAD :: Diatribes from Maenads and LoCs from my buddies

ooooooooooooooooo

 

::A rebuke has arrived on my desk from Mrs. Ray Finlay, do beg my pardon I mean of course Marjory Nourse, now that she has reverted for political occasions to her maiden, that is her father's, surname. Marjory comments on my phantasia of the last ish and its forerunner. ::b. wagner::

 

Can a writer be discerned in his fiction? Does he give himself away in his choice of plots, characters, methods of telling his story, what he leaves out and what he puts in with great care?

These are questions I pondered at length when I was drudging through my Master's recently, having shifted up from rat psychology to human psychology, and although I was then applying my high-powered research methodology to authors of the caliber of Jane Austen, George Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and Henry James, the same questions automatically arise whenever an item of quipu fiction, no matter how stilted and putrid, comes to my attention.

You will have guessed, Brian, that I've been reading your doltish and offensive "memoir" in HOT AIR.

There is no question at all that you reveal your innermost self most blatantly in your tale of the "Kwee-poo" and the romance with the highly imaginary "Asquith Lancaster." For you are one of those writers whose conspicuous narrative voice drenches the dialogue, the interior meditation and the description of events.

Such writers are not always negligible. While Flaubert and Tolstoy reflect all the richness of the world (within the limitations imposed on their perception by culture and period), other authors like Greene and Dostoevski present everything in terms of their own personal tics.

Is this to be decried? Of course not. But the formalisms embodied in such writing must to some extent strip naked the anonymity of the creator's private self.

I have been reading these little fables of yours for some years, Brian. Obviously enough, none of the participants in your invented life (and that includes "you") is drawn directly from your own skin and bone. Yet in a general sense, all of them are.

They are distorted pigmy Wagner clones, split off from each other and from the original somewhat in the manner of the Transactional Analysis picture of us each comprising Adult, Child and Parent.

Can such a method work, or is it just irresponsible cartooning? It can't work as pure naturalism, of course. Not even like the sort of confessional revelations that Mike Murphy used to regale us with, when Crushing Blows descended on his shoulders.

Even so, your games with the reader are obviously a way of exploring ethical and emotional problems in a schematic frame. So it is not surprising that you turn to the literary form best adapted to that aim—fanciful fable. And at once, the question of the writer's presence in his work becomes acutely painful. For it is plain that you are indeed a man living in an emotional vacuum, preying on women for sex and ego support, preferring the onanistic satisfactions of churning out undemanding quipus rather than risking your equanimity and ego in a genuine loving relationship.

Yes, your fable is amusing, so far as it mocks the sort of "dirty" magazine writing which preceded today's more explicitly exploitative pornography. I have read old copies of Adam and Man Junior (my older brother used to hide them under his bed), and to the extent that I remember the style correctly I can only admire your skill in replicating it. I am paying you the compliment of postulating that your intention was satirical at the level of style. I could be wrong, I suppose, and you actually think this the height of sophisticated imagination!

Unhappily, the comic touches are utterly spoilt by rant and venom that seem to have their source outside the fictive universe of the fable.

"Asquith" is shown as a bitch and a sex object right from the outset. Whenever she reacts reasonably to the incredibly pompous and pretentious and loathsomely smarmy narrator (called, strangely enough, "Brian Wagner"), modifiers such as "irritably" and "shrew" spring in to undermine her right to be offended.

She ends, appropriately, being defenestrated. Not only that, she is kicked brutally "with all my karate-trained strength." And the narrator relishes this insanely horrible unprovoked crime, for he "watched . . . as she plunged toward the ground." I am surprised that you did not go on to supply some more precise and gruesome details—you could have pictured her broken on the ground with a dislocated shoulder, say, half her ribs cracked, and one eye gouged out. How did you restrain yourself?

This hammering misogyny of yours is hard to take, Brian. The fable can be seen as an interestingly cynical portrait of the deforming influences that make grown intelligent men (and some women) devote their energies to avoiding real contact and producing quipus instead. In the final analysis, though, your story is a rotten piece of shit and I hope you get run over by the next bus.

 

::Well, hush my mouth.

::I do declare I am quite put about, Marjory. Here I was, a humble scribbler jotting down the True Events of my lackluster life & times, hoping to bring a tear to the eye and a sigh to the breast, and all along a Masked Wolfman was actually hot-wiring my writing arm and spewing out Awful Libels against the gentle sex.

::Truly, you can't appreciate how mortified I feel.

::Why, I am so put about by your penetrating accusations that I just cannot bring myself to notice your laughable self righteousness, or hoot at your preposterous impertinence, or even wonder how much of this rancid gibberish is due to your heightened feminist consciousness and your deep literary training (a Master's degree in it! Impressive!) and your pulsating meaningful real love and caring for all creatures large and small, and how much to the fact that I've declined to give you another fuck since that boring Canberra afternoon of infidelity at the Convocation five months back. ::byron wagner::

 

1970: hermeneutik und ideologiekritik

 

24 July

a gloomy toad

dear Horse

Sitting in the Student Union after a day of tears. Petrol strike. Someone milked my dilapidated car. Getting up steam to hitch home.

Fronted the English Department and demanded to know why I'd only got a bare pass. They sent me in to the Prof. My interpretations, it seems, had been provocative but failed totally to address the questions on the paper. I was profoundly shocked. When I pushed for more details, I learned that the one question I hadn't got round to answering had been the only one where I and the Department saw eye to eye! There must be something defective about my brain. Those electric shocks have left me damaged.

I didn't just crumple up, though. I explained that in my view questions about literature are subject to interpretation, that I had described (perhaps too briefly) my aim in taking an unorthodox approach. I failed to convince him, and went away bent and burdened. Why do I seek out these situations? I could be a happy cretinous little housewife like all the others. On the grass I just vomited out tears, full of gloom and hatred. Defeated. Convinced that I should give myself up to a nomadic life. That's always the temptation, calling me to the sea shore or the bush or the desert, anywhere that there's no stupid people.

After all this self-pitying convulsion was done I took stock and decided simply to drop English. Pottered up to the Psychology Dept (hidden behind sunglasses) and spoke to a kind woman. It can be done, though I'll have to persist with some Eng Lit to keep my credit points.

Two more years. Many many psychology courses. My head is stuffed with rejected sawdust. I think about you and your tachyon detector a lot. Don't understand it, except the beautiful awe and wonder of perhaps picking up signals from the future death of the universe. How extraordinary and poignant.

I had quite a long talk with Lanie last night She knocked on my door and brought in cups of tea. We sat huddled by the radiator. She's fed up with politics and people spinning without getting anywhere. Depressed by the dreariness of it all. She hasn't found a gentleman she can stand. Life in Sydney is all a bit grim if one is not a beer-swilling, one-night-stand pick-up person—though Lanie's taste for gamboling youths has not abated.

The sunsets from my window still feed the soul.

All my love, Caroline

 

A DOG'S WIFE

 . . .two

 

To relax, we stayed in Daddy's Tudor apartment in Washington Heights, and strolled every day to the Cloisters to view the Unicorn Tapestries, for which I have an abiding passion. So sad and limpid. Spot put his ears back and growled, which made me reconsider.

The day's high point, its unmitigated delight, was our romp through Fort Tryon park, where one step carries you from endless megalopolitan Upper East side to genuine woods, and a further five minutes shows you the Hudson. By this time the shores were past their highest colors, but reds burned like coals in the midst of all the turning hues of green and yellow and russet.

I say unmitigated, but in all honesty I must grant that I never relished the business with pooper scooper and leash. Fiona had gifted us with an elaborate device with plastic bags and a heat-sealer, a sentimental relic from our squashed poodle Phiphi, but while that was to be preferred to the fold of ScotTowel favored in the Heights it never seemed to me altogether dignified.

One was forced to admit, though, that the menacing glances of elderly Jewish folk walking their own Dobermans and Borzoi, pan or towel dutifully in hand, was ample deterrent to a more insouciant delinquency.

 

1970: the open classroom and its enemies

 

Shakespeare Pier

tues 28 July 70

dear woggie—professors, as I have cause to know, are almost always shits. but baby, the trouble is you're one of the original innocents. nothing wrong with your neural sawdust, just your idealism lobe.

sickening and heartbreaking and vile as it is, kid, you've got to get it straight:

THE UNIVERSITY IS AN ARSE AND THOSE WHO PASS THROUGH AN ARSE ARE SHITS.

one corollary being:

THE WORST SHITS ARE THOSE CONSTIPATED TURDS WHO REFUSE TO BE EJECTED.

these are known as The Staff, of whom the ripest are The Professors.

another corollary is SPHINX OR SWIM. pardon me. that was rather sophomoric don't you agree?

leave anything you value outside the gate, particularly your soul coz it's gonna get maimed and molested if you allow anyone in there to cop a feel of it.

so maybe it's not a bad idea to give English up—if you care deeply for it.

needless to say, you'll find similar difficulties cropping up in Psych, but at least there you do have certain empirical studies that can be attacked on factual and procedural grounds, whereas in literature as far as I can see the whole thing is ingrown, incestuous and totally subjective.

moreover, it takes a moral hero of unearthly stature to buck the system and come out on top. who can measure up to such a demand? you're showing incredible grit in just surviving, baby. hold high the candle and plod on.

love, houndstooth

 

firepower

 

MACHINE GUN

 

The history of modern warfare has been to a great extent the story of ever-increasing power to kill and maim applied to larger and larger numbers of victims with ever-decreasing personal involvement on the part of individual warriors.

During World War Two, entire cities were firebombed, or blasted by nuclear weapons dropped by remote aircraft. More recently, villages were incinerated by flaming napalm dropped from helicopters, and terrorists mutilate unseen victims with hidden explosives.

Perhaps the beginning of this horror (with world nuclear or bacteriological destruction as its possible end result) was the invention of the machine gun.

For the first time, killing power came from a weapon in a spray of savagery that required no accuracy of aim to rip bodies apart.

Attempts to design firearms capable of continuous operation were two centuries old when the American inventor Richard Gatling perfected a revolving battery gun in 1865. Gatling was an M.D. who never practiced as a doctor. In the American Civil War, though, his invention provided considerable scope for the skills of his fellow medical practitioners.

In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, the French mitrailleuse was introduced, firing 37 barrels at once. Later, an American, Hiram Maxim, devised an automatic gun after moving to Britain, and in 1901 was knighted for his contribution to civilization.

His brother Hudson, author of The Science of Poetry and the Philosophy of Language, perfected the powerful explosive maximite in the same year.

During the First World War the machine gun came into its own, pleasing military planners with its capacity to pin down and slaughter hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers. Although cavalry charges into virtually defenseless infantry was thus made a thing of the past, warfare became a still more brutal contest of firepower and expendable soldiers.

 

HHHHHHHHHHHH

Horsemeat in Cup: A lame entry, my dear Watson

HHHHHHHHHHHH

 

Light machine guns were designed for portable use, delivering bursts of ammunition. Heavier types could be mounted on tripods and fed with endless streams of ammunition on belts. The heavy Browning was adopted in 1917 by the US Army, and by the Second World War the air-cooled .30-caliber and the water-cooled .50-caliber Brownings were standard American issue. In Britain, the favored light machine gun was the Bren.

Following the Korean War, American forces received the semi-automatic M16 gas-operated rifle, firing 750 rounds of 5.56 mm ammunition per minute, effective at half a kilometer, and weighing less than three kilograms. Four times as heavy was the M60, firing 550 rounds of 7.62 mm ammunition and effective at more than a kilometer. This is turning my stomach. If you're still enthusiastic to know more up-to-date details about this filth, I suggest you turn yourself in to the nearest psychiatric center for a good spring-clean.

 

1970: visions before midday

 

No-one else is home. Caroline wakes early (she's set the alarm) for a day all her own. Bliss. She makes up a fine bowl of stewed apple with cinnamon.

Mary, in trendy Balmain, has been sick with a winter cold. Caroline walks slowly up Darling Street to visit.

Billy's there already, hairy and boisterous, drinking tea and Southern Comfort. Mary sniffles into Kleenies but declines the bottle.

Brought your stash, Bill?

Sure. Hey, that'll clear your head.

All the arcana; the selection out of seeds, the rolling, done without attention, in Zen oneness.

Whoop. Hey. Uh uh uh. Wanna hit, Caro?

She hasn't thought about dope for a long time. But today she's in fate's hands.

It might improve my mood.

Here y' go.

After a time she wanders outside and sits in the cool sun, relaxed, watching pretty fluorescent images.

Caroline opens her eyes to the clouds.

Heads. A beautiful lady of peace, quintessence of quiet calm. Men's faces, then, strong at first, then horror & pleading and pain & terror. That passes. Noble beasts: lions, bears, a great elk, an incredible scorpion with a magnificent twisting tail (for the clouds move).

All goes.

Caroline closes her eyes in exhaustion. After a time she looks at the clouds again.

The beautiful lady gazes down upon her. The men, the grandeur, the pain, the heraldry. Caroline pities a crucifix, a poor cross stuck in the hill of the sky at 60 degrees, canted, fading, fading so gradually into a pale pale image, an image Caro must strain to see, of a fine man's face.

The cloud has totally disappeared & there's only blue.

Mary's visitors have come to sit in the sun.

You sleeping? God, Caro, you look exhausted.

I'd better go now. Get well soon.

Mary waves, cloaked in a rug in the cooling sun, laughs at a joke from Billy. Caroline wanders down Darling Street, looks in the craft shop window. Bray's bookshop is shut. Wanders on. Pleasant again.

She drops in on Antony's house. Everyone has left. In an empty room she finds a sleeping man & two chairs.

They moved out, he tells her, rubbing eyes that have been watching lunchtime dreams.

Whose are these? She sits on one of the two small but fine chairs.

I dunno.

Could I have them?

Yeah. Come on, we'll chuck 'em in the back of my van.

 

1970: working girl

 

28th July

My dear Joseph

4 o'clock, the sun is shining in my window. Sitting on a new acquisition, a bright chair to match my bright desk. Strange circumstances.

Today is the first time my mind has been calm in a week. The university makes me unhappy. I guess I'll get over that—it's my projected emotion.

I started a waitressing job at a sleazy place at Circular Quay last night. Lots of Navy guys. Take-away chips, chicken rolls, hamburgers, greasy or dried out, & sit-down snacks and meals. The guy in charge is okay but the clientele are vile. After 10, the drunks from up the road. It won't worry me for about 3 weeks, then I'll throw it in. 5-12 p.m. four nights a week.

Have a courter at present I could do without. Quite nice but . . . he won't be allowed to share my lecky blanket.

fondest love & hugs

Caroline

 

1970: problems of legitimation in late capitalism

 

Shags peer

aug 2 1970

 

The gay, wild pace just never lets up. A party here yesterday at which Melbourne's leading draft dodger and fervorous Messiah put in an appearance, along with various marxists from Latrobe university, the new hotbed of academic revolution. It was meant to be a traditional Saturday bar-b-q but rain sent us all inside. One notable revolutionary kept niggling Wagner, who'd come at my specific request and was all too obviously chatting up this post-puritan fellow's lady wife. At one point the merrymaker poured beer all over Brian's hapless head. The wife was not to be found.

Finally, around 9 p.m. (drinking all the wet arvo, you'll recall) it got too much for Brian, and he hurled a mucky plate of old spaghetti at his tormentor. The wicked communist leaped up in a murderous rage, Wagner ran into the hallway, into Martha's bedroom. Instead of turning the knob his antagonist attempted to smash down the door, wooden panels crashing out, screams and abuse, his wife returning from the pub at the crucial moment, deflecting his rage. Incredible screaming vituperation in the hall, me quaking in my room where I'd fled for solitude before any of this had begun. Wonderful rhetoric overheard. Brian was characterized as "Zarathustra," or more germanely if less germanly as "that fat, overweight, hermaphrodite stuffed with X chromosomes." A highly cerebral approach, as befits a brawling intellectual. Also, I imagine, highly projective: he went on to berate his wife for fucking some tycoon socialist all last year in the back of a Bentley. Finally everyone went off in a huff, including most of the people who live here. I lurked and made notes in a cowardly fashion. When the coast was clear I went in and rescued Brian, who was taking his ease on Martha's bed reading the Marquis de Sade in a banned American paperback edition.

Our mouser has had 4 pretty kits. I watched the last one being born and got all overcome with amazement and cluckiness.

your Friend

Joseph

 

1970: vicious rumors

 

sidders

2 August

Whatever happened to R. D. Laing? Someone on Old Mole told me his colleagues had committed him! Tell me true—I appoint you chief investigator.

your Mad Cobber

 

1970: the decline of charismatic rationality

 

seaside resorts, inc.

8 aug 70

dear fowl

I have my international agents, via several LoCs to British quipu, on Laing's mad trail. Are you putting me on? Are they putting you on? Is Laing—nothing would surprise me less—putting us all on? I would not be astonished if the reports prove accurate. I recently read not one but 2 dubious pieces by that shrunken shrink and sage: one a report in The Listener of a radio talk in which he describes how he found god; the other in the mole I think—where he argues in favor of that lunatic and discoverer of "orgone energy," W. Reich.

Read Mailer's 2nd novel Barbary Shore. Pretty good, scary, crazy McCarthy-era anticommunist fascist FBI nasties monstering ex-stalinist turned true-revolutionary hero. Collapses at the end as a novel (too much political speechmaking) but a stirring work. Universally panned in 1952, always a good sign.

Had dinner with a couple of hikes the other night and kept pushing the notion that people (workers, students, whatever) should control their own places of work, reach decisions collectively. Of course I was scoffed at as an idealist—the workers are all too stupid, I was told, too tractable. Oddly enough, the night before I had been adopting that same skeptical attitude in a devil's advocate role when Bob was forcefully arguing for worker's control. Actually I'm inclined to think that it's the only way we can get out of this shitheap. I recently read and recommend a book by Herbert Kohl on The Open Classroom that takes this line in education. It certainly vindicates your approach to literature studies.

in all foolish hope

Joseph

 

1970: eros and syphilization

 

King's Cross

16 August

dear beast

Control by the workers indeed. A consummation to be craved but not on the agenda this year. After slaving for nine hours today as a true proletarian and meeting the workers face to face once more I can inform you—it's a long way off.

As you see I've changed jobs, to the Cross. The first night here proved astonishing. Having time to kill before six I wandered into shops in the X. One was a men's wear store (thought I'd buy you a decent tie) where I fell to talking with an elderly French gentleman. We struck up conversation easily as I inevitably do with random strangers and he invited me to coffee. He had been living the past 20 years in Noumea, traveling the world between times. He arranged to meet me after work.

So we dined and wined and I didn't get home until after three in the morning. He was a lovely man, saddened when I would not share his bed. Through a quite fascinating evening he told me of his travels and of brothels and prostitutes in many lands. He compared and contrasted in detail the lives of the women, the houses, the rackets, the erotic films; the massages and prolonged fucking that follows them; the wonder and evil, beauty and ugliness of it all.

Keep in mind that this man has had thirty years of exotic experience. He provided me with a detailed description of how to "play," to which I gave amused serious attention. His dildo collection. Bottles of pills, mainly from Germany, that stimulate desire. He is becoming an old man, he said ruefully, and when one sees these beautiful geisha girls, once is not enough! He gave me some of these pills and urged me to swallow them then and there, but I refused. I was exhausted from my first day of work at the hotel and wanted my chaste bed.

When his son was nearly 18, he took wife, son and daughter and a "paid lady" out to a lavish dinner. After the meal he left his son with the lady. He said it was worth the $50 he'd arranged to pay her, for she initiated his son fully, teaching him how a woman may prepare a man and a man ensure a woman's pleasure.

I felt very tempted to "play" with this wise, sweet man, and regret not having taken the opportunity. I'm sure it would have been exciting and memorable. However, too late—he went back to Noumea today.

 

Later—

You said you might come up? You didn't sound very convincing, but make sure to let me know in good time if you do decide to visit.

fond hugs

Caroline

 

1983: joseph's redemption

 

As clever dick Deep Thought Weekends go (and it has been, by design, an easygoing affair, with a minimum of formal programming), it has gone well enough, in Joseph's estimation, considering how close they all are to 1984. No forces of double-thinking righteousness have broken down their doors, torn the marijuana from the lips of those so banal as still to indulge, snatched paperbacks from back pockets and incinerated them with a gush of flaming napalm, stamped on faces forever. Perhaps it is the bucolic air of the place, the Pontes' hobby farm. Cows lowing in the morning, sheep bleating and blatting horribly, fowls yelling their sex-crazed heads off. Pity about the plumbing though.

Joseph fights his way through the crowded main room to the lavatory set aside for the men. Three riotous fellows are crammed into the stall, firing downward shoulder to shoulder. Bladder pressing his belt, Joseph heads for the broad outdoors. I love a sunburnt country, there's so much space to piss. There is an outside dunny here, relic of days before septic tanks but free of country flies in the cool night air. It stands like a sentry box at the end of the Pontes' yard, surrounded by fuel tanks and pipes. A bar of light shows under its door. Another applicant with prior claim waits his turn. Bugger it.

Joe leans one hand on a fence, unzips, listens to the hiss of his piss. He is more than half drunk. His vocal cords are sore from singing. Funny, you'd never believe how many of the words you know until a whole bunch of other people hop in and give the lead. The sky beyond the lights of the Pontes' enormous ramshackle farmhouse is monstrously black, empty, starless. He zips up as the door of the sentry box opens. Marjory steps out. The waiting shape springs for the door. Joseph hums "They're changing Guard at Buckingham Palace." Marjory comes straight toward him and puts her arm about his waist.

"Not palely loitering, Joseph?"

"I like to get a bit in each night, Marjory."

"Ah, don't we all. And how rarely do we succeed in our ambition. Sorry, that was coarse and untrue. Come and have a drink with me." She seems as drunk as he is.

The lights are off when they get inside; Duck Soup is screening on one whitewashed wall. Joseph finds a bottle on a table of magazines. He keeps his arm around Marjory. They share the beer. Or is it cider? Surely beer. Hell, you're drunk, he tells himself.

Oh Jesus, this woman with her breast against my hand, her hair in my face. I have known her too long and not enough—not at all. I can't see her face in this light and her hair all over the place and her tongue in my mouth.

Marjory takes his hand from her back and leads it up under her sweater. It develops a sense of direction, traversing the hollow of her armpit, interposing itself between her brassiered breast and his own chest. After a warm, shivery time, Marjory turns into him, kisses him fiercely, disengages from his hold and draws him to the corridor.

"Have you got a room by yourself?"

Joseph's tongue locks. He nods his head in the semi-darkness.

"Let's stop quickly at my room and get something to drink."

She knows her way about the place. She leaves Joseph in the hallway, nips inside, half-closes the door, flips on the light, rummages, is out again in a trice, light off, door closed. "I thought Ray might have crashed. He must be in there watching the Marx Brothers." There is more than exasperation in her tone. "What room are you in?"

He tells her, taking her hand in both of his."Have you and Ray had a falling out?"

"You haven't been reading the papers. That was some years ago."

"Well, yes, I mean—"

They step out again into the night, cross pebbles, locate one of the small rooms that Mario Ponte has refitted from the original farmhouse stables for such large-scale social occasions as hike convocations. Ivy hangs above the lintel. Three doors down, light spills from an open door; there is a room party warming up, shouts and laughter. Joseph has not bothered to lock his door. Quickly he closes it behind them, snibs the catch.

"Um. I don't know if I have any glasses."

"Bugger your social graces, dear boy, I'll tear the top off with my teeth and we'll hop straight into it."

Joseph regards his friend with some concern. She has lines about her mouth he has never noticed before, and a heavy crease between her eyes. "About Ray, Marj—"

"Ah, yes, Ray. He had a Night of Fire, you see."

It takes him a long moment. "What, the Blaise Pascal of Melbourne town?"

"The same."

"You're not serious. God spoke to him from a burning bush? To Ray?"

"From a painting purchased prior to Vatican II from Pellegrini's, actually."

Joseph's erection cannot decide whether this is good news or bad news, and stays at halfmast, pushing with moderate force against his zip. "I thought he was dead set against eschatologies and teleological metaphysics. Or has he become a Taoist?"

"No, a Christian. He's been born again."

Joseph is aghast. He wishes to shriek with mirth but feels it would impugn the gravity of the case. "Not actually taken the plunge into the briny?"

"Come off it, Joseph. Ray might be mad but he's not stupid."

Sulking, Joseph makes a production of opening the bottle. "I had heard that it's part of the satisfaction of the thing."

"No, essentially Ray's is a cognitive conversion. With ethical side effects. He's most apologetic for the way he's been treating me."

"How has he been treating you?"

"Like shit. Look, shut up, Joe." She finds a switch for the small lamp beside the bed, taps it on, rises, flicks off the room light, crosses her arms over her sweater and turns it inside out over her head. On the end of the bed, bare to the waist, she has one boot off and pulls at the other while Joseph is stepping from his own heap of clothes. He gives her shoulders a shove and she rolls back, arms akimbo. The boot comes away in his hands, followed by her slacks and high-waisted white panties. Over his shoulder they go.

"The way of the cloth is not that of the flesh."

"Very funny."

"It's one of Brian's," he footnotes dutifully.

"Sod Wagner. Kiss my breasts."

There's no confusion in his erection now. Shrilling with lust, his central nervous system cascades with adrenergic neurotransmitters. He fears loss of control, pulls back to the forms of tender banter. "So you've finally progressed to incest."

"To what?"

He is crushed again. "You forgot."

"It seems so."

"That night I stayed at your place. Years ago. '77."

"You silly," she says, hugging him down on her. "Do you suppose I'd forget that? Rather a wasted opportunity in retrospect."

"You said it would be like incest."

"Never mind. If that's what turns you on, I'll call you Daddy." A quick involuntary shudder runs through her, and Joseph sees the edges of her mouth draw back. "I wish I hadn't said that."

The bed is not wide. They roll across it, hit the wall. Joseph caresses her, finds her dry and closed, wets his fingers and sends them down. After a time she sighs. He enters her. Marjory's legs lock across his buttocks. She twists violently, rolling sideways. He fights to keep his center of mass above her. She bites him, flexing like a cat. They fall from the bed.

Joseph's shoulder cries out, rapping the floor boards, and Marjory's weight crushes the wind from his lungs. Dazed and angry, he finds Marjory no longer with him. He belches stale beer. Suddenly Marjory is above him, taking his prick in her mouth, the dark, moist sporran of her pubic hair coming down toward his claustrophobic mouth. He gags, extends a hesitant tongue, reaching up to hold her broad buttocks with his hands. She is making the most extraordinary grunting noises, driving his penis deep into her throat. It is the reverse of erotic. Rolling hard, Joseph knocks her to the floor and spins above her as fast as his drunken reflexes allow.

"Oh shit," Marjory mutters in despair. "Another missionary."

Light flickers from the bedside lamp as he catches his rhythm, rising and falling, the light spilling, not spilling, held back, so many years. On to the death. Only a tight light. Oh Marjory, the speed, the speed, the need for speed. We'll die in our tracks. Marjory, the Night is Dark and we are Far From Home. Can you see in the dark, little fox?

Her fingers needle his back. As he winces, she goes to the side and rolls him under her once more, raising herself above him on her elbows, her breasts falling to his chest, beyond reach of his lips. Joseph lets his head rest on the dusty, rumpled piece of carpeting, closes his eyes. Marjory can dictate the pace. A quickening pulse heralds his coming. Desperate, drowning, he heaves himself above her again, comes without making a sound, capsizing to the floor. Marjory labors over him, her hand tightly gripping him, racing his dying organ to her own climax. With seconds to spare she collapses across his drenched chest.

Blind eyes. Limp hands. Her back, her buttocks. She breathes, matching his quick, slowing inhalations with her own. His head presses something hard: the door jamb. Amazing. Marjory stirs, blows a stream of air in his face. Joseph opens his eyes.

"Hello, Marj."

"Hello, Joseph love." The lovely scent of her.

"We've fucked our way right across the room."

"On a return ticket, I trust."

 

1970: believe it or not

 

Shakespeare Investigations

21 August 1970

Here's what I've heard about Laing. A, harumph, gentleman friend of Martha's visited the house a few afternoons ago in Bob's absence. I spoke to this guy briefly and it turned out that he's a trainee trick cyclist. He's heard that it's well known in the trade that Laing periodically freaks out and puts himself away for his own good, though actually he wasn't certain—it might have been Laing's offsider David Cooper who does this. Ronnie is said to play bizarre roles even when operating as a psychiatrist, such as wearing all green matching clobber down to green fingernail polish. This has evidently been accepted by his clients as part of his brilliant new methodology (and for all I know it may well be). Such roles are liable to alternation without notice, up to several times a day, so that he conveys a different personality each time to the non-professional eye. This is all a very rough rendition of utterly unauthenticated rumor, and could well be the sort of scurrilous flak attracted by critical innovative-thinkers like Laing, but it fits unnervingly with what you reported hearing. I suppose rumors tend to have that feature.

Queensland staff and students have put out a huge book titled Up The Right Channels that criticizes each department and evaluates each staff member and offers arguments for student control.

Bye,

Joseph.

 

1970: systematically distorted communications

 

Rozelle

Sat 29 Aug

Dear old Horse

I write letters in my mind, I write on paper, tear them up and cry. I started crying in the lift the other day thinking of you. I have a new job waitressing in a hotel, taking meals up to rooms. A ghastly thing happened—I went to get "an inch" cut off my hair & they cut off four or five inches. I came home and wept for hours. I really did feel castrated. I can't do anything about it. The bastard pulled my hair to the back so I couldn't see how much he was cutting off, though I had told him. I don't want you to see me like this which is ridiculous but I feel so unhappy about it.

a sad beast

Caroline

 

1970: the flight of the emu

 

Kings Cross

Tuesday September 8, 1970

My dear Joseph

I thought I was going mad again but I wasn't. It's all right now. There are tears ahead for both of us, but that's nothing new. At least this way there's a fresh start.

I had a dream that I was a flightless bird. A big fat emu with lice, stuck on the ground, running in stupid circles. Nothing very subtle about that. When I woke up I was crying. Lanie heard me and knocked at the door. She hopped in the bed with me, because she is a dear kind creature, and I told her how absolutely desperate and fucked up I was feeling. She said that she'd been in exactly the same state when she'd decided to just piss off, take all the money she had in the bank and buy an air fare to Malaysia and GO. It was like magic in my heart, Joseph.

Just go. Why not? I owe you that money, but I don't give a stuff about debts to anyone else. They have just slammed me down, broken my bones. So now I have made myself a promise. I am the only one who defines who I am, what I do, where I go, when I do it, with whom, how I feel about it . . . I'll get you your money, don't freak. Then I'll buy my ticket and fly, fly, fly.

Lanie and I saw a documentary at the co-op on the weekend about India. Like my naked heart torn open and displayed to the sun. Joseph, I wanted to go there and see all that amazing humanity, and it didn't occur to me that there was nothing I needed to do but just go. Now it has. So that's what I'm doing. Lanie will probably come with me, possibly only for a holiday or maybe for good. We will take Australian seeds and plant them in that strange soil, and find a guru and learn mysteries. I am not coming back. You hang about my neck. You are my burden, my cross if you like. I know that you saved my life when I went mad the first time, but now it is your turn to be my oppressor, my slave master, the tyrant caging my free heart. You are a black saint.

Those splotches are tears, yes, how banal. I do love you, Joseph, even if you have never really loved me and never really loved yourself. My mother and father loved me too, and look what that did to all of us. Distance is a knife for cutting through love. The distance between Melbourne and Sydney is not sharp enough.

The documentary was about Bangalore. It's the sixth largest city in India, the capital of Karnataka state. The weather is said to be pleasant. You've heard of it, I suppose, because it was the British headquarters for fifty years from about 1830. Its name means "village of boiled beans." I think I'll go there. Definitely non-trendy. I've never even heard of anyone who's been to Bangalore in search of truth and mystery. I won't write, Joseph.

Not ever. This is it, kiddo. Hence the messy tears. I tried it the other way and look what's happened. (I'm not blaming you, only the situation. The way it is with me.) So I'll scurry about the King's Cross hotel and make my stash and buy a ticket and say goodbye my love, my silly, my stiffnecked horrid hateful lovely love—

Caroline

 

joseph and the cow

 

I stood on the podium in the enormous Hall, looking down past the microphones into the gathering of hikes. They shuffled their feet, easing their legs and backs. Some munched on sandwiches or drank chocolate-flavored milk from Big M cartons. Behind me, drastically enhanced by an epidiascope from the small gallery reproduction on the stand, a great artist's work loomed in light.

I tapped the microphone. Heads came up.

"Roy Lichtenstein gave everyone a nasty shock back in the sixties," I told them, "when he blew True Love comic frames up to the size of walls and, by simple gigantic replication, transformed them from kitsch to fine art."

The acoustics of the system were excellent; there was none of that momentary delayed feedback that rattles the mind through the lag at the ear.

"Pop Art made the medium the message," I said. It did not bother me that this phrase was an icon of a school of mediating interpretation gone to dust half a generation earlier. "Printers' half-tone dots in the cartoon were amplified to endless ranks and files of painterly flattened spheres big as fingernails."

The lights in the hall flickered for an instant. I glanced over my shoulder. The epidiascope was still casting its great lucent shadows on the wall, the image unscarred by the momentary power surge.

"During the seventies," I went on, "Lichtenstein extended his subversion to so many media—Surrealism, Futurism, trompe l'oeil—that he began to seem the Bill Blass or Trent Nathan of the decorator art biz. Yet his instinct was good," I added, after the polite chuckling subsided. "More than a decade later, his 1972 gags are still startling enough to kick the air out of you in a belly laugh if you come on them unwarned."

I gestured above and behind me. They had not come upon this work unwarned. It was the luminous representation of a vast canvas triptych in yellow, white, Benday dots, diagonal stripes.

The first frame showed a farmyard animal browsing contentedly. In the next, the beast was breaking up into strabismus charts. By the third, it had been rendered into a comic-book reduction of a Mondrian.

"The title," I informed them, "is 'Cow Going Abstract'."

Among the burst of good humored laughter there was a splatter of applause. I waited, smiling slightly.

"Yes, good joke." I leaned forward on the podium and when I spoke again, it was with an abrupt return to impassivity. "The real point of the piece, of course, hits you a moment later, when you notice that the cow in the first frame is already totally abstract. It is a flat array of diagrammatic elements only marginally more representational, in the illusory or mimetic sense, than the mock Mondrian."

Like stick figures, the brights looked back up at me in the frozen postures of dream. "We are talking about Joseph Williams," I told them pitilessly. "It ought to be clear to you by now that Joseph Williams is a Cow Going Abstract."

 

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