For what we can no longer accept is precisely this Joycean faith in the transcribability of things. It is because reality cannot be recorded that realism is dead. All writing, all composition, is construction . . . There is no mimesis, only poiesis.
::Robert Scholes, "The fictional criticism of the future"
A DOG'S WIFE
. . .seven
Spot rose to his feet at the wedding reception, lurching more than somewhat, and replied to the toast. The cantors smiled, and the mullahs did the same, and the officiating Cardinal applauded, with all his conclave of nuns and monks and a brace of castrati if I'm not in error.
"Acknowledgments," cried my husband, who had been inhaling the herb. "We wish to thank the musicians. All that sawing and smiting, bowing and puffing and groaning, and why? Why, only to sooth the gusts into gaiety. Here we go. Lift those ankles and prance.
"The magicians, yes, the tumblers, whipping their endless purple, crimson, golden scarves in the spanking musical air. Fowls from eggs, great tails lofting under high crystal, green feathers, hard green, soft green. Sawn in half. Bulky bolted brass-and-leather boxes, proved empty moments earlier. Sheer magic. Good work, team.
"Some people find the libretto obscure. Not us. We're polyglot. And grateful for the poet's drawn face and crabbed manner and song, song.
"Who? The lighting people, sure. Beams like harsh metal poles furring, fogging where they splash into astonishing scales of peals of tinkles of gongings of lightning blue, satin pinks, reds, purples, and all the whites, and the rest.
"There's food on every table, here and there in silver porcelain wooden platters slipping from plates into bowls of dip and sauces laid on the tables and marble waiting surfaces: birds, slabs of crusty meat oozing juice the moon curves of mandarins, oranges, grapefruit, the gold and purple of passionfruit, slimy on the tongue but cut by tart, and tarts all slithery in berries and apricots, pale peaches with sugar crusting, melting cliffs of egg white meringue. So here's one for the chef, the cooks and helpers, the serving staff. Good eating, no doubt, no question there."
The microphone made spattering noises from this point on, for Spot was salivating with delirious stoned intensity, laughing his fool head off and biting from moment to moment at his own flanks.
"Company. The guests. eh? Doing your bit, swarming about, chattering and nattering, bellyaching just enough that we know you're taking the business seriously and yielding no quarter out of sentiment for Randy and Fiona and the lovely lass herself."
Bruce Garbage, the punk crooner whom Randy had flown in from San Antonio, tried valiantly to wrest away command of the public address system but was clearly in terror of having his leather Savile Row suit nipped. Balked, he brought up all his fingers and swung them down in the gesture which at the close of 1981 was to be featured on the cover of Time, and his ensemble seized up their instruments once more and heaved us all into a bruising bout of interactive slam dancing.
1979: things fall apart
A scratch afflicts Joseph's throat. He has been talking at the hike Nitting Circle about the theorists Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault for nearly an hour now, much of the time shouting to convey his scrambled thoughts above the incessant kibitzing and Nit-Picking of his close friend and associate Brian Wagner. He eases the irritation with a glass of light, or lite, ale, and snaps with some viciousness at Wagner, "Fucking piss off, Brian." At once, squeezing his eyes tight against his own aggression, he rushes on, "It's curious that around the time Marcuse revealed the rather startling notions of oppressive tolerance and 'repressive desublimation,' we notice that Foucault was besotted with the idea—Foucault makes this absolutely abominable claim. No, I won't tell you about that—" Instead, he picks up and displays The History of Sexuality, Vol I.
"Go on, Joe. He said what?"
Joseph sighs, rummages again. "Okay, he's discussing Nietzsche. The Frogs all love the Krauts. No wonder they—All right, he says this: 'Man, in his finitude, is inseparable from infinity. The death of God is accomplished through the death of man.' I mean, give me a break."
Wagner has a cigarette out and alight, to everyone's distaste. "He writes badly, yeah."
"It's not just that he writes badly, it's, it's almost impossible to believe . . . Here's a piece he wrote about Bataille: 'The discovery of sexuality, the discovery of that firmament of indefinite unreality—'"
'What!'
"Hang on. '—the discovery of those systematic forms of prohibition that we now know imprison it, the discovery of the universal nature of transgression in which it is both object and instrument—indicates in a sufficiently forceful way the impossibility of attributing the millenary language of dialectics to the major experience that sexuality forms for us.' I trust that's perfectly clear."
A rustle of uneasy laughter.
"See, the heightened and prophetic quality of Foucault's writing from the beginning gets more and more mannered. And his fans love him for it. It's so poetic. It's so transgressive."
This is no news to Wagner. "He has a linguistic problem, really. They all do."
Joseph waves at a wisp of smoke and sighs. "Bullshit. It's deliberate evasion of declarative, um, clarity, chosen for reasons that are probably impeccable. He's made a linguistic decision to have his words work in an unusual way. He wants to show actions and ideas interpenetrating with a degree of force inexpressible in ordinary French, let alone English. It just happens to . . . give me the screaming willies."
"I think he'd like us to feel it could only be expressed—"
RAY FINLAY (first words masked by Wagner's, above):
. . .in the log-jam of trying to work out—
JOSEPH:
Hang on. Ray, once you're onto his paradigm it shouldn't cause any problems per se. It's poetic locution made toward a cognitive end.
RAY:
Oh, I'd agree. To get the intended effect, you'd have to read straight through without thinking and—
BRIAN WAGNER:
How many treatises are you prepared to read through without thinking, Ray?
RAY:
Well, obviously you can go wrong. I've been reading Jacques Lacan in translation and—
JOSEPH:
Christ, he's even more obscure than Foucault.
KENNY:
This is the radical French psychiatrist, right?
JOSEPH:
Yep. Ray, I get the impression that Lacan has taken Freud in directions that Laing might have—Sorry, we're getting a bit—
RAY:
How much of it is the sheer difficulty of translating these poetic statements from one language to another?
JOSEPH:
Exactly! One commentator mentions Foucault's discussion of, um, the 'solar hollow' which he says is 'the space of Roussel's language, the void from which he speaks'."
KENNY:
But Bertrand Russell was English, right, not French? So he—
JOSEPH:
Raymond Roussel, the notorious surrealist. Okay, so this could of course be one playful loon piled on top of another, but what if the term Foucault actually used was 'solar plexus'? This wouldn't advance the world's knowledge a great deal, but it would be less, you know . . . random . . . than 'solar hollow.'
RAY:
That's exactly where I was headed with Lacan, Joe. I was in a study group of psychiatrists the other day—
VOICE:
Ah, they've caught up with you, eh?
ANOTHER VOICE:
But he escaped. Quite mad, but a master of disguise.
[Laughter]
RAY:
—poring over a page of Lacan. He mentioned 'the fractured terms of language's solar specter,' or something like that, and the assembled psychiatrists all fell to babbling, trying to parse this mysterious truth of the unutterable unconscious and its prophet.
MARJORY:
I suppose you set them straight. Even though you speak and read no French.
RAY:
Correct. A specter, eh? Was this the Derridean trace image of the phallocratic sovereign subject, they asked each other. Could the marxist Lacan actually have believed in ghosts and spirits? On and on it went. After a while, I suggested that maybe Lacan was simply drawing an analogy.White light is broken into its constituents by a prism. So too with language. But nobody in the room knew if 'spectrum' is or can be the same word as 'specter' in French, or if the pun would be sustainable, and anyway my interpretation was deemed intolerably reductive and scientistic . . .
MARJORY:
'Spectrum' does translate into 'specter.'
RAY:
Amazing what a training in computer science does for one's powers of extrapolation. Anyway, my point is that even if Lacan actually was making sense, underneath the poetic tosh, you'd never find much evidence of it in his earnest and laughable English-speaking interpreters, let alone his followers.
JOSEPH:
This level of evasion and fancy footwork is now a signature of all the poststructuralists, but the question is: is our own irritation and laziness as readers a product of Marcuse's repressive desublimation? Or is the opaque writing itself evidence of textual laziness?
RAY:
Pretty energetic laziness.
JOSEPH:
Exactly. Exactly.
BRIAN: Big deal. What becomes of a thinker who grows so enamored of his linguistic ability that he turns into a fool when he tries to present his subject matter?
RAY:
Take the other point of view, that Foucault and Lacan are always striving for effects they feel can't be gained with ordinary language, except with an enormous amount of—
BRIAN:
Come on, look at the medium they've chosen to work in. Psychoanalysis, the most pretentious and bogus . . .
JOSEPH:
I'm not convinced it is. They take fairly considerable pains to stress that the linguistic space—the connotative space—available to the 20th century critical theorist is in fact considerably different from that available to the classic empiricist. Marcuse's revival of the dialectic—
BRIAN:
Academic wanking. They play these elaborate games with their followers. It's a big world out there.
[A confusion of voices]
JOSEPH:
Well, sure, it bothers me, too, when Foucault tosses off this sort of merry aside: 'If mental pathology has always been and remains a source of psychological experience, it is not because illness reveals hidden structures, not because man here more easily recognizes the face of his truth, but on the contrary because he discovers here the dark side of this truth and the absolute fact of its contradiction. Illness is the psychological truth of health, to the very extent that it is its human contradiction.' He adds that psychology 'will be saved only by a return to hell'."
BRIAN:
Joe, for fuck's sake, do you actually have the gall to sit there and tell us we should be interested in the intentions of a writer capable of that sort of obfuscation?
JOSEPH: There's no obfuscation within that—
RAY: He's trying to be—
JOSEPH:—Trying to be precise—
RAY:—trying for clarity.
JOSEPH:—pin it down, multiple codes—
RAY: You try and read Finnegans Wake and—
BRIAN: But Ray, he—Why can't you—
JOSEPH: He's explicating a transparent binary contrast of the world—
RAY:Yeah.
JOSEPH:
—or apparently transparent, but he immediately, I mean the thing that comes through is the degree to which what one had stupidly thought to be fairly straightforward is multiply complex, layered with an extraordinary number of overlapping—
BRIAN:
Bullshit! What 'contradiction'? Is a broken leg the 'dark side' or 'infernal contradiction' of a straight one? This is as bad as that Nazi fruitcake Heidegger.
MARIO PONTE:
Is he asserting that these oppositions express the theorist's analysis, or is he trying to peel the surfaces back and expose the theorist's own psyche? Because ninety per cent of what anybody experiences is what he's obliged by culture to experience.
JOSEPH:
Foucault's experimenting in a critical laboratory not many people in the English-speaking world are yet acquainted with: semiotics, deconstructionist—
RAY:
The Structuralists.
JOSEPH:
The poststructuralists. Derrida, Kristeva, that lot. He starts from a proposition that Roland Barthes put forward in a book called "S slash Z"—
BRIAN:
Speculative Zonk.
JOSEPH:
Hmm. Semi-Zymurgyic. Barthes draws the distinction between the writerly text and the readerly text. The writerly text in some sense has a privileged position, aesthetically, over the readerly text. The readerly text is that which we—as far as I can make out; it's very obscure to me, and I would hope that Madame Finlay would help out on this—the readerly text is the classic text, the text which gives itself up to us in all its plenitude, and soothes our minds and massages our sensibilities and tell us all the things we want to know.
The writerly text is the creative interface between the words and the person either writing or reading (as I understand it); we readers don't 'read' the writerly text, we write the fucking thing. And the intention of the author more or less disappears, because we have no—we ought to have no interest . . . You can argue that there's no way of reclaiming the intention of the writer. although a lot of people tried to, in the New Criticism . . . I suppose . . . or do I mean . . .?
MARJORY FINLAY:
The Intentional Fallacy, but you've got it arse-about.
JOSEPH: The Intentionalist Fallacy was repudiated, then, by the New Critics.
MARIO PONTE (musingly):
Where did Gore Vidal discuss that?
BRIAN WAGNER:
Borges said it too, beautiful—
MARIO PONTE:
I read it in something this afternoon somewhere—
JOSEPH:
There's obviously a sense in which it must be true, a sense reflected in Marxist terms like praxis, where the reader engages with the text, creates the text—
RAY:
This is—
JOSEPH:
They're not saying, Here's a Rorschach blot, do what you like—
RAY:
This is quite plainly true, in a restricted sense. We do recreate the text as individuals, simply because no two individuals understand similarly.
JOSEPH:
I'm not sure you can even say you 'recreate' it.
RAY:
The text is the bedrock basis on which you work.
JOSEPH:
Yes, obviously a lot of information is actually embedded in the text proper, it possesses a predetermined structure, and so I find it hard to have all that much empathy with this view. Nonetheless, it's a position that can be defended. Foucault's obviously enormously concerned with it. I mean, he wrote an essay three or four years ago called 'What is an Author?' which often gets confused with Barthes's essay 'The Death of the Author.' Both of them see their dialectical theories as emerging from the system of discourse itself, but the more they tried to obliterate the author, the more their fame as authors grew and grew.
MARJORY FINLAY:
The Writer As Masturbator.
JOSEPH:
Well, they both make a decent fist of it . . . Ahem. Still, there's obviously a paradox at work. Their work seems to me drenched with the torment of their own lives.
BRIAN:
Big deal, Joseph. What else could writers write about, after all? Boring.
JOSEPH:
Well, about meaning. About how language means. I don't know how useful it is; maybe it's so truistic that—But Foucault has been fairly self-aware of this preoccupation right from the beginning. All of his studies, starting from his work with the insane and apparently inarticulate, have been concerned with Making Sense.
BRIAN:
With Making It.
: loitering with intent
still Brunswick yet, already
Monday 29 dec 69
well me dear old sweetheart happy new year
Melbourne is a terrible place. You were right to leave. Sunday was 101 degrees; today a grim and blowing drear.
I visited the Manchesters this afternoon. I sat and chatted and sat and waited and lounged and hungered and at length drew myself up and made for the door, only to be stayed with a nine o'clock invitation to dinner. But not stayed in fact; ran for the tram all hollow within. The chilly stupid misery of the Swanston and Flinders Street intersection, and a slow cold tram. Why can I only deal with people through the imposed distance of quipu? Ah shit.
On the edge of a new year and a new decade I am prostrate once more at your absence. Strange that I never felt this when you were present. (Um, that was meant to be a joke.) (Not funny.) I could go on at length about work, but why appal two of us? all my love, pet—stay alive
1983: talking back
A week's dishwashing awaits Brian Wagner when he wakes. There are no clean bowls left. Grudgingly, slitting his eyes against the late morning summer sun, he fills the sink and shovels everything in, scrubbing half-heartedly at a suitable vessel. When most of its crust is gone he fishes it out and lets it drain while he looks for a dessert spoon.
His breakfast muesli has gone. With a curse he clicks on the clock radio above the refrigerator and hunts out batches of makings, fat plastic bags that have to be slashed and emptied into mouse-proof jars. As he blends his special mix, he glances at the prices on the packages and thinks profoundly on inflation. It is, he decides, primarily a means of taxing everyone's capital by ensuring that interest rates are pushed so high that just to keep your savings indexed to real-terms parity you need to pay a third or more of the inflated margin out in tax: a hidden levy, in effect. It's not simply a matter of bracket-creep, ordinary wage-earners being shoved up into higher tax brackets. That can be accommodated to everyone's political advantage by regular 'tax cuts' that just reinstate the status quo. The status quid pro quo. A quid is still a pro, he hums. A pro is still a quid. No, ripping off inflation-boosted interest is far more sinister, the sole meaningful explanation for inflation in conspiracy terms (and what other kind is worth a moment of your time?) that Brian has yet come across.
The radio is muttering in a familiar slow, theatrically modulated yet inoffensive explanatory manner. Brian grinds a wooden spoon through his mixture (Natural unprocessed bran 43 cents, Black & Gold processed bran 81 cents, Morning Sun rolled oats 87 cents but that's for 750 grams rather than 500, handfuls of Sunbeam currants a whopping 91 cents for 375 grams, a curious measure on the face of it, though it's a quarter of 1.5 kilos for what that's worth, and bits of chopped dried apricot and walnuts no identifiable price since he threw the wrappers out last week). The best prices he can find, but criminally dear. He gives himself a big bowl of it, pours milk, puts it aside to soak, goes back and slices in a couple of strawberries.
While he washes the dishes, the discussion on 3LO hots up. He shakes off suds, reaches a hand to the volume knob.
"Yes, Alan, it's fair to say that the principal cause nowadays is mid-life crisis stress syndrome," avers the psychiatrist from Royal Park.
"And this is as true for women as for men, now that so many women are in the work force?"
"It goes far beyond those in the formal work force, Alan. Our whole social pattern places enormous strains of self-definition on those in the 35 to 45 age group."
Brian gets the glasses out of the way, scrubs at some of the less indurated pots. He reaches to his knees, gropes for Nifti, sprays the really crook ones with ammonia. Take that. The chemical odor bites his nose, makes him cough. Goes nicely with muesli. "We'll take the first call," says the anchorman. "Good morning."
"Hello."
A silence follows.
"Yes, you're on. How are you coping with mid-life stress? I assume you are one of us lucky people—or do I mean unlucky—in that age group?"
For an embarrassing ten seconds there is no sound but the faint whisper of the telephone system. Brian stares at his clock with a growing sense of conviction.
"Are you still there? I think we've lost him, Bill. We'll try another—"
"I can't do anything," Joseph Williams says through the radio. To prove his point he stops again.
The psychiatrist is clearly not used to such verbal reluctance in his media consultees. It is left to the compere to whip in, which he does with astonishing smoothness. "You can't do anything in general, or something in particular?"
"Anything. I don't want to leave the house."
"I don't blame you. If my wife didn't push me out each morning I'd stay there all day." He laughs to show that he means it and he doesn't mean it. "If you don't mind my asking, how old are you?"
"I lost count. It's too boring. Say forty."
"Slap bang in a mid-life crisis by the sound of it, don't you think, Bill?"
"Of course it is impossible and improper to make diagnostic evaluations without seeing someone in the clinical setting," Bill says, covering his tail. "Tell me, what do you do for a living?" Lagging in the headlong pace of the conversation, Joseph's voice says. "I don't have a wife to push me out. This is silly."
"Are you unemployed?"
"Actually I write encyclopedias."
"Good heavens," says Alan with an approving laugh, "you should be the one asking us questions. I didn't know there was a big demand for encyclopedia writers. I always imagined they had world-renowned specialists doing their entries for them."
"Britannica does. All the major firms. The small companies use freelance researchers."
"And what has your research turned up on the question of mid-life crisis?"
"I think I've got it."
Brian's muesli is going soggy, forgotten, as he crouches over the phone in the hall, flipping frantically for the 3LO talkback number. "Look, hello, it's most crucial that I—"
"You will be placed in a queue, sir. Please turn off your radio or there will be problems with feedback to the transmitter."
"I won't know what they're saying."
"We pipe it through the phone to you. There are four calls ahead of you. I'll keep count for you and let you know when you're the next one on. Now, if I could just have your name and address for our records—"
Brian deepens his voice. "I'm afraid you don't understand the urgency. The young man speaking on the radio right now is a psychiatric patient of mine. His name is Joseph Williams. There is a very real risk that he intends to take his own life, possibly on air. You must connect me immediately."
"Oh." The line goes dead. Brian leans into the kitchen, clicks his radio off. Joseph is saying something about the woman he used to live with and the doctor is making a point about the coincidence of Jungian life-stage transitions, endocrinal disruptions, and the first child of a marriage reaching adolescence. It does not sound as if they are sustaining any eternal meeting of true minds. "All right, doctor," says the woman on the switch. "I've informed the program director and she's arranging for you to be patched in. What name was it again, doctor?"
"Almeida Lima. It's Mister, not Doctor. I'm a surgeon."
"Didn't you say you were a psychiatrist?"
"A psychosurgeon, madam. Please put me through now." Lima was the first butcher to perform pre-frontal lobotomy, back in 1935. The name should give Joe a jolt to the higher centers.
"As you know, Bill," says the wonderfully calm and adept moderator, "this morning we've asked Dr. Almeida Lima, a psychiatric specialist working in a slightly different area to yours, to wait for us on another line. Can you join us now, Dr. Lima?"
"Certainly. Good morning to you all."
"I believe you have some advice for our caller? I don't think we need to mention any names," he adds with a merry laugh.
"Quite right," Brian says briskly. "All I require is the proper attitude of deference in my patients, and a sharp hacksaw."
For the third time there is a strange stretch of dead air. The producer must be wetting herself. Before the compere can speak Joseph gives a tinny scream of incredulous laughter. "Wagner, you maniac."
"Well, you won't answer your door or your mail. And your phone's always off the hook. Meet me at two o'clock in the Albion. A beer would go down very—" But an anechoic blankness tells him that he has been cut off. They probably have Telecom tracing his line back at this very instant. Grinning happily, and suddenly thirsty for his morning coffee, Brian Wagner hangs up his phone and skips back into the kitchen.
1970: 'n' the livin' is easy
9 January
My dear Joseph
I got rid of my admirer from across the road last night. Offered friendship but no sex, baby. Poor creature nearly cracked up. I was very cool and diplomatic. Amazing. Went out and feasted my eyes on Les Enfants du Paradis & loved it more than ever. It is so tragic but I didn't cry. I don't cry in movies any more.
I came upon Antony strolling along the street. Is he to be my tormentor?
The boss gave me a pep talk because I haven't been "pulling my weight," the turd. I turned on the charm as best I could and was spared the sack.
I've written to my expensive Melbourne shrink with a plea for help. Once again into the hands of the capitalists!
I've written my position paper for Women's Liberation & the girls in the house find parts of it amusing. I must have some humor left in me yet.
fondest love Caroline
P.S. Can I say I love you?
1970: getting together
U of NSW
15 Jan 70
My dear Joseph
Christ. A hectic morning at the office. Just haven't stopped. I cut the boss off in mid-sentence, so expect to be fired. He's already berated me for not mixing with the other employees, by which he means ceaseless yapping about husbands, animals, hair-dos and cactus plants. They don't, he explained, like "lone wolves."
The Meeting! Last night. Reasonably successful. Gave my paper. It went over better than I'd anticipated & even raised a few laughs.
My topic was "Women as Cheap Labor." They want me to expand it for release as a pamphlet. A woman from the Liquor Trades came up and congratulated me—I was ecstatic. Someone told me later that this woman is regarded as pretty radical and critical.
Right at the end everything fell apart.
We called for people to write pamphlets and work on committees for Abortion Reform, child-care centers and stuff like that.
Uproar. Misunderstandings everywhere. "We don't know if we want to belong to your group."
Some women started babbling that we were selling illegal pamphlets. "The law is the law." Shit. If one goes in the clink we all go. A lot of them weren't having a bar of this.
Even so, quite a number remain interested. This could become a significant movement. We're having an all-day meeting next Saturday.
In total sixty or seventy woman participated. We turned away five blokes, very diplomatically. Margie didn't come along. She thinks she's found a guy, so I guess she thinks she doesn't need Women's Liberation.
Media coverage is uncertain. We were interviewed by the Daily Telegraph and some other papers, but we still haven't decided on our line, how to present ourselves. There were individuals in the audience wetting themselves for fear that we'd say something publicly that they didn't endorse. Okay, we told 'em, discuss it with us, set up your own committees, work together with us on issues of mutual concern.
There's a preparatory meeting on Friday, so I've had no time to be mad in the head. (I haven't written to Laing yet, can't get his address—will see the Dept of Psychiatry at the Uni, they may be able to help).
I found Antony's residence and took some of his luggage around to him, and got back some of my things—including a guitar he obviously didn't intend to return. No acrimony, however. I was very cool. So that's that, thank God.
My social life? I've been out a few times with a painter (so-so) who lives in the Cross, divorced, mid-30s, he's okay. Offered me a roof over my head, to keep me, that whole deal. Couldn't come at it. Can't bear to be touched at the moment. Will get over it sometime. I guess I'll have to stop going out with guys. So it's Women's Liberation for me!
fondest love
Caroline
A DOG'S WIFE
. . .Six
And the sun poured down like honey and all the wild meadows of my body ran with long-eared hares and does and quail for my love to chase and bring down in his soft, his sharp mouth, and my soul bobbed like a woolly cloud, all my education rising from my loins to the choking of my throat with my breasts all perfume yes and yes I said yes I will Yes.
"Arf," said Spot, forgetting himself.
1970: the fox of the earth has his hole
St. Kilda Triangle of the Damned
Monday 19 jan 70
Dear Toad
Intimations of reprieve.
I've moved from Brunswick at last! Among my own kind, or a kind of simulacrum. Hooray. Now that my sepulcher is (partly) whitened, double bed and desk in, books deployed, and parents waved a fond farewell, I'm gradually putting out little new green buds.
"Prelude to the afternoon of a Faun" on the radio. I swoon.
Last night was my first true sleep At Home in Shakespeare Grove. I dreaded showering this morning—the toilet bowl is grotty to the point of revulsion—but mere sanitary considerations were the least thing on my mind; it was all quite cheery.
Socialist reconstruction proceeds apace: carpets purchased, curtains whine through the Singer, wine sings through the merry throng, showerscreens are raised, babies diapered and hushed. Various cognates of the residents, ex-lovers, ex-spouses, in one case current but estranged spouse, and their associated small offspring spring in and out, linger the night, lay one another on the newly laid carpets.
The gaping desolation is departing my own room, aided by a new quasar-like 150 watt bulb and the removal of an assortment of black and odorous items from my fire grate that I had tentatively categorized as cat turds but which, from my description, all-knowing Bob identified as used tampons in an advanced condition of decay. Nasty!
I read several accounts of the Wimmens Lib Group in the Sunday papers. Copious scorn, hostility and incomprehension poured liberally forth. (Actually, cough, cough, I still have profound reservations myself. Is it male chauvinism that needs confronting, or just plain power-rat bloody-mindedness? Is female chauvinism just going to replicate this nastiness in a new ecological niche? And so on . . .) I'm glad your speech went off nicely. Do send me a copy of your pamphlet.
"Lone wolfing" indeed. What a prick. Who do these cunts think they are.
Do come down for a visit to our little nest when you've got some bread together.
love Joseph
1970: joseph misses the tram
The artistic contingent in the magazine section has been sacked. Layout and design is now handled downstairs. The department shrinks by the week, but Joseph has been assured that his own position is safe. He has difficulty sustaining belief in this forecast, after calculating how much he is being paid as a B-grade journalist to . . .
. . .address envelopes
In the midst of his boredom and misery, Quintilla leaps into the office at a quarter to five. This manifestation produces a measure of stunned consternation, not least in Joseph.
Jesus, Joe, what are you wearing?
They make me do it.
But what is it?
It's called a "suit."
Do you know how difficult it is to find anyone in this gruesome building?
Look, there's a chair over here, why don't you—
The tie's incredible.
The tie is Day-glo orange, Joseph's attempt at modishness. He cowers at his desk, covering his throat with one hand and flapping the other.
Quintilla says: Let's go and have a drink.
Actually uh I don't finish until 5.30.
That's slavery!
Not really, I don't start until nine.
People are looking sideways. She's a friend of the Gallaghers, the merest acquaintance when all is said and done. Help! Joseph continues shame-facedly to address envelopes, at a loss to know what to do with her. Finally he persuades her to remain on a nearby chair, from which vantage she continues to disrupt the office, complaining delightfully about the trouble she's had locating him within the Beast of Mammon, the stupidity and fecklessness of all concerned, the absurdity of his job, and sundry other items of valid but tactless denunciation.
Listen, it's nice to see you, uh, but what are you doing here?
I've been in Ballarat, Quintilla tells him, as if this is sufficient explanation.
Joseph is not a hike for nothing. He works out in his head that there must be more to the case than this. He lowers his gaze to the desk, nodding, nodding. He looks up.
You came back by train.
Yep. Horrible. Nothing to look at for hours.
To Spencer Street station, then. Which is only a block away, just down the road but a full half a mile or more from the heart of the city. It makes a twisted kind of sense that Quintilla would prefer to cross the street and search here for a drinking companion than seek out a more suitable chum at a greater distance.
At 5.15 Joseph abandons his pile of envelopes, heaves against his besuited bosom the heavy new carpet he's bought during his lunch break, and takes Quintilla away. His mind is paralyzed by shock and alarm, so he trundles them home by crowded, knock-off hour tram. It does not occur to him until several days later that they might have taken a taxi, or even, after all, gone straight to a pub.
Further sensation on board the tram. Quintilla is wearing a garment that might fairly be deemed short. Wispy, it alternately hugs and billows. Its hues are not muted. Her hair of course is thick and tawny and wonderfully long, like that of the lion of the gender other than her own. They stand in the breezy open doorway of the tram, pressed by office staff and late shoppers, and while Joseph tries pitifully to think of something to say passing cars skid and honk. Two youths leer across her chest in the aisle of the tram, the better to exchange loud remarks of a complimentary nature.
Have dinner with us, Joseph offers. Martha is a fantastic cook.
They arrive to find low-grade squalor. The baby is being fed, washed, de-crapped. Martha and the others are exhausted from their day's toil. A pair of dreary visitors skulks in to use the spare room for a bout of dull illicit fornication. Magic flees.
Quintilla sits without a word in the living room for a quarter of an hour while Joseph dithers and moves his tongue pointlessly around the cavity of his mouth. Finally she pisses off. Nobody seems to care. Martha and her lawful husband grumble at one another and prepare for an evening of fun.
Joseph stares at the living room wall with its crayoned outline of a Douanier Rousseauvian jungle all aglint with eyes and feral teeth he knows will never be completed, and finishes the night babysitting two torpid infants while their various parents cavort at the boozer.
1970: conferenceville
Randwick Saturday 24 Jan
My dear Joseph
Sitting with a cuppa & a ciggie, I ponder yesterday's Activists' Conference. Three or four hours of hot discussion. People from Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide and Sydney. We started by explaining to the audience why, at this stage, we are having closed meetings—due to our socialization, the presence of men inhibits us from free expression. A major conference is planned for Easter.
A couple of Melbourne radical women from the Bakery started out with Maoist skepticism but ended wildly enthusiastic when they realized it was not a paranoid anti-male faction. I gather that even some of the ladies in and around your household are interested—that should topple a few gods!
Subsequently we learned that the Anti-Vietnam activities over the road (in another part of Resistance) had wound up in a harangue about the divisiveness of us Women's Liberationists.
The whole left movement is in uproar. How dare we hold an independent conference that clashed with something the Holy Males had decided was more important!
At the end of our session a few of us went across and found these amazing scenes of yelling and denunciation. There was no absence of men's voices in our defense, I add. We jumped in and declared this the inaugural mixed session of Women's Liberation. Meanwhile Albert Langer, Hero of the Student Revolution, was going out of his mind over the Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm—not political, he claimed. I jumped up and said this was a bullshit objection. Psychosexual factors are certainly critical in attaining liberation for men as well as women. Bob Gould, who owns a radical book store, defended us, although he says he's still proud to be a male chauvinist. He informed us that it is a distinctly painful personal change to have to get your own cup of tea, and do your own washing—and your lady's to boot!
Albert thinks we're splitting the left. He fails to see that in Resistance no woman opened her mouth. We will come back to the active Left far stronger for an absence while we gather strength, consolidate our true identities. And come back not in a supportive role but as an equal force.
Poor old Albert sat mopping his brow between fits of hysteria.
And don't think I'm letting you off the hook. Before you and your cool logical quipu friends go into similar outbursts of reflex condemnation . . . think, observe, listen. Then state your opinion. We shall see what we shall see.
I went off looking for a temporary teaching job, but you need a degree. I can't even get a reference from the last place I worked at—they thought I was unstable. Have to forge something.
Went to see a psychiatrist I was referred to from Melbourne. He was okay, supplied me with Stelarzine and sleeping pills. Told me to come back in a month for another peer.
Lanie gets back in four days and she, I and Sarah (one of the Liberation committee) are renting a house together in Rozelle (nice little lesbian set-up, I hear you mutter.) You can come and stay as long as you like, if your job vanishes—except when we're having closed sessions, naturally.
fondest love
Caroline
1983: a nice chat
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
DUD BASH is a special issue (but then, so is every issue) (though hardly ever a March, 1983 issue) of ATYPICAL QUIPU,
not A Typical quipu by any means,
a catch-all bucket as our computing cobber Ray would say for the piles of letters that spill from my crusty desk. Edited & published by Brian Wagner, the Miss Lonely Hearts of Melbourne hikedom. Can be had for love or money, from the address listed on the back. A large X means you're on my shit-list and this is the last issue you see unless you Act Fast.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
::Kicking off with a lament, Joseph Williams (yes folks, you read it here first) the last lark of summer—::
goforit! goforit! goforit! goforit! goforit! goforit! goforit! goforit!
Your unsought advice to the socially bankrupt, broadcast on national radio and followed up across four or five beers in a particularly unsavory Carlton pub, got put to use this afternoon, Wagner. I suppose you'll want to dine out on this sorry tale, so stick it in your rancid sheet. Who has pride? Oy vey. (By the way, did you know that Antonio Egas Moniz, who invented the lobotomy performed by his surgical colleague Almeida Lima, was murdered by one of his post-operative patients whose impulse control had been removed along with his frontal lobes? No shit, as you might well put it, Brian.)
Get out of the house more, you told me. Go to the Lemon Tree and order strange drinks. Chat up the lady advertising executives hanging about there in low cut blouses. Follow them to hot tub rorts in South Yarra. Smoke marijuana and lean against a wall at a dark party. Seek out sleaze bunnies and have my body oiled and pummeled by jaded housewives in search of bent thrills.
Luff, luff, you said to me in your Peter Lorre voice. Ve haf conquered science, vot do ve need of luff?
It's easy for you to say that, Brian.
My life works by a completely different principle. I will give you an example, because it is still smarting.
I'm pedaling back from Readings bookshop in Carlton, right. Very hot day. Slogging along Drummond St., which has a median strip and not too much traffic. The lure of the library tugs me to the right at Newry St. (I have tickets to something like seven municipal libraries and generally keep them in heavy use, as we encyclopedists will). The door is shut. Wrong afternoon. I wheel the bike up a block, get a carton of coffee-flavored milk and two blue plastic straws. You never know when one of them will develop a dysfunctional kink in it.
On the other side of Rathdowne St. is Curtin Square, which has trees, grass, public toilets marked BOYS and GIRLS, a "recreation center" of sinister mien, and a sandy patch full of clapped-out steel equipment for kids to slide and jump about on. I go the other way, having a fear and hatred of children whatever their size or age, perch my bike against the bole of a tree, and sit down in its fairly defective shade.
In this same corner of the parkette is a group of four: two women reclining, two half-naked youths booting a soccer ball around in their near vicinity.
I drink the milk, stare at trees, regard with quiet pleasure my remaindered John Fowles' Mantissa ($4.95 hardcover). Shortly I decide that what I witness is not, after all, a foursome, unless it's composed of mothers and sons. (I'm short-sighted. No I'm not, I just don't pay close attention to the non-print world.) The boys are now discerned as being about 14 or 15 (but why aren't the little swine at school? It's not a public holiday, even though the library is shut. And it's only about 2.30 in the afternoon.) One of the women is maybe 40ish, the other five or ten years younger.
As you can tell by sticking your head out the window, it's been bloody hot. So these women are taking the sun, and dressed accordingly. (So am I, for that matter, in shorts and sweaty shirt.) The boys tire and leave. The women ignore me, but that's okay. I'm fifteen or twenty feet from them, behind and to their left. Neither is wonderfully sexy, though both are displaying their legs and shoulders to a marked extent; the younger woman, resting on her elbows and reading, has hoiked her dress up to her bum and waves her feet in the air in a careless manner.
After a time, one of the hazards of Curtin Square puts in its regular appearance. A gaggle of thirty or so council oafs heigh-ho past, brooms at the camber.
"Haw hullaw," they cry. "Yuk yuk snort." They bash one another about the back and shoulders, bugging their eyes at the revealed flesh, grabbing manly arses of opportunity and beating their hands up and down for each other's information and amusement in the vicinity of their crotches. Adding to this sport, one rogue hollers, "Watch that bloke on the grass perrrrvin' on yuz, girls. He's up to no good."
This was all your doing, Wagner.
The whole thing irritates me while it happens, primarily because stupid people scare me and secondarily because the charge is vaguely justified. So I become acutely uncomfortable.
In fact none of this ugly buffoonery attracts attention to me from the women, either favorable or the reverse. "Piss off, arseholes," yells the younger woman in a gravelly voice. They continue their studies (several unidentifiable books, Cosmopolitan, a Women's Weekly for godsake).
I crush my carton and toddle across the grass to deliver its remains dutifully to a bin, then find a bubbler and fire some water in after the milk, wash the coffee stains off my chin and the sweat from my brow. I stroll back to my bike.
Now it is important that you understand the next point, Brian. My emotion is not, and has not been, predominantly lustful. It is your failure to grasp this general fact that makes your sex-drenched scenarios so irrelevant. The propinquity of these wenches has lulled me with a soothing boojwah sense of God in his Heaven and ratepaying Carlton wives lethargic in their municipal park.
However, since I have been called on perving, and in line with your advice to strike up conversations with nameless strangers whenever possible, I decide that I ought to be civil and address my person to these ladies.
So up I hop. The older of the two is in shade, meager though it is. I'd prefer to speak to her (the direct rays of the sun tend to roast my skull, precipitating migraines and burning my nose) but that would call for an extra couple of steps and a self-conscious about-turn. So I sit down on the grass near her friend, who is facing me reading an enormous black academic volume. She has got to about page xi.
"If you started in the middle," I say, "you'd get through it twice as fast."
Certainly she's registered my arrival. There is no reaction whatever. But I cannot just get up and leave. I feel like a flustered flasher. After a loooong pause she looks up and says, "I beg your pardon? Did you say something?" You sniveling boorish turd.
This was not the way you described the procedure, Wagner.
Trapped. The other woman has not turned, or even lifted her head. Lamely but doggedly I say, "Well you see, I noticed that your book is still hardly broached."
But by now she's back to studying the black marks on the pages with fierce scholarly intensity. After another stomach-crampingly attenuated interval she looks up and says, "I'm sorry. What did you say?" And is instantly back to staring at the page.
There is no overt hostility, no piss off arsehole, not even a killing snigger or shared look of disdain between them.
I sigh. "I see that you fully intend to disregard my specialist speed-reading advice." No response at all. I groan slowly to humiliated feet. "Aw shit," I say, "and a very pleasant afternoon to you both."
To my bike, through the fence, across the footpath, over the lefthand side of Rathdowne St, up and across the median strip, on to the other lefthand side of Rathdowne St, boiling with rage, and away.
It was a great plan, Brian. Next time I'll just stay home and blow the top of my head off.
::Joseph, Joseph, what a heartbreak old nervous nelly you are. Leaving aside the question of your abysmal dialogue, which no doubt you polished to a gleaming edge during those Edwardian longueurs while you gazed at the leaves and the spare unsucked straw in your Big M carton, hardly crucial since, if it were, the jocks who mumble their lips as they read would have been snookered out of the Darwinian Pool Game long since in favor of those of us or some of us at any rate with rather more advanced horsepower, no the trouble Joseph is that you waffled off there at the end instead of standing your ground.
::Suppose you'd hit your dreary interlocutor with a line like this (and you could have spent some time getting it straight, since she was patently as tongue-tied as you, and it hardly matters whether by genes or design):
::"Surely you're not actually a mental defective," you could have told her. "Your head looks too big."
::Naturally, this tack could lead to nasty bruising.
::Why not the blunt, candid approach: "Don't be a bitch. I'm just being friendly."
::Actually, old chum, as you say it was my mistake. You're a natural bleeder, Joseph. We need to toughen you up.
::Seriously, Joe, it's good to see you back to quipu activity. You've been hiding in your tent too long.::
1970: a flying fuck
Rozelle
Chez Contentment
11 March
My dear Joseph
Thank you for the plane trip back to Sydney—it was better than acid. And a lot better than hitching all that way.
Alone in yet another house (not Lanie's and mine, I mean) and quite happy to be alone, listening to the ABC—nuclear power stations, state of engineering, and now the gentle abyss of musical notes . . .
I'm staying in Alan's peaceful old terrace, sitting on the balcony regarding the breathtaking view of the harbor. It won't last, though I would be glad to live here alone forever. But Alan will not be in America forever, and in fact his wife Jane will be moving back in here next Saturday. Nothing like the arrival of strange bird of alien plumage to bring the estranged wife flapping back to the nest.
So really I'll be glad to leave. Alan's domestic upheaval is only now starting to bite. There's nothing placid about Jane—she's rung here twice in his absence.
My room at Rozelle will make me happy. It's small, narrow, with a sink and cupboard under a window looking down over the backs of shops. I hope for peace and good study. Lanie has the best room, fireplace and balcony, but noisy with street clatter. We haven't moved in yet—get the key on Saturday. Sarah's not coming in after all. We'll have to advertise in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Actually my trip to Melbourne devastated me. A butterfly with maimed, scorched wings. Will I ever be able to fly? Why why why. It was okay the first couple of days. A little tense. I suppose it all fell in on me when I got back from my parents. They do it to me every time. It's so dreary and boring—I'm sorry, Joseph, I'm really sorry. I hate what I do to you, what I make you. It's pointless seeing me. I'm dreary, draining, dragging-down dead-end person—also I'm becoming extremely ugly—at the best of times wretchedly plain. This is literally true, not paranoid. The moth who used to be a butterfly.
Sorry about all this but I don't care what I say with you, I have no pride, in fact I don't give a flying fuck. That was good, lying on your bed reading to the rhythm of your typewriter, gazing out the yellow curtains, looking at you typing some silly thing for Brian's quipu and you not knowing and not caring and the air warm and touching my skin, the ceiling high and the door closed just you and me and that typewriter holding us together.
You thought I was bored and wanted to go out—it wasn't so. I'd have liked to dance for an hour maybe with you, with music blasting from all sides. You should try dancing, it'd help loosen you up. You're not as clumsy as you think. So what else is new?
I've started at university and still don't know anyone there. This pleases me. To be a shadow is a good feeling. To be lost is to my liking.
The lectures are disappointing, if you can be disappointed about something you expected little from. The staff are drab, humorless conservatives, "academic" scored all over their blank, flabby faces (thinking they've walked out of C. P. Snow). So what's new?
Spent an evening with Antony and his new lady, Iris. Dinner, tuneless talk from both of them about people I'd never heard of. He played two of his own pieces on Iris's guitar, pleasant enough. I started talking about how devastated & excited I'd been by the Pram Factory performance I saw in Melbourne (Antony knew one of the actors) and he responded with reticence. We used to talk so freely. His humor was stale where once I found it fresh and inventive. Iris, though, is a likeable person who tried very hard to make me welcome. I wish I was free to like her. So much for that evening.
Well, my dear, that's it. There's no point in sending this letter (or any of my previous ones) but I will, because there's no point in not sending it.
11.42. You are a ghost afar.
Most of the time you are real, and I believe we have lived together. Other people are smoke always, once I haven't seen them for a few days.
I'm not depressed or suicidal. I am living amazingly realistically. I don't cry, I don't lie around dreaming, I don't clutter the room with continuous stupid remarks—I'm very alert most of the time, always on the ball in company.
I am beginning to adjust to reality. To really watch my face in the mirror and not deny it's me, to affirm it is, that it always will be. This physical change is strange too. I can't express it yet but I'm not lying about that either.
I visited a business friend of my father's over the weekend—they'd rung him up, I suppose, fobbed him on to me, make sure I was eating. We talked and talked about the 1940s, had omelettes and claret and talked some more until 1:30 in the morning. Very satisfying. I slept well that night. Would they believe that, understand it?
Well distant star adieu until another night.
Caroline
J.—
Can we turn our faces to the wall and die?
Can we turn our faces to the wall
Can we turn our faces
Can we turn
Can we?
C.
1971: pack-raped by political bikies
In a tone of gentle logic Tom Nourse tells his daughter, "The police don't start these things. They're just ordinary family men with an unpleasant task. The only reason they're out there in their hot uniforms on a Sunday afternoon is to protect the public's order and property." He puts his empty glass precisely on the wet ring it had left on the table. "I'm sure they'd much rather be at home with their kiddies, tending their gardens."
Ray fills the glass and pours one for Marj. He sees violence in her. "As far as you've gone," he says rapidly, "you're right, of course. None of us thinks the cops are psychopathic bullies who thrive on sadism—"
"Like hell," says Marjory.
"—or if we do get that feeling about some of them, we know it's due to the larger context." Curiously, the older man raises no objection; he looks on benignly. "You know and I know that some cops are thugs. It's always been that way. One reason for having a police force is to give the hostility of brutal men a social function, buy them off if you like. That's a truism, surely. But what role is the police force playing tomorrow? Look, this is Australia, not South Africa. Public protest goes back to the goldfields and beyond. Teachers make their primary school pupils memorize it all. It's legitimated, almost part of the parliamentary process."
Doris Nourse is less happy to hear this than her husband. She is clearly agitated, but says nothing. Ray argues: "If demonstrators did rush about this country looting and raping and killing, one might understand the law being out in force. Heavens, you've just got to watch the TV. When trouble does break out, the principal reason is that a few police have lost their heads and done something inane like riding horses into a crowd. And pretty minimal crowds at that, usually. You'll have noticed that the politicians kept the police under tight restraint during the big Moratorium marches."
"Ray, you're a grown man. You know as well as I do that the police have to be on hand in case anything does flare up."
"Flare up?" Marjory shouts. "We're all too bloody comfortable. Are a bunch of bourgeois students and middle-aged unionists going to tear up the paving stones outside Parliament and burn down the Stock Exchange? You're as out of touch as the baby Maoists."
Is Tom Nourse a trifle discomfited? "It's not that. You have to remember, they're constantly being manipulated by the communists and the anarchists." Ray and Marjory stare at him. "Those people'd stop at nothing if the police weren't there to intervene. Look what they did in Czechoslovakia."
"That's exactly right." Ray notices how calm he is. My God, he thinks. "All those communist students and workers coming out of the offices, factory-hands with flowers in their fists up against invading tanks. Really amazing. But surely you're not saying that we too should—"
"No, no, I meant—"
Marjory begins very noisily explaining her dislike for Stalinists of the kind in power in the Soviet Union and its satellites; that she has read a number of history books; the distinct immunities to duped brainwashing that are imparted by a tertiary education of the post-Cold War variety.
She goes on in this vein for some time. Hungry and now post-coitally sad after all, Ray broods on the meeting at which Jan and Peter must even at this moment be drawing up their tactics by reference to Lenin and Mao and Debray. He shrinks on his garbage lid at the sincere dishonesty of what Marjory is saying. Vietnamese are burning and starving and being shaken apart by concussion, and the binary fallacy rides myopically in old Sydney town.
Beside, he thinks, she's responding blindly to blindness. Marjory's father is a stockbroker, competent and well-regarded by his peers. How can one reason, Ray asks himself hopelessly, with a person whose entire way of life has conspired to deform his values?
"Marjy," her father says patiently, "these young bucks we're talking about are still impressionistic, still going through the adolescent phase of revolt."
"Terrific," Marjory says scathingly. "Really terrific. You've been keeping up with the Heart-Balm column. Look mate," and she leans toward him, stabbing her chest with a finger, "I've just done three solid years of psychology, on your money."
Nourse takes no exception. Placidly he tells her, "Then you'll know what I mean. They're impressionable, open to suggestion and manipulation from communist—"
"What god damned communists?" It's a shriek of baffled rage. "Do you have the Maoists in mind? Or could it be the Russians? Perhaps you're thinking of the four or five Trot splinter groups. A couple of rowdy union bosses and a handful of local government stirrers. The communists are a bloody farce in this country."
Tom Nourse jerks forward with his first show of emotion for some time. "You support the communists in Vietnam, don't you? Even though our boys are dying over there. I never thought I'd see the day! And you reckon you haven't been manipulated!"
"The communists you're talking about are Vietnamese in their own country. We're the aliens there, we're the foreign invaders."
With a thudding, deliberate ponderousness, Ray says, "I thought even the Wall Street Journal agreed by now that the war has to stop, if only by the most self-serving calculation. We're not interested in communism. What we want is an end to an insane, brutal exercise in technological carnage and imperial realpolitik."
While this lead balloon is plunging into the earth, Marjory acidly echoes her father's earlier words. "Our boys! Listen, bad luck, the poor bastards happen to be on the wrong side. Did you feel a little warm glow of sympathy for all the German mums and dads who supported the Nazis because 'their boys' were working the late shift on the gas ovens?"
"They couldn't do anything else, dear," Doris Nourse explains nervously. "They'd have been shot, wouldn't they?"
"You think we should be shot for marching?"
Tom Nourse puffs his pipe, but his cheeks are veined with purple. "Nazis, rubbish. No-one's stopping you from marching and clamoring and protesting day and night. But the rest of the community needs some protection from the hotheads who don't realize how thankful they should be for the privilege of living in this wonderful country." He looks out the window at the small, rather squalid portion of it in Marjory's backyard. "And for having the protection of our great ally, the United States of America. You'll find as you get older that there's an important distinction between intelligence and knowledge," he adds, not one to be cowed, "the sort of knowledge you get only from experience. It's hard won, you can't pick it up from books."
axes to grind
INTELLIGENCE
Fully-grown human beings are remarkably similar to one another when compared to any other living creatures. Even so, in a number of ways they also differ from one another quite considerably. Men and women are physically distinguished by their role in reproduction, though the significance of this fact has been over-emphasized in many societies, to the disadvantage of women.
Human groups have been divided into "races," usually for evil motives, on the basis of their skin color, hair type, minor variations in shape of nose, eyes, lips, and so on. Other aspects of human variety have had less drastic consequences.
Some people are much shorter than average, others are much taller. Those who have had excellent nutrition all their lives tend to be heavier and more immune to disease than those who have been on the borderline of starvation. Yet nobody speaks of the "race" of tall, well-fed people (though "upper-class" or "privileged" individuals do tend to have these characteristics).
This line of thought helps us deal with some problems arising from such notions as "intelligence," "imagination," and "creativity."
It is obvious that some people seem to be quick-witted, able to cope competently with tasks that confront them, knowledgeable about the world and the details of their society. These tend to be called "clever" or "smart." Others seem slower, less able and persistent, without much interest in anything outside very narrow limits. These tend to be called "dumb" or "stupid." Most of us fall somewhere between, being quite good at some things and not so good at others.
A convenient but dubious shorthand way to refer to these mental abilities is to speak of a person's "intelligence." After all, we say that a clever person acts "intelligently." It might seem that surely this is due to some abstract quality or gift the person possesses, just as a tall person possesses marked "height." But notice something strange: it does not explain why a person is unusually tall to say she has great "height." That merely repeats the same fact.
(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((
Barely measurable: A limen trait, my dear Watson
)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
Around the turn of the 20th century, a number of psychologists who were studying the structure and operation of the human mind looked into the question of mental abilities. At first it was thought that measuring the size of the skull might give a clue to a person's cleverness, since it was thought that a large skull contained a large brain and a large brain would be better at thinking than a smaller brain.
This seems ridiculous to us today, because we know that (except in extreme cases of brain disorder) the size of the brain has no bearing on ability. However, it gives us an indication of the kinds of errors we can fall into if we think of mental abilities as definite "things in the brain" that clever people have to a greater extent than less clever people.
The next step in measuring ability came when the scores on tests in vocabulary, reaction times, skill in recognition and manipulation of shapes, and so on, were condensed into an average score. This work was pioneered by A. Binet (1857-1911) in France, C. E. Spearman (1863-1945) and C. L. Burt (1883-1971) in Britain, and L. L. Thurstone (1887-1955) in the USA, though their interpretations of the results were drastically different.
The simplest method was to devise a large number of tests and place them in order of difficulty. Young children would usually succeed on the early items but fail on the harder ones. With each extra year of age, children tended to succeed at more items. Dull children (not surprisingly) did less well than other children of their age, but so too did "slow developers," who caught up in later years. Smart children were likely to do as well as children several years older than themselves, and this advantage usually persisted. Clever children grew up to be adults more mentally able than most.
How many highly intelligent people, in this sense, are there in the world? Tests are designed so that as test scores increase, it becomes progressively harder to perform at a given level. It is as if the hill being climbed gets steeper and steeper, so there are fewer people in each category. One in 10,000 people, according to standard measures, show an IQ of 160 or greater. Yet only one in 30,000 can reach 164, and just one in 160,000 scores 170 or above. No more than 6000 people in the whole world are eligible to join the high IQ fellowship Mega, and most of those live in China or India unless they have migrated to the West.
In summary, though, the notion of "intelligence" as a single factor (termed g by Spearman) should not be taken too seriously. The influential psychologist J. P. Guilford isolated test results into at least 120 separate factors, all independent. Given the cruel and unnecessary discriminations (even including sterilization) imposed on innocent people in the 20th century by naive or malicious I.Q. testers and their political advocates, there is every reason to be extremely wary.
However, it should be admitted that there has emerged recently some remarkable evidence that revives some of the hopes of I.Q. enthusiasts, such as the members of organizations of high-scorers like Mensa, Point Two Six, Four Sigma and Mega. Certain measurements of the speed of electrochemical reactions in the brain suggest that clever people are "high-speed" thinkers, due to more efficient connections between their neurons (brain cells). Those with lesser endowments are prone to a greater number of transmission errors in the central nervous system.
If this proves to be true, it could be seen as evidence of the g factor championed by Spearman and Burt (who is now known, however, to have forged most of his pro-I.Q. data). The general intelligence factor would then be comparable to the speed and reliability that, in part, distinguish the capacity of one computer from another.
1983: epistle of marjory to the galatians
April 11, 1983
Dear Joseph
I am writing to you in a tiny corner of time created by a stinking cold. So forgive me if this turns out slightly incoherent. About the only thing I'm capable of reading when I have a cold like this is quipu, and you'll understand how far my resistance has dropped when I mention that I've just ploughed my way through Wagner's latest HOT AIR, no hang on I mean ATYPICAL QUIPU (why do you buggers feel this need for uncontrolled proliferation of titles?) Anyhow, this is how I came upon your sad story of being beaten up in the park by two women, and Wagner's really sensitive and intelligent suggestions for how you should have coped.
First of all, Joseph, what I am about to say is strictly off the record.
While I sympathize with your problem(s), I have to say that it amazes me when I see you taking them to Brian Wagner for advice and comfort. But then, you know my opinion of Wagner. I haven't gone out of my way to hide my contempt for his utter self-absorption, his manipulation of others, his waste of his own talents, his rudeness, brashness, callowness and general nerdishness. I realize that you've known him a long time, but I think perhaps you should update your Wailing Wall, confessor, whatever he is. His comments on your story are so typical of Brian's reflex nastiness that I would just hate it for you to take them as a guide for yourself.
I've just had another two aspirins. I'm trying to follow the first day's play at the National Economic Summit from Parliament House, but the ABC keeps losing the line. It really does sound like a cricket match. They've just gone out for morning tea, at last report. Prime Minister Bob Hawke as Captain of the First Mixed Economy Eleven. Oh dear.
Look, love. To start with, you had no business approaching those women. Despite all your protestations of sexual innocence, your text gives you away over and over; all that dithering detail about their naked shoulders and legs, really Joseph. Obviously you were entertaining that typical male masturbatory fantasy, of the wondrously compliant hot eager women lying about just waiting for you to give them the nod and they'll smirk like the plastic dollies on the cover of Penthouse and rush over and grab your cock.
It isn't like that, kiddo.
Look at the real situation. It's a hot day, in Carlton where nobody has a backyard to sunbake in because real estate prices are so exorbitant. Two middle aged women, undoubtedly with husbands, kids, lovers, blah blah fill in the details yourself, or maybe they're lesbians and enjoying each other's company, are relaxing in a quiet corner of the park. Suddenly the place turns into a zoo. Two teenage boys rush around in that very corner of the otherwise isolated park (if I read your description correctly), booting a ball in a rather attention-seeking fashion. Well, that's not too bad, women are used to having children jumping around in their shadow. Then you wheel your bloody bike in, for God's sake, and prop yourself behind them where you can perv up their legs without meeting their accusing gaze.
Right. That's merely the setting.
So far there's no true imposition, from their viewpoint, though they are undoubtedly aware that you're hanging about in a suspect manner. You can forget about the yahoos. The dreary repertoire of sexually offensive cat-cries from such creeps is no news to any woman. They dealt with it directly, in its own terms.
The real point is, mate, you had no business at all going up to them and forcing your boring attentions on them.
I've offended you, have I? How dare I call your attentions boring? You're a really fascinating character, aren't you, a polymath of information in this dull television age?
Big deal. So what. You went into their turf and they had not given you the slightest, most remote hint of an invite. And you can forget about that puerile bare legs crap, we've dealt with the weather already.
How can a woman respond when some galah mooches up and sits down next to her in a public place?
She is constrained by manners, to her own detriment.
Yes, she can tell him pre-emptively to piss off, arsehole. This, of course, is rather dangerous at close range. Would you say that to some enormous oaf who sat down near you in an empty park and I don't know started playing a 30-watt per channel four speaker ghetto blaster in your ear (yes, I've read DOG'S WIFE—and quite liked it, which will surprise you I imagine). Of course not. Why antagonize some monster who has just demonstrated defective social sensibilities?
She can get up and move, maybe twice, with a threat to summon the authorities if he persists in following her. Joseph, we're tired of all that. Sick to the stomach. The way the blacks were. Jesus, you should grasp that much. No, the woman is going to stay there, where she put her blanket and her books and magazines (and how dare you mock the chosen reading matter of these women you are doing your best to smarmy up to? My God, Joseph, you Y-chromosome creatures are so pitiful so much of the time.)
So she is left with two choices, only one in practical terms. She ignores the unasked-for intruder and hopes he'll take himself off, or she humiliates him in terms posited by his own intrusion. Simply ignoring him places the burden back onto her. She has to cringe there, twitchy with adrenaline as the worst case, distracted and annoyed as the best case, waiting for someone else to make a decision that affects her more than it does him. Amazing!
Or she fights back with her stolid, armored indifference, her denial of him, her blank face. In your case this was clearly highly effective, because it turned your attempt at wit back on you, left you beached in your own impertinent visibility. I cheered when I read your victim's response, Joseph—not because I relished the pain you were feeling, because I like you, but because she was representing me in the non-stop fight against all of you damned stupid impertinent thick-witted overbearing insensitive pricks.
Then you might pay some heed to your wonderfully witty gambit with this unfortunate woman. She is minding her business, reading what you describe as a substantial and demanding book. In you come with your grotesque insult. Of course (the frame of your merry little jab tells us all) women in general and she in particular cannot read properly. You have been watching her, and you're here to let her know that if she were only lucky enough to be you, to be a man, she would be proceeding through the pages at a much faster rate. When she ignores this with the contempt it calls for, you actually have the vulgarity to go on and spell it out, repeat the sub-text in explicit form, rub her nose in it.
And all this in the context of a cheery voice, I have no doubt, a contextual assertion of friendly interest, an invitation to stop reading and have a conversation. One founded in her agreement that what she is reading is less important (and instantly perceived as such, the moment you arrive in all your glory) than your whim, your merest fancy to have a chat with an available woman, whoever she is, knowing nothing about her. And, as we've seen, requiring from her a blithe acceptance of her role as the butt of your joke, her agreement that she is a silly thing who, in any case, cannot read properly and is panting for your instruction in this matter.
Joseph, you fool. In a situation as blatant as this, you then have the stupefying audacity to feel hurt by her "indifference"!
Then we have Brian Wagner's profoundly stupid advice.
Far from facing up to any of the discourtesies in your assault on the peace of these women, Wagner takes it for granted that you have every right to slam yourself down in their midst and harass them to your heart's content.
What's his remedy to their (entirely justified) rebuff? No prizes. Abuse and persiflage. Execration or moaning complaint. ("Aw come on, girls, give a bloke a break or I'll vomit all over you.") Wagner is a fuckup, Joseph. I don't think he's responsible, but that doesn't mean I have to put up with it. If you let yourself get turned into a Wagner winebar protege, you can kiss your last chance at integrity and self-esteem goodbye.
It's nice outside, right now. Warm and blowy. The rain this morning, and through the last couple of weeks, has spruced the grass up in the yard. Well, the weeds at least. And the cracks in the ground seem to closing up at last. (You can view this paragraph of virus-driven babble as pointed metaphor if you wish.) See you at the next convocation, if not before. I understand it's being planned for the Pontes' farm. We can get drunk together and I'll explain in detail how much finer the world would be if all the men died quietly one night.
your cross Friend
Marjory Nourse
1970: sorry sorry sorry
Rozelle
13 March
My dear Joseph
I can't sleep (it's 4 a.m.), thinking about that foolish, self-indulgent letter. Can you accept my apology? It won't happen again. It's very bad to do things like that to people, I know. I'm truly sorry.
Watched television last night at a friend's—Baby Jane, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. It was astounding. One sister causing the other to go mad with jealousy. Incredibly horrifying.
I started a job today. Driving a Kombi van, delivering clean diapers and carting off crappy nappies to the laundry. Some difficulty driving, a terminally crapped out can. I mean "clapped out van," this must be your influence. The gear-stick knob flew off, the horn fell out, the gears stuck—Christ, U-turns on precarious dirt shoulders, backing blind, trying to avoid ditches. Nearly got bogged in French's Forest. It's very beautiful country, all the houses dispersed, like Eltham a few years ago.
7.30 a.m. to 3.00 p.m. for 2 weeks, perhaps longer. $50 a week. Came home after an English tutorial on top of that, flaked. Vague, indirect tutor, around 30, wouldn't answer any of my questions about Romanticism. I'd been thinking about Ernst Fischer, wanted to see how he fitted in. (This was hardly arbitrary—Romanticism is the period we're doing.) I tried to explain what I meant, the early expression of industrial alienation through identification of the image of "I" with nature & not man . . .
First, he said, he'd better explain what Romanticism was (having vaguely nodded his head at what I'd said), then just abandoned it. "No, no, it'd take too long, I can't really." Waffled off onto something else. I know he's not meant to supply us with answers, but some preliminary discussion was surely in order, so we could place the novels and poetry in some context. I felt very strange afterwards, as if I'd been told I shouldn't ask questions. But without probing, how else can one find out? Reading, yes, but aren't tutorials the occasion for ideas to be brought together and rubbed on each other? I have to do a paper on Lear for the next tute, and feel very insecure—so what's new!
Lanie and I shift in tomorrow, a great relief. Living at Alan's is making me neurotic.
The nights are chilly and the breeze during the day is cool. Summer's over, and I think I'm having a reaction to the change of season. Somehow I got it into my head that winter would never happen up here in Sydney, a thousand kilometers closer to the equator than Melbourne, that the air would always be warm and brilliant. I forgot . . . A letter would be nice—please.
My love to you,
Caroline
1970: censorship of the repressed
Mad Scientist's Benchtop
Monday March 16 70
petalfrog
The brainstem continues to operate on a vegetable level, and gets me here to work only half an hour late on the average. You may make yourself free in admiration for the quality of paper, design and letterhead printing on this classy sheet of paper. One of the boss's little coups, garnishing his empire as it sinks into the blood-red sea.
What of your house, have you moved in yet? Your affair with the American? Your drudgery? The slings and slurs of earning that brittle crust? For Christ's sake write me a note, even if just a brief one, to say what your present phone number is. If you have one available to you.
In an amazing splurge I rushed into Myers the other day and blew fifty bucks on a Casa Pupa bedspread. And voila! The room is now livable, which it wasn't during your stay I fear. I seized up a black cupboard from the kitchen (now replaced with an authentic crockery cabinet) and lugged this thing into my room and placed it beneath the window with a horrid red metal filing system on its ebon top and thought myself a clever little fellow indeed. My grandmother's battered suitcase which once held my every worldly item is now redundant and hidden beneath the bed and my room is a prospect of luminosity and wonder. All it needs is a pair of sprawling Norman Lindsay nudes. AND WHERE ARE THEY, I CRY?
With my long-whetted interest in Roth's "Civilization & Its Discontents," you can imagine how eagerly I ripped out of the hands of Wagner the celebrated quipu publisher a copy of Portnoy's Complaint, that wicked banned document, in (of course) a plain paper cover. Jeez, funny! I could of cacked meself!
I'm not altogether convinced that it lives up to its reputation as a dirty book. For improper porno proper, one might better turn, for example, to Image of the Beast by a guy called Farmer (also banned by the Australian censor and smuggled in by Wagner), which I've just read with many a shudder. The first chapter kicks off with an al dente account of a man who is (a) strapped to a Y-shaped table with leather thongs, and has his prick (b) sucked off, and then (c) gnawed off with (d) stainless steel dentures.
The women of this house are indeed interested in Wimmens Lib. Converted in part by Bakery reports. And perhaps your sense of excitement. But if any of you bites off anyone's dong I'll never speak to you again. Must do some of what I'm paid for.
love and licks
your frend J
1970: without tablets
Rozelle
Sunday 22 March
My Dear Horse
Lanie and I sitting at the dining room table, radio blasting, omelettes eaten, drowned in cups of tea. 9.15 p.m. Just finished writing up an experiment for Beh. Sci. on observation and recall. The wonders of a truly educated tertiary mind!
We scour secondhand furniture shops, bargaining wildly. Lanie thinks she's still in Asia, where it's de rigeur. Will we still be scouting around Op Shops when we're 64? 'Fraid so.
A beautiful, gentle camp guy answered our ad. He'll move in soon.
Driving the Kombi on the North Shore means I travel alongside the coast and can stop for lunch by the sea, walk along the beach or just sit on the sand breathing salty wind—really beautiful. I'm beginning to sleep without tablets which makes me happy. Alan has returned to his wife, thank God. It was getting me down. I'm going to cut out some letters about Portnoy from the uni paper. They'll give you some idea of what I'm dealing with. Without exception, they denounce the foul obscenity of it all. (Actually, I don't think I could slog through the whole book. The bits on masturbation were hilarious.)
beautiful thoughts,
Caroline
A DOG'S WIFE
. . .five
Our bags were packed for Australia when the gentlemen from the government called by to announce that we might not emigrate after all. Their arguments were Byzantine and sturdily documented with sheafs of paper each of a different unusual size. Their case for refusing our exit bore every indication of hinging on Spot's deficiencies as a human being, a bigoted and politically unpopular stance; carefully masked, therefore, by technicalities of a veterinarian nature.
It quickly came home to me that these manifestations in turn were intended to deflect attention from the true reason for our durance, namely, Spot's peerless gifts as a nuclear theoretician. The government wanted my husband to make bombs for them.
"The di-quark hypothesis," he told me. We had no secrets from each other. Although I am not certain that I followed him in every detail, it seemed that rather large bangs could be elicited from small amounts of fairly rare stuff using another variety of extremely unlikely fizzy material, which failed to add up to zero when you checked the niobium spheres.
1970: checks and balances
Melbourne Monday 30 March 70
McPossum
Easter Monday morning and I sit at my desk at work, city empty, boss on holiday, troll secretary on holiday, adman on holiday, hurray, clad in hairy pullover and lairy flares of huge green & white flowers, lighting up my nth Kent for my leathery morning throat, tired and shaky for no real reason having spent a dull afternoon yesterday—ah yes, I did, I did—at the Easter hike convocation—I can't seem to stay away, but all they do is compete and show each other the size of their intellectual dongs . . . I sit here, as I say, and consider your various unanswered letters. Thank you for writing them (Another Person in Another Place is saying Hello).
Your hung-up letter was pretty sad, but I am not sorry you sent it anyway. And shit, don't apologize—it was more real than anything I've ever written to you.
Your job sounds arduous and repulsive. Everyone at Chez Triangle of Death sends commiserations, while envying the lunches by the sea-cliff (I used to think St. Kilda was by the sea until I moved there).
My Big News is that I resigned on Friday and will only have to stay in this behavioral sink for another week, or until the boss can replace me. This is regarded as a remote prospect by some here (no professional would touch it, $100 a week or not). Hence, it was with a wild surmise that I suggested to Wagner that he might care to supplant me. He cackled and drooled, the poor blind fool, so I'll put him up for the position when the boss gets back tomorrow.
In order to finance this extravagant madness, I may have to defer paying my university debts yet again. I've now got enough to live on at $25 a week (ample I hope) for 18 weeks, and I can scrape up some more here and there. In say 6 months perhaps you'll be able to pay me back a bit of that loan and I can always look for a more congenial job. (But for Christ's sake don't worry about paying me back before then. Grinding the face of the poor into shitty nappies is more than my stomach could tolerate.)
Various souls from our house took themselves to the Launching Place "Miracle" (peace, love, joy and $30,000 profit to the organizers), fanging off with high hopes on Saturday at lunchtime with bags and tents and lamb chops and singers and instrumentalists, and returned muddy and bedraggled and saddened and hungry Saturday evening.
Mud and rain and drunken yahoos and portable lavatories blown over by the howling torrent and amps failing in the middle of songs. Wendy Saddington smiled sweetly, it seems, at the end of her bracket, and took the mike angelically, and said with all her might: "I'd like to send a big cheery get fucked to the organizers of this farce," and there were cries of approval, and away everyone raced into the gloom for home and hot chops done on a gas stove like God meant and hot cross bums.
Our evil rooting cat is pregnant, having failed to avail herself of her Malthusian Belt the fuck-wit.
I got a call from Libby the other day, saw her for drinkies. Bumped into her in town a week later, window shopped, arranged lunch for last Thursday. By half past one I was hungry, frustrated and furious. I bought some sandwiches at two thirty. No call even yet. Wicked, wicked Libby. Or could there be something wrong in my approach to women?
Back to Portnoy and self-service.
I'm not really obsessed by the lower things, you know. I have an advanced political consciousness. As I stood bored and devastated at the convocation, several people rushed up saying, "Oh come see, a great marvel, a little-known luminary from America."
"How sublime," I cried. "By what wonder is it that we should be blessed to have an actual living American here amongst us, here in our unpretentious island continent."
"Why," they told me, their faces glowing at this stroke of luck, "it was made possible only because he happened to be in Melbourne on R & R."
Jesus Fucking Christ, I thought, this is Easter Sunday not Napalm Sunday. "What does he do in Vietnam," I asked.
"He's a Computer Programmer."
"Oh, he doesn't actually burn the people himself," I mumbled into my paper cup of Coke, "he just arranges the schedules?"
Blank looks. "Well anyway, come on, I'll introduce you."
"No thanks," I said, and walked in the other direction, pursued by looks of scorn and incomprehension. But Jeez, he's a famous little-known genuine American quipu editor and international clever dick, they told one another.
I suppose I'd better do some work now, sweetheart. Even if I do plan to leave as much as possible to my hapless successor.
lots of love
Joseph
1975: truth is no stranger to fiction
((((((((())))))))))
Special LEST WE FORGET issue of HOT AIR
which is published, typed, and fairly often completely written by your correspondent, Brian Wagner, but usually mimeo'd and collated by my kind friends at our famous Monthly Collation Party. Last stencil (this one, dummy) is being typed November 10, 1975, the evening before Remembrance Day. With all sincerity, I bow my head and pray: may they not have died in vain. A million dollars every two minutes is the last estimate I read of the arms expenditure of our peaceful world. HOT AIR is available at my whim, or for trade with your quipu. No subscriptions.
((((((((())))))))))
Because so many of you have been asking me for an authoritative account of how our Government and our Loyal Opposition got themselves into the current lunatic deadlock, with the Senate under Opposition control denying Supply to the Government we elected just a year and a half ago, I am going to tell you, instead, the strange and until now hidden tale of my conversion to hikedom.
Yes, dear friends, there is no longer any sense in paying attention to politics, to the commonweal, to common sense for that matter. Our masters are all fucked in the brain. Whether Gough or Mal wins in the current battle, it is we who are certainly the losers.
I am aware that Joseph Williams, for example, will not be startled by this point of view. Against his nihilism, I have argued in support of Ballots, Involvement, Close Attention To The News and all that stuff which I gather my American readers imbibe in, er, "Civics Class."
My faith in due process is now fairly shook. Even during the Vietnam war I never entirely lost hope in rationality. When Gough Whitlam became Prime Minister of Australia in 1972 and pulled the troops out of Nam, I felt my faith was justified. Now that we seem to be on the verge of a coup (and what else can you call it when a wealthy minority Opposition gets ready to throw out the elected Government?) I have changed my mind. The world is a nest of fantasy. There is no truth in it.
So I have decided to tell you something that is true, for which I can vouch from my own intimate experience. I will tell you how I encountered my first Quipu, and how this pivotal moment in my life explains the absence thereafter in my bed of all the numerous beautiful women who once thronged that place. Okay?
It was in the early 1960s. I do not care to be more precise, lest I incur the jeers of callow newcomers. I sat in my penthouse apartment above Collins Street. My green martini olive gazed like a bland eye. I swirled the glass lazily, set the insouciant fruit bobbing, and winked sardonically back at it.
I felt at peace with the world that year and that day, and with good reason. The conservative parties ruled the land. No one had heard of Women's Liberation. (Seriously, Marjory, just joking. If you don't believe me I'll send you my I AM A HUMORLESS FEMINIST badge.) In the kitchen a luscious long-legged model named Asquith Lancaster was humming softly. With some satisfaction I congratulated myself yet again on my good taste and good fortune.
I stretched, and every muscle in my lean athletic body tensed and relaxed, even though aerobics had not yet been invented. My silk pyjamas rustled. Recessed lamps suffused peach light, and the conditioned air was intimate with Asquith's perfume.
Only unwarranted modesty would permit me to deny that my apartment, twenty floors above the scuttling lights of the inner city, was a testimonial to my exquisite taste. Worth Avenue had supplied most of the interior. My decorator had flown to Australia specifically to do the place out. The bric-a-brac I'd picked up in my wanderings perfectly complemented the Lanfranchi decor.
From above the marble fireplace, a samurai sword cast a paradoxically gentle wash of light into my eyes. It always amused me to recall how it had come into my possession. The small, astoundingly nimble old Japanese martial arts expert had found me besottedly engaged with his unmarried daughter. With terrible rage, but awesome control, he suggested a method whereby our mutual honor might be satisfied. It was a frightening moment; as the saying is, my cojones were on the line. When his naughty daughter giggled merrily, however, I knew that the outcome was assured.
Three times I heard hajime, the call to begin, and three times it was not I who at last called for quarter. There is much to be said for a strict diet of animal proteins. On the following morning, in the bright Tokyo sun, the old gentleman presented me with the precious heirloom that mere hours before had threatened that portion of me by virtue of which, ironically, the sword was forfeit and satisfaction contrived.
When Asquith glided into the room with our coffee my gaze moved as if by metaphor from the ancient polished curve to her own graceful form. Her heart-stopping beauty momentarily stopped my heart, as, delicate and daring beneath the luminescence of her floating peignoir, her incomparable beauty subdued to a mere backdrop the apartment's elegance.
Without a word I placed my half-finished martini on the cherrywood table as she put down the silver tray, fumes of coffee rising, and I took her into my arms, her face nuzzling my chest, my own lips moving across the ebony of her hair. The doorbell rang.
"What is it now?" Asquith asked nastily. "Your secretary?" She looked at her tiny Swiss watch. "Special delivery from Fortnum & Mason's? Perhaps your interior decorator?"
Though I fumed, I allowed no trace of my annoyance to show. The bell rang again, and I drew a monogrammed chinese gown about my shoulders. "I'm truly sorry, my dear," I told her with a boyish smile. "I left unequivocal instructions with the porter that we should remain undisturbed tonight." I went across the thick pile of the carpet.
A demented, unshaven man stood with his finger on the bell, dressed in shoddy, grubby clothes. At his feet was a sturdy wooden case, plastered liberally with injunctions concerning its handling. I looked again from box to face. My first impression had been correct. It was the face of a complete fool.
"Joseph, what are you doing here?"
"Hello, Brian." Joe Williams had never been to my apartment before. I watched a sequence of expressions as he gazed through the half-open door. All involved a measure of greed or lust. "I've been in Peru working on the Paqari-tampu dig. I've got a present for you."
"Is he coming in?" Asquith asked. I was gratified in my proprietorial enthusiasm by the convulsive spasm of Joseph's throat. As I shook his hand it was his head he shook numbly, staring at her. After the thin high air of the Cordillera Oriental, he had stumbled on heady perfumes too rich for his parched sensibilities. "No. Plane flights. Very kind. Tired. Finlay."
"This is Joseph Williams," I told Asquith, and gave him her name in return. "He's been doing some archeo-linguistic work with my friend Ray Finlay. He appears to be letting us know that Ray sent this crate to me, and I would hazard from this inference that it contains something too delicate or precious to consign to commercial carriers. Would that be the gist of it, dear fellow? Are you sure you wouldn't like a drink?"
Asquith was at Joseph's elbow, a narrow enough squeeze in the doorway, with a long scotch. He took it and a hearty snort without demur. We wrestled the crate inside while Asquith topped up his glass. I helped him lever the top off. Splintering, the metal-lined wooden top laid bare an enormous supply of packed cotton waste. Joseph drank down his second scotch.
"We thought at first it was a Psammead." He sniggered and leered at Asquith.
"How lovely!" She beamed and clapped her hands. "A sand-fairy! And in the mountains of South America! I thought they were mythical beasts."
"Science has learned much in recent years," Joseph told her as she refilled his glass. I removed a large wrinkled leathery object from the box and held it out with some distaste.
"Ugh. An ancient Peruvian soccer ball?"
"Certainly not," said the syntactical archaeologist. "It's an egg. A fossil egg. Raymond thought it might grace your collection of objets trouvés." He leaned over to point out a salient feature and fell on his face. The massive pile of the carpet spared him any lasting injury.
"Another?" murmured Asquith, presenting decanter and ice.
"Nope. Must be off. Your hospitality." I noticed that he was peering fondly into Asquith's décolletage, and steered him into the gloom of the corridor.
I set the egg in a silver bowl on the mantelpiece, contemplated it for a moment with intense fascination, and cleaned away the cotton waste and shreds of crate. Asquith made fresh coffee. We drank it fresh and sweet, from a single cup, gazing at each other. I took her to bed.
"Twice or thrice had I loved thee," I cribbed from John Donne, "before I knew thy face or name." Asquith breathed warmth into my poetic mouth. Her moist tongue touched the edges of my teeth. A cool flame licked at my dazed mind. I crushed her savagely against me and bit her earlobe, remembering as a sort of prospective metaphor the endless night on the combat mat in the Tokyo dojo. A vivid noise detonated in the living room.
There was a slow pungent exhalation of air six or seven thousand years old.
My heart leaped like a wounded thing. Asquith stiffened, which was a great deal more than could be said for me.
"My dear," I said, "can you reach the lights." In the darkness there was an irritated bumping as my beauty twisted the rheostat. Even as the lights came up there was a ghastly squawk and such a scratching of horny feet on painted ceramic tile as I had never heard even from game-cocks in a crisis of murderous rage.
Asquith did not stint herself. She screamed her head off.
I catapulted off the bed like a marionette jerked by some higher agency, following with my eyes the line of Asquith's shaking finger. On the fireplace tiles in the living room, surrounded by torn leathery shards, blinking beady eyes in the light from the bedroom, a small crabby creature preened its wings and tore at the carpet with its feet.
"Oh my God," Asquith said. "It smells awful."
"It's been in the shell rather a long time," I pointed out.
"You know what it is, Brian."
"It is difficult to believe." I went closer, holding one of my new love's hands behind me. The anatomy was indubitable. This was no Psammead. "It's a genuine paleomorph," I said. "Let us hope it is the domesticated and not the feral variety. Truly incredible." I think I was lost from that moment, enchanted and committed.
You know how it is with cats. No one owns a cat. It is a condition of mutual respect. It is impossible to con a cat with insincerity. By the same token, cats are incredibly jealous. Watch the way a man's cat acts when a beautiful woman enters the room. If you're attune to it, the air is singed with unvoiced antagonism.
Just about the worst thing a woman can do, in such a situation, is to praise the cat, ruffle it dutifully, and then pretend it isn't there. Almost inevitably she will be edged out of your life, and you'll never know quite what it was about her that you disliked.
Asquith did not do that worst thing. She pulled her hand out of mine and stormed across the room. In her white face, her cheekbones held two burning points of anger.
"This is no better than a mad-house," she told me. Carefully avoiding the engrossed creature peering up at her, she pulled her long dark cape over her shoulders. Her voice was high, not in the least pretty. "I don't know why I came here in the first place." She found her purse. At the door she turned. "You can sleep with your bloody horrible old mythical creature."
A small, fierce gout of flame singed the edge of her cape as she swept from the room, and the Kwee-poo (for such it was, dear friends) yawned a jagged mouth of teeth and came meaningfully across the carpet toward me.
1977: kidnaped
Without a radiator (the Finlays do not run to luxury), wrapped up against the icy air in skivvy, pullover, cord trousers undone at the waist, and blanket, Joseph Williams lies in his guestroom bed, watching gray and white images on the 14-inch screen and waiting for the phone to ring and tell him his father has died at last.
Cliché encompasses everything vital in our lives, he thinks. Leave aside the drama, at once heightened and flattened, on the silly television set. All that he has read (and most of what he has read is trivial, fatuous, palliative), all of it has given precise accounts of just this burning emptiness in his viscera, this needle thrust, this ache behind the eyes and in the antrums. When his mother died, when Caro left him, he wept without hesitation, swallowed by the spontaneity of his grief. For his old, parched, eaten father he feels no empathy, no true link, not even any longer the irritation that used to enrage his mornings and evenings. His father is dying of lung cancer, stinking in his hospital bed, and Joseph can do nothing more cogent than stare at the Finlays' spare monochrome TV set. As usual, he hasn't even got anyone to talk to. Ray is away for the weekend at an AI conference, Terry the geologist is off in the center of the Dead Heart belting the deep crust with shock waves and listening for the cry of oil, Marjory is presumably delving into linguistics in her study.
Joseph's hand slips down under the blanket, reaching for his lonely prick.
There is a tap at the door, which opens immediately.
1976: an invitation
26 October 76
DEAR JOSEPH
I AM WRITING IN BIG LETTERS IN CASE YOU SEARED YOUR RETINAE INTO BLISTERED LAVA DURING THE EXCITEMENT OF THE ECLIPSE.
On second thought, that is not likely, since as a person of Tested and Accredited Genius you would be conversant with the dangers and risks of the Scientific Method.
Our dog did not Howl, even though we showed him the Eclipse on Telly. Perhaps he has lived too long with Man, and his Feral Nature has been covered over by a Thin Veneer of Civilization.
Actually he is not our Dog but Terry's. Terry is the geologist who shares our Home. Actually the Dog is not a He but a She.
My Husband Ray's two Cats were very bad the other night. They ripped the Chicken Remnants out of the Garbage Bag, tunneling through the plastic with their Teeth and Paws. Bad Pussies! It might have been the Eclipse.
Where was I? Ah yes, thinking about something Ray said tonight. He told me that you were feeling really pissed off with life but (like Mike Murphy) at least prepared to write about your misery. What he actually said, if I remember correctly, what that in your confessional self-revelations was the true heart of Australian hikedom, appallingly vulnerable, defensively brittle or silly, sprung from a hundred familial herniations into a tenuous, desperate recension of the same unbearable dynamic (paradoxically), yet finally risking that huddled core of wounded self in a most unsure and uncertain hope of resurrection. I'm pretty sure I've got that right.
In short, me and the hubby would like you to pack your bag and come across on the tram and stay with us for a week or so. We've got a spare room and a spare cat, so get your arse into gear and take a week off from your depressing surrounds. No excuses will be tolerated.
your Friend
Marjory Finlay
1977: repeat offensive
22 August 77
Dear Joseph
We haven't seen you for a long time. Have you gone mad and been destroyed under the Rabid Dog's Act? Think yourself lucky, at least, that you do not share the parlous condition of the brain-swap bloke I watched last night in The Revenge of Frankenstein. He'd been bludgeoned a number of times across the cranial wound with a stout chair. It was likely, the criminal surgeon mused, that this had damaged a brain cell.
I notice on my calendar that it's now ten months since we offered you a room and a cat for a week or so. It's no wonder you persist in your Slough of Despond when you refuse to take up these unparalleled opportunities to taste my crook cooking. We expect to see you on the doorstep before the week is out.
sternly,
Marjory Finlay, M.A.
1977: won't you dance
Guiltily, Joseph snatches his hand from beneath the blanket and stares fixedly at the television screen.
"Worth watching?"
"No. Quite amazingly cretinous, in fact. It makes you wonder." What is this he's babbling? He would be hard pressed to identify the channel, let alone the program. His erection has subsided; he looks across at Marjory, who settles herself comfortably on the end of his single bed.
What he sees causes a series of distinct physiological alterations in his body-chemistry, each as banal and stereotyped as the mood of pent mourning for his dying father had been two minutes earlier. Thankfully Marjory is not looking him in the face. His skin warms, then cools.
A mad surmise leaps in his chest.
She has arrived in his bedroom, when all is said and done, as close to naked as it's feasible to be, given the chilly air. Joseph has never seen either Ray or Marjory in their night wear, and on a subliminal level has supposed that, like him, they go naked in summer and leave their underwear on in winter. Evidently Marjory is more conventional than that, for here she is in a strikingly translucent nylon nightdress, high at the throat and falling to her ankles but hardly hiding her wonderful full breasts and the bifurcation of her lower limbs.
Cliché or not, Joseph's heart squeezes in syncope, a long pause, a lollop, a bloodless moment for his brain. His erection surges back.
"Feel free to change the channel," he says. If she does that she will be obliged to learn forward, which will cause her breasts to move free of her ribcage into the line of the blue radiation burning like ice on the screen.
Jesus, Joseph thinks. I am reacting like a smutty schoolkid who's never seen the curiously arousing weird forked hairy thing he scribbles so drivenly on lavatory walls, behind the doors, in the back of his homework book. Some ludicrous censor in my mind is interposing itself on the raw reality of what I wish, like the psychic manifestation of a Victorian chaperone.
Marjory leans placidly against the wall. She has said something about whatever he's watching suiting her. When a ghastly commercial capers across the screen she gives him a quick smile of complicity.
It was Marjory who asked him here, after all. Neither of those letters had Ray's mark. If anything, she insisted. Badgered him. It seems impossible to believe, but could she even then have had this in mind? Or is he inventing the whole thing, the musky tang in the air, the straining forcefields between them across the Invicta blanket he's tugging to his chin.
"Marjory," he gets out, interrupting something she's started about his work, his parents, whatever it is.
"Joseph," she says in turn, after a moment, with a touch of mockery. It is almost enough to bring him unstuck, to nail his tongue. He waits for the trembling in his legs to come under control, certain that she must feel the humiliating tremor through the frame of the hard-sprung bed.
"Well, it's just that, Ray isn't here, and I'm all alone after all, and I wonder if we might not more profitably employ ourselves at some more sensual task than watching replays of last Saturday's football."
The door is closing in a blur before he can untangle what happened. Was that a strangled laugh? An incredulous snort cut short too late? Joseph covers his head with the blanket, cold as ice, shaking with fright and self-detestation.
The images tumble pointlessly on the screen. The door opens again. In comes Marjory puffing ostentatiously on a cigarette. She rarely smokes, considers it a habit foisted on people by unscrupulous capitalists. She chucks the opened packet to him, matches from the other hand. A heavy dressing gown covers her chubby flesh, closed with a safety pin across her ample breasts.
"I'm sorry," Joseph tells her finally.
"No, no, don't be silly. It's just that—" She puffs in breaths laden with carcinogens and calm. There is no ashtray, so she drags over the stencil-filled trash basket. A stench of singed wax floods the room when she stamps out her butt, lights a second cigarette and lobs in the smoking match. "You've always been like a brother to me, Joseph."
He mutters resentfully, "And you're not into incest."
She grins at him, forgiving, friendly. "One of the few sins not on my charge-sheet." But neither of them has much appetite for banter. The moment the show finishes on the screen, she hops off the end of the bed, gives his cloaked foot a sisterly squeeze, and retires to her own chaste fastness.
Stereotype or not, Joseph lies back on his pillow and bites at his lip until the blood runs.
1979: joseph loses faith in human kind
JOSEPH:
The artist as criminal and victim. The victim as mutilated—
BRIAN WAGNER [rising, leaving the room]:
No reflection on your talk, Joseph.
JOSEPH:
You notice that the subject of truncation has caused Wagner to move to the lavatory.
[Laughter]
Now this struck me as interesting, because in those days, in 1966, when I was lying in my enormous bed . . . I had built myself a very large bed in 1966 in the house I was sharing with some friends. I made it out of three separate single beds; I then built a gigantic bookshelf all around it, and this construction filled almost all the room. I had my record player near the window. One day when I came home I found the window open and the record player gone. I felt mutilated and violated, and this wasn't a good feeling. At that moment I lost faith in human kind. I wanted nothing more than the immediate instigation of a cruel universal regime of surveillance and punishment.