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THREE: Plato's essence

The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the philosophical tradition that what we see and measure in the world is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality . . . The temptation to reify is powerful. The idea that we have detected something "underlying" the externalities of a large set of correlation coefficients, something perhaps more real than the superficial measurements themselves, can be intoxicating. It is Plato's essence . . .

::Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
 

1978: getting to grips with the All

 

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THE MAGAZINE OF GRAND OVERARCHING THEORY

is a special number of Ray Finlay's .26APA regular,

STANDARD DEVIATION,

 

and is dedicated to the sixth anniversary of the marriage between Marjory and me, an event which not one of you will remember, you drunken swine, on Saturday, April 1, 1972. If that was Saturday, this must be Saturday too. Yes, folks, by the miracle of the Gregorian calendar, I type this colophon on April Fool's Day, 1978, under the helm of John Malcolm Fraser and his splendid band of illiberal Liberals. Maintain your rage, Brian.

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[] 1. It takes a worried man to sing a worried song.[]

 

I don't like what's happening to this country. It is being turned into a strip-mine and hauled across the ocean, and nobody seems to care too much. We might have ceased burning the skin off Vietnamese kids but the people who brought you My Lai and Hiroshima are still running our elected representatives. All the flashy baubles of the fifties and sixties have gone back into the boxes. My Marxist colleagues have a happy gleam in their eyes. The spreading recession and rocketing unemployment might shock those who thought the Boom would never expire, but not my mates. It's the long-predicted collapse of monopoly capital, you see.

The prospect of ever-increasing misery, here and in places where misery is taken for granted, does not cheer me, however.

 

[] 2. Everyone wants to go to Heaven, but nobody wants to die.[]

 

It's said that these are the necessary conditions to crack the shell of capitalism. I hate that thought. For starters, I don't see the problem as restricted to capitalism, monopoly or otherwise. It looks to me as if global technological rationality is the villain. Red, or Red White and Blue, it's the machine mind that's killing us. It's no longer fashionable to quote Marcuse (Hi Joe) or Theodore Roszak, and I wonder why that is. I suppose their ideas must have been exploded. That must be it.

 

[] 3. When I was a fascist.[]

 

Social science is a mess right now. On the left, we have a morass of unintelligible Krauts and Frogs garbling on about hegemony and hermeneutics and poststructuralism, all form and no substance. On the right we have, if Australia's madly rightist Prime Minister John Malcolm Fraser is to be believed, Ayn Rand.

A good many years ago, when the rough and tumble of clever dick debate occasioned the disclosure of one's political hue, I cheerfully used to say I was a fascist.

Of course that was rhetoric, shock tactics, rather like Joe Williams telling us he's an anarchist when actually he's just lazy. I was hopelessly vague on most of the historical events and processes that had occurred between the end of the second century A.D. and the middle of the 1950s, but I knew about the Jews in the death camps. I knew enough to loathe real fascism.

So, in terming myself a fascist I was not espousing the cause of jackbooted psychopaths (or jackbooted civil servants). I was using adolescent exaggeration to express the belief that had been instilled into me: that most people are incapable of managing their own affairs without the firm guiding hand of a specially gifted elite. Imagine how happy I was when my scores came back and I was invited to join Two Six.

Like our Prime Minister today, I held the works of Ayn Rand in high regard. Although her style wasn't a million miles from pulp best-sellerdom, I was made euphoric by the integrity of her individualist philosophy. Had I received a thorough bourgeois education, perhaps I'd have thrilled instead to Nietzsche. As it was, I found in Ayn Rand an intoxicating denunciation of the collectivist hive society, and a bracing promise of freedom through the ethic of pure selfishness.

I was prepared to tolerate the crude dichotomies embodied in her heroes and villains. Still, even though this was well before all the uproar over sexism, I didn't like the sadomasochist sex enjoyed by Rand's supremely individual protagonists. For a while I figured this was a personal hang-up of Ms. Rand's. Later I saw it was the obscene, loveless essence of the radical right.

So I don't call myself a fascist any more. And a quick glance around the world suggests a few skeptical thoughts about Marxism. What we need is an updated look at how It All Fits Together. Go back to basics. Think it through again. That's what I've been doing lately. Here are some of my thots.

 

[] 4. Everything you wanted to know about Everything but were afraid to ask.[]

 

We can kick off with three axioms about the nature of the Being of the universe (as opposed to the Nothingness that its existence excludes, and don't give me any trouble, Meyer):

Let's agree that, ontologically, the universe must be [i] autonomous (i.e., self-generating and self-sustaining), [ii] monistic (all one thing, not split up into mind and matter, say, or matter and energy), and [iii] coherent (internally consistent, all its bits governed by (and expressions of) a single principle, though this might take different forms under different conditions.

These axioms can't be tested. The first two, as Kant showed, refer to features of the Ding an Sich (the thing-in-itself) which in any meaningful empirical sense is incorrigibly "behind a veil," beyond description or analysis. The third is a necessary act of faith. Heisenberg and Gödel indicate the impossibility of "proving" this postulate from within the system, which is where we are and where we will remain.

We know a lot about the universe that we didn't a century ago. This inundation of information, especially from the empirical sciences, is the result of close, careful investigations into specialized "fields of study." Breaking your questions up is expedient, because it works so well, but it has created a de facto proscription on any attempt at overall perspective, of the kind religions once provided.

More crucially, this view has a de jure status among many philosophers of science. The method of systematic doubt, coupled with the relativity of the involved observer, seems to leave no invulnerable standpoint from which you could get a general perspective.

Partial systems have been built within the limits allowed by the general prohibition. No matter how fragmentary they are, no specific studies can proceed in a conceptual vacuum. The very use of procedural rules implies a measure of methodological unanimity.

So partial theorists are, as it were, agnostics rather than atheists.

Marxists and a variety of other cultural determinists fail on similar grounds, covertly relying on smuggled-in teleology to extrapolate history by "rules" that turn out to be merely a celebration of the status-quo.

This celebration of the prevailing order (which does not, of course, preclude condemnation of aspects of that order) underlies—and undermines—the epistemology of the partial theorists themselves. Neo-Marxist critics have been at the forefront in exposing the derangements of theory afflicting post-positivist doctrines.

Regrettably, the therapeutic benefits of neo-Marxist critique are marred in turn.

Not the least of its problems is the hoary "dialectic." Since Hegel's day, and Marx's, logical tools have been available more sophisticated and coherent than the extraordinarily open-ended "negation of the negation."

A crucial weakness in the dialectic as a tool for thought was asserted by Karl Popper: it is either a brutally binary, polar discrimination, or else so sloppy that it's useless when applied to science or history. (I shall come back to this.) "Yes/No" is not a summary of the universe. We must have the possibility "Neither/Either/Both/Some." Joseph Williams tells me this insight has been forced on science in the form of a "quantum logic," as micro-physical states are always described in probabilistic terms.

A weak reed, the dialectic points nonetheless to the true and crucial proposition that any event contingent on other events is a "fact" only in so far as it "suppresses" all the alternative facts that might have been generated by other combinations of the events on which it is contingent. Few facts are inevitable.

Yet strict bounds limit (and express) the number of variant "realities" available as recombinations of a given set of facts. An example from mathematics is the use of group theory to map out the exact kinds and number of subatomic particles that can exist if everything is built up from a limited set of quarks and leptons. Thus a "fact" suppresses only its generable alternatives, not everything else in the universe.

Facts are not singular and isolate. A clue to the solution was suggested by Arthur Koestler, who invoked the non-fragmentary principle of hierarchy. Koestler coined the valuable term "holon," which is matrix, mosaic and unit all in one. His Janus-faced polyoptional holons provide a key to a field-understanding of the data that specialists have torn bleeding from the universe.

At one level of perception, a given holon is a whole system; at another, it is merely a small feature of a more complex holon. A molecule may be part of a protein, which is part of a living cell. Yet it has its own integrity, as have the atoms of which it is composed, as have the nucleons at their heart.

The role of the synthesist, the grand theorist, is to put back together, in qualitatively ascending ranks, the holons that partial theorists have studied locally.

Because holonistic systems are self-regulating, communicating up and down between levels along a variety of feedback loops, the synthesist has a finite task. Once he has isolated the holons and their structural laws, he can depend on them not exploding in his face.

On the other hand, since holistic systems transmute quantitative change into qualitative jumps, his enterprise re-introduces into science (not merely as a wishful hope from religion) a rigorous link between "facts" and "values." It offers the possibility of choices outside the status-quo, options that are repressed into neither the reactionary eschatologies of metaphysics nor the one-dimensional totalitarianism of ideology.

 

And we'll have more on this gripping topic, if you can bear the drone of my voice, in the next STANDARD DEVIATION, sports fans.

 

A DOG'S WIFE

 . . .four

 

Father interceded at once, bless him. An entire battery of lawyers tussled around the clock with their opposite numbers in the Administration. Randy had lost his entrée to the Pentagon, unfortunately, following the release of that film.

Possibly with a view to comforting me, Mother called by. She patted my hand. "Rover will be just fine. You'll see." I kicked her ankle. She hobbled out.

 

1970: exhumations

 

Rozelle

Friday 3rd April

My dear Joseph

Friday night dinner: tea & bread & cheese, friendly shadows on the wall, peace.

English tutorial this evening, with an arrogant turd big on 18th century Romantics. He got totally crapped off when I introduced 20th century concepts of the novel—I cited D. H. Lawrence and Patrick White as using similar plots to far more devastating political (social?) effect. Irrelevant. Oh. How about John Barth's Sot-Weed Factor? That was more to his liking. He babbled on about Fielding's invention of structured plot.

Why must I waste my time with these two hundred year old dodos? Literary merit? But what do they tell me about today? I mean, when the bastard won't even allow them to be compared with current work? I should chuck it in after the half-year exams, take some semester credit points and piss off uo north to Darwin in my little car. I have a Statistics exam in 2 weeks and still haven't even bought the text book.

Still hot up here. I struggle with nappies—christ they can get heavy. It's good, though, out in the fresh air. Always trees.

Strangely, I was pleased that you've thrown in your job. Another proof that you are not selling out like everyone else. Just make sure you don't stay home all day, you'll suffocate. Get out to the art galleries. I find some sensational things—occasionally.

At the university library tonight I tried to order a book they don't have in the catalogue. I couldn't have it purchased, being an undergraduate. Broad education. My harangue was interrupted by a little scuttling mouse spinning and twitching in circles. The librarian was not amused. The place is full of them. She plans to set some traps.

Sydney Uni Fisher library's no better. It's like Prahran market on Saturday morning just before noon. I spoke to one of the Women's Liberation members who works in the stacks there. Big drama—she asked her boss for permission to wear slacks (there's no regulation covering the matter), and it's to be brought up at the next staff meeting. Slax in the Stax—is this the start of the revolution?

Saw Zabriskie Point. Worth seeing for the beautiful girl, a robust Eve, fabulous. Starts well, the middle's a drag with some okay bits & pieces, ends brilliantly. Worth $1.75.

When your hair grows out again, will you get someone to take some photos for me? I know it's despicable and corny; my bourgeois upbringing.

I bought a new hot water bottle today.

Caroline

 

1970: pumping irony

 

Primate Typewriting

St. Kilda

28 April 70

 

dear bobbles

Much frenzied running round for the Vietnam Moratorium. Our household contingent of Liberated Matrons is preparing jollies for the May Day march. Wimmen's Lib at the Bakery are constructing earnest sober placards to hoist aloft. They roundly and hissingly rejected the suggestions from our own sprightly groovers, who now plan to march in their own wee bloc under such motifs as CHRIST WAS A WORKING GIRL, NO COPULATION WITHOUT REMUNERATION, SPURN THE SPERM and so forth. Outrage on every side.

Mum rang last night to warn me of the dangers of taking part in the silly business, breaking the law by sitting down in the streets and interrupting decent working people, following that silly fellow Cairns, you weren't thinking of going in it were you Joe, oh well, it's your own life, just don't expect your father to bail you out because we won't.

Looked into hiring a mimeo to run off my own quipu. $5 a week. They must be joking. Have to try to get Wagner to do it for me.

I decided to spend a month Improving Myself. Learning to touch-type. Take driving lessons. Start at a gym. I got as far as seeing the proprietor of the local gym, who swore he could cure my asthma in three months with a program of squats (sic), which consists of just that, hundreds of times, with increasingly monstrous weights hung across one's spindly shoulders or deltoids.

Ha.

$30 for three months, in advance. Build the body beautiful as well. He'd start me off with a general program that thoroughly (and no doubt excruciatingly) exercises every muscle in the bod, eventually concentrating on those parts in greatest need. (A hugely muscular penis?) Two factors deter me. One is that the gym, though conveniently situated, lacks a sunlamp. How jejune to bulge pastily. The second is that the gentleman who gave me this good oil is fat as Falstaff, with well-watered beer pot, a man gasping under his own weight.

By the way, the crippling asthma I got in Sydney persisted for a couple of days after I got back, then vanished. It seems I am doomed to dwell forever in gray grimy Melbourne. Or keep off sex.

keep warm, & love to yr cohabitators

Joseph

 

1970: family life

 

Rozelle

2 May

My dear Joseph

Life hums. I clatter nappies.

Moratorium street theater is losing impetus. I'm pessimistic about the whole thing. Still, one must not think but act, my policy henceforth.

I saw Polanski's Cul de Sac: sick humor, drawing out sadistic vibes from oneself and the others in the audience. I always feel disturbed after that type of film. My sister.

Antony is silent since I wrote denouncing him. I'm crabby. I suppose I'll have to venture there in a week or so for a grand confrontation, to be thrown out bodily, no doubt, in a stream of abuse.

Everyone here at Cockroach Follies enjoyed your stay and welcomes your return anytime. Lanie was astounded by your frivolity, having taken you previously for a grim monster of High Intelligence. You've cracked that social barrier at any rate.

She's discovering the chains of liberation. Took a boy from work to dinner and to bed. Nice. He asked her to live with him. Horrors! Make an honest fella out of him.

I am incredibly sane.

How are the local ladies? Make a move, my boy. I am investigating electric blankets—one body is not sufficient these chilly nights.

The grass grows without cease. The bathroom window is still broken. The living room floor is subsiding. The stove is in A-1 condition after springing a gas leak which nauseated us all for two days.

thinking & Dreaming Sometimes

Caroline

 

P.S. Suppose life is a man carrying flowers in his head.

 

 

1975: but a good kwee-poo is a smoke

 

ooooooooooooooooo

WORD SALAD :: Lettuce from my chums

oooooooooooooooooo

 

::The great Ray Finlay broke his dogmatic silence only for the express purpose of doubting my word. My word. ::b. wagner::

 

Congratulations on your timing, Brian. Impeccable as usual. On the very night that the nation totters into constitutional crisis, with our non-elected demi-monarch booting out our elected leader and instating a wealthy grazier more to his liking, what is the editor of HOT AIR telling us? Urging us to the barricades? As it happens, no. We find him at his mimeo cranking out [a] Mike Murphy's incoherent mumbles about the rapturous time he had at the Canberra Convocation worshiping Leon Kamin from afar (why didn't you just go up and talk to him, Mike? It's only Governors-General that bite without warning), followed even more boringly by [b] the editor's own piece of tripe. If we wished to waste our few spare moments on the works of E. Nesbitt, Brian, we'd trot off to the nursery and read the originals, which contain less heavy-handed tributes to the jackoff material you presumably studied so closely as a pimply youth.

 

::I could just recommend that you take a flying jump up your own botty, Ray, but I am a man of classy reserve. Instead, I am resolved to pay you back in the coin you so gratuitously besmirch. We shall come back later to your interesting suggestion that the coup against the Labor Government failed to attract my attention, you shitface.

::As it happens, more than one dazed and fascinated subscriber to HOT AIR has insisted on elucidation. To be brief, they clamor to learn what became of my beautiful if ill-tempered lover Asquith Lancaster and my curious hatchling, the palaeomorph Kwee-poo. For all these faithful readers, I add this postscript to my tale—

::I surveyed the Kwee-poo from a safe distance. "So much for orthodox science," I muttered, remembering with new respect that Scientologist who tried to join our number after having his IQ raised and his thetan cleared. This incendiary creature was like no beast whose bones graced the world's museums. It strutted and crowed about my penthouse, thoroughly at home, emitting at irregular intervals fat little puffs of bluish flame.

::I confess that I was at a loss to know precisely what to do. I edged about the room making friendly noises and keeping one eye prudently cocked on the fire extinguisher. Eventually I blundered into the couch and collapsed heavily, brooding regretfully on Asquith's abrupt departure. The Kwee-poo snuffled in amicable fashion about my suede-slippered feet. I cautiously drew my legs up under my chin. For a moment the Kwee-poo searched inquisitively before sitting on its haunches with its snout between its claws, watching me with bright-eyed interest.

::Naturally, I laughed. I smote my knee with delight, and laughed again.

::The Kwee-poo bounded back several feet, smouldering a small area of carpet, and began to cry.

::I was shocked. An unwonted and unwanted sense of solicitude for the small beast crept into my breast. I tried to stifle it. Why was the wretched animal howling, anyway? God knows. Well, why do babies cry? Because they are hungry, or because their nappies are wet. I looked carefully. This Kwee-poo had no nappy. Ergo, it was hungry.

::Tentatively, I stroked its horrid head. The unhappy howling did not abate. I stood up, fetched a Ming bowl from its stand. Into the venerable vessel (though perhaps no more venerable than this shelled creature) I emptied the contents of the newly opened decanter of scotch. I stepped back a discreet distance and adopted an attitude of scientific dispassion.

::The Kwee-poo ceased its sniveling and edged forward. A bright purple tongue slipped out and lapped. The entire snout disappeared into the whiskey. There was a violent guzzling. The whiskey disappeared into the snout.

::"And such a young Kwee-poo," I thought, disapproving on principle.

::The effect was delayed but worth waiting up for. Supine for several minutes, the creature abruptly bounded backwards into the air. There is not a great deal of airspace even in a luxurious penthouse. Wings snapped and caught. The animal soared, cleared the chandelier, sailed to ground in a nose skid that brought it grinding along the carpet to my feet. Blindly, it tucked in its wings and claws and went to sleep.

::The following morning I rose early and telephoned my butcher. He sent up ten pounds of excellent minced steak. It was the least I could do for a Kwee-poo with a hangover.

::Of course, Asquith maintained her grudge. She considered it obvious that the Kwee-poo disliked her and that it was her duty to reciprocate. To me, nothing was obvious but my continued enchantment with her beauty and her spirit.

::Two weeks later, suave in cobalt silk nightshirt, monogrammed in silver thread, I stretched on my couch and sipped the evening's first ante-meridian nightcap. Asquith was outrageously attractive in a soufflé of a garment that revealed only her face and her mobile hands. She sat at a bedroom mirror brushing her hair. Rather brash jazz, of a kind I detested but suffered on Asquith's account, tooted from concealed speakers and blended with the Samurai sword to lend the penthouse a neo-colonial air. The Kwee-poo purred at my feet, and I scratched its cold nose with a negligent toe.

::Humming softly to the music, Asquith came into the room and turned down the lights. She went to the windows and opened one wide. A cool breeze came up from the street and played around my bare feet. I joined Asquith at the window.

::Hundreds of feet below, the city was a scattered hoard of jewels. So ugly close to hand, the river cast cold light up between the dark geometry of office blocks and the more organic outlines of old Victorian buildings. I placed my arm gently around Asquith's shoulders and we gazed on the world that was ours. We went softly to the couch in the darkness and Asquith slid downward, her lips soft but waking with hunger that—

::"God Almighty Christ shit!" I had not heard her shrew voice before. "This bloody reptile!" She swung her delicately molded leg with public-school trained accuracy and agility at the Kwee-poo dozing curled on the couch.

::The beast hurtled into the air with an angry squawk. With a thunderous noise it wheeled, clawing at Asquith's face. In two weeks it had grown substantially. Undaunted in her fury, Asquith raised a cushion and beat blindly at the Kwee-poo's head. I tried to intervene, but she was propelled by pent-up hatred.

::"Filthy—" she cried, "misshapen—," swinging the cushion, "monstrous—," collecting the Kwee-poo's snout, "beastly b-b-beast." She burst into self-pitying tears as the cushion came apart in her hands, spraying the room with kapok.

::I snapped the lights up and tried to pacify the Kwee-poo. It gave me a look combining misery and contempt and fled through the open window.

::"Oh my God," I cried. I leaned out the window. I couldn't see a thing. Leaping back into the room, I flipped off the lights to the accompaniment of fresh gales of angry grief, and went to the window again. It took some seconds for my sight to adjust. I was horrified to find the Kwee-poo pointed head downward, departing vertically along the face of the building. Even as I watched it gave a thin derisory squawk and vanished into an open window.

::I turned back into the room, frantic. Asquith blundered toward me, make-up smeared over her face, seeking comfort and support. I was not in the mood. "Why did you have to do that?" I shouted. "Now the poor thing's gone. It's probably lost for good."

::Tears forgotten, eyes wide and jaw slack, Asquith stood for a moment staring at me, her arms akimbo.

::"Poor thing?" Her voice rose. "What about me? Don't I have any feeling at all? Is that it? And you actually expect me to marry you?"

::She had a very good point. I went once more to the window and looked into the darkness. Far below, the Kwee-poo's head protruded from a window. It was gazing upward with a reproachful, hopeful look. I gave a cry. Asquith ceased her denunciations for the moment.

::"Thank God," I said. "Asquith, I think it's coming back."

::She crossed the room with tremendous speed for someone burdened with a fire extinguisher. Before I understood what she was doing, she leaned out the window and held the device upside down, freeing its noxious foaming chemical retardants. Froth boiled into the blackness, falling like acid to blind the hapless Kwee-poo. I realized in that ghastly, fateful instant, an instant that lingered it seemed for an hour, an instant that clutched my heart with a frozen hand, that a choice lay before me, a decision of the most profound import: that I must choose between the most beautiful woman I had ever met, all my worldly possessions (for a Kwee-poo is a hungry, remorseless beast), my very peace of mind . . . and a single scaly horrible orphan monster.

::And you know what I did, Ray, for we all have made this choice one way or another.

::What I did, Ray, in my boring, E. Nesbitt fashion, what I did was lean back, take a firm balancing grip on the back of the couch, and with all my karate-trained strength boot Asquith Lancaster through the window.

::I watched for a moment as she plunged toward the ground. My Kwee-poo turned its head to follow her passage, then raised its eyes and climbed straight back up to the penthouse. I got down the Ming vase and opened the decanter and we settled in to our companionable drinking.

::And that's how it was, Ray. Consider yourself warned.::b. wagner::

 

1975: tying the knot

 

Unsatisfied and tense, Marjory presses her hands to her breasts for comfort. His back to her, Brian lies on the alien sheets, curved into himself, naked in the air-conditioned warmth of the Raymond B. Cattell Hall of Residence. At this moment, across the courtyard and through the trees, her husband is moderating a panel before one or two hundred people in the A. D. Hope building's Reading Room, principal venue for this astonishing event, this historic anomaly, the first international Point Two Six Convocation held in Australia: one of the few, in all truth, to leave its imperial American and British homelands. None of this gives her an abiding sense of security. Ray's careful logical being is as subject to random interruption as anyone's. If he trudges over here now, seeking a handkerchief or a celebrated quipu to cite, they will be in major explicit crisis with no notice.

Her body aches with the deception done upon it. You bastard, Brian, she thinks. You selfish pig.

It is not even as if she likes him particularly.

He rolls over and his wry pale eyes catch her gaze, and he grins apologetically and puts his arms around her, and she recalls with a visceral shock the words, the truthful unguarded words that he'd once quoted to her from the dean of Australian quipu writers. Will he remember them now? Will they express her own ambiguity to him, penetrate his barriers of buffoonery and bigotry and egotism?

"Why Do You Publish Quipus?" she quotes, straining her neck away from his nuzzling face.

He looks up at her, really looks at her for a single moment.

"Yes, I know Marj."

Because I'm lonely.

Marjory shivers, darts her hands down and tweaks his balls, sits up quickly as he jumps in surprise and releases his own hold. She crosses to the tiny apartment's shower (good thing Ray had first grab at a tutor's unit, rather than one of the shared-facility student one-roomers), turns the jet on full, stands in hot steamy clouds under the sluicing spray. A highly effective ventilator removes the steam with dispatch, clearing moisture from the mirror.

Through the hum of the fan, she distantly hears Wagner say, "That's "kwee-poo," singular and plural."

She dries herself swiftly with a towel brought from home, leaving the hotel linen untouched. "Crap, Brian. "Kee-poo" singular, "kee-poos" plural. Check your dictionary."

Unwashed Brian has his clothes on when she steps from the bathroom.

"Hike usage hasn't made it into the dictionary yet, Marjory. "Kee" or "kwee," it's "poo" whatever the number. I'm making some tea. Want some?"

"You'll find the teabags are rather repulsive."

"Less so than the coffee sachets. Speak up, woman."

Dressing, she nods. Her nerves are relaxing. She doesn't even know very much about him, after all these years. He's Ray's friend really, they all are. Marjory pulls up the sheets, straightens the blankets, bashes the pillows into shape. It is Ray's honorary position as assistant to the Chairman of the Convocation which is paying for this room. Brian Wagner, like many of the Melbourne brights, commutes each day and sleeps at home, or crashes on someone's floor. In Brian's case, she reflects, it could well be someone's bed he crashes in. If he can find a willing partner. Until now, there's been little enough spare to go around. At least the size and magnitude of this event has attracted interested and curious non-hikes, by the score. Healthy young librarians, teachers, Public Service clerks. Opportunities for them all, for hapless Mike Murphy with his self-destructive bouts of inappropriate fixation, for Joseph, for all of them. Maimed and half-formed, for all their authentically prodigious gifts. Calibans.

Because I'm lonely.

The tea is wonderfully hot. Marjory sits in a Fler chair and looks at her partner in infidelity.

"Brian, why don't you find some woman and get married?"

"Shame on you, Marj. There are strict penalties for bigamy."

She regards him in astonishment. They fill the pages of their quipu with endless nonsense and leave out all the important stuff.

"I didn't know you were married."

"Well." He slurps at his tea, an attempt at comic distraction.

"Give. What's her name? Anyone we know?"

"Hardly likely. Alice."

"Where is she now, Brian?"

"I think they deported her."

Marjory spills her own tea into the saucer. Should have brought some mugs. "They can't do that, Brian. What, you don't mean she—"

"Alice was Chinese, from Taiwan or Hong Kong or somewhere. She wasn't very fluent."

Despite herself, Marjory is laughing out loud. "Brian, you imbecile. What rubbish is this?"

"Happens all the time. Her parents wanted to marry her off for a tidy sum to a Taiwanese gent back home but Alice wanted to stay here. She had some cousins in Brisbane who ran a restaurant. It was all part of some half-crazed family Triad feud. I've never been good with these tonal languages. I was talking to some guys in a pub. I'm not even sure they really were her cousins."

"Are you telling me you married a girl from a Chinese take-away and you couldn't even pass the time of day with her?"

"She was a student, actually. The Department of Immigration planned to ship her back home when she finished."

"But surely if she married you—"

"Yeah, that's what we thought. What her cousins thought."

"You did this out of the goodness of your heart?" That is harder to believe than the story itself.

"Are you nuts? They paid me a thousand dollars."

"Good God, and you took it?"

"They were stinking rich—racehorses as well as restaurants. I was broke. This was well before Joe Williams got me his old job and I became a paid-up member of the Australian Journalists Association." Wagner sits himself on the edge of the neat bed and sprawls back on it, pulling up both pillows behind his head.

"How bizarre. What happened?"

"We all fronted along to the local registry office and got married, at least Alice and I got married. Then, just for the form of the thing, we went off for the honeymoon to this bloody great luxury hotel on the Gold Coast. It pissed on this joint." He waves expansively at Marjory's borrowed accommodation. "Her cousins came with us, of course."

"What? They disturbed the sanctity of the wedding chamber?"

"They did indeed. Most insistent. After all, they had to make sure we didn't have it off with each other. That way it could all be legally annulled after a suitable delay, and she'd be available for re-marriage as unmarked goods."

"You're a sexist pig, Brian."

He widens his eyes and tilts his head. "I merely describe the world, my dear. I didn't invent it. The slant-eyes have lived this way for five thousand years, don't take it out on me."

"And a racist pig." She does not smile. Brian sighs, lies back on the bed. After a time, Marjory rises and switches on the jug again. "You can't stop now."

Instantly bouncing back, Brian says, "All four of us sat around the bridal suite for three days. We played cards non-stop and drank. At least the cousins and I played cards, along with various friends of theirs who dropped in at all hours. Alice just rang up room service and asked for tea every half hour. The cousins were pretty sharp cardplayers, better than fans."

"Oh, Brian. You lost your money."

"The thousand dollars was gone by the end of the first day. So they lent me some to keep the ball in play, and I won a bit back. It was just like playing Monopoly. All these meaningless large-denomination notes kept changing hands. Sometimes I had a great stack of it, at other times I had nothing and had to borrow some more."

Without benefit of room service, Marjory fills their cups with more tea, sugar, milk. She hands Brian one. Hikes are different than you and me, Ernest. They're crazier.

"Thanks. Well, at close of play on the third day I had $500 in front of me. I think they must have arranged among themselves to let me keep that much. We all shook hands, and I went out and bought a new suit and an air ticket to Melbourne. The rest went in the bank. You could buy quite a bit for five hundred bucks in those days, before the ruinous inflation of the socialists had brought us all unstuck. It was strange, Marj. I could barely credit anyone being stupid enough to exchange these bits of paper for a packet of cigarettes, let alone a new woollen suit."

"Did you ever see Alice again?"

"Never saw any of them again. Six months later two bloody great Commonwealth wallopers came to my front door and asked why I wasn't living with my wife. I said we'd had a quarrel. They wanted to know if I'd read reports that Australians were being paid to marry Asians so they could stay in the country in breach of the immigration regulations. I told them I never read the gutter press. A couple of months later I saw a little news item on page 7 or 17, well back anyway, about Alice and a few other men and women being deported."

For a moment Brian looks so doleful and distant that Marjory's heart softens. She puts down her cup and saucer and sits beside him on the bed, taking his slack hand.

"Brian, that's a sad and sordid tale."

His mouth tightens, then relaxes to a sardonic grin. "You're too innocent, Marj. It was all quite amicably arranged." He gives her a swift, hard kiss and goes to the door. He stands at the boundary to the corridor. "The only sordid bit was that it had to happen at all."

 

1970: marching

 

Cockroach Delighthouse

Rozelle

Sunday 10 May

My dear Joseph

Trauma and hysteria, hatred & tears. No, not me, baby—the musical Antony.

I found myself last night at a Peacock Point party—great music and dancing, I was in high spirits—and Antony & his entourage turned up. Time to remind him of some unanswered mail.

It was quite late when I confronted him. I was civil and cool (hadn't had a drink all night). No, he wouldn't talk to me, he was going home. Come off it. Oh, all right. We went outside and he became quite uncontrollable, so emotional, ranting and weeping, I hate you, hate Joseph, hate, hate—You destroyed me utterly, that letter, so horrible, so cruel it made me cry . . .

So it went. Excuses of his pitiful upbringing. I mentioned that this was not totally germane to the matter of his debts to me. How about some money? Screams and shouts again. Really bitter, fuck.

"You used me as an escape from Joseph, never loved me"—all this crap. I told him, "Yes, you hate me, you hate Joseph because you couldn't destroy my love and admiration for him."

"That's right, I couldn't & I hate him, I hate you, your insanity destroyed me, and then you abandoned me, just pissed off with Alan . . ." He really believes his lies, Joseph, I really think he's convinced himself that he didn't turn his back without a word, that I goaded him into coming to Sydney—it's all so incredible.

Of course Iris and Francine rushed to the rescue. Leave him alone! Antony in tears (admittedly he was a bit drunk) kept justifying himself, appealing to Iris: "You know how upset I've been, I can't sing when I'm like this." Crap crap crap.

I let him go. He staggered off, a broken man, into the night—it was both a good act and pathetic, such a pathetic sight. I guess I don't get my money back.

This torrent of hatred for you amused me. I'd humiliated him, and he knew you are not vulnerable to me in that way. He'd have killed me . . . enough of that. Sorry to bore you, but thought you might care to know how it all turned out.

Passed psych. More exams in 6 weeks or so. Have done no study.

Work is shitting me to death. So to speak.

The moratorium was a great success. Did you see our street theater on telly? Cheers and applause at Sydney Uni. Crippled frightened little Vietnamese. Five people as the War Machine in stark white face, black clothes, dead black stocking Balaclavas—we looked vile, quite horrifying. Then we led the march! Thousands of students with linked arms behind us—Americans, Australians, Vietnamese, screaming and whipping, kicking and abusing, genuine tears from fatigue and emotion, pleading, the War Machine chanting and droning.

We went on stage again at the Town Hall but the police blocked off most of the view. The cops were bored, really crapped, because there was no violence. When a communist guy got up to speak he was drowned out by the crowd yelling "Peace Now!"—incredible, how can anyone suppose that the Moratorium was a "communist front"?

Because we were up on the platform we could see how many people were there. And the street march in Melbourne! 75,000 people . . . it must have been devastating. Saw a bit of it on telly. Tell me about it.

I've had an average of 4 hours sleep the last week. Now the Moratorium's over I can recover.

Write and give me strength.

with the usual dreary spirit of love

Caroline

 

1971: political science

 

Day ebbs from the sky. Ray gets up, turns on the light. He refills the kettle and carries the pot to the sink. Frustrating as this conversation is, infuriating, it intrigues him.

Living as he does in an Annandale terrace with three other socialist atheists of comparatively like mind, involved the rest of the time with tutors and students, he is out of touch with the world at large. The Nourses must be close to the norm for a middle-class couple of their age-cohort. Shut Marj up and reason with them. She's too close to them, too full of personal bile and bias. Christ, listen to the woman—she's being just as absurd as they are. No, not just as absurd, that'd really be pushing it. But pretty intemperate.

"Look," he breaks in, leaning on the back of Marjory's chair, "just tell me one thing, Tom. Why do you have such a low opinion of activists?"

No hesitation. "Louts with no respect for their elders. Just because they're lazing around at university they think they should be running the country. When I was their age I was working my guts out making a place for myself in the world. They expect it all to fall into their laps."

"Must've been tough," Ray says sympathetically. "Growing up in the Depression, war breaking out, low wages."

"It was awful," Doris Nourse says. "You young people have no idea."

"But the economy's more buoyant now. More options're available. Isn't that part of the freedom you fought for?"

"They ought to be studying for their exams, not wasting the taxpayer's money disrupting the community."

"Exams! Exams are a mystification," Marjory announces, a proposition, Ray sees to his gloom, that is a prime exemplar of the evil it denounces. "As it happens, a survey by the Political Science department has shown that most of the radical activists do better than average in their exams."

"Tom, it's not that we have too much," Ray says. "The point is that we have enough. We're not all forced into the rat race quite so soon, or so urgently. And that's an epithet your generation coined, 'rat race'."

"You need to get your nose out of all those books and into real life."

"Oh God," moans his daughter. Ray digs both thumbs into her back but she shrugs irritably. "You're the one who's so strong on reports and figures and statistics. I can show you a whole armload of U.N. reports giving the details of ecological destruction and world poverty and suburban neuroses and waste in our community and—"

Ray jabs her again. She subsides into sub-vocal muttering.

"Look, Tom," he says, "every day in our academic work we're faced with real facts about human misery and other real facts about how little our community's doing to relieve it. And further real facts, if it comes to that, about how much of that misery we actually cause."

He raises his voice as Nourse starts to speak. "I agree with you—academic abstractions are often remote from everyday reality, universities are often diversionary. I imagine we'd differ on the details of that criticism. But one by-product, Tom, one by-product of our training in the ivory tower is the capacity to gather data together, and frame solutions to general problems on the basis of that data."

"What's this got to do with the real world?"

"Well, let's take an example. The real world contains four billion people. Each year millions of them literally starve to death. Another real fact: our own society is the richest, most technically advanced in history. We have the answers. But we won't use them. It's a matter of deliberate choice."

"Piffle. Australia sends millions of tons of wheat to Asia."

"A pittance and you know it. An effective solution's going to need more than shipping off our surplus grain on time payment. There's just not enough caring. That's why we march. Tom, it's your generation that's been brainwashed. You'd rather spend billions on weapons and useless pollutive gimmicks than on saving half of mankind from hunger and disease."

"Be realistic," Nourse says, stoking his pipe. "They'd just go on breeding like rabbits and starving in even greater numbers."

Ray Finlay can scarcely credit this. Is the man literally deranged after all? But abusive invective wins no converts. "Indeed, that's possible. If we keep them so poor they can't spare resources for education. If we cut off their markets, distort their economies, force them to sell their oil and produce dirt-cheap by pointing a gun at their heads—"

"It's the way of life they've chosen, Ray. Look at Japan, a miracle."

"Propped up with American money. But yes, Japan shows what can be done if we're prepared to spend the cash."

"Why should we?"

"I could mention 'Love thy neighbor'."

"Be practical, Ray." Nourse squints at him with amusement. "Anyway, I thought you were rather proud of giving up your religion?"

"Religion crap," Marjory says angrily. "It's simple justice. Listen, we did it to them! Just like we gave the aborigines poisoned flour and poxy blankets. We've got rich on their backs. We sailed in with gunboats and smashed up their economies, we gave them the elementary techniques to cut child mortality without allowing them to industrialize properly . . . I mean, these are clichés, for God's sake, truisms—"

"You're both talking like bloody communists."

"Facts, Tom. No interpretation necessary. Left and right can exploit those facts but they didn't create them. We have dues to pay," Ray says, conscious of his overwhelming moral superiority to this dreadful barbarian. "Our first duty is to get our damned sticky fingers out of what remains in the pot. Instead, we toss the change from our pockets into the crowd and put our fortunes into military dictatorships."

In the tired silence, Marjory rouses herself to pour fresh tea. Ray lights a cigarette. Have to give them up. Useless pollutive gimmicks indeed. He coughs.

"You see, Ray," Tom Nourse says, "I'm sorry, but that's the way the world is. There are no simple solutions."

"Nixon thinks half a million troops is a simple solution. The Pentagon and the Kremlin think there's one buried in concrete silos, waiting for someone to light the blue touch paper."

"I don't think anyone is going to use nuclear weapons," Nourse says judiciously. "We all agree that's a very bad way to fight a war. Some of my friends in the Defence Department are working on chemical methods that are much more humane."

And Marjory flares finally. Ray feels his skin tighten. It is almost terrifying. It is like magnesium igniting in a darkroom.

"Yes," she says in a funny high voice, "that's the difference isn't it. Between us and you. We just can't get it into our silly heads that one way of killing people is more humane than another. It's sad for your balanced evaluations, but we have a strange notion that war is absolutely filthy and utterly unjustifiable. We reject the whole thing and the whole society that wants it right from its stinking foul premises."

An intolerable desolation darkens Ray's spirit.

What she says should be true, but where does morality lie? Confounded in a bad pun. He knows he will rejoice when and if the revolutionary warriors march victorious into Saigon and Phnom Penh. If there are bloodbaths of reprisal, likely enough, despite the bland assurances of the spokesmen for the left, he can see that he will shrug them off in calculations of justice and realpolitik. It is a matter of estimating consequences, his old bugbear. Like Joseph Williams, he yearns for tachyons to carry messages from the future. Or the realization of his dream of a calculus of systems, an authentic basis for sociological prediction, a scientific theory of history that works on the fine grain. But where then would be freedom? In the absence of utopia, he knows there is no simple pacifism. He has read Fanon, who teaches that the black man can regain dignity only by killing his white persecutor.

Tom Nourse takes no offence at his daughter's quivering outburst. "It's man's nature," he explains. "There's no sense in getting angry about it. The whole universe is competitive."

It is a point Ray will concede, in his bleaker moments. Is it not the impulse behind his fascination with I.Q. tests, with the Burt dogma of inherited gifts? Marj, true to form, can't see it that way.

"Oh, right. Human beings are just another stack of statistics. Punch them into a Balance of Payments computer program."

"You'll understand when you get older," Nourse assures her. "But don't misunderstand me. The difference between the society we enjoy and what you propose is that you want us to give up our high standard of living. My friends want India and those other countries to have the same high standard of living. Level up, not down, you see." It is dark outside now. Time for dinner. Nourse gets to his feet. "It's been nice seeing you again, Ray. Come round and visit, Marjory. If there's a program you want to watch on the television."

Doris Nourse, hiding at the edge of the table, gathers her things together and gives Marj a kiss and a hug. "Now don't get too near those mounted policemen," she warns. "The horses sometimes get frightened by all the people."

At the door, Tom Nourse turns and extends his hand. "And thank you for the discussion. I might be an old square, but I always like to hear both sides." The door clicks shut. There is a hysterical silence. Ray Finlay dumps cups and glasses into the sink and hopes Marjory will wait until her parents have reached the street. Behind his shoulder, he hears a strident, torn, high-pitched laugh.

 

1970: foreign aid

 

Blessed Saint Kilda

May 12 70

Look love it's like this:

A certain quantity of money has come into my hands. I've got more than $1300 in the bank right now and my need is not great. So herewith, five hundred bucks so you can stop shoveling shit.

I'm being awfully presumptuous, and if you'd rather not, just send it back. But I thought it'd be pleasant if you had the option to piss your job off and study full time, or at least work only one day a week (say) waitressing. I assume you can get the full $200 student loan mentioned in the handbook. I won't want this back for a long time, and if worst comes to worst I can always use my degree to get another job.

The Moratorium here, as you will have read, was luverly. Vast and very peaceful. Bumped into a bunch of first-year kids, recognized one of them (lives up the street from my parents, I coached her brother in physics last year), went sadly away full of yearning for the coming force of Wimmens Lib when the silly creatures started an excited conversation about palmistry (some buffoon on telly, evidently): who they were fated to marry, when and where. Looking into the future was apparently, for them, limited solely to that blissful and inevitable consummation. Hell's teeth.

This household is giving me the shits—just sitting around, I mean, reading a bit but bugger all else. Martha's seriously considering giving up teaching, which I find a vile prospect: the baby home all day too, mewling and puking. Absurdly, I can't think of anything else to write about. There's been nothing dramatic or tragic for miles in any direction. Visitors from Sydney; big deal, you see them all the time, or don't know them. Karen's given up screwing for two weeks until her twat heals after some unnameable operation. Gray gray and nothing's afoot. So I'll bid thee good night for the nonce and to bed.

love to all

J.

 

1970: taking it

 

May 16

My dear Bandersnatch

The check was all a bit much. My spontaneous reaction was to send it back, but, thinking about it . . . I haven't. Probably because I'm so stuffed, feeling dreadful. I'm at the end of my tether & I've got exams in June & my only real hope of scraping thru is to chuck the job.

I have friends in Paddo who are opening a shop where I can sell stuff I make—they have a sewing machine, maybe I can make clothes or toys out the back of the shop. Any orders?

The Socialists' Scholars Conference begins on Thursday so if you're coming up I'll expect you Wednesday.

Got the photos I took of you. They're pretty bad, you're so tense you look as though you're about to crack in two.

Hope to see ya. Any of the Shakespeare Grove people are welcome, but will have to bring blankets & sleep on the floor.

Terribly tired.

Caroline

 

boxed in

 

IRON LUNG

 

Certain diseases and injuries can paralyze the muscles of the chest to such an extent that breathing is impossible. Since respiration is essential to life, machines have been devised to take over the job of the muscles for such patients.

The iron lung is a large, air-tight container with a pump or diaphragm allowing internal pressure to be increased or decreased in a regular cycle.

The patient's body, with the exception of the head, is totally enclosed within the iron lung. As the internal pressure builds, the air inside the patient's lungs is forced out. When it drops, the chest expands and draws air in.

Naturally the machine has to opened from time to time, to permit washing, excretion and medical attention, and during these intervals the patient's head is enclosed by a dome or mask attached to the pump.

 

PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP

Bitter salad: Alum entree, my dear Watson

ddddddddddddddddd

 

The iron lung was invented by Philip Drinker, an American, in 1929. With the control of poliomyelitis (a severe paralyzing illness) by the Salk vaccine, the machine became less important in medicine.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of its use is that people can tolerate such an existence. But the human spirit can flourish in infirmity. Indeed, one Australian woman doomed to spend her life in an iron lung has actually conceived and given birth despite her affliction.

 

1970: civilization and its discos

 

5 Rozelle

June 2nd

Dear Pog,

A day late, I just finished a 3000 word essay (rang them with the news that I'd had a minor car accident) on Conflict in Societies. I'm awash with it. Got in my bit on glorious western civilization (My Lai) versus controlled hostilities in savage tribes. I was so bold as to say that egalitarianism is fascist—you're familiar with the argument. Pretty old hat, but still . . .

Cockroach Tavern is full of loonies and screaming nutters and boring turds and interesting passers-through. Aggression and bad vibes resound in the halls.

After the few days visiting with you in Melbourne I felt nothing but happiness. Contentment, warm inside. Hope you felt the same. I came down almost immediately with violent bronchial flu. I know, I know, you warned me—so? I don't care, I'm happy sharing your yoghurt and licking your spoon.

A local photographer has offered to use some of my crocheting in a color spread for POL, when I have enough of it done. My God! Lanie nude in Chance (maybe, if she gets her nerve up) and me in POL!

I visited Martin Sharp's exhibition this afternoon. Exciting, very phallic stuff, brilliant colors, cartoon twists and satiric images splashed over traditional prints. I wandered around exhilarated by the pumping music and zany words scattered and resounding. All of that was rather shrouded, I admit, by the blaring black prices—$50 for a print poster in an edition of 10 or 20, $1200 for a painting, $1100 for a collage—Christ, he'll be the wealthiest hippie in London!

Evidently his prices were lower at first until he discovered the impact he's made in Australia, the charisma sparking from his name. So he bumped the prices up. Can't blame him. While I was there I spotted him wandering through the crowd, the artist in full bloom. You'd have enjoyed his satiric obscenity.

Margie has found a new gentleman friend and is thoroughly In Love. From this I deduce that he's neither tugging her pants down nor biting her boobs.

no more, no more,

Caroline

 

1983: pants and boobs

 

On Brian's express orders, Joseph accompanies him to a Saturday afternoon barbecue. Everyone there is glossy with social competence. No red sauce runs down their chins, no sausage leaps to the dried-out grass from seared fingers. How is it that Wagner knows people of this stamp? Good God, one of them is Howard, editor and appliance-fancier from Science Today Publications. All those years ago. Balding, bland, cheerful.

Nice to see you again, Joe. You'll have some Chablis?

It's true. Howard remembers everything and knows the meaning of nothing. Rather like Joseph's own case, put that way.

Must go on my hostly way, Joe. Glad you could get here.

Joseph retreats to the farthest extent of the yard, gazes down on the pool and its sagging nylon cover, safety net for leaves, dust, pensioned-off spiders.

Hello, I'm Mandy.

She is plain, short, female.

Brian tells me you used to work with him.

Not exactly.

It's too difficult to explain, so he smiles at her instead.

Come away with me Mandy, and we shall all the pleasures prove. But his ears redden, how can he carry this sort of thing off?

Naughty.

She's scribbling on a piece of notepaper.

Call me about the middle of next week. I'm just too exhausted right now, just got back from Bali.

I like your suntan, Joseph tells her in a frenzy of hope.

He inveigles Wagner into accompanying him by taxi (Wagner's car is on the point of death) to Mandy's apartment on the following Friday night. Trembling and full of preposterous terror.

She gives them coffee. A very plain young person, when all is said and done, but she's been to interesting places. In her car they dash into town for a bit to eat, a movie. Wagner insists on a monstrous and pretentious pub in the middle of the city. Joseph is rather shocked. He has always assumed that the inner metropolis is dedicated entirely to nasty department stores and yawning glassy caverns of finance. Beaten copper, Aztec patterned carpet, dark wells of snug seduction.

Mandy asks for a Harvey Wallbanger.

They stock up well enough on pepper steaks, brandy, creme de cacao. Appallingly expensive.

Peter O'Toole is screamingly funny.

As they go about finding her car Mandy makes several jokes that send Joseph to the pavement, cracking his knees.

Getting out of hand.

Brian is obliged by a previous engagement to leave them. Blur of careful driving.

You might as well stay the night, you'll fall under a tram in that condition.

But she keeps her pants on under her shortie nightie. And the bed is only a single. They lie extended like nails. Joseph quivers.

It's that time.

What?

Very bloody.

An old-fashioned and absurd objection, Mandy. Haven't you read The Female Eunuch?

Of course she hasn't, that was ten years ago at least. Cosmopolitan seems to have turned against menstrual sex. It must be the New Romanticism.

She shows him the trick she uses to build up her chest. You press your palms together, elbows out like a plucked chicken's wings, and push like buggery for a count of ten. It doesn't make your boobs bigger, but the underlying pectoral muscles increase in size and this plumps out the chestal area.

The chestal area?

Yes, haven't you heard that hilarious Woody Allen record?

Joseph has missed out on many of the last decade's more salient cultural events. Now he makes good his ignorance. Mandy pops the tape on. It is screamingly funny, but only while it lasts. Mandy turns her back and goes to sleep. Joseph lies beside her, his spine like a stake through a vampire's heart, and waits for sunrise so he can skulk home.

Mandy's apartment faces the Royal Park Golf Course, and beyond that the walls of the Zoological Gardens. As the early summer sun whips the lid off the sky, bleary Joseph hears the lions roar for their breakfast.

 

1970: eaten inside

 

University of New England,

Armidale.

June 10, 1970

dear grub

Without the decencies of modern mechanical transduction, in chilly Armidale, forced to take up the archaic pen (tried using Paul's typewriter but it possessed so many astonishing faults that I gave it up), here, alive and well, or approximately, looking into the sky for the secrets of Time and Space. Maybe, one day, anyway.

I would have written earlier but so much sudden organizing has disrupted my habits. After you returned home to Sydney I dithered with my flu for a few days and decided at last that the only sensible thing to do was plunge in, put my bloody theory to the test, so I flew up to Armidale. If Paul and I do find any time-reversed tachyons in our mess of pottage I'll use them to signal my former self and spare both of us all this hurry up & wait.

My body has been rebuking me. The day before I was due to catch my plane north, there came a crotchety gnawing at the entrails. As luck would have it, Martha had prepared one of her glorious carnivorous curries, a splendid trencher of lamb and beef and spiced vegetables and coconut snowed across the lot, and her famous yoghurt, and spliced bananas and diced apricots and small pieces of tomato and onion and cucumber, and chilly beer in each fist, and my metabolism rebelled, overloaded, croaked it.

In mid-munch I hied me to my bedroom, guts growling and snarling with unknown pains, where I capered in the semi-dark acrobatically seeking some posture that might supply relief. No way. All the shades of gray and blurting blurry trumpets. In and out of consciousness I went. I might have been having a miscarriage (yes, I thought of your pain), had the plumbing not been otherwise.

Reluctantly, fearful of paramedical scorn (amazing how these high-level social responses surmount our most bitter and unmediated pangs) I made the great trek back to the dining room where everyone ate happily of pudding, and consulted our resident nurse. Quaffing her prescription (copious milk and aspirin) I went back to die in my room.

Horrid, frightened night. Next morning to the local quack, a ponderous oily sweating man with a Hitler moustache who prodded and poked and ruminated and thank god saw no cause for a barium meal. I must abandon nicotine. I must exercise like a decent Christian. Above all, I must eat only of the fruit of the blandest tree in the garden. The list he provided is horrendous: custards & milk shakes & no booze & nothing of a fibrous or irritant nature.

No ulcer, at least. Stomach cramps due to tension and lack of god-fearing sport. So for a week now I've been dining breakfasting and lunching on gloop. There is no end in sight. It does help a bit, true. He suggested three months. I shall certainly go mad. I know you will not credit this, but I have cut down to four or five ciggies a day though it's creeping up again. I spend most of my conscious hours sneaking up on the clock, watching the hands creep: my rule is one smoke every three hours. Dementia. And the man speaks of tension as a cause.

I got to Armidale just under a week ago. As I think I told you on the phone, I'd arranged with Paul Ramsden to have the tachyon detector wired into the SQUID by his lab tech buddy in the physics department. My precipitate arrival was greeted with less than the total enthusiasm due a man who was going to share the next Nobel Prize; in fact, Paul berated me for a reckless spendthrift, but took me in and gave me the spare bed in his study. Cats lie on my face at night. (Martha is looking after mine, never fear.) There are no suspicious squeaks from the, ahem, master bedroom. Either Paul and Tom have got past that sort of thing, like my parents (and, to be honest, as you and I did for fair stretches) or they go about it with great delicacy.

Without the detector and its computing interface, I disport myself about the house in rather the way I've become accustomed to at home: dipping into physics journals, making endless inconclusive calculations concerning the boundary conditions we can expect to obtain in a universe closed at both ends by a Big Bang and a Big Crunch, both connected by swarms of shuttling tachyons, reading novels, wondering how I can turn all this into usable quipu form. And eating bland (yuk) meals.

Tom Truczinski, Paul's friend, is very good about this. He won't have either Paul nor me in the kitchen, except to wash up, and he insists on giving me what the doctor ordered. A few years ago he had a genuine ulcer, none of your crypto-bellycramp bullshit, and takes it all fairly seriously—knows what to warn me off.

Other than that continual kindness, we have a highly ambivalent relationship. He's quite aware that I'm not queer, that on that level I'm no threat to his er "marriage" with Paul. He strikes me as absurdly insecure, given his proven accomplishments in particle theory; I take it that he'll be the youngest person to have a high-energy physics Ph.D. in the history of the State. Still, he resents my presence ferociously because I distract Paul from total preoccupation with him.

I'm taking all this subliminal flak with as much cool (but warmish cool, if you see what I mean) as I can sustain. Since this sort of confused subfusc meta-communication unnerves me and makes me hostile by turns, I can only hope the damned detection apparatus is up and on-line soon.

It looks as if I'll be stuck here a couple of weeks at least. Don't know what darling Tom will think of that . . . (Yes I do.) So meanwhile write to me here.

lots of tachy love

Joseph

 

A DOG'S WIFE

 . . .three

 

For some days we hid out in a Lina Wertmuller festival. Without disrespect I must reveal that she is not my ideal auteur, but Spot always makes taking in a movie such fun, and I was terrifically excited when he told me how much I had always put him in mind of Mariangela Melato, whom Lina employed with some wit.

"Hang in there, baby," Randy told me from the West coast, his voice oddly interspersed by bleats of telemetry from the space shuttle preparations. "We'll have the kid back on the bomb bay floor by New Year's." For a fleeting moment I wondered if Father's lawyers had misunderstood the quandary facing my husband, and were in fact directing the enormous resources of the studio to the task of getting Spot into rather than out of the weapons research program. Such things had been known to happen.

 

1970: following orders

 

Caroline loiters on the stairs outside the English Department, hoping to worm some clues from her tutor for the forthcoming exams. Woe & gloom, her mood. Rising tension, her bodily state. Crabby, her demeanor. He rounds the corner, a man in his mid-twenties with the face of a handsome stoat.

Oh. Come in.

The bastard doesn't know zilch.

Actually, Miss Muir, I haven't even seen the exam paper.

I thought you all had to—

If you must know, they rejected my suggested questions.

She does not speak.

What topic were you worried about? I have a busy schedule today.

Drama. The course you teach us.

Actually, I have to confess that drama isn't really my "thing."

Caroline is flabbergasted.

Why are you tutoring in it, for God's sake?

Well, you have to do as you're told. He smiles enchantingly and pushes back a lock of hair. You know, tote your barge.

Caroline presses her teeth together. Her belly knots. Fool, turd. She says nothing. She picks up her big bulging bag and turns away to the open door.

Oh, while you're here.

Yes?

He's glancing at a sheaf of paper from the department secretarial office.

I see you have two extra essays to hand in before the exam.

What? What?

"Death of a Salesman" and "Mother Courage."

But you didn't—In panic she delves into her bag, spills paperbacks, brush, an orange. A sheet of paper flutters. She snatches at it. Look, here, there's no mention of—

Really? No, sorry, I haven't had a chance to tell your group before this, I've been terribly rushed.

But how can I possibly—I'll need an extension.

No, I'm going to have to be firm about that, Miss Muir. It's a departmental decision. We can't accept them after that date. Sorry, sorry, just passing down the orders.

Caroline sits in the union. She sips a stewy cup of tea. Infinitely slowly she takes out a fresh sheet of paper, finds a pen, and starts a letter to Joseph.

 

1970: view from a distance

 

Twitchy Cloisters

Rozelle

12 June

My dear Joseph

Kiddo, you gotta watch yourself. An ulcer can't be wished away. Do what the man said—go to a gym, put up with the effort and the embarrassment. But let's face it, when have you ever listened to me about anything?

Had a rotten time with my tutor today. Wish you were here to give me a cuddle. The house is full on and off with dreary, dreary people.

Here's my big exciting news: I have bought an electric blanket. One depends on these trivialities.

Downstairs the other happy members of our ménage delight in Scrabble, while I stare from the window of my little room. It might be winter but the view is very pretty. Everything is pretty from a distance. You even find me pretty from a distance.

love Caro

 

1975: the end of the universe

 

Joseph looks from his podium at the several hundred hikes and hopefuls gathered here, in the Reading Room of the Humanities Research Center on the top floor of the A. D. Hope building in the Australian National University in Canberra, waiting to hear him speak. Mastering the tremor in his arm he takes water, rattles the glass back to the table. They stares at him benignly. He recalls the Bhagavad-Gita:

 
On all sides That has hands and feet;
On all sides eyes, heads and faces;
On all sides in the world it hears;
All things it embraces.

They are waiting for him to begin. He begins.

"Fellow Australians, international guests, it broadens my bosom, as they say in The Thousand Nights and One Night, to join you at this wonderful convocation. 1975 is a year I shall surely remember all my life. Since I don't have a terrifically good memory for faces, I'd like you all to hold still for a moment, smile, and say 'Cheese'."

He cannot focus his gaze on any one of them. Are they gaping in confusion, smirking at the tremolo in his amplified voice, or perhaps smiling in complicit anticipation as he takes from his soft leather shoulder bag, hung on the back of his chair, a Canon complete with theatrically protuberant fisheye lens attachment. He raises it to his eye, pans across the room, sets the f stop, and hits the shutter button. Light blazes from his flash, rips the color out of their cheeks in that instant.

"I've always been interested in capturing important moments on film, on tape, on paper," Joseph tells them, losing the mike for a moment as he turns to slip the camera carefully back into his bag. "That's why I am a quipu hike, I suppose. Still, this must seem remote from my announced topic, which is a brief account of my experiments over the past few years. Those experiments, as some of you will know, concerned the possible existence of a class of elementary nuclear particles dubbed 'tachyons.' Sadly, the experiments failed. I think you might find some intellectual pleasure in hearing about the train of thought that led me to invest so much of my time and effort in such a strange quest."

He sips again at water, feeling a little more assured, a touch more fluent. Despite the presence in the audience of several accomplished physicists who will find his simplified presentation puerile, unrigorous and absurdly rudimentary, he keeps his inner focus set on the rather larger number of brights who, for all their deftness with numerical puzzles, possess no special mathematical or physical training: the taxation clerks, housewives, historians, bus drivers, hedonistic layabouts like Wagner who certainly sits smirking down there in the front row.

"Why the camera? Because it symbolizes my goal. In a way, it became my ambition to take a photograph of the End of the Universe." They look up at him. Moist stones.

"I'm not speaking of the physical limits of the Universe, mark you. I had no great interest in quasars, those monstrous flares burning at distances that must be reckoned in the billions of light years. What we know of them are merely images of galactic cores long perished, images that are mere streams of photons coming into our telescopes no faster than three hundred thousand kilometers a second, messages to us from the extinguished boundaries of early time.

"No, I became fascinated by quite the opposite problem. I wanted to get a snapshot of the other End of the Universe. The Big Crunch, when everything falls back under gravity and is swallowed by the gigantic Black Hole that will be all of the Universe at the end of time."

He can hear them rustling now, can imagine the frowning brow, the cocked ear. These people are not without imagination. "That's right. I wanted to take a picture of the future."

 

1970: cheap shots

 

Armidale

Tuesday 17 June 1970

Hi kid

Energy might well travel faster than light, but matters here proceed slowly. Paul and I await the arrival from the workshop of our wonderful computer-compatible noise-compensating signal-enhancing cascade-detecting tachyon monitor Mark 1. Can't do nuthin without it. Can't give up smoking without it. Tom growls and stamps about the house, or goes off in trizzy fits to get plastered at some poofter pub or club. Hard to comprehend that this is one of the prime minds of our generation.

I can understand his anxiety and jealousy because I'm stealing so much of Paul's spare time (work time too, once the bloody machine is up, so the prospect is worse than the prevailing case). The irritating thing is the way he whines and carries on precisely like a spoilt child whining for endless attention. While it's sad and affecting, in a pathetic sort of way, this is just the kind of behavior guaranteed to piss Paul off in the shortest span of time (unless their relationship, heaven forfend, actually bases itself on that sort of pathology).

So the threesome is rapidly becoming intolerable. Still, I'm reluctant to go home before we've had a chance to test the theory with some appropriate hardware—and, if I'm honest, I don't wish to leave Paul to the possible glory and authority of doing it himself in my absence.

If I did go it would certainly remove the immediate strain from Tom, but I suspect it'd leave no more than an illusion of tranquillity. But for all I know, success in our endeavors might introduce a fresh wonderful regime of harmony, prosperity, honor, advancement and sexual joy into their lives.

 

Later:

Just had an evasive, elliptical discussion with Tom. I wondered obliquely if perhaps he wished me gone, and that this might not be the worst idea in the world, and he alluded to his intermittent feelings of paranoia that were always followed by remorse and self-flagellation if he'd made a scene, and how he'd apologize under such circumstances if his pride would allow it, which of course it wouldn't. None of this, naturally, was expressed in such brutally crisp and unambiguous terms, but in even more rococo cynical self-sendups from both of us. We scientists are noted for the clarity of our communications. Accordingly, tensions are somewhat eased, though doubtless the central problems remain unsolved.

I rang Shakespeare St. the other day by a curious communications expedient known only to engineers—breaking the university switchboard defenses against long distance calls. This demands iron finger tips and a spectacular natural sense of rhythm . . . you bang the hanging-up doovers (as they are known technically) a certain number of times to simulate the clicks of a long distance prefix (03 in the case of Melbourne, ten clicks, then three) and this fools the silly creature into letting you through for the price of a local call. However, the timing is critical, and the noise made in whacking the aforementioned doover is not inconsiderable. So I can't use this method at will; one must wait for an empty office. Another method, involving a bent paperclip, is currently under development, and should permit calls from public boxes.

At any rate, they told me there's a letter from you languishing on my shelf. Forwarded, it might well arrive tomorrow. I hope you're okay, me dear, that the impending exams are not too hopelessly daunting. I rush to the late mail box.

luv

The Cosmic Detective

 

1970: classroom iconoclasm

 

Friday night &

Saturday morning

dear ornithopter

2 o'clock in the wintry morning and snug in my lecky blanket.

Upheaval in the household. The transients are on their benighted way, taking one of our number with them alas. Patricia Lamb moves into the spare room (remember her? very autonomous, extrovert) which is fine by me. The last two months have been atrocious. I've really hated living here in this ha "commune." Difficult enough to find peace and consolation behind my closed door.

Next week the exams. Burning dreams of the first weeks of cracking up—how long now? '68.

Ambiguous pleasures of dealing with my 18th century English novel tutor (not the dreary turd I had for Tragedy). Though hesitant and suspicious, he seems to approve of my attitude. I turned in an essay condemnatory of Jane Austen, which attracted the predictable tute shit-storm. The tutor, though, scribbled this on it:

 

Interesting committed approach. Way outside that permitted or understood within the conventions of a university course, but why not? Is it more important to tell the truth about Jane Austen or about society? I might come down on your side, I imagine, but that is not what university courses are about, nor, I think, can they ever be. Your approach foreshadows not just the destruction of literary studies in their present form, but the collapse of English literature altogether—which is okay by me. But why on earth are you doing the course in the first place? Or is your aim avowedly subversive? (Which, again, is okay by me.)
 

I'm taking the bloody course, fella, because it's part of the syllabus, an obligatory prerequisite to study of present-day work.

 . . . No, Joseph, I was not that direct, even with someone who permits criticism of the "great J.A."

This guy makes it plain that he finds me more than a little eccentric, but he does not fail to seek my opinions in every tutorial, which is flattering. Is this the Caroline who never dares open her mouth in your presence? I'm converting my co-students to Women's Liberation. A formal group has been established at the university. It's not doing much yet because of the pending exams—but we look forward to some tough self-analysis!

My chances of passing some of the less appealing courses are about 40/60.

I can't understand the first thing about tachyons. Are you writing anything about it for a quipu? If so, give me a look at it first (come on, a photostat isn't that expensive)—I feel quite excited by the aura you've created, and I can't bear to have to wait to find out more.

Maybe I could visit you in Armidale when the exams are over? I wouldn't mind going to Melbourne the long way. That is, if Paul and Tom don't object to females (yetch!) around the house.

write with words of comfort

Caroline

 

1975: faster than light

 

"It is well known," Joseph tells the assembled hikes, "that the theory of Relativity shows time slowing to a standstill for a particle accelerating ever closer to the speed of light in vacuum. From the viewpoint of the particle, of course, time ticks along at a reliable rate but space shrinks. The universe literally closes up ahead of it. The wavelength of incoming radiation becomes indefinitely short, as more and more troughs and humps are squeezed together by the compressed time of the particle."

It might be well known, but it remains a perspective to stagger and incapacitate the mind. He has lost some of them already.

"Given that this is true, it seems intuitively plausible that the arrow of time might be reversed by traveling faster than light. Sadly, it is axiomatic in Relativity theory that nothing can go faster than light." For a moment he pauses. "Or is it?"

"Of course it is," comes a muffled cry from the floor.

"Actually, it's not," Joseph tells them, relaxing back into his chair. "There's a loophole. Certainly it is impossible to push a particle with proper mass through the light-speed boundary. But mathematicians realized more than a decade ago that there's no prohibition on particles with imaginary mass."

Unexpectedly, there is a burst of laughter. He is nonplused for a moment. Oh shit, they think it's a droll jest. Joseph holds up a hand.

"Yes, appealing to a particle with imaginary mass might seem like a gambit from Alice in Wonderland. Let me assure you, however, that in mathematics a number is dubbed 'imaginary' if the result of multiplying it by itself is a negative number. That is, if it has a negative square."

Oh Christ. There goes half the remainder. Nothing for it but to push on with scholarly background stuff.

"The era of the imaginary particle was fully launched, after some early discussion by the Russian Terletski, by three Rochester University physicists, Bilaniuk, Deshpande and Sudarshan. It should be clear to anyone who's ever read the contents page of a professional physics journal that no one with a name as commonplace as 'Joseph Williams' could possibly discover anything significant." Good, friendly laughter. A nice touch, he hadn't really expected it to play.

"That was in 1962. They described in detail how pairs of imaginary particles might be captured and emitted by particles of proper mass, the sort we're made out of. Five years later, Gerald Feinberg published a powerful paper on the proposed particles, which he dubbed 'tachyons,' from the Greek tachys, meaning swift. That made three general categories of particles in the universe: 'tardyons' or 'tardons' or 'bradyons,' depending on which college you went to, which comprise ordinary atoms; 'luxons' which are massless and whip along at the speed of light; and 'tachyons' which never go slower than light.

"It was plain from the outset that they are dreadfully annoying things, if they exist. Feinberg notes his original paper that 'a state which contains no tachyons according to one observer will be seen by another observer to contain a large number."'

"It's like the number of holes in your argument," Brian Wagner yells powerfully from the floor, cupping his mouth with his hands. "It depends whether you're counting or I am."

A flock of startled laughter bursts up into the smoky air. Annoyed Joseph forces himself to grin down.

"You're a horrible fellow, Wagner," he says, "and no respecter of True Science."

Amid the giggles, there is some sympathetic hissing at naughty Wagner's expense. Joseph flips on the overhead projector. A nice clean drawing in several colors is abruptly there, fetched from the aether on strings of light.

"This is a Minkowski diagram," Joseph tells them. "It is a convenient spacetime chart for plotting four-dimensional 'world lines' by compressing all three spatial directions into a single horizontal x-axis, and representing time as the vertical y-axis. By traveling up the diagram, a marked point moves forward in time. Traversing the diagram laterally represents a compressed view of motion in three-dimensional space."

He flicks the controls of the projector. A new diagram appears, slightly more complicated. "Under certain conditions, the motion of tachyons would imply movement backward in time, that is, back down the chart. Tachyon theory," he says, conscious of an access of bleakness, "appears to invoke a determinate future. One where consequences cannot be evaded because, from the four dimensional perspective, the future can loop back and provide causal inputs to its own past. To avoid logical paradox, this kind of looping can only be sustained if the future that's doing the looping is directly coupled to the past it is affecting. Everything, from the point of view of the Minkowski diagram, has already happened."

The hike audience sits very still, regarding the geometric runes.

"Do you grasp what I'm saying? It's quite horrifying, you see. Even if a message could be transmitted to us now, to this very moment, from the future, using tachyons, we wouldn't be able to use that information to extend our volitional choices. We could not alter the future. Why not? Because in the future that sent us the tachyon message, it has long since been received. Whatever has happened as a result is what will happen. We are trapped in a block of rigid spacetime and nothing can ever get us out."

 

1971: the last refuge of the incompetent

 

Sunglare infiltrates the broken slats, abrading Ray Finlay's eyes. He groans, pushes his face into the rumpled valley between pillows. His jaw persists in sliding off the hard edge of the rubber pillow, dumping his nose and mouth into the suffocating fluffiness of Marjory's kapok monstrosity. Foul breath comes back at him. He gags. He sags drearily between near-conscious pain and near-sleeping asphyxiation.

At length he stumbles off the low bed and gropes three codeine tablets out of their guaranteed-not-to-tear foil. A pair of mosquitoes lies embalmed like a quote from Yeats on the surface of his bedside glass of water. Grimacing, Ray staggers to the bathroom and sloshes the glass clean. He douses his face and finds all the towels gone. My God, he thinks. That girl has the constitution of an ox.

They had grown maudlin over beer, eventually, and dragged out a bottle of Scotch from Peter's room, and become very drunk, falling onto the bed in confusion and love, exhausted with the incomprehensibility of the world and their own inadequacy. Now Marjory is down at the laundry and Ray, a decade closer to death even before he started, creeps back to bed.

When next he wakes the September sun glazes the window from eleven o'clock. No Marjory. Marjory at the laundromat. He lies in the sweaty bed and considers the day's agenda. The concrete stage. No rain, at least. Sun instead. Media cameras. Circus and purpose in one rousing package. He is, he understands, afraid of mass emotion. It is too potent. It is a vehicle for too many disjointed hostilities. Yet what alternatives for persuasion are so accessible? And it is not true, he admits finally, that Peter and Jan expect the apocalypse. Their instinct is valid. One must fight and fight and fight, be there, hold up banners and take the thumps of the cops and the sneers of the poor gulled buggers who haven't worked it out yet. Nothing is given; not despair, not faith and hope.

With a crash the bedroom door flies open. Don the Red puts his beard around the jamb.

"Get your clothes on, mate. I've got the van out the back."

Ray is not delighted to see him. Don the Red sees himself as Australia's Che Guevara. On weekends he practises with his automatic rifle in the hills. Like Che, he suffers from chest conditions; it is a link he cherishes.

"Seen Marj?"

"They were coming back from the food co-op. I brought them round, they're stashing the veggies away."

Ray climbs unsteadily into his underpants. "Lodged your route?" Protest organizers have an informal arrangement with the authorities. They present tight advance route-schedules to the City Council and the police. It helps minimize stupidities on both sides.

Don follows him to the bathroom door. "The obstructionist bastards are still quibbling. We've changed the route."

"You're not going straight to Hyde Park?"

"No way. We're going through the Cross to Rose Bay, to the American Embassy."

Oh, wonderful. Hold a demo in the middle of the red light district. Good thinking, Don.

"I thought the idea was to show the flag in town, attract ordinary people to join in."

"Just as many ordinary people in the Cross, mate. The media'll love it, sex and riots."

"Do you think the permit'll come through?"

"Not much they can do except deploy the pigs along the gutters. Oh, it'll be a nice clean useless little ritual."

Ray looks up at him, face dripping, eyebrows raised.

"Wait until you see what I've got in the bus, baby." Don laughs and goes back into the kitchen.

Ray towels and dresses, suspicious and angry. As he's pulling on his boots Marjory skips in, gives him a hug. "Hi. Still smashed?"

"I'm all right." She blinks at his tone. "Marj, what's he got out there?"

She's startled. "Placards, bike helmets, loud hailers, a box of marbles, you know." Lines crease between her eyes. "I know you don't like marbles, Ray, but it's better than getting trodden on by horses."

"It's one way to guarantee that someone gets trodden on, even if it's someone else." He brushes past her into the kitchen. Jan is mixing a spicy salad. It curdles the saliva at the back of his tongue. Peter slices ham, looking unhappy as Don harangues him.

Jan is jolly, a kid looking forward to a picnic. "Good evening, O Lochinvar. Marj has told all about your brush with the fascist olds."

Ray ignores her, as he usually does. "What's it going to be, Don? A Lee Harvey Oswald? They got him too, you might recall."

Don grimaces, excited and contemptuous. "It's going to be beautiful, baby. Direct action, revolutionary force. The time has come. We've played their game too long on their terms." Don has not read Marcuse for nothing. "Demonstrations," he explains, "are just another assimilated ritual. Just one more reinforcer of what a tolerant democracy we enjoy. It's time for violent dissent, baby, muscle in the message."

"Plastique, Don?" Ray is so furious he can barely speak. "Napalm? Are you planning to napalm a traffic cop? That'd be very colorful on telly, don't you think?"

Peter, clearly uneasy, says, "Actually I agree with Ray. Sporadic violence is adventurist, Don, it's unmarxist. Demonstrations are meant to change the consciousness of the masses through their praxis. I mean, we're trying to elicit sympathy. We want to show them how many people are against the war. Violence from us just produces backlash. Fascist reaction."

Don's eyes roll. "What are ya, a fuckin' media executive? Democracy's a sham. They've all been conditioned by the fascists who own the Press and the armies and the churches. The only way we can reach them is by violence. We have to give them a piece of what their bloody so-called democratic government is doing in Vietnam."

They've all trailed Ray out to where the van is parked. He climbs in the back as Don's exposition continues and starts shoveling through the hardware. One styrofoam cooler holds red glass containers filled with murky liquid, evidently under pressure. Another has similar bottles coded with green. Ray tugs one out, raises it to eye level. It is heavy and very cold. Don jumps in beside him. "Jesus, have a care," he yells. "If you smash two of those bottles together in here—"

Ray grabs his sweatshirt front without replacing the green container. "What is it, Don?"

The revolutionary strikes away Ray's grip but it is plain that he does not wish to fight in the back of the van. He jumps down into the long green grass. "Cool it, man." He rubs at his upper arm. "If you insist on the details, it's a CNS cholinesterase inhibitor in binary form."

Ray puts the bottle down very carefully. "Nerve gas," he says. "Oh you fucking fuckwits."

"That's just labeling," Peter tells him. "You're being superstitious. It's non-toxic. Mix the two fluids together and you get a light suspension of vapors that absorb through the moist membranes. We'll be all right, you just need a filter mask and we've got half the Chem labs' supplies in the vans."

"Christ," Marjory whispers.

"Bern and I made it in the labs," Don says. "It'll have the pigs puking their guts out. We'll keep it in reserve till the last moment, then take over the Embassy while everyone's running round like headless chooks. Once they see we mean business, people will—"

Without having the faintest premonition of his own impulse, the muscles and sinews in his arm driven by central nervous system chemical transmitters originating in some deep center of his limbic system, Ray lashes out and belts Don heavily in the gut. With a numb fist he does it again, then chops hard on the side of the man's neck as he falls forward. His hand feels swollen. Physical violence is hardly his forté: the jolt of the blows is painful and exhilarating, a revelation.

Marjory hesitates, then squats beside the unconscious man. Ray slams the back of the van shut. "I'll park it round at your parents' place," he tells her quietly.

"Maybe we'd better leave just the bottles there. Bern and the other organisers'll be looking for the van. They need the hailers and the helmets, Ray."

"They'll have to do without."

Jan and Peter are on their knees in the grass beside the prone Don, silent in a kind of unbelieving shock. Don starts to come round. He groans, touches his bruised neck, twists his head around. "I think something's dislocated." His eyes dart in outrage and betrayal.

"Listen, you crazy bastard." Ray helps him to his feet, teeth clenched. "What the fuck do you think you're playing at, you tin-pot Lenin? Haven't you got the faintest idea about social feedbacks? Do you really want to trigger off a goddamned pogrom?"

"Oh, leave him alone." He looks up to the reproach in Peter's face, in Jan's. Marjory glances away, her hands working together.

Jan stares at him. "At least he's not just all talk. At least he was trying to do something."

"You're all mad," Ray says, walking away from them. "You're all bloody insane."

He starts the van and backs it out into the narrow, cobbled laneway. Marjory has remained with the others. He feels nauseated, and hungry, and alone.

 

1970: the poetics of science

 

Armidale Madhouse

23 June 70

broccoli

My sympathies. Still, with the odious household throng routed things can only look up. I wish you well for your exams. Take heart. Surely you must be among the few who've bearded the Great Tradition in its den and got away unscarred.

The SQUID is up and in detecting mode, but now we have to debug the extraneous shit that flies through the air and the ground and from the inherent radioactive isotopes in our damn clothes and fingers. Calibration and collimation. The computer will have to create a profile of all this background noise before it can look for the little splurts of tachyons with the exact cross-section we predict. Needles and haystacks, you know. Meanwhile I dine on pale slop and hope that edgy Tom doesn't decide to rid himself of my presence by poisoning me at table. Nothing new. Did I mention that I saw Antony's ex lady friend Francine just before I came up here? I had brief lascivious fantasies of sharing my bed with her (fat bum or not—see, I remember these snide asides), but she declined to stay overnight.

I've been considering what is called the lure of the limerick. Herewith, some instances:

 
A clever-dick fucker named Fisk
had a pelvis astoundingly brisk.
So fast was his action
The Fitzgerald contraction
foreshortened his dick to a disk.

(An Einsteinian conceit. All will be made clear in my quipu contribution on tachyons and relativity Real Soon Now.)

Here's one for Paul and Tom and the gang in the Puce Room (I laughed so hard at this that I caused a false reading on our printer):

 
Said the limp-wristed Sheik of Algiers
to his harem assembled, "My dears,
you may think it odd o' me
but I weary of sodomy;
so tonight's for you ladies." (Loud cheers.)
 

P.S., op. cit., et al: about the Jane Austen essay, kiddo: look around you, abandon your sweet gentle illusions, that's the way it is, babe, you are in a Sausage Machine that wants processed products. The university is not in the business of commitment and original truths. Maybe some of the science faculties but I wouldn't bet on it—we've been catching a lot of dubious looks around here with our Tachyon Quest, it's outside the standard paradigm so it doesn't exist, and if it does it shouldn't so it doesn't anyway. So what can you expect in a realm like the English department that manages to lack simultaneously any empirical basis for testing and remedying its hypotheses, and any source of imagination independent of middle-class quid status quo? That degree you're aiming at is a teaching or public service meal ticket, no more, no less—exactly like they say on the prospectus.

it's a nasty place, the world

Joseph

 

the eighth photograph

 

Only the contingent fact that she is speaking, and the decision of the photographer, highlights Caroline in this portrait of a group of women. Her dejected face is drained of expression, color, hope. She slumps into her chair, hands folded on her lap, eyes lowered. Three women lean forward, angry and worried and speaking simultaneously. One wears overalls and no cosmetics; her long hair is pulled back tight at her nape. A second is altogether softer, fussy hair floating about her face, her limbs rounded in wool. The third is Jane, wife of Caroline's one-time lover Alan. It is difficult to be certain of the object of Jane's animus, but one hand reaches across her knees toward downcast Caroline like a small concerned animal. The other women form a seated circle in the room, somehow heraldic, archaic: a company of warriors paying discreet homage to one of their number wounded in a clash with the endlessly pressing foe; a tribal group seeking nurture in the earth, comforting an exhausted hunter. One of the women feeds an infant at her breast, her face turned away slightly from Caroline's woe. Near the door, Lanie gazes with a sweet smile at the mother and her child.

 

the ninth photograph

 

It is not immediately evident that the pile of jumbled clothes and bedding is Caroline. The eye tracks aimlessly for a moment around the photograph of her room, picking out her desk, piled with books, the small pictures of birds, the colorful chair, the window of sky. An arm dangles out of the blanket, hand resting on the floorboards. Several empty bottles with their labels torn off lie nearby. The cap from one of the bottles has rolled halfway across the floor, and now rests, a small fat wheel, against one leg of the chair. Caroline's stringy hair, among her pillows, seems no more human than a bundle of drenched wool.

 

the tenth photograph

 

On the Casualty trolley, under bright lights, comatose Caroline has been placed in the left lateral position, left arm tucked under her chest, right arm brought over, left leg extended, right knee up, crossing her bare left thigh where the stained and disheveled dress leaves her uncovered. A pillow behind her back keeps her chest expanded. The registrar, a neat handsome man in his mid twenties, indicates to the still younger intern a point of interest concerning the wash-out tube, thick as a garden hose, that rises from Caroline's gullet, emerges through her slack mouth and drops over the side. In the trolley's shadow, a thread of irrigating liquid laden with synthesized neural poisons falls under gravity into a plastic bucket. Beyond the trolley a flustered nurse readies an electrocardiogram monitor, one hand pushing the machine's plug into a power point, the other holding out a handful of wires.

 

the eleventh photograph

 

On the ECT trolley, anaesthetized Caroline is stretched full length in her white cotton nightdress, feet bare. Two nurses stand at her left, one at her right. Their hands touch her lightly. They watch her toes, curled in muffled convulsion from the current that has shrilled her brain. Gooseflesh lightly covers her exposed skin. From the back of her right hand a scalp-vein needle and its narrow plastic tube loop from a blood vessel that has carried into her body Brietal to render her unconscious and Scoline to relax her muscles. The anaesthetist stands at her left shoulder, one hand lightly on her carotid artery, holding the oxygen mask to her mouth and nose. The gas rises through its rubber tube from a large black cylinder behind him. On Caroline's right, the psychiatrist is removing the bilateral black electrodes from her scalp. They look like ear-phones, orange switches let into their dark shiny surfaces. The ECT machine is a box behind her, neat, with a green light, and several switches. Its current has passed into her head for the shortest time, less than a second. Had the photographer clicked the camera an instant earlier, the picture would show a yellow light on the machine. Caroline would be seen in electric convulsion. It would not have been a very dramatic photograph. Her body would be contracted slightly, shoulders drawn up. As it is in this shot, her face would remain half-covered by the oxygen mask, blanked in chemical sleep.

 

1970: the incredible culture

 

still Armidale

Thursday June 25 70

old dear

I mentioned to Tom and Paul the possibility that you might motor through and maybe could you stay over?? . . . Tom indicated that he'd rather you didn't. He explained rather pointedly that he might sort of go crazy (he's given to random hysterical turns, it seems) which would embarrass both him and you. Might be best if I wrapped things up here as quickly as possible and met you back in Melbourne—it's pretty crazy having you drive all the way up here in any case.

I sympathize with your nerves, but try not to get too hung-up about the exams. Think Zen thoughts. It's all a Game.

Speaking of Jane Austen, as so many people presumably are these days (though hardly ever around the physics department at the University of New England, mate), I'm reading John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, which evidently has become an even more swollen best seller than The Magus. Formally it's unlike his previous work—he adopts a slangy variety of 19th century diction interrupted by Brechtian bursts of "Hoy, listen, this is fiction you're reading, you know, it's all invented," and "The Victorians, unlike us, did, thought, felt, believed X, Y and Z." His philosophy remains game-theory existentialism, but the protagonists are even more alienated from the incredible culture they move through. He's clearly done stacks of research into Victoria England and projects the milieu quite brilliantly. An agreeable book, one I mean to treat as a bridge back to the actual novelists of the time. (Yeah, and I know Jane Austen was 50 years earlier, but her emphasis on propriety, duty, form and so on permeates the book. I say this authoritatively on the basis of what you've told me, never having read J.A.)

run run run to the mailbox

Joseph

 

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