Quipu (16 page)

26 October 76

DEAR JOSEPH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

your Friend

Marjory Finlay

1977: repeat offensive

22 August 77

Dear Joseph

We haven’t seen you for a long time. Have you gone mad and been destroyed under the Rabid Dog’s Act? Think yourself lucky, at least, that you do not share the parlous condition of the brain-swap bloke I watched last night in
The Revenge of
Frankenstein
. He’d been bludgeoned a number of times across the cranial wound with a stout chair. It was likely, the criminal surgeon mused, that this had damaged a brain cell.

I notice on my calendar that it’s now ten months since we offered you a room and a cat for a week or so. It’s no wonder you persist in your Slough of Despond when you refuse to take up these unparalleled opportunities to taste my crook cooking. We expect to see you on the doorstep before the week is out.

sternly,

Marjory Finlay, M.A.

1977: won’t you dance

Guiltily, Joseph snatches his hand from beneath the blanket and stares fixedly at the television screen.

“Worth watching?”

“No. Quite amazingly cretinous, in fact. It makes you wonder.” What is this he’s babbling? He would be hard pressed to identify the channel, let alone the program. His erection has subsided; he looks across at Marjory, who settles herself comfortably on the end of his single bed.

What he sees causes a series of distinct physiological alterations in his body-chemistry, each as banal and stereotyped as the mood of pent mourning for his dying father had been two minutes earlier. Thankfully Marjory is not looking him in the face. His skin warms, then cools.

A mad surmise leaps in his chest.

She has arrived in his bedroom, when all is said and done, as close to naked as it’s feasible to be, given the chilly air. Joseph has never seen either Ray or Marjory in their night wear, and on a subliminal level has supposed that, like him, they go naked in summer and leave their underwear on in winter. Evidently Marjory is more conventional than that, for here she is in a strikingly translucent nylon nightdress, high at the throat and falling to her ankles but hardly hiding her wonderful full breasts and the bifurcation of her lower limbs.

Cliché or not, Joseph’s heart squeezes in syncope, a long pause, a lollop, a bloodless moment for his brain. His erection surges back.

“Feel free to change the channel,” he says. If she does that she will be obliged to learn forward, which will cause her breasts to move free of her ribcage into the line of the blue radiation burning like ice on the screen.

Jesus, Joseph thinks. I am reacting like a smutty schoolkid who’s never seen the curiously arousing weird forked hairy thing he scribbles so drivenly on lavatory walls, behind the doors, in the back of his homework book. Some ludicrous censor in my mind is interposing itself on the raw reality of what I wish, like the psychic manifestation of a Victorian chaperone.

Marjory leans placidly against the wall. She has said something about whatever he’s watching suiting her. When a ghastly commercial capers across the screen she gives him a quick smile of complicity.

It was Marjory who asked him here, after all. Neither of those letters had Ray’s mark. If anything, she insisted. Badgered him. It seems impossible to believe, but could she even then have had this in mind? Or is he inventing the whole thing, the musky tang in the air, the straining forcefields between them across the Invicta blanket he’s tugging to his chin.

“Marjory,” he gets out, interrupting something she’s started about his work, his parents, whatever it is.

“Joseph,” she says in turn, after a moment, with a touch of mockery. It is almost enough to bring him unstuck, to nail his tongue. He waits for the trembling in his legs to come under control, certain that she must feel the humiliating tremor through the frame of the hard-sprung bed.

“Well, it’s just that, Ray isn’t here, and I’m all alone after all, and I wonder if we might not more profitably employ ourselves at some more sensual task than watching replays of last Saturday’s football.”

The door is closing in a blur before he can untangle what happened. Was that a strangled laugh? An incredulous snort cut short too late? Joseph covers his head with the blanket, cold as ice, shaking with fright and self-detestation.

The images tumble pointlessly on the screen. The door opens again. In comes Marjory puffing ostentatiously on a cigarette. She rarely smokes, considers it a habit foisted on people by unscrupulous capitalists. She chucks the opened packet to him, matches from the other hand. A heavy dressing gown covers her chubby flesh, closed with a safety pin across her ample breasts.

“I’m sorry,” Joseph tells her finally.

“No, no, don’t be silly. It’s just that—” She puffs in breaths laden with carcinogens and calm. There is no ashtray, so she drags over the stencil-filled trash basket. A stench of singed wax floods the room when she stamps out her butt, lights a second cigarette and lobs in the smoking match. “You’ve always been like a brother to me, Joseph.”

He mutters resentfully, “And you’re not into incest.”

She grins at him, forgiving, friendly. “One of the few sins not on my charge-sheet.” But neither of them has much appetite for banter. The moment the show finishes on the screen, she hops off the end of the bed, gives his cloaked foot a sisterly squeeze, and retires to her own chaste fastness.

Stereotype or not, Joseph lies back on his pillow and bites at his lip until the blood runs.

1979: joseph loses faith in human kind

JOSEPH:

The artist as criminal and victim. The victim as mutilated—

BRIAN WAGNER [rising, leaving the room]:

No reflection on your talk, Joseph.

JOSEPH:

You notice that the subject of truncation has caused Wagner to move to the lavatory.

[Laughter]

Now this struck me as interesting, because in those days, in 1966, when I was lying in my enormous bed…I had built myself a very large bed in 1966 in the house I was sharing with some friends. I made it out of three separate single beds; I then built a gigantic bookshelf all around it, and this construction filled almost all the room. I had my record player near the window. One day when I came home I found the window open and the record player gone. I felt mutilated and violated, and this wasn’t a good feeling. At that moment I lost faith in human kind. I wanted nothing more than the immediate instigation of a cruel universal regime of surveillance and punishment.

1978: getting to grips with the All

[] 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.