Quipu (24 page)

Caro with love

1978: snakes & ladders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does any of this matter?

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

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

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

1970: throwing up

St. Kilda

23 July 1970

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

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

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

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

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

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

let me know how the exam results turned out.

frail-ly, Joseph

1970: caroline’s trip

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

Sydney? that’s my way, he says.

Settling in: Cigarette?

No thanks.

She draws out the Drum tobacco.

Are you fair dinkum?

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

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

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

What would you do if I kissed ya?

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

Ah, okay, I’ll forget it.

Shit, Caroline thinks. Four hundred miles.

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

And wakes sick.

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

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

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

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

1970: writing science

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe, Joe, my day will come.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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