Quipu (5 page)

I miss you. If you listen carefully.

Why do you insist on denigrating yourself? Antony is right: magic sea sprite sadly beautiful. Take this for reassurance—everyone at that damned party came forth with unsolicited testimonials to your warmth and excellence, and expressions of amazement at my letting you slip through my fingers. Indeed.

All my love, old trout.

kiss kiss

Joseph

1979: red menace

It’s winter-dark in the Uskadar, but warm, friendly with fat soft candles and cloth hanging in folds and tucks from the ceiling. The Nitting Circle shamble and straggle into the place, peer at the Turkish menu, agree grudgingly with Joseph’s plan that all are to share a set menu. For the best part of an hour and a half they gorge on tiny pieces of meat (lamb chops, slices of lamb, shish kebab, sausage), on dips glistening with oil, on the wine and beer they have fetched with them. It is carnage, and nervous Joseph abandons his thoughtfully prepared mineral water. When Cabernet Sauvignon is pressed on him, Joseph is a goner. His voice rises to the hangings. His arms levitate. A reckless note of song enters him.

There are not quite enough cars to see them all back to Marks St. Happily, several of the brights relish the stroll, setting off into the blackness with Wagner, who knows enough about Brunswick to get them there. The street smears before Joseph. Cats prowl his hallway when he clicks home the key. He’s forgotten to leave the lights on; there is a degree of fumbling, an irritated hiss from Marjory Finlay. What’s she doing here anyway, Joseph asks himself. She can’t abide untrained people discussing the written word.

“Want some coffee, Joe?”

It’s Maria Ponte, Mario’s handsome, swarthy sister.

“Huh? Oh, um, yes thanks, um, Maria, I could do with something to get my mind clear.”

The young woman smiles at her host and trots off to the kitchen. Joseph is touched and frightened. He battles the tape recorder for a minute, at her cleared throat looks up, takes the hot mug, nods non-commitally. Maria, abashed, sits neatly in a small chair in the corner of the living room where Joseph had the minimal wit to deploy all the seats in the house. With a sigh, he sips, puts down his mug, piles up a bundle of mixed theory and social criticism by Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault on a table beside the microphone.

The doorbell rings. Wagner and his expedition arrive with maximum rowdiness. Brian Wagner might well be as drunk as Joseph; he is extravagant, mockingly gracious to Marjory Finlay, snide to Joseph. It strikes Joseph, not for the first time, that Brian hates not being center stage. He finds his cooling coffee, drains it, nods guilty thanks again to Maria Ponte. She is looking with bemused fascination at Wagner.

“Is everyone here? Is the front door shut? I don’t want the cats to get out. The lavatory is at the end of the hallway and on your left; kitchen is opposite. Feel free to make coffee for yourselves. Okay.” Joseph’s tongue is slightly numb. He is confused and tries to obscure the fact by dealing with simple procedural matters, step by step as he has been taught in countless laboratory experiments. “I presume you’ve all done the requisite reading.” Fat chance with this lot, they’re more into puzzles and word games than social dialectics.

“You’re pissed, Joseph,” Wagner informs him. “Get on with it.”

“Aren’t the minutes going to be read?” someone says officiously.

“If you really insist.” Joseph looks around with his eyes held a tiny bit out of focus. This is a trick he learned when he first had to deliver lectures to freshman students. Despite the blurriness so induced, he is instantly terrified by what seem to be hundreds of eyes staring directly into his soul. A dollop of saliva catches in his throat.

“Boring.” Brian Wagner stares hopelessly at the ceiling. “I thought you were an anarchist.”

“It’s more a matter of religious observance,” Ray says sarcastically. “We must be teleologically correct, Joe.”

Wagner, witlessly and inexplicably, presumably driven by some reflex arc of lewd association, cries: “Paleologically
erect
.”

Joseph dismisses this with an annoyed flick. “The people who were here last month heard Mario’s excellent presentation on Gödel Undecidability. Those who weren’t missed out. Right now I’m going to try to explore the use of dialectical theory in the work of an avowedly marxist writer, Herbert Marcuse, who died two months ago, and Michel Foucault, who is still with us.”

“You love to waste your time on these antiquated non-entities,” Wagner tells him. “Worthless, all of them. Hayek, Joseph. Popper!” He squints from the corner of his eye at Marjory Finlay, whose features are utterly composed and remain so.

Joseph gazes around to remind himself who’s here. “The interesting thing about Marcuse is that while great minds like Brian can’t see what all the fuss was about, people like Mike Murphy
sometimes
can. I’m going back a long way, admittedly—let’s say that around 1967 or 1968, during the Paris
événements
, Mike could
vaguely
see what all the fuss was about, but can’t any longer.”

Amused murmurs come from audience, entering into the spirit of the thing: “Poor Mike…A bit slow…”

Joseph grins compliantly. “Since then, of course, the nature of the fuss has changed.
I
stopped seeing what all the fuss was about in 1972, around…aw…halfway through
Counterrevolution and Revolt,
when I decided he wasn’t remotely as on the ball as Michel Foucault, who of course is a Frog.’ After a cunning beat, Joseph gives them a little tingle of current. Blandly, he adds, “Marcuse was not a Frog. He was a Kraut Jew, born two years later than my grandfather. So he had a few problems being accepted, but not as many as Foucault, who’s a poof.”

He means ‘born two years earlier,’ actually; at a not very deeply buried level of his unconscious, Joseph has rattled himself with what he intended as an apotropaic bite or two at any vestigial racism, ethnocentrism or homophobia in his audience. In fact, several incredulous hisses of in-drawn breath make him note that he’s missed his mark again, failed to transmit his several-layered meaning, botched it, raised nothing better than a suspicion that he is himself a thoughtless Jew-baiter and queer-basher. Even as this realization washes across his brain like the dregs of an old coffee pot cast on compost, Brian Wagner has his own mouth open.

“But you’re neither a Kraut nor a poofter, Joseph.”

“Was this Marcuse a hike?” cries a pimply American exchange student named Kenny. He has made a point of ensuring that everyone in the room knows he once scored 176 on an accredited test instrument. “What’s the salience?” He looks baffled and irritated. “And what’s ‘poofter’ in English?”

“In English,” Joe tells him, “that’s ‘poofter.’ In American, it’s ‘faggot’.” Have a nice day, now.

This time, the apotropaic usage seems to get through to some of them, though another stupid young bright sniggers as if Joseph were cracking a dirty joke in the school playground.
Is
that in fact what he’s doing? The thought flashes on and off, suppressed.

Two of the magazines in his pile have photographs in them. “If you want to know what Marcuse looked like, this is a picture taken a few years ago at the University of California at San Diego, where he was an honorary emeritus prof. If you want a picture of him when he was in his
filthy Freudian
period we have here…” and Joseph widens his eyes, shows his teeth, “Herbert displaying a copy of
Eros and Civilization.”

Everyone cranes. Most of them have never heard of him.

“And here’s Foucault, author of an on-going
History of Sexuality
, in all his bald glory.”

“I’ve never heard of him.”

Kenny says, “I think Delany quotes him in
Tides of Lust.
Or maybe it was
Triton.
”

They peer at the sinister portrait.

Someone says, “He looks at you with slides of lust.”

Joseph says snidely, “Snides of lust.”

“Slides of tusk,” Wagner says, not to be outdone.

Gazing carefully around the room, Joseph says in a mild voice, “Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault are very serious thinkers.”

Instantly, his living room is in uproar. Volumes slip and skid as Joseph seeks a particular book. “See, the trouble, is I’ve got so much source material here…” As his voice trails away, Wagner’s rises in a good-humored parody of peevishness: “It doesn’t matter if I interject because of your complex arrangement of—”

“Marcuse was a figure of some importance during the antiwar protests in America and even in this country in the late 1960s, but long before that he’d been a key player in the Frankfurt School of marxist revisionist theorists, especially after they were exiled from Germany by the rise of Nazism and most especially when they reopened in New York at Columbia University in, in—”

“‘34,” Finlay says immediately.

“We have here an authority on the period. Ray was programming an abacus for IBM in 1934.”

“Where do you keep the painting, Ray, up in the attic?”

“It’s true, he don’t look a day over 75.”

“Like his colleague Adorno,” Joseph says heroically, “Marcuse had an unusually rich concern with the tonality of culture, with abstract art and, and, and innovations such as serial music—”

“With all that tonality seriality sexuality,” says bored Brian Wagner, a man who knows a word salad when he hears one. He lifts a glass of Chablis, poured from his Killawarra cask, and downs it.

Joseph is virtually trapped. He lunges for a paperback. “Which brings me back at last to
Eros and Civilization
.”

1969: the tides of love

brunswick the golden

Sunday 30 Nov 69

Upon your distant brow.

Caroline, am I writing too often? When there’s no one to talk to (most of time) I find myself grabbing paper and babbling to you. If I could sublimate this urge into writing for quipu I would be famous on six continents.

Friday: after thumping in on the thumb due to the power strike (all the trams and trains shut down, roads clogged with bad-tempered buggers—though I must admit to finding a lift with a cheerful bunch of rogues who otherwise would have had nothing in common and might never have spoken to one another) nothing happened all day. I sat around trying to look inconspicuous.

It’s risky visiting the Manchesters these days. I had a splendid meal there on Friday night, but the evening deteriorated gruesomely as the numerous guests and rowdies became boozily inarticulate and Bob sang atrocious hillbilly bluegrass with the aid of his twanging ukulele. I went away most ungratefully without a word (the ghost who walks) into the sleet-like night and took a taxi home. I miss you.

My father is indeed driving me crazy. It still freaks me out to find him ‘reading the paper’ (the
Sun
, natch, he’d never open anything but a tabloid) to the high-decibel accompaniment of the most banal quiz program on telly plus the hour’s pompous fascist blatherings from radio South Africa. He achieved the ultimate this morning. I got up late (well, it’s Sunday) and emerged blinking and grunting to find him assiduously viewing the channel 9 test pattern. I’ve heard that loons do this while high on acid, but…Mum, of course, was muttering around in the laundry; it didn’t bother her, useful tranquillizer against the old sod probably. Where did the genes comes from, I often ask myself.

Actually if this job gets any worse I might run off and join you in Sydney. I’ve squirreled enough money away to keep me going for maybe three months. I don’t know how serious I am. But there’s a limit. There are several limits.

I hope you’re happy, sweetheart. I won’t run through the stale rhetorical device of listing questions pertinent to your doings and welfare. You know I care, baby. Please do write, even if (like me) you’ve got nothing much to say—it’s incredibly happy-making to come home to a letter from you.

lots of love, old lustyloon

Joseph

1975: corrosive rot

“Ray and Joe are members of a sort of exclusive global club which comprises those people who have taken a supervised IQ test—and managed to score more than 99 percent of the population.”

“One in 400 actually, Grant.”

“That’s more than 99 percent isn’t it?”

“I suppose it is,” Ray admits.

“This curious tribe call themselves ‘hikes’ or ‘brights,’ and they keep in touch through the publication of amateur magazines called ‘quipu,’ You’ve probably heard of the oldest and most famous of these groups—Mensa. Now our own local brand of ‘clever dicks,’ as they also call themselves, is hosting the annual international Point Two Four Convocation.”

“Point Two Six.”

“Well I’m only off by point two. What does it mean, anyway, for Christ’s sake, they don’t seem to have it here?”

“Clipped on the front of the folder,” the producer explains, leaning over in a veil of crisp perfume.

“Right, right.”

“Point oh two, Grant.”

“What? It says here—”

“Never mind. What it means is, test scores as high as ours are found in only 0.26 percent of the tested population. Just over one in 400. See?”

“Gotcha. The convocation’s guest of honor,” Grant Moore tells the camera, “is a distinguished British psychoanalyst, Dr. Hans Eysenck.” Moore pauses to get a balky rabbit bone out of his mouth. The waitress has placed a huge wooden bowl of some antipodean approximation to wild salad in the center of the table, and a wine waiter stands by with a bottle for Moore’s approval. “Hmm, a Tyrrell Pinot Chardonnay. Our wonderful Hunter Valley wines. Eat your hearts out, France.” The cork is freed with a flick, wine flows golden into glasses that catch the cool sun at their brim. “Some critics allege, of course, that groups like Mensa and Point Four Six are only for the emotionally retarded and insecure.”

Expansively, plucking a huge plug of savory meat from his terrine and swirling his glass in a sticky hand, Ray says, “Vergé is certainly an extremely capable and inventive chef.”

The interviewer frowns. “You’re suggesting that high IQ groups are the
cuisine nouvelle
of intellectual life, lightweight but…uh, inventive?”