Quipu (8 page)

Firstly, Caroline was plainly reluctant to broach her problems with either of you. Nor with any of her girl friends, except very cautiously and peripherally. It seemed important that she should tell
someone
. Trust depends on trustworthiness. If Caroline wanted to tell me things she felt incapable of revealing to you, I could not then reveal them to you. (Unless it became unquestionably imperative to do so.)

Caroline’s trust enabled me to arrange for her to see a psychiatrist. That was a crucial decision in more than one way. It meant that she and I would learn if her state was as serious as I feared. It also meant (since going to a doctor was itself an objective transaction requiring the payment of fees, medical benefits and so on) that sooner or later you would learn about it without any betrayal of trust by me. If the family situation was as open and responsive as everyone except Caroline kept insisting, everything would be sorted out without too much difficulty, though, of course, not without a measure of surprise, shock, pain, resentment perhaps, and concern.

And here we are at the most disagreeable point in what I have to tell you.

My small knowledge of clinical and theoretical psychology (a mere smattering, true, as Mrs. Muir told me today; but twenty or thirty books’ worth more, I have now to insist, than the great well of wisdom open to most middle-aged housewives) left me with a dilemma:

A strong materialist school of psychology maintains that mental disorder is a product of biochemical abnormalities and specific injurious learning experiences such as those Caroline suffered at times at school, say.

The main alternative school of thought derives from Freud and is less impressed by studies on rats and pigeons. It may be represented by Dr. Laing, who is uncompromising in his belief that the collapse of the experience of a human being into madness cannot be understood outside that person’s crucial human context: her family, principally.

If the first school was correct, Caroline was a machine that had broken down and needed a mechanic. If the second was right, she was a person trapped in a horrid unconscious tangle. My prejudice is clear enough. I could not bring any of this out while Caroline depended on my silence.

Naturally, all these rules of thumb were abandoned at the moment Caroline broke down into psychosis. I immediately rang the psychiatrist she’d been to see on one occasion, and then I rang you. It was a ghastly situation, but I attempted to place you in possession of the facts as I saw them. You felt that I was accusing you, trying to make you feel guilt. No. I wasn’t. I’m still not.

But if it has been difficult for you to pay any attention to me, an upstart youth without manners, who sponges off the government and writes for pretentious magazines, I hope you will see that I do not find it agreeable or easy to say and write things that can only reinforce your bad opinions of me.

Perhaps also I have been living too long with this tragedy as an unfolding experience to grasp the shock it must have been for you—to understand that I could hardly begin a cool and involved analysis in the unprepared moment of that shock. In the meantime, unhappily, the opportunities for understanding each other have rather diminished.

Does all this sound no better than an attempt to justify myself? It is less that than an oblique attempt to let you see in some detail through my eyes. In isolation you might consider that point of view to have little to recommend it; but we are not in isolation.

Mrs. Muir assured me that the Ward psychiatrist says the family has nothing to do with Caroline’s condition, that such illnesses come utterly out of the blue. It is a tenable viewpoint, though our everyday practice denies that we believe it. I’ve always supposed that one of the fundamentals of our way of life is the parents’ right and duty to choose the pattern of their children’s education, upbringing, associates…Why, if not because these factors are deemed of critical importance in shaping the future character of the child? Can we abdicate from that realistic expectation if the results are not to our liking?

I urge this line of thought, despite the fact that its implications in the present situation are far from happy, not from some absurd pretention to dispense blame and guilt. I do so because
if it is true
we can all
do
something for Caroline.

If mental disorder appears in a flash from nowhere, or from the buried infantile past, then we are helpless; nothing can be done. But if it is a state of mind sustained by identifiable relationships in the present, if it is the outcome of patterns of action that have prevailed for years unnoticed and prevail still, then
everything
can be done, when we uncover and change those patterns.

Can you truly believe you’re doing Caroline a service when you deftly steer conversations away from “depressing” topics? Or are you afraid to listen?

Do you actually think everything is bright and well and promising again when finally she gives up the attempt to communicate these profoundly important, agonizing thoughts and feelings, and bustles instead with a practiced smile chattering banalities? I’ve watched this performance often enough, and it makes my skin crawl.

Can’t you see the superhuman effort she has made to talk about these dreadful things, to try to come to terms with them, which you—with the best will in the world, I don’t deny it—neutralize with ‘optimism’? Do you fail to see the gray metal gates slam into place at the very instant she becomes once more, to your relief and delight, your ‘dutiful, happy, recovering daughter’?

You have never seen Caroline numb and staring blankly in the room she’s renting, or weeping in a kind of hopeless loneliness at what she says is the bitter futility of it all: as she wonders yet again why to go on living.

Do my words seem nothing more than macabre fantastic rhetoric? Can you really believe that?

I suppose I’ve just destroyed any fragment of empathy that might have survived my earlier pages. I can only hope this is not entirely true. Perhaps you might wish to show this letter to Caroline’s psychiatrist, or the Ward doctor, and get their reactions. Please do so, if you think it appropriate. Whatever happens, I hope you will give some consideration to what I’ve said here. This letter has not been undertaken lightly. I feel exhausted.

My love to you all,

Joseph Williams

one small step for [a] (man)

CONVEYOR BELT

Perhaps no single invention has so revolutionized humanity’s war habits and methods of production, and been so thoroughly loathed, as the conveyor belt.

It has taken much of the hard physical labor out of work and replaced it with tension and ruthless monotony.

The design concept is simple. Instead of loading materials into motor-driven vehicles and taking them from place to place, the motor stays put and drives a rotating pulley. A long belt is attached, supported at intervals by rollers, and the materials are carried on the moving belt. In 1868 such a conveyor was used in Liverpool, England, to transport grain on the docks. The revolutionary impact came, however, when small machine parts were rolled past a line of workers who assembled them into larger machine components.

The method had been pioneered in 1798 by Eli Whitney, an American gun maker. A century later, in 1908, Henry Ford coupled small-part manufacture and assembly with the conveyor belt to mass-produce the Model T motor car.

The benefit depends on careful analysis of the best way to put the parts together, with the least wasted effort. Since each individual task is simple, semi-skilled workers can replace all-round craftsmen, at lower wages. With fewer skills, and therefore less industrial leverage, these workers are less likely to strike for improved money or conditions.

The end of the line of this technique is automation—the total replacement of human workers by machines controlled with computers. With the rise of the micro-chip, this result can be expected increasingly throughout society in the 1980s and 1990s.

1969: joseph and dzhugashvili

brunswick Sunday

7/12/69

Caroline honey

I’m sorry to hear Antony is screwing you up, but it was fairly predictable. I hope you can get everything settled without too much anguish and boredom.

Of course, by now (I assume) you’ve surely been seduced away all flushed with sonnets and bubbly into the penthouse apt of some lustful Assistant Professor.

At present I labor through Bertram Wolfe’s
Three Who Made a Revolution
…Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin. At 400 pages (much of it read standing up in the tram, poor proletarian swine that I am) I’m only at the halfway mark. It’s as stirring as last year’s telephone directory. Still, I now feel competent to begin talking to our better informed comrades.

Tuesday afternoon I finally screwed together the courage to see your dentist again. He was properly indignant that I should be back to see him so soon; his professional competence was affronted. We had stabbing and jabbing and drilling for many happy minutes before he discerned that the damned thing was nerve-free, dead as a stale fart. So he patched it up and warned me of the Five Danger Signs of Incipient Abscess.

Is your pulse hammering as you learn these fascinating truths? Of such is the epic of my life composed. Perhaps I should after all produce a quipu of my own and fill it with these boredom-defying details.

So I sit at my desk and read about Lenin, a subversive activity funded all unknowing by the nation’s leading capitalists. When the boss infrequently ghosts across the room I leap smartly about with a conciliatory smile and do his bidding. An example? Only too happy:

On Thursday I was invited to rule 200 pages into squares with pencil and straight edge. Having failed to master the art of malingering, I cheated laterally, inventing the cardboard cut-out template. It blew the poor bugger’s mind when I completed the task some ten times faster than he’d anticipated, and he couldn’t be bothered contriving any further makework. I sat paranoically for the rest of the day reading Lenin’s insane life and waiting to get fired for redundancy. My God.

As for the Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm: surely sex authorities have been maintaining for years that the twat proper is as sensitive as a frozen glove. (A telling figure of speech, I hear you cry.) After all, as Reader’s Digest articles assure us monthly, leading specialists relish nothing better than to perform all manner of drastic surgery to the inner vagina without resort to anaesthetics. Which just makes the mystery of female sexuality more obscure, of course. On the basis of my quite remarkably modest field research it seems undeniable that orgasms for ladies are more extended and intense, when they finally actually get around to happening, than for men, or me anyway. The clitoris is clearly rather crucial to the process. So you’d think female masturbation should be more popular than it is commonly held to be. Curious. Very curious.

At the Gallaghers’ party yesterday I responded to the general gaiety as to a hammer gradually smashing my bones. Libby refused to be comforted. Mad Quintilla stayed away. The host was as repulsively obnoxious as he’s grown to be.

I eventually took a tram to the Manchesters’ and slept there after a pleasant enough evening. Their several guests proved to have Advanced Opinions. Not an aspirin between us, we all pussyfooted around the hungover morning sharing mild expressions of comfort, rather than shouting and hunting.

Don’t you dare commit suicide. Come over here and I’ll kiss it better. Space gone better close. Lots love babe.

1970: apocalypse now

JANUARY FIRST NINETEEN SEVENTY

The clocks are being smashed.

We are a generation in revolt. The old rhythms are breaking up, ocean froth before a tidal wave.

Now is not then. The clocks are shuddering and shattering. This world of us is not the world of them.

We are a generation in revolt against the sickly wistfulness of bullshit sentiment, against the evasions that stifle honesty and rage, against the dull gray smog of dull robot work and gray lifeless clothes on stiff dummy bones.

And yes, indeed, we are in revolt against that one bright feverish flame at the center of the dull gray world we were born into, the lunatic nuclear flame that is waiting to burn us out.

It is in the last ten years that we have become who we are.

We are the generation walking cool on our own feet into the Seventies but we were formed by the Sixties. That ferocious decade which has just closed was the time when we found ourselves, created in our own bodies and our own styles a rhythm shaking the worn-out world.

And it is the
music
of the Sixties that is our rhythm and our style, our voice, our voyage of discovery: us shaping ourselves.

Where we have been already points to where we are going. And where we are going—if we keep our nerve, if we keep our cool, if we keep our truth, if they do not destroy us first—is into the Revolution of Joy.

The music of the Sixties is our history.

It is the mad, wild, fierce truth of Dylan, and his lyricism.

The music of the Sixties is the dream fantasia of psychedelic West Coast America, the surf pulse and the good vibrations of the Beach Boys, the blatant savage adrenaline of Jimi Hendrix, the nimble black Tamla Motown beat, the White Negro voyage of Presley.

Above all the music of the Sixties is the evolution of the Beatles: the honest sexy excitement of their first songs, the nervy innovations of Sgt. Pepper, their hungry curiosity for new ways to speak and sing and their glad embrace of ancient raga from that crowded Indian manscape that previous generations had despised and crucified, the search for reality and beauty no matter the color of its skin, the discovery of the naked human body, that taming of the devouring computer to the musician’s soul-plucking, sledgehammer art, the welding of East and West and Peace and Love in the strange wonderful harmonies, so vile and so hideous to older ears and eyes, of John and Yoko…

It is our poetry, scarring the sky and tearing apart the placid paralysis of the air, coming on strong and heavy with all the good and bad vibrations, all of them.