Quipu (9 page)

The music of the Sixties, if it does not fail, if we do not let it out of our hands, is an arrow into the history of the Seventies.

1971: young love is such a sweet emotion

Ray Finlay listens to strange music in the sunny autumn of 1971. Holocaust burns in South-East Asia. Gangsters less couth than usual rule in Washington. Toadies more feeble than average govern in Australia. History is flattening into foul stagnation. Eight human beings have stood on the Moon. Naked in the afternoon and conscious of his small but definite pot belly, 29 years old, Ray is fucking with his girlfriend. It is not yet
de rigeur
for Ray to think of her as his ‘woman,’ not at any rate in Australia. And Marjory Nourse, barely 20, remains legally a ‘girl,’ Of course this legal fiction of physical and mental immaturity would be tested more drastically were she a boy (though if she were a boy she would not be under Ray Finlay’s thrusting body at this moment or any other; oh no), for if Marjory had copped a Y chromosome instead of one of her two X’s, she’d be tumbling in the barrel with all the other hapless conscription marbles. By life-affirming contrast, instead of shivering in peril of some ghastly Indo-Chinese jungle trail she cries and pants and heaves her chubby glowing body against her lover’s.

They are alone in their household, a rare pleasure. Jan and Peter have strolled across to mad Don’s Blockhouse to plan the final deployment of their contingent in the revolution. Well, the demo. Peter and Jan seem to share an unspoken and ill-defined hope that storming Hyde Park will steamroller events directly into Revolution, though 1969’s assault on the American Embassy in Melbourne mysteriously failed to attain that end. Nor, indeed, did those heart-cracking Moratorium parades, the scores of thousands marching behind Dr. Jim Cairns, socialist parliamentarian and saint of resistance. This time, though, surely the proletarian struggle will be vindicated in a great spontaneous uprising of Workers and Students, 1968 Paris in 1971 Australia, forging, in harmony, out of history and turmoil, the nation’s brave future. “If it doesn’t happen everyone’s in big trouble,” Ray has commented caustically. “Because the buggers are never going to
vote
for a Labor Government.”

Actually Ray does not really object to this barmy myth of redemption, having concluded that some people possess a need, rather like a vitamin deficiency, to believe they can make the incredible tangible. On the other hand he’ll fly off the handle if anyone asks his star sign, or calculates the mystic numeric value of the letters in his name, or tells him how they saw this enormous white flying saucer in the sky, right near where you’d expect the moon to be but twice as large.

So, while the others foment the stuff of destiny, Marjory and Ray stay home and employ themselves at a more sensuous exploration. On the stereo is a John Cage tape Marjory has brought home from the university library. A lusty arrhythmic collage disorders the air. Post-coital Finlay, Ph.D., and his lissom if well-padded student, by no means sad after, jump and fall and roll and giggle from one item of furniture to the next, convulsing in shrieks at the sheer presumptuous lunacy caroming from wall to wall.

It’s one thing to practice erotic elaborations to West Coast raga-rock, and quite another to make holy sex within the cathedral mathematics of Bach. But Cage, Ray reflects (watchful as always from that quantum remove which elides only in sleep), Cage puts you where you are every day. His hands snarl on Marjory’s damp, drying skin. Cage is the guts of the 20th century.

These abstractions are subliminal to vanishing point. For the most part Ray and Marjory hoot, and stop to listen spellbound, and grapple with each other. The polite rapping at the door is assimilated to the background.

The second time, white Ray pushes pink Marjory away and sneaks to the door. He flips down the mirror system that cunning Don has installed to one side of the front verandah (against
der Tag
, or its thwarting), and views Marjory’s parents from two superior angles.

Mrs. Nourse knocks a third time. They’ve heard something. Denied satisfaction now, they’ll be up the side in a flash, and in the back way.

Ray dives for the stereo and turns it up, tosses Marj her shift while she hunts for her panties, and scoots for the bathroom. The hot water nearly scalds him sterile, but he emerges pink and bathrobed and rubbing at his soaked hair with the nonchalance of one who’s sung contentedly beneath the shower for half an hour. Tight and edgy, the parents are settling themselves at the big table while Marjory, with quite awesome composure, empties the teapot.

“Why, hello,” says surprised Ray, shaking water from his beard. “Pardon my appearance, I’ve—”

“—just come over for a shower,” Mrs. Nourse tells him in her guileless voice. “Poor dear, Marj has just been saying how the Gas Board are doing repairs in your street.”

“Odd sort of music,” says Mr. Nourse dubiously, knowing but wondering, his nostrils a-twitch.

“It
is
a nuisance. They just love digging up my road.” Ray turns the Cage tape down to reasonable volume, then lowers it further. “An avant garde composer, Tom, not everybody’s taste.”

“Not mine, certainly. The world’s gone mad when they can call that sort of din music.” Naturally he doesn’t believe the set-up for a moment, but he does what he can. His wife Doris, timid as a little owl, nudges a dirty teaspoon around the table in front of her and believes with all her might,

“Tea or beer, Ray?” Marjory is sluicing cups. “I think Peter left some in the fridge. He and his wife’re out visiting, Mum. They’ll be sorry they missed you, you come round so seldom.”

“You’ve got your own life to lead,” Nourse says. “Study and all.”

Possibly this is a blow beneath the belt, but if so it’s of unusual subtlety. Ray met Marjory seven years ago through friends of her parents, when Marj was a spotty and fairly unappealing thirteen year old, sluggish with her homework and in dire need of extra-curricular guidance. Not that Ray is a cradlesnatcher; it was fully five years before Marjory effectively expressed her carnal interest and managed to tussle her once and future tutor onto a rose-patterned carpet in the family dayroom.

“You should invite them home for dinner one night,” Doris Nourse ventures. “And Ray too, of course.”

“Tea, pet,” Ray says, scrubbing at his wet scalp. “Yes indeed, must arrange that some time, Mrs. Nourse.”

“One thing about Ray,” Mrs. Nourse confides in her husband. She says it every time. “He’s the only visitor who helps with the washing-up without being asked.” Tom Nourse grunts his tired amazement at this fact.

Ray can hardly keep standing here wearing only a borrowed bathrobe. “Don’t bother pouring mine,” he says in a confident social voice as Marjory brings the implements to the table. As she turns back for the pot (naked, its woollen cosy long lost), she gives him a sour satiric glance. He is obliged to cover his mouth with the sopping towel.

Fortunately he has left his garments in the hall, scattered as they fell. Through the bedroom door he slides, scooping socks, closes it with a silent groan. Time is against him. He has to get back to the kitchen before Marjory blows her limited cool and starts a screaming match with her father over some modest ideological difference, such as the value of human life.

When Ray returns in jeans, tee-shirt and thongs, Tom Nourse is studying the stereo boxes in a marked manner. Marjory and her Mum push on with a vapid and only slightly strained natter about a Nourse neighbor’s hysterectomy. You just can’t keep sex out of these conversations. He debates leaving the Cage on. It will drive them away more swiftly and discourage their return for a few months. A more humane impulse takes him to the machine.

“It’s been warm,” he points out, running the spool off.

“Not too hot for these student demonstrators, apparently.”

Aw, no. Ray pours tea, fetches it to the sturdy plastic garbage can where he sits during political debates. “It’ll certainly be a test of their convictions,” he says guardedly.

“Of their brainwashing.” Evidently Nourse is in fine fettle for he adds, “Probably the only kind of washing most of them are familiar with.”

Among wolves, Ray recalls, baring the throat is a sign of conciliation. Not here. His own feint having so miserably failed, he can scarcely object (though he does, he does) when Marjory relinquishes the matter of reproductive surgery in favor of its form. “Come
off
it!” Feral-eyed, she castrates her father with a ghastly glare. “We may not be pathologically obsessed with anal compulsions, but we’ve been adequately potty-trained, as I dare say you’ll recall. Who the hell—”

Ray sees little value in this. “Actually,” he says loudly, “all the long-haired protesters in my classes enjoy a shower quite as much as I do.” His wet hair is flat against his head, pretending to be shorter than it is; he toys with a lock and says rapidly, “Are you sure you won’t have some beer, Tom? Plenty of cans in the fridge. Pete got in a good supply for the uh barbecue.”

“For after the uh demo,” Marjory says defiantly, resenting his evasion, his duplicity.

The old man looks as happy as Ray’s ever seen him, like a veteran examining a war wound that hurts excruciatingly. Doris Nourse is clearly wishing the whole scene would turn into a television commercial. “I wouldn’t say no, Ray,” says Tom Nourse. “A cool glass would go down very nicely today. Try and get a good head on it.” As a charger of glasses, Ray Finlay is notoriously inept.

“Do you think it’s wise?” Mrs. Nourse asks nervously. “You’re not going to get hurt, are you, dear?”

“Of course she’s not,” Ray says, pouring a glass that’s seven-eighths froth. “Probably,” says Marjory simultaneously. “Nonsense,” Ray tells them. “It’ll be thoroughly organized. After all, the marchers do represent the most educated, responsible and capable—”

“Humph,” snorts Nourse, regarding the botched beer.

“If the bloody cops don’t run riot,” Marjory says, “and beat up all the pregnant women.”

Doris Nourse blanches, and her fingers twitch the teaspoon. Ray feels an irritated impulse to pat her hand. It’s all right, dear, Marjory may be thoroughly and scandalously debauched but she’s
not
pregnant. Can’t say that, though. That’s not the name of the charade. Our daughter may be Wild and Eccentric, but thank the Lord she has her Virtue still.

In truth he’s appalled, as always. Ray is easily shocked by other people being shocked by things that don’t shock him. Still, if that’s the way they want it there’s no gain in ramming the obvious down their throats. And maybe getting Marjory’s allowance cut off. He has no ambition to become perforce her sole support and comfort. Not that it’s likely. He recalls one time she went home for the weekend and left her pills lying around. “I see the doctor has given you something to regularize your periods,” her mother had told her. “That’s right, Mum.” Ray feels an odd rush of affection.

It can’t be sustained, though. Nourse is saying drearily, “Now I’ve got an open mind about things and I like to see both sides of every question,” always the dichotomy, the mentally crippling binarization, every major and minor issue has two and only two sides, “but if you’re actually suggesting that the Police Force, a splendid body of men with the rare exception, the very rare rotten apple, Detective Inspector Hubbard is one of my oldest friends, that they’re
wrong
to protect the community from rioting over-educated little upstarts with too much money in their pockets…”

“Over-educated?” Of course Marjory is on her feet, actually out of her chair and yelling. “Too much god-damned
thinking
, is that what’s wrong with us?”

“…manipulated by the Reds…” Nourse is saying, but Marjory plainly means to refute his assertions point by point.

“Too much money, for Christ’s sake? It’s your complacent mindless little clerks who get the money, baby!” His true love’s hold on democratic principles, Ray observes, goes all to pieces under stress. Her hands grip the edge of the table while her father sits back now, relaxed, puffing his pipe. “Rioting?” she cries shrilly. “Oh the callous bastards, they’re out there beating up those poor leather-jacketed club-swinging pregnant policemen. And bombing their hospitals.” She exhausts breath and impetus, and walks shakily across the small room to Ray’s perch on the garbage can.

“Marjory!” her mother objects in a shocked whisper. “What kind of language is that?”

“Oh, fuck off,” Marj mutters. But she masks it by swilling down the last of Ray’s beer.

A DOG’S WIFE

…seven

Spot rose to his feet at the wedding reception, lurching more than somewhat, and replied to the toast. The cantors smiled, and the mullahs did the same, and the officiating Cardinal applauded, with all his conclave of nuns and monks and a brace of castrati if I’m not in error.

“Acknowledgments,” cried my husband, who had been inhaling the herb. “We wish to thank the musicians. All that sawing and smiting, bowing and puffing and groaning, and why? Why, only to sooth the gusts into gaiety. Here we go. Lift those ankles and prance.

“The magicians, yes, the tumblers, whipping their endless purple, crimson, golden scarves in the spanking musical air. Fowls from eggs, great tails lofting under high crystal, green feathers, hard green, soft green. Sawn in half. Bulky bolted brass-and-leather boxes, proved empty moments earlier. Sheer magic. Good work, team.

“Some people find the libretto obscure. Not us. We’re polyglot. And grateful for the poet’s drawn face and crabbed manner and song, song.

“Who? The lighting people, sure. Beams like harsh metal poles furring, fogging where they splash into astonishing scales of peals of tinkles of gongings of lightning blue, satin pinks, reds, purples, and all the whites, and the rest.

“There’s food on every table, here and there in silver porcelain wooden platters slipping from plates into bowls of dip and sauces laid on the tables and marble waiting surfaces: birds, slabs of crusty meat oozing juice the moon curves of mandarins, oranges, grapefruit, the gold and purple of passionfruit, slimy on the tongue but cut by tart, and tarts all slithery in berries and apricots, pale peaches with sugar crusting, melting cliffs of egg white meringue. So here’s one for the chef, the cooks and helpers, the serving staff. Good eating, no doubt, no question there.”

The microphone made spattering noises from this point on, for Spot was salivating with delirious stoned intensity, laughing his fool head off and biting from moment to moment at his own flanks.

“Company. The guests. eh? Doing your bit, swarming about, chattering and nattering, bellyaching just enough that we know you’re taking the business seriously and yielding no quarter out of sentiment for Randy and Fiona and the lovely lass herself.”

Bruce Garbage, the punk crooner whom Randy had flown in from San Antonio, tried valiantly to wrest away command of the public address system but was clearly in terror of having his leather Savile Row suit nipped. Balked, he brought up all his fingers and swung them down in the gesture which at the close of 1981 was to be featured on the cover of
Time,
and his ensemble seized up their instruments once more and heaved us all into a bruising bout of interactive slam dancing.

1979: things fall apart

A scratch afflicts Joseph’s throat. He has been talking at the hike Nitting Circle about the theorists Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault for nearly an hour now, much of the time shouting to convey his scrambled thoughts above the incessant kibitzing and Nit-Picking of his close friend and associate Brian Wagner. He eases the irritation with a glass of light, or lite, ale, and snaps with some viciousness at Wagner, “Fucking piss
off
, Brian.” At once, squeezing his eyes tight against his own aggression, he rushes on, “It’s curious that around the time Marcuse revealed the rather startling notions of oppressive tolerance and ‘repressive desublimation,’ we notice that Foucault was besotted with the idea—Foucault makes this absolutely abominable claim. No, I won’t tell you about that—” Instead, he picks up and displays
The History of Sexuality, Vol I
.

“Go on, Joe. He said what?”

Joseph sighs, rummages again. “Okay, he’s discussing Nietzsche. The Frogs all love the Krauts. No wonder they—All right, he says this: ‘Man, in his finitude, is inseparable from infinity. The death of God is accomplished through the death of man.’ I mean, give me a break.”

Wagner has a cigarette out and alight, to everyone’s distaste. “He writes badly, yeah.”

“It’s not just that he
writes
badly, it’s, it’s almost impossible to believe…Here’s a piece he wrote about Bataille: ‘The discovery of sexuality, the discovery of that firmament of indefinite unreality—’”

‘What!’

“Hang on. ‘—the discovery of those systematic forms of prohibition that we now know imprison it, the discovery of the universal nature of transgression in which it is both object and instrument—indicates in a sufficiently forceful way the impossibility of attributing the millenary language of dialectics to the major experience that sexuality forms for us.’ I trust that’s perfectly clear.”

A rustle of uneasy laughter.

“See, the heightened and prophetic quality of Foucault’s writing from the beginning gets more and more mannered. And his fans love him for it. It’s so
poetic
. It’s so
transgressive
.”

This is no news to Wagner. “He has a linguistic problem, really. They all do.”

Joseph waves at a wisp of smoke and sighs. “Bullshit. It’s deliberate evasion of declarative, um, clarity, chosen for reasons that are probably impeccable. He’s made a linguistic decision to have his words work in an unusual way. He wants to show actions and ideas interpenetrating with a degree of force inexpressible in ordinary French, let alone English. It just happens to…give me the screaming willies.”

“I think he’d like us to feel it could only be expressed—”

RAY FINLAY (first words masked by Wagner’s, above):

…in the log-jam of trying to work out—

JOSEPH:

Hang on. Ray, once you’re onto his paradigm it shouldn’t cause any problems
per se
. It’s poetic locution made toward a cognitive end.

RAY:

Oh, I’d agree. To get the intended effect, you’d have to read straight through without thinking and—

BRIAN WAGNER:

How many treatises are you prepared to read through without thinking, Ray?

RAY:

Well, obviously you can go wrong. I’ve been reading Jacques Lacan in translation and—

JOSEPH:

Christ, he’s even more obscure than Foucault.

KENNY:

This is the radical French psychiatrist, right?

JOSEPH:

Yep. Ray, I get the impression that Lacan has taken Freud in directions that Laing might have—Sorry, we’re getting a bit—

RAY:

How much of it is the sheer difficulty of translating these poetic statements from one language to another?

JOSEPH:

Exactly! One commentator mentions Foucault’s discussion of, um, the ‘solar hollow’ which he says is ‘the space of Roussel’s language, the void from which he speaks’.”

KENNY:

But Bertrand Russell was English, right, not French? So he—

JOSEPH:

Raymond Roussel, the notorious surrealist. Okay, so this could of course be one playful loon piled on top of another, but what if the term Foucault actually used was ‘solar plexus’? This wouldn’t advance the world’s knowledge a great deal, but it would be less, you know…random…than ‘solar hollow.’

RAY:

That’s exactly where I was headed with Lacan, Joe. I was in a study group of psychiatrists the other day—

VOICE:

Ah, they’ve caught up with you, eh?

ANOTHER VOICE:

But he escaped. Quite mad, but a master of disguise.

[Laughter]

RAY:

—poring over a page of Lacan. He mentioned ‘the fractured terms of language’s solar specter,’ or something like that, and the assembled psychiatrists all fell to babbling, trying to parse this mysterious truth of the unutterable unconscious and its prophet.

MARJORY:

I suppose you set them straight. Even though you speak and read no French.

RAY:

Correct. A
specter
, eh? Was this the Derridean trace image of the phallocratic sovereign subject, they asked each other. Could the marxist Lacan actually have
believed
in ghosts and spirits? On and on it went. After a while, I suggested that maybe Lacan was simply drawing an analogy. White light is broken into its constituents by a prism. So too with language. But nobody in the room knew if ‘spectrum’ is or can be the same word as ‘specter’ in French, or if the pun would be sustainable, and anyway my interpretation was deemed intolerably reductive and scientistic…

MARJORY:

‘Spectrum’
does
translate into ‘specter.’

RAY:

Amazing what a training in computer science does for one’s powers of extrapolation. Anyway, my point is that even if Lacan actually was making sense, underneath the poetic tosh, you’d never find much evidence of it in his earnest and laughable English-speaking interpreters, let alone his followers.

JOSEPH:

This level of evasion and fancy footwork is now a signature of all the poststructuralists, but the question is: is our own irritation and laziness as readers a product of Marcuse’s repressive desublimation? Or is the opaque writing itself evidence of textual laziness?

RAY:

Pretty energetic laziness.

JOSEPH:

Exactly. Exactly.

BRIAN: Big deal. What becomes of a thinker who grows so enamored of his linguistic ability that he turns into a fool when he tries to present his subject matter?

RAY:

Take the other point of view, that Foucault and Lacan are always striving for effects they feel can’t be gained with ordinary language, except with an enormous amount of—

BRIAN:

Come
on
, look at the medium they’ve chosen to work in. Psychoanalysis, the most pretentious and bogus…

JOSEPH:

I’m not convinced it is. They take fairly considerable pains to stress that the linguistic space—the connotative space—available to the 20th century critical theorist is in fact considerably different from that available to the classic empiricist. Marcuse’s revival of the dialectic—

BRIAN:

Academic wanking. They play these elaborate games with their followers. It’s a big world out there.

[A confusion of voices]

JOSEPH:

Well, sure, it bothers me, too, when Foucault tosses off this sort of merry aside: ‘If mental pathology has always been and remains a source of psychological experience, it is not because illness reveals hidden structures, not because man here more easily recognizes the face of his truth, but on the contrary because he discovers here the dark side of this truth and the absolute fact of its contradiction. Illness is the
psychological truth
of health, to the very extent that it is its
human contradiction.’
He adds that psychology ‘will be saved only by a return to hell’.”

BRIAN:

Joe, for fuck’s sake, do you actually have the gall to sit there and tell us we should be interested in the intentions of a writer capable of that sort of obfuscation?

JOSEPH: There’s no obfuscation within that—

RAY: He’s trying to be—

JOSEPH:—Trying to be
precise
—

RAY:—trying for clarity.

JOSEPH:—
pin it down
, multiple codes—

RAY: You try and read
Finnegans Wake
and—

BRIAN: But Ray, he—Why can’t you—

JOSEPH: He’s explicating a transparent binary contrast of the world—

RAY:Yeah.

JOSEPH:

—or
apparently
transparent, but he immediately, I mean the thing that comes through is the degree to which what one had stupidly thought to be fairly straightforward is multiply complex, layered with an extraordinary number of overlapping—

BRIAN:

Bull
shit! What ‘contradiction’? Is a broken leg the ‘dark side’ or ‘infernal contradiction’ of a straight one? This is as bad as that Nazi fruitcake Heidegger.

MARIO PONTE:

Is he asserting that these oppositions express the theorist’s analysis, or is he trying to peel the surfaces back and expose the theorist’s own psyche? Because ninety per cent of what anybody experiences is what he’s obliged by culture to experience.

JOSEPH:

Foucault’s experimenting in a critical laboratory not many people in the English-speaking world are yet acquainted with: semiotics, deconstructionist—

RAY:

The Structuralists.

JOSEPH:

The
post
structuralists. Derrida, Kristeva, that lot. He starts from a proposition that Roland Barthes put forward in a book called “S slash Z”—

BRIAN:

Speculative Zonk.

JOSEPH:

Hmm. Semi-Zymurgyic. Barthes draws the distinction between the
writerly
text and the
readerly
text. The writerly text in some sense has a privileged position, aesthetically, over the readerly text. The readerly text is that which we—as far as I can make out; it’s very obscure to me, and I would hope that Madame Finlay would help out on this—the readerly text is the classic text, the text which gives itself up to us in all its plenitude, and soothes our minds and massages our sensibilities and tell us all the things we want to know.

The writerly text is the creative interface between the words and the person either writing or reading (as I understand it); we readers don’t ‘read’ the writerly text, we
write
the fucking thing. And the intention of the author more or less disappears, because we have no—we ought to have no interest…You can argue that there’s no way of reclaiming the intention of the writer. although a lot of people tried to, in the New Criticism…I suppose…or do I mean…?

MARJORY FINLAY:

The Intentional Fallacy, but you’ve got it arse-about.

JOSEPH: The Intentionalist Fallacy was
repudiated
, then, by the New Critics.

MARIO PONTE (musingly):

Where did Gore Vidal discuss that?

BRIAN WAGNER:

Borges said it too, beautiful—

MARIO PONTE:

I read it in something this afternoon somewhere—

JOSEPH:

There’s obviously a sense in which it
must
be true, a sense reflected in Marxist terms like
praxis
, where the reader
engages
with the text, creates the text—