Tales of Mystery and Romance

by Frank Moorhouse

  I’m sick of hearing you all scorn manilla folders.

  I wouldn’t say I was fully proud of my files – I don’t put things in them carefully enough and the edges of things protrude tattily from the folders. But I like them nonetheless. I don’t usually carry on about them. Milton brought that on. They supply sought-for answers but I’ve noticed that they also supply answers to unasked questions. They are full of forgotten questions, unasked questions, and unsuspected questions.

  Sometimes the forgotten or unasked questions are far better than the questions you bring to the file.

  The unconscious mind knows what’s happening in the files. It is planning connections which it presents to us when we are ready to receive them.

  As I picked them up from the lawn where Milton had strewn them, I did so gently, as if I were lifting a wounded dog.

  Maybe I don’t live up to my files. Maybe I don’t go to them often enough.

  My babies.

  Happy Thoughts about the Seminar Circuit.

  When I was invited to the seminar in Canberra, that City of Conference, I was engaged, keen, but you snorted and did a parody with your thumbs in your braces and your glasses down on your nose.

  I know the seminar circuit is disparaged.

  The seminar circuit is a bit of a joke – not the way to arrive at truth. You say it is unpoetic, too postured, over-structured, intellectual peacocking, not the gentle, mysterious way to find truth.

  Well, too bad. I like a good three-day seminar.

  You see, for me, the seminar is an airship. It inflates to a shape and takes a journey which is always beyond the controls of the organisers. And everyone there takes their own interior journey as well.

  It may begin as a row of permanised identibadges, but as the seminar moves forward, ballooning, expanding, the participants begin to move about in their space suits, doing tasks and tricks. They walk in space, complete, or fail to complete, their tasks, and return, bobbing back to the airship. Like a huge, talk-inflated balloon the seminar bumps off the ground, bumps back again, and then rises, if things are right, and drifts in a wind of thinking, ridden by the participants all holding on, bumping, bumping across the terrain of the program, with the organisers working a useless rudder.

  Don’t you see, Milton?

  I do everything at a seminar. I take one of each and go to everything. Go to all the papers – do not duck off. Donald Horne taught me how to ‘do’ a seminar. Horne’s Rule. Be there for the foyer chat, read all the notices, answer all the surveys, be the last to leave. Go to all the parties in all the motel rooms. The off-guard talk in the shared car to the airport is part of it all. Collect and file the last morsel of the last remark. Sometimes something good is said while waiting for baggage at the airport when back home.

  I feel fully functional when I have my identibadge, seminar satchel, papers of the day, clipboard – fully accoutred, my mind prances.

  I don’t feel embarrassed, over-present, depersonalised when I wear an identibadge. I don’t fear my identity. Oh I can make jokes about it. That’s easy. I wear it home on the plane.

  At a seminar I’m all there.

  Oh Milton! The seminars we could have gone to.

  The Committee Meeting Extolled.

  ‘There he goes,’ you said to Sheena, or Hestia, or Lydia, or Cleo, ‘off to WEA meetings – will they never cease. Did you know that the WEA meetings are perfectly circular – that the entire business is the planning of other meetings?’

  With their shrieks burning in my ears, I’d take my blushing face out into the cool night with my agenda, agenda papers, chairman’s memoranda, and the minutes and financial statement, and my scarf – all an overflowing mess in my hands. I’d straighten them up, get them together, and plod off to my meeting while Milton got high with Sheena Petrie or whoever.

  The committee meeting, Milton, is spiritual, in the French sense. As dinner parties and luncheons are spiritual in the French sense.

  Or an imbroglio, in the musical sense.

  The committee meeting is a constant correction.

  A reminder of the intransigence of irrationality, the imperfection of our social mechanisms, the clumsiness of life, the tedious nature of human arrangement, the weight and strength of inertia, and the impatience of radicalism.

  The committee clears away the illusion that the world moves at the speed of our desires and to our ever-growing personal advantage.

  Milton is wrong if he thinks he can escape the committee. We are all items on someone’s agenda.

  That one does not ‘like’ committee meetings is what committee meetings are all about. Committees are supposed to be obstacles to our wilfulness and our rashness.

  It is part of Milton’s need to ‘like’ everything. What is this hankering after an even flow of enjoyment? Who promised an affectionate existence? Who speaks for the problematic, the unpalatable, the tedious?

  I do.

  I speak for those who fall short.

  Committees are parental.

  Committee goers are infantile.

  The Ardent Votary of Pleasure Speaks: Celebration or Compensation?

  About champagne. I admit that for me it is more often compensation for the missing froth and bubble in my life than it is a celebration of it.

  I am aware that too often in this country we pretend to be enjoying ourselves so as not to disappoint the host and that the only pleasure the host gets is that people appear to be enjoying themselves.

  I have earnestly sought volupté. I have been failed by my companions as well as by myself. My fellow explorers and I have too often fallen drunkenly from our horses before we have found the cave, the underground river. I do not blame them. The climate is harsh. The going rough. The maps are next to useless. Too often we chose the comparative comfort of the waterhole and forgot our destination.

  Resistance to Ideological Boast.

  Our strength is in our pooh-poohing, our refusal to grant life its ideological boast. It means that we miss out on the experience of zeal.

  False Enemies.

  Some people appear as opponents who are really advertising for refutation – they want to be convinced that they are wrong, they are yearning to surrender to a stronger opposition. They are false opponents.

  They unconsciously seek abdication of self through conversion.

  Committee Tricks.

  Beware of ‘routine matters’, ‘our legal adviser’, last items on the agenda which have to be quickly dealt with to ‘let everyone get home’, over-supply of information at the last minute so that people feel they have to defer the matter until next month (did someone want it deferred until next month?), ‘it has always been the practice’, ‘we can safely leave that in the hands of the president’.

  Always remember that people over-promise, feel more diligent, more honest, more committed when at a committee meeting and that these feelings wane later.

  Beware of the committee person who invents data so as to have something to contribute.

  Never storm out of a meeting or your opponents will pass a unanimous decision in your absence.

  Beware of the committee that laughs too much. Laughter deflects argument.

  The Tactic of Intellectual Patience.

  Milton once said, ‘I’ll say this much for you – you have intellectual patience.’ I enjoyed the praise. I sucked hard on that praise – warmth, praise, was so rare in our household towards the end, when Milton was being fitted for a new Life Style by the Alternative Tailors.

  Introspection turned it sour. I saw that concealed within my ‘intellectual patience’ and the imaginative assistance which I gave to my opponents (as required by the highest standards of discussion) is, sadly, just another artful tactic. The intellectual courtesy, generosity, draws the opponent’s attention to my intellectual manners, and away from the weakness of my case and also, at the same time, induces the opponent to be more than fair, not just fair.

  But more than that. It invites the opponent or the au
dience to give me credit for the intellectual correctness, the good manners, which can sometimes become transferred, or cheated across, as credit for superiority of position. The implication is that my generosity operates out of a strong position, a position that can afford to give away.

  The Allegation that my Knowledge is Gappy.

  Yes, yes, yes – I have no Weber. My understanding of Marx is synoptic. I do not think that I have got evolution straight in my head. I think that I did understand it but I keep forgetting how it goes. I think my astronomical picture of the formation of the earth is now superseded. I am under-read in physics.

  The Chicanery of Encounter Magazine.

  Assumption of bases – you attack someone for not having a certain virtue – civility, scholarship. This argument gains that particular virtue for the attacker. The user of this form of attack is asking to be granted proprietorship of that base, civility, scholarship or whatever.

  It does not help that one is justified in assuming proprietorship of a virtue. The possession of intellectual virtue has always to be demonstrated by practice and can never be satisfactorily claimed. Even obliquely.

  For the same reason, the absence of a virtue in an opponent, according to the code of discussion, cannot be accused because it implies ownership of the virtue by the accuser. To do this is to invite the pretence that one’s intellectual personality is not flawed.

  I was constantly seeking Milton’s views on these and such matters but he would laugh and shrug and say that he was ‘into something else now’. That was my first inkling.

  I worried too about the way writers in Encounter dismiss correspondents’ criticism. The haughtiness of their replies to correspondents reeks of insecurity. They do not display intellectual gratitude for having been corrected. There is too little self-questioning in Encounter.

  Milton does not read Encounter because it is proscribed by The Left, to which he once be longed.

  I read Encounter in secret because I am curious about these Encounter people and the things they say, and the way they say it and how they carry on.

  Milton is a Guilty Pleader.

  Each radical generation places the older generation on trial simply by progressing the issues. They create ideological offences which indict the generation older than they. Milton pleads guilty each time to each oncoming generation. Sometimes, as now, he becomes a warder for the new Theoretical Masters. Helps guard their prisoners. Helps with the Inquisition.

  I pleaded with him that the Young are not always right. May never be right because of their inherent disadvantage – limited experience, knowledge, insight, preparation, access, contacts, and with little self-evaluative equipment.

  He backs the Young because he says they will be the ones who judge his work.

  It is not that some of the offences are not valid but that they do not take account of the extenuation of history. The extenuating blindness, incapacity, inherent in historical placing – all generations are limited in vantage.

  They refuse, also, to see that their fine new position exists because of data exuded from the failure and the resignation, of the older generation.

  The Cocktail Party.

  I enjoy canapés enormously. Whereas much attention is given by food writers to the meal, little attention is given, critically or appreciatively, to the snack, or to the canapé – those eating experiences which come between full meals. Morning and After noon Teas deserve more attention.

  I think a lot can be said for the conversational pastiche of the cocktail party. My remarks about Seminars could be applied to the cocktail party.

  It may not be lineal but it yields.

  Milton abhors cocktail parties.

  That Milton Cannot Carouse: that I can Carouse Fairly Well.

  I think that it can reasonably be said that I am, in the tighter sense of the word, ‘debauched’. For instance, I like the flavour and associative force of the word ‘slut’. I like the idea of a ‘slut’. I like the outcast word ‘anus’. I frequent nite spots.

  Milton cannot carouse probably because he is too serene. I can carouse fairly well, given that the conditions for carousing are not that good in this country. The climate is harsh. My companions fall drunkenly from their saddles. The practice of couples going everywhere, the faithfulness, worse, the messy ‘freedom’ some couples have but do not use because ‘it just makes things complicated’. The self-consciousness which, in fact, says ‘I do not deserve volupté’. All these factors make carousing hard to get going. The chains, of course, of inhibition also. But I do think that, as a society, we still hold carousing to be a good thing. That’s something.

  As for feasting, the only time I organised a feast for Milton he said the meat tasted ‘like rotten wood’, the wine tasted ‘like manure drainings’ and the entrée, he suspected, was the flesh of baby. He was, of course, on to something.

  In carousing, I think that physical combat, the discharging of firearms, the destruction of property, and gambling, are all optional but at least one should figure. Some nudity is essential. Feasting also. Loss of identity through intoxication or mask or costume or darkness or lighting is pretty much essential.

  I do accept that we, I, could be better at it than we, I, am, are.

  The Girl Who Loved Tutorials.

  During a carouse, quite debauched by NSW standards, everyone trying, with nude dancing, oysters in vaginas, dressing up in costumes from the trunk, etc., I met a girl who told me that she loved three things – carousing, long distance swimming, and tutorials.

  ‘Above all,’ she said, ‘I love tutorials. English Department tutorials excite me. Discussing books seems to be some sort of ultimate – intellectual nude wrestling. I find a lot of grease in a tutorial, if you know what I mean. What the mystics don’t realise is that the dead can talk – they talk through books. Books are the only way we can link ourselves with the ceaseless flow of the living past. If that’s what you want to do. God! How I love tutorials.’

  She stopped dancing and a shudder of nervous excitation moved through her oiled body.

  I asked her if she would mind if I used that.

  She said no, she’d be flattered.

  ‘I am building a case against Milton,’ I said, ‘he detests tutorials.’

  ‘He would,’ she said.

  THE CHAIN LETTER STORY

  This is a chain letter story. Send a copy of this book to two (2) friends. Do not break the chain. if you do not wish to join the chain DO NOT READ THIS STORY. THIS IS NOT A JOKE. This is a rotten luck chain. Send it to a person who often has rotten luck. This is a chain of commiseration. Nothing very good has ever happened to any of us in this chain. Becker had good luck with a girl in a lavatory but nine minutes later lost his job with Coca Cola. T. George McDowell lost his factory and his daughter is now into films, Milton was hijacked by a New Life Style and four days later found himself supporting a commune, Cindy failed to get a guarantee of permanent love and nine months later had a baby. I myself am not feeling too hot. THIS IS NOT A JOKE.

  I recently broke the chain started by St Antoine de Sedi, the gentle South American missionary, in 1953 and which had continued unbroken since then. It came to a halt with me. I have been a recipient of this particular chain three times since I was seventeen. This is the first time I have broken the chain. It is not really, I would argue, a ‘break’ in the chain. I intend to repair it with this chain letter story after having first cleared up the matters which worry me about the chain. Especially the way Constantine Diso pushed his way into the de Sedi letter.

  The letter relates how Carlos Brandt, an office worker, received the chain. He forgot it and lost the letter. A few days later he lost his job. But – but – he found the letter and sent twenty-four copies (more about number-of-copies-to-be-sent, later) and nine days later he got a better job (more about luck-waiting-period, later). Zerin Berreskelli received the chain. He did not believe in it and threw it away. Nine days later he died.

  I am not worried by the spell,
the curse, and the threat of the chain letter. But I am worried about the standard of the chain letter. The standard seems to have dropped since I first received one. There is a carelessness which could be taken as failing faith by the believers and for simple ‘players’ like myself this lowering of standard reduces the incentive to participate.

  Take the de Sedi letter. This time around it has words missing like ‘it’ and ‘the’ and words are run together. This breaks the luck of the chain itself. A missing word allows the luck to leak out, as it were, from the letter. The arcana says that letters have to be word perfect. That’s why I’m transferring what luck is left into this chain letter story.

  And the copy I received this time is photocopied. For christsakes, chain letters have either to be written in your own handwriting or typed out personally (except this chain letter story, one part only to be handwritten – see later). The luck accumulates through the undertaking of a ritualistic chore – monk-like, dutiful repetition. The luck comes through the fingers. A chain letter has to be finger-lucking good. THAT IS NOT A JOKE.

  It says that the chain has been around the world ten times. Who counts? Who knows that? And the more you think about it, you realise that it can’t work that way. Because it is not a ‘chain’ at all in the logical sense of extension. It is a tree-like branching. How could it be said to ‘go around’?

  The de Sedi letter is thirty-three lines long and suffers badly from inconsistency – introduced, I argue, by Constantine Diso. The letter begins by stating that it comes from Venezuela – from the humble monk’s cell of St Antoine de Sedi. Further down we find it saying that the original letter began in the Nether lands. When you analyse what I rightly call the ‘de Sedi letter’, you realise that there is an intruder – someone has forced his way into the de Sedi letter – that someone is Constantine Diso. There are two letters in one. There is the make-twenty-copies-good-luck-in-four-days letter (the de Sedi) and the twenty-four-copies-good-luck-in-nine-days (Diso, the pushy Dutchman).

  It doesn’t help much for a chain letter to have a confusion like that.