A Woman of the Future

by David Ireland

  I lay there, feeling I was perhaps condemned to sail the seas of emotion for ever, never to land or stop, never to become one with the magic mountain of feeling – everything – all – at – once – forever – and – never – stopping.

  Would I be condemned to pay with my soul for whatever of this magic eternity of moments I managed to get hold of? And when I got a better hold on these moments, what would I do with them? Would they really be as evanescent as people said? Was there something I could do to ensure that they did not slip through my fingers?

  Love and Sweat

  I have mixed feelings about one’s partner sweating down on one. I mean on me. Every woman knows how it is, the male with the penis inserted and pointing slightly upward, the arms, or at least one arm around one’s neck so that the downward pressure of the arm and the upward bend of the penis make the latter something of a hook, down past which one’s body cannot go; and if the day is warm or if the effort is a little beyond the male’s physical readiness the drops of sweat come from his chest and neck and face and drip round past the base of his ears, and drop on one’s body and breasts and face. One’s face! And sometimes so much that it seems both have been rubbed generously with oil.

  If only I had experienced love. If only I’d had a man that I could feel deeply for. Then I could learn to love, perhaps, his excretions. And smile, and brush aside his apologies and make him feel entirely welcome. Yes.

  If only I could have one who was entirely welcome!

  Art Assignment: St. Francis Curing the Leopards

  The saint was not preaching with arms upraised gracefully from his lonely, set-apart figure to a meek and rather ludicrous quantity of winged creatures: he was standing astride one leopard which lay on her back, paws raised straight up and a trusting, even a rather humorous look on her great jaws. The little saint was examining the leopard’s body, apparently feeling for lumps, and the two forepaws enclosed his slight robed figure in a friendly manner.

  The other leopards were lying around on their sides, tongues lolling. And the whole thing was in a cave lit by rays of the sun outside; a village was some distance from the cave, down a long slope; behind the village was the rather modest skyline of a small city; behind that, rising to the height of the old skyscrapers, was a vast metropolis of buildings of all shapes and sizes, but large. As a backdrop there was one single building that extended from one side of the horizon to the other and lost itself in the sky so that there was no blue at the top of the picture; windows for miles up and miles across, as if that building was the rest of the world in that direction.

  I was unconscious of what I had done until Footlow pounced.

  “You’ve done that before, Hunt! Exactly the same.”

  “Leopards?” I said, not understanding.

  “No, no. That cave perspective. The city with buildings that get bigger the further away they are.”

  Of course. Why had I repeated that particular image? For a time I felt guilty about it, until I realized that if it was so much in my mind, that fact was the important thing. And forgave myself immediately.

  Parent Assessment: My Father

  I think he had at the bottom of his mind, as a sort of mental sludge left from the time and the fashions when he was young, an implicit view of how social and political change is achieved. In those days it was revolution, attacking and destroying the power bases of society itself. The bastions of power were the large private and public bureaucracies, insulated against popular persuasion, which listen to no voice but violence and the threat of violence. He had been conditioned to despise reformers, or fear them and remove himself from anything that was not wholesale destruction and overturning. Out of the old the new may rise.

  Yet, at the same time, he fervently desired a better world; more peace, cooperation, contentment: less alienation, less bigotry. And his temperament was in line with these fine sentiments; he was a man inwardly at ease with himself.

  He had an inward stabilizer that righted him after any sort of disturbance. Even if he had lost his mental battle and didn’t know where to go, he was able to dismiss the problem, clear it off his mental desk and put it away for some other time. Unsolved matters, unfinished thought, all went down into the drawer marked “Later,” and he got on with the routine of living. Perhaps there was a sort of health in it.

  Despite the fervors of his youth, he didn’t go into politics, or even business—to rebel against the revolutionary way of thinking. He valued neither money nor power. He was a cooperative man rather than competitive: independent, democratic. But his democracy was internal, he was free within himself, and would have been free under any flag.

  Yet he said to me once he was not certain who had led his life.

  Creative Social Science: Sunset in the Suburbs

  Sunset in the suburbs, and the emptiness of the continent drifts in, like the emptiness of the moment after “Gooday” has been spoken by an Australian to a stranger. This Australian has no ties with any other Australian in the form of words; he has no recognition signals apart from the absence of words. He has no ties except the emptiness and the silence. It is a continent of dreams we inhabit, a waiting continent. All who have set foot in its bush, its lonely places, know that silence. The continent is dreaming. We have felt it and been afraid, and turned to trivial things, and retired to the outer rim as if ready to depart. Everyday the quiet tides of darkness roll over us from the menacing interior.

  The Australians, not yet the damned of the earth, get a certain comfort from the sunset. After all, one breathes. Though it’s better to breathe audibly once or twice or even that assurance wobbles. A bout of heavy breathing can let the darkness come down more lightly, and mitigate its threat. This is the collective sigh you can hear across the wide brown land just after the gold edge of the sun has gone.

  Creative Social Science: The Strangest Continent

  By Gabriel Sentongo

  The country itself is so new that the people transplanted there suffer a curious eye trouble. The sun is something they have not yet assimilated. It illuminates, and the last thing they want is to see their landscape; it dazzles the eyes, and they have a great resistance to being dazzled.

  The land itself tries everything to keep them away from its sacred inner self. It floods them, drowning everything under vast tracts of callous water; it denies them water; it burns them from their bland fields which have laid waste the original and proper soul of the country.

  They take refuge in tight settlements on the least inhospitable edge of the continent. The interior remains unsubdued and empty because they don’t know what to fill it with; they have neither the energy nor the fierceness to subdue it.

  It was two hundred years before the inhabitants knew the land they walked on had a history. And by that time the majority needed special assistance to see any distance beyond the Media Average Satisfactory Sight; that is, the distance one could hold a newspaper, read what it said, and view television.

  Of any person standing on that continent, looking into the distance, you may be sure he sees nothing. His sight is not equal to emptiness. He is resting. He is idling.

  Gabriel was always knocking Australia, but we didn’t mind. He and his family—what was left of it—were refugees. Their village had been dispersed; the people lived in the bush for a long time before daring to go back. They stayed for a bit, then had to run again when a different lot of soldiers came. Finally they got on a refugee boat and landed on the west coast of our country. We let them in. Gabriel was only tiny when the troubles started; he got here when he was nine. He is full of imagination.

  I wrote a poem about being a refugee, as far as I could imagine it. I may put it in with my next assignment, if I get the chance.

  At first we came back very slowly

  unwilling, I suppose, to see a home

  in this half-forgotten assortment of hill, tree

  and winding road at evening.

  But the tiny houses were obviously snuggling closer
>
  in the waning light

  and in the end we were glad to bed down there.

  It is years since then

  but mornings continue to startle us

  the sun pushing too fast into the sky

  callous light inflaming the heavy face in the mirror

  stripping the world bare far too suddenly.

  We have brought home with us the house inside our hearts

  built during the hunger and the running away.

  It is ourselves we die of.

  Despite the Glorious Dreams

  Despite the glorious dreams that I waited for eagerly every night—dreams of sensual riches—no one among the boys at school and the casual males at parties could arouse me, since Mister Jonson’s purely physical success. No matter what lead-up they performed, no matter how much time I had with them, or they with me—no one.

  Once or twice I felt the shivery beginning of the at-home-on-my-bed feelings, but they seemed to be independent of the company I was in. When I say independent I mean they didn’t coincide with the times I was with them; the feeling might be starting, then they would interrupt; they might have been with me, and have “done” me—(their word)—when the feeling would start, and go on through their leave taking, and persist after they had gone, but it was something that had arisen of itself. Because of some trigger in me, or simply because it was time. They hadn’t done it.

  The place in me where this response lived, was untouched.

  Willie Kemp

  I was laughing at him and confused him: he thought I was smiling at him. Their egos are immense. However, I let things proceed.

  “What do you do for a crust?” I asked Willie as he and his approached my body.

  “I’m at Business Sensitivity School,” he answered in capitals. He kept trying to get in at all sorts of points where there was no hole, and one where there was, but not the right one. He got in, settled forward on his favorite elbow—they usually settle down to the position they always take—and explained.

  “Basically it’s the smelling out of profit. Training in feeling for the profit situation.”

  “How do they make you sensitive?”

  “Same as they make you sensitive to anything. Surround you with it, surround you with the lack of it, rub you up against it, deprive you; most of all, talk about it and see examples of it in figures, buildings, products, balance sheets, ads, all that sort of thing.”

  “The elusive profit,” I said. Business had no interest for me, it seemed so simple and uninteresting.

  “That’s it!” he said with animation. “Treat it like you’re a hunter! Go after it, smell it out, then bang! Bring it down and bag it.”

  When his physiological processes currently on-going climaxed, it was not with a bang at the end of a steep reckless out-of-control hill, but a pathetic whimper.

  “Oooohhh,” he said, giving himself to me. And subsided like an emptying bag of air.

  “Well,” I said brightly. “It wasn’t a cannon, but there was a recoil.”

  He hadn’t the energy to reply.

  He gave himself to me. I gave myself to none of them. I don’t know what that “myself” means, but it’s something inside that I’ve never seen, maybe that no one has ever seen.

  When he’d returned to a semblance of life in a minute or two, he said, “I don’t know anyone like you. I guess I haven’t had that much experience, but I haven’t heard of anyone like you either. Past or present. No one.”

  I heard him in silence and waited while he got it up. He certainly needed a long recovery time for a boy with an almost silent bombardment. At the crucial moment he coiled up, almost as if he was hurting, then fired and let the spasms shake him. His interior jerked him about. Not the tail wagging the dog, but the dog’s guts wagging both tail and dog. Quite unlike the kids that ride like cowboys and keep going long after it’s all out and running everywhere.

  Something about him annoyed me. He was too observant of me. He deferred to my wishes in the tiniest things, never taking it on himself to be definite, to insist, to contradict. The question is: could I ever stand to be worshipped?

  I tolerated him several times, then let him go.

  Dried Husks of Insects

  How sad it was when the fuck was ended, particularly if there was nothing in it for me and I was merely waiting. The male eased away, withdrew, and the emptiness of the whole barren continent flooded the place where he had been, and this emptiness it was that overwhelmed the slight, shadowy soul of the male.

  I felt pity for them. Not sympathy: pity. They were light as leaves, a breath of wind would blow them away, out of the sight of humans, of females. A whisper of human breath could do it: a word from the mouth of a skilled female.

  Wwhhhhhhhhh! They were gone. They ceased to exist.

  What a Funny Race Men Are

  To think that opening your legs is in any way giving them access to you. As if this hole: dull, unfeeling, so expandable, was a health and wealth-giving prize to them, and an advantage given up and lost by us!

  They have had us, they say. Had be damned! They’ve been in contact with a few dozen square centimeters of mucous surface, coated with a lubricant which prevents actual contact with the internal flesh. They have never reached beyond the surface. Yet, when they open their arms to us, their vitals are exposed.

  If all qualities ever manifest in mankind are latent in all mankind, how can they be looking for, how can they find, anything important and unusual in a continual reconnoitering of our various surfaces? What keeps them going? Are they primed daily, in a mechanical way, so they cannot help themselves?

  To men, ours was a sub-world where duty, honor, truth and honesty were mere words. Dishonesty in women wasn’t much to blame, in fact we were incurably dishonest, nothing we said could be taken at its face value unless it was favorable; sin to a woman was being caught.

  How ridiculous men are.

  You can see them in public positions, issuing curt commands with asperity. “Get the morning tea immediately!” The managers of offices peopled by bowed sheep, with jaw muscles standing out, standing rigidly on legs loosely hairy and hidden by the trouser; how ridiculous they are.

  And in a personal crisis, what is their remedy for doubt, indecision, fear, and the nameless dread of loneliness? Why, they look for a tunnel into the problem and push a shaft in and make little explosions in it, hoping to blow up the world. But after every calamity and orgasm and the death of part of their world, their problems still remain. They simply do not know what to do with us.

  They look back, each one of them, on a time when they were children and their families provided bounds for them and their mothers gave them law and affection in equal parts and the world was simple and there was no need to trouble themselves with the enormous effort to give affection to, or be interested in, or spend their precious egos on others. Their personal sadness is that they ever had to leave their little ballgames and paddling in water or mud or snow or trying to catch innocent fish, and at every chance they go back to what gives them greatest pleasure, they go back to what they think the world is all about. For to men, the world is a toy, and life consists in playing with it, manipulating it, prodding it to make it move, and finally destroying it, just as they did with their first caterpillar or ladybird or puppy or lone ranger cap gun. Children almighty, in charge of the universe, their bottoms wiped by mother.

  And what to do with women? They don’t know. They try to use her, like they used good old Mum, then want her out of the way, to have no regulatory power over their self-destructive activities.

  They are children.

  They are afraid of us.

  Love

  I don’t really think that humans mean little to me, it’s just that the feelings people give me seem to be—not dissociated—but to have a slightly loose fit with the things that give me those feelings.

  I know touches to my skin electrify me; I’ve found that touches I give myself are so wonderful, so far beyo
nd what others’ casual or even intended touches mean to me, it’s no wonder touch is the thing I wait for; the touch of love certainly, but love’s touch as a physical thing on my skin.

  What I need is someone to touch me with love.

  A Dirty Dose

  The older family members and clergymen didn’t know the significance of the place, but we held the marriage of Sandra Noonan and Ollie Hartigan in the old quarry. The kids all sat around, draped on the big rocks, lying on the flat shelves of sandstone just like they did on regular Saturdays while the officiator and parents and friends arranged themselves round Ollie and Sandra.

  After the service most of us went up to the lake to have a party in the open, with barbecue things, and not long after I drank something I began to feel a change coming in me. A spell of dreaming, feeling that all normal restraints had lifted from me, that the trees around were fantastic people, that I had unbalanced something in my head and would feel peculiar until it got back into position. I wandered away from the party to give my head a chance to clear.

  I said hullo to a tall person who turned out to be a tree, and must have misjudged his distance, for he knocked me down with a blow to the side of the face. This was a different Alethea Hunt; the girl who was knocked over by no one and who hit back harder for every hit she got.

  I was next lying in a grassy scrubby place and hardly noticed two males, my absorption in my interior state was so complete. I know that I was half naked and barefoot, I never found my shoes; scratched by the sharp ends of native bushes, on my back in the grass and stunted shrubs. Tears fell from my eyes, and the whole earth and heavens were sad. Above me, between the crowns of trees, the sky was endless, so that my mind tried to follow the endlessness across and back, then deeper into the unresisting but impenetrable blue. The endless sky, the earth spinning dizzily, the endless sky and the deep deep sun burning and spinning above me. The sun burned and slowed all my thoughts to a crawl, my thoughts crawled on the inside of my mental barrel. Chewing some grass seemed a reasonable thing to do, as bits of white cloud softly passed over my head. I reached up and touched a cottonwool cloud, which burst softly with a musical note.