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A Woman of the Future

Page 39

by David Ireland


  But you, my boy who touched me, who woke me from the sleep of childhood, how it could be with you! You could do everything, if only you would. I would be there, helping you in every action: helping you do me, helping you love me. My smell would reach into your every pore and bathe you, and you couldn’t get rid of the thought of me.

  Components of Greatness

  I spent the whole of next day in a sort of daze. My thoughts played round with the meaning, the source, the possible effects of my new condition. Something else came with it: a steering of my thought toward the idea of love.

  I couldn’t get away from it. Love, love. What was it?

  Colin’s touch sounded through me like a bell the moment I thought of him, with more effect even than I’d felt before. I was a bell with many mouths. The echoes of his touch sounded throughout my body. A bell with many mouths, his touch sounding in them all.

  I was dry with a thirst to find love. No sooner did that come as words into mental view than I recognized the truth of it. The rest of me relaxed with an invisible sigh. I was bones inside a loose skin. I slumped. I was filled, gradually, like a large wineskin, with a feeling of joy that I cannot express.

  One touch to my flesh had drawn me toward love.

  Perhaps finding love would be my greatness. What did it mean, to find love? Would I find it in me? In others?

  Never once did I think I might be a great lover, only that I might be greatly loved. Where was the greatness in that? Where was the strength, the goodness, the beauty, originality, dignity; the judgment?

  In the meantime my nipples ached for him, for the touch of his hands, for the pressure of his body. They wanted so much . . .

  Nipples can be very demanding.

  The Transfer of Ideas Unit

  I tried to take my mind from my absent boy; I tried to think, in spite of my boiling thoughts, of the future.

  What the world accepts as greatness must have some power the future respects. Perhaps it implies power over the future, bringing the future about.

  An idea—it can be a re-arrangement of the words used to describe a state of affairs—sometimes has power to seize men’s minds, alter their direction, suggest, even prescribe their actions. And the sum of their actions is the future.

  Which ideas will be transferred into the future? Answer: those presented to humans with the ability to make them actions.

  A special unit of ideas people could be formed to push, to help the transfer of their ideas, of others’ ideas, perhaps even to Proles. A Transfer of Ideas Unit. No one knows the future, but with a Transfer of Ideas Unit, I would help cause the future that actually happens. Power is a component of greatness.

  Perhaps my Transfer of Ideas Unit would grow out of me in the way Mario Julian’s girl grew out of him.

  For she was now out, and walking round. She could not speak, she knew nothing. All she did was respond to a quiet voice, and cling with her arms. She had no ovaries, no periods, she understood nothing: was completely dependent on anyone who had her . . . And she had wandered off, and Mario was searching for his lost female self to rescue her body—for his own, of course—and whoever had her was not letting go nor letting on.

  My Transfer of Ideas Unit was to be an underground organization that would get ideas that had been thought deeply about—in their effects and possible disadvantages and all that—from their source, before business people could arrange to patent them and keep them from the world—or to keep the world at bay until a fee was paid—and transfer them to those who would use them.

  Its aim would be a changed society, in which its members had a new relation to property. The corollary was an enforcement unit, which would attend to those who attempted to copyright and patent. Not so radical as to seek to change the distribution of citizens between the classes, but it was something.

  This was far more attractive to me than the program of the New Dreamers of the Absolute, with their microdets the size of heart pacemakers, and their destructive acts. It seemed a better thing to plant ideas than detonators and plastique. The New Dreamers had already been around the high schools, looking for suitable new members among those of us who might make it through the grading gate. They were at all universities, waiting to recruit their intellectual commandos, waiting for the numbers they needed and working to perfect their organization, which they modeled on the great criminal secret societies.

  The New Dreamers of the Absolute

  They said: there is no foundation in the individual on which democracy can be built.

  They said: the series of events in the mind cannot be understood as a coherent pattern, only as observed, separate, even fragmented parts of a jumble. You cannot say: This inventory can be totaled and has such and such a meaning; all you can say is: it is there.

  They stood for imagination: guard the imagination, preserve it, feed it, glorify it, and it will save you.

  They said: Each time of change can be a beginning. This is—in general terms—still a beginning. In the beginning was the imagination, and the imagination was fed by the word.

  They said: Humanity has reached another starting line, and does not know.

  They said again: The light of freedom shines on monsters.

  They said further: All humans are brothers and sisters; the only aliens are the State and its servants.

  A Picture of Christ Kissing the World

  Christ Giving the World a Big Sloppy Kiss, I titled it. Christ was huge, standing in space; the world was a beachball, its colors radiant. Christ’s lips covered the belly of Australia.

  It was originally meant to be the forty days and forty nights of rain and arklife, then when I thought further the forty days of Christ’s desert experience seemed a good link, so Christ had to replace Noah. He had to be loving something, and what better than the world?

  And if the temptations took three days, what of the thirty-seven remaining? I had that number of panels arranged as a border round the painting, showing the Son of God in various desert activities, such as catching the odd insect and lizard, straining dew from leaves in the mornings, hiding from bandits and wild animals, performing natural functions, just lying on the heavenly shoulderblades contemplating, or asleep.

  The teachers praised it, but with the things I had on my mind, my heart wasn’t listening to them.

  Even my weightlifting victories—bench press, squat and dead lift—in my first championship, could not satisfy that part in me that was empty.

  English Expression: The Great Man

  There is now among us a brain, a sensibility compared to which the rest of us are idiot children. This brain and sensibility is housed in a male body, yet apart from outward signs he is neither, and both.

  I have seen him and there is nothing in him. Only those who do not know him like him, and it is impossible to know him. There is nothing in him to like, but, further, there is nothing in him. Yet he is a great man.

  I have talked to him, and he has nothing to say, yet when he writes the world comes alive.

  He does not care to live or die, yet what he does now will live by the spirit that he uses. That spirit is not in him; there is no sign of it in his eyes, his gestures, his way of living. He pulls it out of the air, perhaps, or—and this is a thought I have often—it uses him.

  He shows neither sorrow nor joy, regret nor fear, desire nor hatred, yet he knows the bounds of all of them.

  He combines words in fantastic, prophetic, heroic and profound ways; he is a performer using a keyboard, yet that keyboard is within him.

  He has experienced nothing, and everything. A lion or a trout is familiar to him as a stone, and he sees a universe in that stone and builds it in words.

  One person is as another to him, as a bird is, yet all are precious.

  He cannot love. Because he knows.

  The English teacher was a little worried by this.

  “It’s all very well using imagination, but you can’t rely on some jaded teacher marking your exam paper up on something en
tirely new to him.”

  I began to feel that Mr. Ramadan thought he knew better than I did what was in my mind. But the most annoying thing was, he thought everything I did was pointed toward the examinations. I knew perfectly well what to do in examinations: I knew exactly what they wanted.

  A White Woman Of a Man

  It was only the natural growth of a talented boy into a maturing and brilliant pianist, but I was impressed. Robert Gough had been a pale insipid kid at Primary, and had grown into a pale insipid youth.

  In an August recital father took me to, he played Chopin at the Opera House. His hair was cut short, his tails long, and from this replica of the younger piano masters came music that took me and floated me up among the sound reflectors, some way above the pianist on his stage.

  It was music that sounded with you—how can I say it?—with the inner parts, of you in such a way that they were in time with a music in the blood, as if the notes had always been there, but you had forgotten.

  I sat back. The notes hung in the air, unwilling to fall; within a phrase they stepped forward, slowed in mid-stride. Mid-stride? In mid-air. Or were cast out over the surface of silence, like flies for fishes, and drawn back gently. We were an audience of fish with open mouths—to breathe with no noise and not break the silence.

  The prunus that grew brown-leaved and flowered pink at the corner of the Goughs’ backyard rustled into my mind; I remembered afternoons when I came back from a sweaty, messy root in the playground after school, and the notes of Mozart cascading up out of the window where he played, flirting with the electric wires on their poles and dazzling round my head their mocking clarity. Tears came to my eyes listening to the elegant misery of Chopin, as once or twice they did as I bowed my head at my own strength and sloppiness as the semen of boys leaked down my legs.

  I was glad of Chopin’s half-tones of tears, and didn’t bother wiping my face.

  In our snailed, sailed, shelled cathedral of reverence for sound and the movement of sound, Robert Gough bowed, thinking over the keys. He played mazurkas, études, waltzes; cerebral dances, studies of aristocratic sorrow. The stylized frenzy of the performer was held in an easy, cold control that matched the coldness at the heart of Chopin.

  I could no longer see the individuals of the audience, only a tear-blurred mass of lumps, and those lumps were human heads.

  Robert Gough knew what revolutionary war was, through the master whose fingers wrote the study he played, and in following that other man’s notes, he knew what war should be and how his notes should advance, like soldiers with their arms. Always advance, always triumphant.

  The polonaises followed. The pianist crouched, an ugly manikin over his helpless instrument, and battled to control the rising tide of sound. But the composer had won that battle over a century before. I began to think of the twin problems laid out before me, of Colin’s touch of love and whether I would get through the grading gate toward greatness.

  I disliked the polonaises. My thoughts made the memory of the cheerful afternoon street outside the Goughs’ house vanish. I sat back, estranged from this crowd, and alien; thinking somewhere within the triangle bounded by genius, glory, and genitals.

  I Am Beginning To Be Afraid of Where I Have To Go

  My life was unsatisfying. The expectation of something wonderful somewhere in the future had lifted me up for so long that if I began to fall down, I felt I would keep on falling. It could not be possible that an ordinary life was all there was for me. My mother’s prophecy accorded too well with my own feelings about the possibilities within me, to let it all go.

  I had had every chance. I had every ability necessary. What did I lack? A task? Then it was imagination at fault.

  Was I looking in the wrong place?

  Did I lack courage to choose? Did I have too much imagination, seeing n possibilities, then multiplying each n by n.

  Was I too much caught up with the idea of power?

  Was I too proud to fasten on one thing alone?

  Was it my too great reverence for my self that had pushed aside my possibilities?

  Was it simply that I could not bear to choose?

  Was it that I wanted love now, as well as the wonderful future all my childhood years seemed to promise, and these two things were pulling me in different directions?

  Yet love had always been impossible to me. How can I say that the power of the touch that haunted me was love or could have led to love? I had never experienced love. To say that love was a reciprocal feeling aroused in me by another’s desire, was that to talk about love?

  I Wrote This Poem

  I wrote this poem about it, but left out all my doubts.

  The waves are hungry for the bay

  and fast as great wild horses race across

  the deep green dangerous kingdoms of the drowned;

  the sea is hungry for its love

  and so am I.

  The cliff is yearning for the sky

  and straining upward while it wears away

  and bears the marks of blows about its base;

  the earth is waiting for its love

  and so am I.

  The night is restless for the day

  and all those cold white stars could tell you why

  pointing with stiff fingers without sound

  the night’s impatient for its love

  and so am I.

  Letter From Lil

  Dear Alex,

  I know you know I’m not brilliant like you are, but I know you would always want to be a great person some day and if I was a praying sort I’d have prayed for it to be. As for me all I’m fit for is to look after Kevin, my old man. Did I tell you Gavin left me, and I’m living with Kevin. About the time I left Booker’s to work at the hospital, it was. He drinks a lot and that keeps him away from the place a lot and he can hardly raise the effort to do me. One of his kids, Ray, is sitting on a flagpole to raise money for new equipment for the crippled kids’ school, I like to have them do things for others, otherwise they get to think they’re the only ones on earth. One of our chooks died Saturday and I and Kevin’s kids made a coffin for it and tied it up with a ribbon. When they filled the grave in they put a cross made up of two sticks and a bit of string. Kev went crook when he got home from work, he got home early not drunk, that was one time they wished he’d stayed at the pub longer. His own old man used to stay with us, he’s not as healthy as my father, I sort of knew he was going to die, he sat on our veranda, listening to the weather. He was cautious like an oyster, didn’t say much, not like my father who runs practically instead of walking and talks the hind leg off a donkey. He had trees to look at, the iron-bark that always catches the breeze in its leaves no matter how small a breeze, and the coral tree with red flowers. The day he died the moon was white and flew like a kids kite among the little clouds, and the concrete of the old patio was warm with the sun soaking into it all day, and warm far into the night, long after we called the doctor and lifted him inside onto a bed. He lay on the concrete, it made me think of an old house in sort of ruins, and the tenant gone. I knew he was dead before I got to him.

  The day we went to the funeral the sky was like a sea made of grey, bits fell down and we called them drops because they dropped on us. Don’t mind me talking like this, funerals make me feel sort of loose, as if bits of me might come off anytime. I was standing there with the two youngest, holding a hand each and no hand left over for my hanky, and I saw something move from the corner of my eye, standing there at the graveside, and you know what it was? One petal of a flower had just opened from its bud, it sort of opened with a click, a click that made no click if you get me, like if you said k softly, and I was so happy I saw that flower open, it was only a freesia, that I cried more, but the kids don’t understand if you suddenly take your hand away so I had to stand there with tears down me. They argued before he was buried about where to have the wake, they said not at our place because we had no way to keep the beer from getting warm.

/>   So now I’m writing to you, dearest Al, using this nice silver colored pen that was gifted to me, not given but gifted if you don’t mind me twisting English around, and the sun is coming in the door like a, like a what? I guess it’s not like anything, it just is. Just light. And here’s me telling you things like this. Don’t mind me, dear Al. I’m sitting here writing this to you and the thought that comes into my head is that nothing ever stops. What happened before, goes on. I don’t know why I thought that thought. I guess my duty in life is to bring up the kids and love them and keep on loving my old man no matter what.

  I send my love to you too, dearest Al. Please be happy,

  Your Lil.

  Homework

  This winter has been clear and sun-filled. The August winds were late, coming early in September when spring should have started; the weather has turned cold and wet and windy, it is going to be a spring of changes: now hot, now cold; we’ll have rain and winds and probably a wet November.

  As I watched the world over my homework from my window, a blast of thunder shook the glass in its frame. A storm was on the suburbs. Large raindrops fell, almost sadly, then quicker drops, then lancing spears, drifts of rain, columns of spears coming across the road, kicking up the little bits of splash I used to think of as the cats and dogs it was raining.

  Thinking again of that touch, as I do so often, it seems to me that the feeling it gave me, and still gives me in my memory of it, is the nearest thing to the feeling I give myself when I can no longer resist the urge to do it and when it is a really elaborate one with all the subtle touches I like to feel. I can’t help it. Perhaps others feel the same way. But what a thought it is—that the best you can think of that you can compare such a magic touch with, and what may follow from that electric touch—is your own masturbation!

 

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