However, in summary (sorry for all this boring complaint, but you asked for it!) what I become is, in the last analysis, my own responsibility. It might not be my fault the way I am constructed now, but it will be my fault if I allow present trends to worsen while failing to cultivate their alternatives.
In my next loc, I will discuss the importance of imaginative fiction as a means of putting forward new ways of looking at Man and Society. That is, if you are interested enough to print this one! Best wishes,
J. D. Williams
1969: the bride of frankenstein
Paddington
Sydney
14 November 1969
My dear Joseph
So, in Sydney. If I were as cynical as Brian Wagner I’d add “…all safe & sound.” In fact, we very nearly didn’t make it. I had a prang about 100 miles out of Liverpool. Sixteen hours at the wheel, by the time we got here to Paddo, pilled of course. Had to have the radiator replaced fifty bloody bucks.
Antony and I will stay in Paddington until we can organize a beautiful, peaceful house of our own.
I am finding it extremely difficult to recuperate & my mind is not functioning. This is an extremely dull letter. Can’t face the thought of a job. Hope all is well at your parents’ place. I guess it isn’t. I wish you’d get out of that godforsaken place.
I miss you. I yearn for your company. I’m incredibly vulnerable. When I realized for the first time that you were 600 miles away I knew how much I “loved” you (the unspeakable verb) but what’s the sense in it what’s the point when you won’t accept it. I tell myself that you can love another person without any return of love for only so long before you are brought right up against your own bloody masochism.
Antony, of course, dramatically declares his love. How farcical. He and I have been together such a short time.
Surely you must feel something for me after 2 years even if it’s only to despise oh shit why should it matter now? Hell it’s all over but so often you’re still with me.
I can’t go on raving like this I feel slightly delirious.
Regards to parents.
fondest—?
Caroline
1982: getting started
* * *
LAUGHTER IN THE DIKE
the quipu of costive[l] humor
* * *
written, edited, run orf and footnoted by Vladimir B. Wagner for Point Two Six Amateur Press Association,[2] and out just in the nick of time to rescue his good standing and sustained credentials with that August body. Some copies will be seen by non-members of .26APA, but I regret to say that I am far too niggardly and costipated to trade for your scungy rubbish. Away with you! There’s a wheelbarrow out in the toolshed. Emitted 17 December 1982. You can find my phone number in the book. Overseas readers never ring me anyway. Does anyone read colophons any more? Doubtful. I’ll just keep strumming on this
[1] Concise Oxford: a. constipated; [fig.] niggardly
[2] the well-gnome writing arm of all us good guys who there are only 0.25742 per cent of in the world owing to our having smarts of 146 or more oh wow which isn’t as good as Mega[3] but you can’t women all
[3] the Mega Society, limited to folks in the 99.9999th percentile, which is taking a good thing a little too far if you know what I
As you know, I am an inveterate entrant of contests. I have pushed pennies along a train track with my nose, heedless of the iron horse and motivated by nothing better than a powerful wish to see young Billy Illywacker bested. Billy, needless to say, was scrambling along the alternative rail, shoving with all his might, short-trousered knees grinding through blue stone fragments which lacerated as well his horrible snot-hardened palms; the broad flat penny darkly dazzling in his vicious squinting eyes as the summer holiday sun burned up from coin and rails without discrimination as to metallic pigment; and I scrambled likewise, the damned thing teetering and skidding off the track, splinters in the sleepers tearing into skin and bone, the hoot of the on-rushing train and the panic-stricken cries of our youthful companions unheard by either of us in the unspeakable compulsion and fire of macho competition; ah, those were the days.
Now, of course, I am far more refined. I must needs be urged by my colleagues to enter, with tremendous diffidence, such sublimated wrestling matches as the National Time 500-item Old Time Movie trivia quiz, say.
These days, as a subscriber to many of the world’s leading intellectual journals, quarterlies, newspapers and financial advice letters, it was inevitable that I would write and submit by urgent airmail the following shrunken saga (here annotated in the usual manner for the edification of those numerous members of .26APA who, it grieves me to report, would not know their asp from their Elba).
THREE MINUTE EPIC, WITH SEQUEL[1]
Zero puckers. Bright spacetime Bangs.[2]
Quark[3] soup[4]: that’s one-hundredth of a second.[5]
Lumps curdle in boiling soup: nucleons[6]. Mesons[7] and anti-kin[8] smash, evaporate, leave thin grit.[9]
The light[10] goes out.[11]
Everything[12], blowing apart[13], cools to a hundred million degrees.[14]
Somewhat later: stars[15], life[16], us.[17] Thin wisps in darkness.
[1] That merry wag Brian W. Aldiss invented the mini-saga while penning the introduction to a short story anthology. He was, at the time, embedded in his monumental “Helliconia” trilogy, a multi-generational 70mm split-screen saga. In stark contrast, the mini-saga must be a miracle of concision and compression: precisely 50 words long, with a contributory title of up to 15 additional words. Upon public disclosure of this new art form, the Sunday magazine of the London “Telegraph” launched a contest that attracted entries by Frederick Forsythe, Frank Muir, Hammond Innes. P. J. Kavanagh, and the Australian hike editor, columnist, wit and namesake of the artform’s discoverer, Brian Wagner, whose effort graces this footnote.
[2] A nearly perfect instance of the form can be found in the first fifty words of the King James translation of the Bible, describing creation. A somewhat more up-to-date version, using many more words and equations, has been given by the Nobel Prize laureate Steven Weinberg, in his popular (but, I am assured by that great physicist Joe Williams, accurate) account of cosmogony, The First Three Minutes. The interval mentioned in both Weinberg’s title and my own is approximately equal to the time required for the primeval universe to settle down from the Big Bang singularity to an expanding mass of elementary nuclear particles, exchange quanta and neutrinos. Everything of importance to human beings occurred, of course, after this three minute egg had boiled and been removed from its shell.
1975: worth the journey
It has taken the arrival in Canberra of the Magi from Overseas, here for this international Point Two Six Convocation—prophets of Intelligence and egalitarianism alike, Hans Eysenck and Richard Lewontin, Richard Herrnstein and Isaac Asimov (a dedicated non-flyer, borne by luxury ocean liner)—to goose the media into paying attention to the indigenous hikes. Ray Finlay finds this strikingly apt.
“We’re still having a bit of bother with the O.B. van,” the director tells him soothingly. “I do apologize for not getting you chappies a little drinkie, but we don’t want you sloshed before the actual event.” She laughs and holds Ray’s biceps.
“Isn’t it going to be rather contrasty? I was expecting something indoors, to tell you the—”
“Relaxed and outdoorsy is what we’re aiming at. We’ve had a fair bit of experience with sporting functions.”
“Quite.
The ABC crew stagger about with wires, cables, conduits, television cameras and make-up kits. His own face has been lightly powdered. Joseph shambles out of the lavatory, looking like a clown.
“I’m starving.”
“What a stroke of luck that you find yourself in a restaurant.” Ray stares at his watch. “I suppose Professor Eysenck and Dr. Rose will arrive before the pudding.”
“Ah, they’ve had to cancel,” the director says over her shoul
der. “Hans ate a bad oyster and it’s given him collywobbles. Steven had a prior engagement, our slip-up. You’ll have to do all the work by yourselves. Think you’re up to it?”
“Oh shit, no,” Joseph says and Ray tells her at the same moment, “We’ll manage, Shirley.”
Grant Moore, his macho moustache bristling, steps from the kitchen into the bistro’s patio, face tanned from forays to Queensland and points farther north and retanned by artful cosmetics. “Okay, blokes, the tucker’s just about edible. Let’s siddown.”
Ray is already seated under the merrily striped bistro umbrella. Joseph is placed at his right hand, Grant at his left. A camera takes the fourth place, with another off to one side. By artful editing it will be made to appear that they sit in the customary arrangement.
“Everyone’s sick of the usual talking-head bullshit. It’s 1975, for Christ’s sake, not 1965,” Grant Moore tells them. “And what’s the fall-back alternative? How much guts does it take to slam your audience from one walk-in jumpcut to another? Listen, Ray, we’re really climbing out on a limb here.”
“Really? In discussing intelligence intelligently?”
“By going for conversation, period, for fuck’s sake. If a point’s worth hammering, we’ll linger on it. We’re not scared of a bit of abstract conceptualization if that’s what it takes. With me?”
“Won’t our chewing-tend to…well, muffle our conversation?”
“We can cut. We can dub. That’s technical shit.”
“Jean-Pierre’s ready,” Shirley tells him.
But it takes three false starts before the mood relaxes sufficiently for their lemon sorbet to be broached.
A DOG’S WIFE
…nine
I was not wholly without sympathy for Fiona’s qualms, though I’d have died before admitting so. On the other hand I judged her objections fundamentally reactionary. In this age of moonshots and dime-store calculators, it seemed to me not merely ignoble but rather trite to find some course of action offensive simply because it was not hallowed by family tradition.
The fact is, Spot was the brightest dog I had ever met. He entered college under a special program, endowed by the Chomsky Institution, and was a wild fellow, mad for poetry and drinking all night and the theater. He swiftly discerned that culture as such is problematical, overdetermined, quixotic, that its appeal is essentially to the intellectually lightweight. He dabbled in painting for a time, creating a small stir with his innovative brush stroke. But it was the endless wonder of science that spoke to Spot’s heart of hearts, and led to his specializing first in chemistry and finally in the application of Sophus Lie’s theory of continuous transformation groups to that previously intractable poser, the ‘periodic table’ of elementary particles and their resonances.
Much of his work was awfully abstruse and beyond my modest attainments, yet Spot retained a sense of primal joy in his assault on the universe. One might come out into the yard with a bone from the table (for he was then living at our home under an exchange arrangement) and find him gazing raptly at the moon, his lips parted, inflamed with an innocent intoxication so much purer than his raunchy nights backstage with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I was struck then, fondly, by his ardent, wistful expression, so like Carl Sagan’s. Any comparison I might make, however, is bound to be misleading. I’d never met anyone, man or woman, who affected me so piercingly. Before I knew it, I was head over heels in love with a dog, and I am prepared to confess that at first I was just as astonished and taken aback by this discovery as was my dear bitter mother a few months later when Spot went in to announce our intentions.
1969: obituaries
Bloody Brunswick
Monday 17
Nov 69
dear Caroline
Very short note before I rush out at lunchtime to post this. Spent yesterday at Brian’s, helping crank out the latest HOT AIR (which you will find enclosed; the ink should be dry by the time you get it). I sat at my typewriter all Friday night writing a Letter of Comment for his LoC pages, a way of telling people that we’d split up. It’s on page 12.
It’s all so sad, Lovely, even though it seems quite impossible to…imagine how we could ah fuck it read the thing in the quipu.
kisses, Joseph
WORD SALAD:: Lettuce from my chums
::A singularly strange and moving letter arrived from Joe Williams after I’d run off most of this ish of HOT AIR, but I’ve remixed the SALAD to make space for it. We don’t see much of Joe these days, now that he’s a Big Time Science Journalist, and his unhappy circumstances will therefore come as a shock to many of you. There’s not much comfort to be had in words, Joseph, I know, but believe me when I say that we all share with you in your mourning::b.wagner::
It’s funny. I haven’t met most of the hikes whom Brian sends HOT AIR to, but I feel a sort of sense of family with you, at least as much of one as I’ve ever felt with any group. Despite this, I have tended to keep my private life to myself. This might seem hard for some of you to believe, having been inundated with my most passionate beliefs about politics, writing, music, and the ins and out of the School of Physics, but basically I haven’t conveyed anything close to myself since about eight years ago, when I didn’t know any better and sent some ghastly LoCs to GRUMBLING WOMBATS, which are certainly better forgotten.
It’s hard getting to the point, isn’t it? Well, taking a deep breath, I must force my fingers to the keyboard:
Two days ago, my wife Caroline died of cancer. She was buried today. I am in shock. She was a lovely, kind, poetic, sensitive person. Until the disease undermined her physical constitution, she was also a physically beautiful woman, as the few of you who met her will recall. It always seemed to me that she had something of the graceful fluid lines of bone and flesh of a French model, though her ancestry had been Australian for at least three generations. I rarely told her that she was beautiful. Now it is too late.
Those of you who never met Caro, or me, those of you who live in other States or other countries, will not be all that upset by this news, except in the general sense that we share a momentary pang at news of another’s bereavement. Those of you who encountered us once or twice, but without our orbits intersecting, will perhaps feel some more direct twinge of empathy and grief. And those few, like Brian, who knew us rather better than that, who visited our house or had us around to theirs, will perhaps be rather taken aback by the news, because they will know that what I have just written is not true.
I am not married, and never have been. Yes, I have lived with Caroline at various times, and until several days ago we shared a house not ten minutes’ walk from Brian Wagner’s roguish den. But Caroline has not been ill, not physically, and she is certainly not dead. She has relocated to Sydney, hoping to create a life for herself free of the metaphorical carcinogens that were threatening, day by day, to destroy her. These included: my own selfish impatience and lack of caring, the frightful pressures her parents subjected her to which just tore her up, her horror at finding so many of her old friends from school or university settling into “happy” mindless bourgeois marriages and baby-making, her own secret desire to do just that and my refusal to collaborate: cancers of the soul.
And she took herself away, upped and left, went away weeping, and left me weeping too, and it is just exactly as if she were dead. As if she were lying out of touch or sight in a hard wooden coffin where no sounds can be heard and there is an odor of perfume and old suits and incense.
By speaking of cancer and death, of course, I try to let myself off the hook, try to pretend for a moment that I am not at least fifty percent responsible for the destruction of our relationship, for the chilly misery I now feel, and the despairing awareness that no amount of confession of guilt, complicity and rottenness can repair what is corroded and gone between us, that Caroline (or I myself) could just as truthfully be described as dead, killed by some insidious disorder over which neither of us had any real control.
And that last
assertion is probably just as much a cop-out as anything I’ve written so far. So I’ll stop. No flowers, by request.
::Joe’s letter, which he delivered by hand late on Friday night and would not tarry as I read its baffling mixture of truth and metaphor, is not the sort of thing I have been accustomed to publishing in this quipu. Maybe it should be. Joseph and Caroline are not the only victims lately. If we could all try a little harder to express what we actually feel, even if we must do so with the aid of misdirection, we might manage our personal lives somewhat more successfully::b.wagner::
1969: love is a german shepherd
Paddington
Sydney
20.11.69
My dear Joseph
At peace.
I received your quipu article yesterday. At first I was outraged. I wanted to tear you into small strips. I thought you were saying that you wished me dead (I might as well be). Then I re-read what you’d written and I think I understand. Poor Joseph, it’s the only way you know to express your feelings. Like your refusal to speak of “love.” So I take your article as I suppose you meant it, as a tribute to our relationship, to the feelings you had for me. You must admit it’s a very strange thing to read. But I suppose you would not have written it if you had felt nothing at all for me. So in the end, after crying all morning, I saw what you were getting at, and your article gave me strength.
The days have been floating past restlessly and I with them. I’m starting to loosen up, though sleep comes very intermittently.
Antony is the Great Pretender. I am very wary of him now. He has a long way to go & doesn’t know it. He thinks he’s got it all sewn up but he’s fly-papered in the bourgeois conventions he says he loathes so deeply. Every attempt to escape tangles him up further—look at what he’s got himself into with me. His dope, his drinking—these are all middle-class to the bone. I’m staying on with him because I’m lost in Sydney. I’m fond enough of him but he’s going to end up hating me for just those human flaws I share with him. I’m weak. I take pills to keep my sanity.
Quipu Page 3