Do you actually think everything is bright and well and promising again when finally she gives up the attempt to communicate these profoundly important, agonizing thoughts and feelings, and bustles instead with a practiced smile chattering banalities? I’ve watched this performance often enough, and it makes my skin crawl.
Can’t you see the superhuman effort she has made to talk about these dreadful things, to try to come to terms with them, which you—with the best will in the world, I don’t deny it—neutralize with ‘optimism’? Do you fail to see the gray metal gates slam into place at the very instant she becomes once more, to your relief and delight, your ‘dutiful, happy, recovering daughter’?
You have never seen Caroline numb and staring blankly in the room she’s renting, or weeping in a kind of hopeless loneliness at what she says is the bitter futility of it all: as she wonders yet again why to go on living.
Do my words seem nothing more than macabre fantastic rhetoric? Can you really believe that?
I suppose I’ve just destroyed any fragment of empathy that might have survived my earlier pages. I can only hope this is not entirely true. Perhaps you might wish to show this letter to Caroline’s psychiatrist, or the Ward doctor, and get their reactions. Please do so, if you think it appropriate. Whatever happens, I hope you will give some consideration to what I’ve said here. This letter has not been undertaken lightly. I feel exhausted.
My love to you all,
Joseph Williams
one small step for [a] (man)
CONVEYOR BELT
Perhaps no single invention has so revolutionized humanity’s war habits and methods of production, and been so thoroughly loathed, as the conveyor belt.
It has taken much of the hard physical labor out of work and replaced it with tension and ruthless monotony.
The design concept is simple. Instead of loading materials into motor-driven vehicles and taking them from place to place, the motor stays put and drives a rotating pulley. A long belt is attached, supported at intervals by rollers, and the materials are carried on the moving belt. In 1868 such a conveyor was used in Liverpool, England, to transport grain on the docks. The revolutionary impact came, however, when small machine parts were rolled past a line of workers who assembled them into larger machine components.
The method had been pioneered in 1798 by Eli Whitney, an American gun maker. A century later, in 1908, Henry Ford coupled small-part manufacture and assembly with the conveyor belt to mass-produce the Model T motor car.
The benefit depends on careful analysis of the best way to put the parts together, with the least wasted effort. Since each individual task is simple, semi-skilled workers can replace all-round craftsmen, at lower wages. With fewer skills, and therefore less industrial leverage, these workers are less likely to strike for improved money or conditions.
* * *
Citrus sauce: A lemon tree, my dear Watson
* * *
The end of the line of this technique is automation—the total replacement of human workers by machines controlled with computers. With the rise of the micro-chip, this result can be expected increasingly throughout society in the 1980s and 1990s.
1969: joseph and dzhugashvili
brunswick Sunday
7/12/69
Caroline honey
I’m sorry to hear Antony is screwing you up, but it was fairly predictable. I hope you can get everything settled without too much anguish and boredom.
Of course, by now (I assume) you’ve surely been seduced away all flushed with sonnets and bubbly into the penthouse apt of some lustful Assistant Professor.
At present I labor through Bertram Wolfe’s Three Who Made a Revolution…Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin. At 400 pages (much of it read standing up in the tram, poor proletarian swine that I am) I’m only at the halfway mark. It’s as stirring as last year’s telephone directory. Still, I now feel competent to begin talking to our better informed comrades.
Tuesday afternoon I finally screwed together the courage to see your dentist again. He was properly indignant that I should be back to see him so soon; his professional competence was affronted. We had stabbing and jabbing and drilling for many happy minutes before he discerned that the damned thing was nerve-free, dead as a stale fart. So he patched it up and warned me of the Five Danger Signs of Incipient Abscess.
Is your pulse hammering as you learn these fascinating truths? Of such is the epic of my life composed. Perhaps I should after all produce a quipu of my own and fill it with these boredom-defying details.
So I sit at my desk and read about Lenin, a subversive activity funded all unknowing by the nation’s leading capitalists. When the boss infrequently ghosts across the room I leap smartly about with a conciliatory smile and do his bidding. An example? Only too happy:
On Thursday I was invited to rule 200 pages into squares with pencil and straight edge. Having failed to master the art of malingering, I cheated laterally, inventing the cardboard cut-out template. It blew the poor bugger’s mind when I completed the task some ten times faster than he’d anticipated, and he couldn’t be bothered contriving any further makework. I sat paranoically for the rest of the day reading Lenin’s insane life and waiting to get fired for redundancy. My God.
As for the Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm: surely sex authorities have been maintaining for years that the twat proper is as sensitive as a frozen glove. (A telling figure of speech, I hear you cry.) After all, as Reader’s Digest articles assure us monthly, leading specialists relish nothing better than to perform all manner of drastic surgery to the inner vagina without resort to anaesthetics. Which just makes the mystery of female sexuality more obscure, of course. On the basis of my quite remarkably modest field research it seems undeniable that orgasms for ladies are more extended and intense, when they finally actually get around to happening, than for men, or me anyway. The clitoris is clearly rather crucial to the process. So you’d think female masturbation should be more popular than it is commonly held to be. Curious. Very curious.
At the Gallaghers’ party yesterday I responded to the general gaiety as to a hammer gradually smashing my bones. Libby refused to be comforted. Mad Quintilla stayed away. The host was as repulsively obnoxious as he’s grown to be.
I eventually took a tram to the Manchesters’ and slept there after a pleasant enough evening. Their several guests proved to have Advanced Opinions. Not an aspirin between us, we all pussyfooted around the hungover morning sharing mild expressions of comfort, rather than shouting and hunting.
Don’t you dare commit suicide. Come over here and I’ll kiss it better. Space gone better close. Lots love babe.
1970: apocalypse now
JANUARY FIRST NINETEEN SEVENTY
The clocks are being smashed.
We are a generation in revolt. The old rhythms are breaking up, ocean froth before a tidal wave.
Now is not then. The clocks are shuddering and shattering. This world of us is not the world of them.
We are a generation in revolt against the sickly wistfulness of bullshit sentiment, against the evasions that stifle honesty and rage, against the dull gray smog of dull robot work and gray lifeless clothes on stiff dummy bones.
And yes, indeed, we are in revolt against that one bright feverish flame at the center of the dull gray world we were born into, the lunatic nuclear flame that is waiting to burn us out.
It is in the last ten years that we have become who we are.
We are the generation walking cool on our own feet into the Seventies but we were formed by the Sixties. That ferocious decade which has just closed was the time when we found ourselves, created in our own bodies and our own styles a rhythm shaking the worn-out world.
And it is the music of the Sixties that is our rhythm and our style, our voice, our voyage of discovery: us shaping ourselves.
Where we have been already points to where we are going. And where we are going—if we keep our nerve, if we keep our cool, if we keep our truth, if they do
not destroy us first—is into the Revolution of Joy.
The music of the Sixties is our history.
It is the mad, wild, fierce truth of Dylan, and his lyricism.
The music of the Sixties is the dream fantasia of psychedelic West Coast America, the surf pulse and the good vibrations of the Beach Boys, the blatant savage adrenaline of Jimi Hendrix, the nimble black Tamla Motown beat, the White Negro voyage of Presley.
Above all the music of the Sixties is the evolution of the Beatles: the honest sexy excitement of their first songs, the nervy innovations of Sgt. Pepper, their hungry curiosity for new ways to speak and sing and their glad embrace of ancient raga from that crowded Indian manscape that previous generations had despised and crucified, the search for reality and beauty no matter the color of its skin, the discovery of the naked human body, that taming of the devouring computer to the musician’s soul-plucking, sledgehammer art, the welding of East and West and Peace and Love in the strange wonderful harmonies, so vile and so hideous to older ears and eyes, of John and Yoko…
It is our poetry, scarring the sky and tearing apart the placid paralysis of the air, coming on strong and heavy with all the good and bad vibrations, all of them.
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.<
br />
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.”
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