Quipu
Page 11
Spent an evening with Antony and his new lady, Iris. Dinner, tuneless talk from both of them about people I’d never heard of. He played two of his own pieces on Iris’s guitar, pleasant enough. I started talking about how devastated & excited I’d been by the Pram Factory performance I saw in Melbourne (Antony knew one of the actors) and he responded with reticence. We used to talk so freely. His humor was stale where once I found it fresh and inventive. Iris, though, is a likeable person who tried very hard to make me welcome. I wish I was free to like her. So much for that evening.
Well, my dear, that’s it. There’s no point in sending this letter (or any of my previous ones) but I will, because there’s no point in not sending it.
11.42. You are a ghost afar.
Most of the time you are real, and I believe we have lived together. Other people are smoke always, once I haven’t seen them for a few days.
I’m not depressed or suicidal. I am living amazingly realistically. I don’t cry, I don’t lie around dreaming, I don’t clutter the room with continuous stupid remarks—I’m very alert most of the time, always on the ball in company.
I am beginning to adjust to reality. To really watch my face in the mirror and not deny it’s me, to affirm it is, that it always will be. This physical change is strange too. I can’t express it yet but I’m not lying about that either.
I visited a business friend of my father’s over the weekend—they’d rung him up, I suppose, fobbed him on to me, make sure I was eating. We talked and talked about the 1940s, had omelettes and claret and talked some more until 1:30 in the morning. Very satisfying. I slept well that night. Would they believe that, understand it?
Well distant star adieu until another night.
Caroline
J.—
Can we turn our faces to the wall and die?
Can we turn our faces to the wall
Can we turn our faces
Can we turn
Can we?
C.
1971: pack-raped by political bikies
In a tone of gentle logic Tom Nourse tells his daughter, “The police don’t start these things. They’re just ordinary family men with an unpleasant task. The only reason they’re out there in their hot uniforms on a Sunday afternoon is to protect the public’s order and property.” He puts his empty glass precisely on the wet ring it had left on the table. “I’m sure they’d much rather be at home with their kiddies, tending their gardens.”
Ray fills the glass and pours one for Marj. He sees violence in her. “As far as you’ve gone,” he says rapidly, “you’re right, of course. None of us thinks the cops are psychopathic bullies who thrive on sadism—”
“Like hell,” says Marjory.
“—or if we do get that feeling about some of them, we know it’s due to the larger context.” Curiously, the older man raises no objection; he looks on benignly. “You know and I know that some cops are thugs. It’s always been that way. One reason for having a police force is to give the hostility of brutal men a social function, buy them off if you like. That’s a truism, surely. But what role is the police force playing tomorrow? Look, this is Australia, not South Africa. Public protest goes back to the goldfields and beyond. Teachers make their primary school pupils memorize it all. It’s legitimated, almost part of the parliamentary process.”
Doris Nourse is less happy to hear this than her husband. She is clearly agitated, but says nothing. Ray argues: “If demonstrators did rush about this country looting and raping and killing, one might understand the law being out in force. Heavens, you’ve just got to watch the TV. When trouble does break out, the principal reason is that a few police have lost their heads and done something inane like riding horses into a crowd. And pretty minimal crowds at that, usually. You’ll have noticed that the politicians kept the police under tight restraint during the big Moratorium marches.”
“Ray, you’re a grown man. You know as well as I do that the police have to be on hand in case anything does flare up.”
“Flare up?” Marjory shouts. “We’re all too bloody comfortable. Are a bunch of bourgeois students and middle-aged unionists going to tear up the paving stones outside Parliament and burn down the Stock Exchange? You’re as out of touch as the baby Maoists.”
Is Tom Nourse a trifle discomfited? “It’s not that. You have to remember, they’re constantly being manipulated by the communists and the anarchists.” Ray and Marjory stare at him. “Those people’d stop at nothing if the police weren’t there to intervene. Look what they did in Czechoslovakia.”
“That’s exactly right.” Ray notices how calm he is. My God, he thinks. “All those communist students and workers coming out of the offices, factory-hands with flowers in their fists up against invading tanks. Really amazing. But surely you’re not saying that we too should—”
“No, no, I meant—”
Marjory begins very noisily explaining her dislike for Stalinists of the kind in power in the Soviet Union and its satellites; that she has read a number of history books; the distinct immunities to duped brainwashing that are imparted by a tertiary education of the post-Cold War variety.
She goes on in this vein for some time. Hungry and now post-coitally sad after all, Ray broods on the meeting at which Jan and Peter must even at this moment be drawing up their tactics by reference to Lenin and Mao and Debray. He shrinks on his garbage lid at the sincere dishonesty of what Marjory is saying. Vietnamese are burning and starving and being shaken apart by concussion, and the binary fallacy rides myopically in old Sydney town.
Beside, he thinks, she’s responding blindly to blindness. Marjory’s father is a stockbroker, competent and well-regarded by his peers. How can one reason, Ray asks himself hopelessly, with a person whose entire way of life has conspired to deform his values?
“Marjy,” her father says patiently, “these young bucks we’re talking about are still impressionistic, still going through the adolescent phase of revolt.”
“Terrific,” Marjory says scathingly. “Really terrific. You’ve been keeping up with the Heart-Balm column. Look mate,” and she leans toward him, stabbing her chest with a finger, “I’ve just done three solid years of psychology, on your money.”
Nourse takes no exception. Placidly he tells her, “Then you’ll know what I mean. They’re impressionable, open to suggestion and manipulation from communist—”
“What god damned communists?” It’s a shriek of baffled rage. “Do you have the Maoists in mind? Or could it be the Russians? Perhaps you’re thinking of the four or five Trot splinter groups. A couple of rowdy union bosses and a handful of local government stirrers. The communists are a bloody farce in this country.”
Tom Nourse jerks forward with his first show of emotion for some time. “You support the communists in Vietnam, don’t you? Even though our boys are dying over there. I never thought I’d see the day! And you reckon you haven’t been manipulated!”
“The communists you’re talking about are Vietnamese in their own country. We’re the aliens there, we’re the foreign invaders.”
With a thudding, deliberate ponderousness, Ray says, “I thought even the Wall Street Journal agreed by now that the war has to stop, if only by the most self-serving calculation. We’re not interested in communism. What we want is an end to an insane, brutal exercise in technological carnage and imperial realpolitik.”
While this lead balloon is plunging into the earth, Marjory acidly echoes her father’s earlier words. “Our boys! Listen, bad luck, the poor bastards happen to be on the wrong side. Did you feel a little warm glow of sympathy for all the German mums and dads who supported the Nazis because ‘their boys’ were working the late shift on the gas ovens?”
“They couldn’t do anything else, dear,” Doris Nourse explains nervously. “They’d have been shot, wouldn’t they?”
“You think we should be shot for marching?”
Tom Nourse puffs his pipe, but his cheeks are veined with purple. “Nazis, rubbish. No-o
ne’s stopping you from marching and clamoring and protesting day and night. But the rest of the community needs some protection from the hotheads who don’t realize how thankful they should be for the privilege of living in this wonderful country.” He looks out the window at the small, rather squalid portion of it in Marjory’s backyard. “And for having the protection of our great ally, the United States of America. You’ll find as you get older that there’s an important distinction between intelligence and knowledge,” he adds, not one to be cowed, “the sort of knowledge you get only from experience. It’s hard won, you can’t pick it up from books.”
axes to grind
INTELLIGENCE
Fully-grown human beings are remarkably similar to one another when compared to any other living creatures. Even so, in a number of ways they also differ from one another quite considerably. Men and women are physically distinguished by their role in reproduction, though the significance of this fact has been over-emphasized in many societies, to the disadvantage of women.
Human groups have been divided into “races,” usually for evil motives, on the basis of their skin color, hair type, minor variations in shape of nose, eyes, lips, and so on. Other aspects of human variety have had less drastic consequences.
Some people are much shorter than average, others are much taller. Those who have had excellent nutrition all their lives tend to be heavier and more immune to disease than those who have been on the borderline of starvation. Yet nobody speaks of the “race” of tall, well-fed people (though “upper-class” or “privileged” individuals do tend to have these characteristics).
This line of thought helps us deal with some problems arising from such notions as “intelligence,” “imagination,” and “creativity.”
It is obvious that some people seem to be quick-witted, able to cope competently with tasks that confront them, knowledgeable about the world and the details of their society. These tend to be called “clever” or “smart.” Others seem slower, less able and persistent, without much interest in anything outside very narrow limits. These tend to be called “dumb” or “stupid.” Most of us fall somewhere between, being quite good at some things and not so good at others.
A convenient but dubious shorthand way to refer to these mental abilities is to speak of a person’s “intelligence.” After all, we say that a clever person acts “intelligently.” It might seem that surely this is due to some abstract quality or gift the person possesses, just as a tall person possesses marked “height.” But notice something strange: it does not explain why a person is unusually tall to say she has great “height.” That merely repeats the same fact.
* * *
Barely measurable: A limen trait, my dear Watson
* * *
Around the turn of the 20th century, a number of psychologists who were studying the structure and operation of the human mind looked into the question of mental abilities. At first it was thought that measuring the size of the skull might give a clue to a person’s cleverness, since it was thought that a large skull contained a large brain and a large brain would be better at thinking than a smaller brain.
This seems ridiculous to us today, because we know that (except in extreme cases of brain disorder) the size of the brain has no bearing on ability. However, it gives us an indication of the kinds of errors we can fall into if we think of mental abilities as definite “things in the brain” that clever people have to a greater extent than less clever people.
The next step in measuring ability came when the scores on tests in vocabulary, reaction times, skill in recognition and manipulation of shapes, and so on, were condensed into an average score. This work was pioneered by A. Binet (1857-1911) in France, C. E. Spearman (1863-1945) and C. L. Burt (1883-1971) in Britain, and L. L. Thurstone (1887-1955) in the USA, though their interpretations of the results were drastically different.
The simplest method was to devise a large number of tests and place them in order of difficulty. Young children would usually succeed on the early items but fail on the harder ones. With each extra year of age, children tended to succeed at more items. Dull children (not surprisingly) did less well than other children of their age, but so too did “slow developers,” who caught up in later years. Smart children were likely to do as well as children several years older than themselves, and this advantage usually persisted. Clever children grew up to be adults more mentally able than most.
How many highly intelligent people, in this sense, are there in the world? Tests are designed so that as test scores increase, it becomes progressively harder to perform at a given level. It is as if the hill being climbed gets steeper and steeper, so there are fewer people in each category. One in 10,000 people, according to standard measures, show an IQ of 160 or greater. Yet only one in 30,000 can reach 164, and just one in 160,000 scores 170 or above. No more than 6000 people in the whole world are eligible to join the high IQ fellowship Mega, and most of those live in China or India unless they have migrated to the West.
In summary, though, the notion of “intelligence” as a single factor (termed g by Spearman) should not be taken too seriously. The influential psychologist J. P. Guilford isolated test results into at least 120 separate factors, all independent. Given the cruel and unnecessary discriminations (even including sterilization) imposed on innocent people in the 20th century by naive or malicious I.Q. testers and their political advocates, there is every reason to be extremely wary.
However, it should be admitted that there has emerged recently some remarkable evidence that revives some of the hopes of I.Q. enthusiasts, such as the members of organizations of high-scorers like Mensa, Point Two Six, Four Sigma and Mega. Certain measurements of the speed of electrochemical reactions in the brain suggest that clever people are “high-speed” thinkers, due to more efficient connections between their neurons (brain cells). Those with lesser endowments are prone to a greater number of transmission errors in the central nervous system.
If this proves to be true, it could be seen as evidence of the g factor championed by Spearman and Burt (who is now known, however, to have forged most of his pro-I.Q. data). The general intelligence factor would then be comparable to the speed and reliability that, in part, distinguish the capacity of one computer from another.
1983: epistle of marjory to the galatians
April 11, 1983
Dear Joseph
I am writing to you in a tiny corner of time created by a stinking cold. So forgive me if this turns out slightly incoherent. About the only thing I’m capable of reading when I have a cold like this is quipu, and you’ll understand how far my resistance has dropped when I mention that I’ve just ploughed my way through Wagner’s latest HOT AIR, no hang on I mean ATYPICAL QUIPU (why do you buggers feel this need for uncontrolled proliferation of titles?) Anyhow, this is how I came upon your sad story of being beaten up in the park by two women, and Wagner’s really sensitive and intelligent suggestions for how you should have coped.
First of all, Joseph, what I am about to say is strictly off the record.
While I sympathize with your problem(s), I have to say that it amazes me when I see you taking them to Brian Wagner for advice and comfort. But then, you know my opinion of Wagner. I haven’t gone out of my way to hide my contempt for his utter self-absorption, his manipulation of others, his waste of his own talents, his rudeness, brashness, callowness and general nerdishness. I realize that you’ve known him a long time, but I think perhaps you should update your Wailing Wall, confessor, whatever he is. His comments on your story are so typical of Brian’s reflex nastiness that I would just hate it for you to take them as a guide for yourself.
I’ve just had another two aspirins. I’m trying to follow the first day’s play at the National Economic Summit from Parliament House, but the ABC keeps losing the line. It really does sound like a cricket match. They’ve just gone out for morning tea, at last report. Prime Minister Bob Hawke as Captain of the First Mixed Economy Eleven. Oh dear.
It isn’t like that, kiddo.
Look at the real situation. It’s a hot day, in Carlton where nobody has a backyard to sunbake in because real estate prices are so exorbitant. Two middle aged women, undoubtedly with husbands, kids, lovers, blah blah fill in the details yourself, or maybe they’re lesbians and enjoying each other’s company, are relaxing in a quiet corner of the park. Suddenly the place turns into a zoo. Two teenage boys rush around in that very corner of the otherwise isolated park (if I read your description correctly), booting a ball in a rather attention-seeking fashion. Well, that’s not too bad, women are used to having children jumping around in their shadow. Then you wheel your bloody bike in, for God’s sake, and prop yourself behind them where you can perv up their legs without meeting their accusing gaze.
Right. That’s merely the setting.
So far there’s no true imposition, from their viewpoint, though they are undoubtedly aware that you’re hanging about in a suspect manner. You can forget about the yahoos. The dreary repertoire of sexually offensive cat-cries from such creeps is no news to any woman. They dealt with it directly, in its own terms.
The real point is, mate, you had no business at all going up to them and forcing your boring attentions on them.
I’ve offended you, have I? How dare I call your attentions boring? You’re a really fascinating character, aren’t you, a polymath of information in this dull television age?