Quipu

by Damien Broderick

  “It was in the Age, you can check it. One of your top men in nuclear physics said we should have our own bomb for defense.”

  “That’s just bloody Aronside. He doesn’t know what he’s on about and anyway he’s a fascist.”

  This seems to calm Tom down a trifle. “I can’t see that wanting to protect your country is being a fascist, even Hitler wanted to do that and in any case he wasn’t a fascist he was a Nazi. And if a professor of nuclear physics doesn’t know about atom bombs I don’t see how you can claim to.”

  “Protect the country! How is having a bloody nuclear bomb going to protect your precious country, frighten the Martians away?”

  “If you haven’t noticed, there are people closer than Mars who would like a bit of Australia.”

  “Maybe there are, but how do you expect them to get here? There’s all that water in the way. Who are you expecting, more boat people on rafts? The Japanese, or do you love them now, seeing they haven’t turned communist? Or is it the yellow hordes of China that are going to turn the whole place into paddy fields?”

  “What would you know about the Japanese, or the Chinese for that matter. Your precious Whitlam was quick enough to let them in the front door, and there are a thousand million of them.”

  “Whitlam? Don’t talk to me about Whitlam, maybe you didn’t see it in the Sun but he’s just got himself a nice plum position on a couple of bank boards. Anyway, it was your hero Richard M. Nixon who let the Chinese into the United Nations, or have you forgotten?”

  Ray listens to his wife. At least she’s given up farting in bed. It’s all a matter of cycles. Holons.

  There is a pattering of rain on the window and Ray turns his head to look at this unusual sight. All of Melbourne is cracked and parched, walls are fracturing as the earth slips, drying out; plaster falls in the night. And now the rains have returned. Locales burned to black ash a couple of Wednesdays ago have already been flooded by freak squalls further down the coast. God’s providence.

  The bugger’s going to blow up completely any second. Doris can see it coming too, poor old biddy, she’d prefer a harmless conversation about the footy much as she loathes the game. I should say something conciliatory, Ray tells himself. Change the topic. Fat chance.

  “Jesus Bloody Christ! You’re a real live savior on a stick come to deliver us from the yellow peril! It’s a pity all you know about politics is the shit put out by the Festival of Light, isn’t it?”

  That’s done it, Ray acknowledges, that’s really done the trick, perfect. She’s taken the Lord’s Name blasphemously in vain and called Tom a fool into the bargain, with some scatology in the same breath. Here it comes: the lava welling, churning beneath the surface, the skin on his hands white and peppered with large spots, ready to bash his daughter’s head in.

  Ray and Marjory and Doris Nourse sit mute now. Marjory has damned her soul to perdition, she is beyond absolution. Her ways are those of the devil and there can be no salvation from the depths to which she has so wilfully cast herself.

  The pattern in the heavy brown velvet curtains is starting to go where the silverfish have been at work. Jesus and His Mother and a mixed batch of saints and Popes gaze on from gilt frames, constant, compassionate, beyond blasphemy, shielded by glass.

  Ray lets his thoughts slip away into contemplation of poor dead Jean-Paul Sartre’s error in asserting an unbridgeable metaphysical gulf between the Pour-Soi and the En-Soi, Being-for-itself and Being-in-itself, volitional consciousness and inert matter. It is the assertion of this gap that caused Sartre to deny Darwinian evolution, a denial as absolute and ludicrous as any churchman’s refusal of Galileo’s telescope. But evolution is a reality; rationally it cannot be denied or ignored that some of the structural elements of consciousness are the creation of selection pressures in the brute universe. So human praxis is to some extent canalized by the pratico-inert aspect of our being, just as the movements of our limbs are constrained by the metrical laws that constitute gravity and inertia. But Sartre’s intuition of freedom, Ray thinks, that remains largely valid. The holonistic structure of consciousness generates an enormous optional range of actualization.

  Yet the Pour-Soi has limits, and those can only be unearthed by positivist, reductionist science, Sartre’s bane. Is the world a clock, after all? Out of the cradle endlessly ticking.

  The only moving thing in the room is the ornate sweep hand. It presses on with its simple gyrations. There is no blood in the clock’s veins to quicken or falter as the souls of the dead drown in the burning seas of hell. Ray considers the sweep hand skimming the gothic numerals, crossing the two key holes (one for the main spring, one for the chimes). The clock stands solid, a lighthouse in the high tide of anger swirling about it. Marjory is sunken and withdrawn in her corner of the sofa, eyes signaling her rage and contempt. Ray’s body seems quite dead. None of the sensations of life ticking over on standby are available to inspection. He wishes he were dead. He lets his gaze drift upward again to Jesus, the Man sharing his torn-out wounded heart with the room, a perfect case of the triumph of the Pour-Soi over the En-Soi.

  To his horror, Ray’s eyes well with burning tears.

  He is taken up and out of the room, into another place. Light pours into him. Cream, thick and sweet, into the cracked jug.

  Why now? Oh shit. Not me. Aw fuck.

  He chokes, coughs, stares at the painting, horrified, sick with belief. It is the flood after the drought, too much, too suddenly, smashing into the ashes and hurling them in a foaming muck to smear the broken charred stumps of incinerated trees, the crisp-skinned rotting corpses of animals too slow to escape the flames and now too dead to care about their drowning.

  The old man’s rage is love shouting at his deaf, stupid, brilliant daughter.

  Ray goes out of the room, stepping on Doris Nourse’s arthritic toes as he stumbles by. Father and daughter look at him in surprise. He rips down his jeans, strikes the cold rim of the lavatory bowl, no time to lower the seat, and voids his liquid bowels. It is the love and truth of God pithing him. He finds himself grinning. He wipes his stinging arse, using sheet after sheet of floral absorbent paper. The stomach cramps subside. All his bitter shame. He flushes the lavatory and washes his hands happily, trying to believe this dreadful, ill-timed ambush.

  In the living room, he tells Doris of his attempt to cook one of her casserole recipes. Oven temperatures and pyrex, carrots and stewing steak. His own heart is pumping. Marjory leaves her redoubt on the sofa and sits on the arm of Ray’s chair, putting her arm around his neck, her hand coming to rest against his collarbone, inside his shirt. She is trembling. Ray disengages himself, gives her hand a squeeze, goes to the kitchen on the pretext of checking a detail in Robert Carrier. The volcano follows him, passes him in the hall, heading for the workshop out the back. Ray returns, wondering what he is going to do with the rest of his life, and sits in an unoccupied chair, leaving his wife on the arm of the one he has vacated.

  1975: against interpretation

  * * *

  WORD SALAD:: Diatribes from Maenads and LoCs from my buddies

  * * *

  ::A rebuke has arrived on my desk from Mrs. Ray Finlay, do beg my pardon I mean of course Marjory Nourse, now that she has reverted for political occasions to her maiden, that is her father’s, surname. Marjory comments on my phantasia of the last ish and its forerunner. ::b. wagner::

  Can a writer be discerned in his fiction? Does he give himself away in his choice of plots, characters, methods of telling his story, what he leaves out and what he puts in with great care?

  These are questions I pondered at length when I was drudging through my Master’s recently, having shifted up from rat psychology to human psychology, and although I was then applying my high-powered research methodology to authors of the caliber of Jane Austen, George Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and Henry James, the same questions automatically arise whenever an item of quipu fiction, no matter how stilted and putrid, comes to my attention.
r />   You will have guessed, Brian, that I’ve been reading your doltish and offensive “memoir” in HOT AIR.

  There is no question at all that you reveal your innermost self most blatantly in your tale of the “Kwee-poo” and the romance with the highly imaginary “Asquith Lancaster.” For you are one of those writers whose conspicuous narrative voice drenches the dialogue, the interior meditation and the description of events.

  Such writers are not always negligible. While Flaubert and Tolstoy reflect all the richness of the world (within the limitations imposed on their perception by culture and period), other authors like Greene and Dostoevski present everything in terms of their own personal tics.

  Is this to be decried? Of course not. But the formalisms embodied in such writing must to some extent strip naked the anonymity of the creator’s private self.

  I have been reading these little fables of yours for some years, Brian. Obviously enough, none of the participants in your invented life (and that includes “you”) is drawn directly from your own skin and bone. Yet in a general sense, all of them are.

  They are distorted pigmy Wagner clones, split off from each other and from the original somewhat in the manner of the Transactional Analysis picture of us each comprising Adult, Child and Parent.

  Can such a method work, or is it just irresponsible cartooning? It can’t work as pure naturalism, of course. Not even like the sort of confessional revelations that Mike Murphy used to regale us with, when Crushing Blows descended on his shoulders.

  Even so, your games with the reader are obviously a way of exploring ethical and emotional problems in a schematic frame. So it is not surprising that you turn to the literary form best adapted to that aim—fanciful fable. And at once, the question of the writer’s presence in his work becomes acutely painful. For it is plain that you are indeed a man living in an emotional vacuum, preying on women for sex and ego support, preferring the onanistic satisfactions of churning out undemanding quipus rather than risking your equanimity and ego in a genuine loving relationship.

  Yes, your fable is amusing, so far as it mocks the sort of “dirty” magazine writing which preceded today’s more explicitly exploitative pornography. I have read old copies of Adam and Man Junior (my older brother used to hide them under his bed), and to the extent that I remember the style correctly I can only admire your skill in replicating it. I am paying you the compliment of postulating that your intention was satirical at the level of style. I could be wrong, I suppose, and you actually think this the height of sophisticated imagination!

  Unhappily, the comic touches are utterly spoilt by rant and venom that seem to have their source outside the fictive universe of the fable.

  “Asquith” is shown as a bitch and a sex object right from the outset. Whenever she reacts reasonably to the incredibly pompous and pretentious and loathsomely smarmy narrator (called, strangely enough, “Brian Wagner”), modifiers such as “irritably” and “shrew” spring in to undermine her right to be offended.

  She ends, appropriately, being defenestrated. Not only that, she is kicked brutally “with all my karate-trained strength.” And the narrator relishes this insanely horrible unprovoked crime, for he “watched…as she plunged toward the ground.” I am surprised that you did not go on to supply some more precise and gruesome details—you could have pictured her broken on the ground with a dislocated shoulder, say, half her ribs cracked, and one eye gouged out. How did you restrain yourself?

  This hammering misogyny of yours is hard to take, Brian. The fable can be seen as an interestingly cynical portrait of the deforming influences that make grown intelligent men (and some women) devote their energies to avoiding real contact and producing quipus instead. In the final analysis, though, your story is a rotten piece of shit and I hope you get run over by the next bus.

  ::Well, hush my mouth.

  ::I do declare I am quite put about, Marjory. Here I was, a humble scribbler jotting down the True Events of my lackluster life & times, hoping to bring a tear to the eye and a sigh to the breast, and all along a Masked Wolfman was actually hot-wiring my writing arm and spewing out Awful Libels against the gentle sex.

  ::Truly, you can’t appreciate how mortified I feel.

  ::Why, I am so put about by your penetrating accusations that I just cannot bring myself to notice your laughable self righteousness, or hoot at your preposterous impertinence, or even wonder how much of this rancid gibberish is due to your heightened feminist consciousness and your deep literary training (a Master’s degree in it! Impressive!) and your pulsating meaningful real love and caring for all creatures large and small, and how much to the fact that I’ve declined to give you another fuck since that boring Canberra afternoon of infidelity at the Convocation five months back. ::byron wagner::

  1970: hermeneutik und ideologiekritik

  24 July

  a gloomy toad

  dear Horse

  Sitting in the Student Union after a day of tears. Petrol strike. Someone milked my dilapidated car. Getting up steam to hitch home.

  Fronted the English Department and demanded to know why I’d only got a bare pass. They sent me in to the Prof. My interpretations, it seems, had been provocative but failed totally to address the questions on the paper. I was profoundly shocked. When I pushed for more details, I learned that the one question I hadn’t got round to answering had been the only one where I and the Department saw eye to eye! There must be something defective about my brain. Those electric shocks have left me damaged.

  I didn’t just crumple up, though. I explained that in my view questions about literature are subject to interpretation, that I had described (perhaps too briefly) my aim in taking an unorthodox approach. I failed to convince him, and went away bent and burdened. Why do I seek out these situations? I could be a happy cretinous little housewife like all the others. On the grass I just vomited out tears, full of gloom and hatred. Defeated. Convinced that I should give myself up to a nomadic life. That’s always the temptation, calling me to the sea shore or the bush or the desert, anywhere that there’s no stupid people.

  After all this self-pitying convulsion was done I took stock and decided simply to drop English. Pottered up to the Psychology Dept (hidden behind sunglasses) and spoke to a kind woman. It can be done, though I’ll have to persist with some Eng Lit to keep my credit points.

  Two more years. Many many psychology courses. My head is stuffed with rejected sawdust. I think about you and your tachyon detector a lot. Don’t understand it, except the beautiful awe and wonder of perhaps picking up signals from the future death of the universe. How extraordinary and poignant.

  I had quite a long talk with Lanie last night She knocked on my door and brought in cups of tea. We sat huddled by the radiator. She’s fed up with politics and people spinning without getting anywhere. Depressed by the dreariness of it all. She hasn’t found a gentleman she can stand. Life in Sydney is all a bit grim if one is not a beer-swilling, one-night-stand pick-up person—though Lanie’s taste for gamboling youths has not abated.

  The sunsets from my window still feed the soul.

  All my love, Caroline

  A DOG’S WIFE

  …two

  To relax, we stayed in Daddy’s Tudor apartment in Washington Heights, and strolled every day to the Cloisters to view the Unicorn Tapestries, for which I have an abiding passion. So sad and limpid. Spot put his ears back and growled, which made me reconsider.

  The day’s high point, its unmitigated delight, was our romp through Fort Tryon park, where one step carries you from endless megalopolitan Upper East side to genuine woods, and a further five minutes shows you the Hudson. By this time the shores were past their highest colors, but reds burned like coals in the midst of all the turning hues of green and yellow and russet.

  I say unmitigated, but in all honesty I must grant that I never relished the business with pooper scooper and leash. Fiona had gifted us with an elaborate device with plastic bags and a heat-sealer, a sen
timental relic from our squashed poodle Phiphi, but while that was to be preferred to the fold of ScotTowel favored in the Heights it never seemed to me altogether dignified.

  One was forced to admit, though, that the menacing glances of elderly Jewish folk walking their own Dobermans and Borzoi, pan or towel dutifully in hand, was ample deterrent to a more insouciant delinquency.

  1970: the open classroom and its enemies

  Shakespeare Pier

  tues 28 July 70

  dear woggie—professors, as I have cause to know, are almost always shits. but baby, the trouble is you’re one of the original innocents. nothing wrong with your neural sawdust, just your idealism lobe.

  sickening and heartbreaking and vile as it is, kid, you’ve got to get it straight:

  THE UNIVERSITY IS AN ARSE AND THOSE WHO PASS THROUGH AN ARSE ARE SHITS.

  one corollary being:

  THE WORST SHITS ARE THOSE CONSTIPATED TURDS WHO REFUSE TO BE EJECTED.

  these are known as The Staff, of whom the ripest are The Professors.

  another corollary is SPHINX OR SWIM. pardon me. that was rather sophomoric don’t you agree?

  leave anything you value outside the gate, particularly your soul coz it’s gonna get maimed and molested if you allow anyone in there to cop a feel of it.

  so maybe it’s not a bad idea to give English up—if you care deeply for it.

  needless to say, you’ll find similar difficulties cropping up in Psych, but at least there you do have certain empirical studies that can be attacked on factual and procedural grounds, whereas in literature as far as I can see the whole thing is ingrown, incestuous and totally subjective.