Quipu

by Damien Broderick

  moreover, it takes a moral hero of unearthly stature to buck the system and come out on top. who can measure up to such a demand? you’re showing incredible grit in just surviving, baby. hold high the candle and plod on.

  love, houndstooth

  firepower

  MACHINE GUN

  The history of modern warfare has been to a great extent the story of ever-increasing power to kill and maim applied to larger and larger numbers of victims with ever-decreasing personal involvement on the part of individual warriors.

  During World War Two, entire cities were firebombed, or blasted by nuclear weapons dropped by remote aircraft. More recently, villages were incinerated by flaming napalm dropped from helicopters, and terrorists mutilate unseen victims with hidden explosives.

  Perhaps the beginning of this horror (with world nuclear or bacteriological destruction as its possible end result) was the invention of the machine gun.

  For the first time, killing power came from a weapon in a spray of savagery that required no accuracy of aim to rip bodies apart.

  Attempts to design firearms capable of continuous operation were two centuries old when the American inventor Richard Gatling perfected a revolving battery gun in 1865. Gatling was an M.D. who never practiced as a doctor. In the American Civil War, though, his invention provided considerable scope for the skills of his fellow medical practitioners.

  In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, the French mitrailleuse was introduced, firing 37 barrels at once. Later, an American, Hiram Maxim, devised an automatic gun after moving to Britain, and in 1901 was knighted for his contribution to civilization.

  His brother Hudson, author of The Science of Poetry and the Philosophy of Language, perfected the powerful explosive maximite in the same year.

  During the First World War the machine gun came into its own, pleasing military planners with its capacity to pin down and slaughter hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers. Although cavalry charges into virtually defenseless infantry was thus made a thing of the past, warfare became a still more brutal contest of firepower and expendable soldiers.

  * * *

  Horsemeat in Cup: A lame entry, my dear Watson

  * * *

  Light machine guns were designed for portable use, delivering bursts of ammunition. Heavier types could be mounted on tripods and fed with endless streams of ammunition on belts. The heavy Browning was adopted in 1917 by the US Army, and by the Second World War the air-cooled .30-caliber and the water-cooled .50-caliber Brownings were standard American issue. In Britain, the favored light machine gun was the Bren.

  Following the Korean War, American forces received the semi-automatic M16 gas-operated rifle, firing 750 rounds of 5.56 mm ammunition per minute, effective at half a kilometer, and weighing less than three kilograms. Four times as heavy was the M60, firing 550 rounds of 7.62 mm ammunition and effective at more than a kilometer. This is turning my stomach. If you’re still enthusiastic to know more up-to-date details about this filth, I suggest you turn yourself in to the nearest psychiatric center for a good spring-clean.

  1970: visions before midday

  No-one else is home. Caroline wakes early (she’s set the alarm) for a day all her own. Bliss. She makes up a fine bowl of stewed apple with cinnamon.

  Mary, in trendy Balmain, has been sick with a winter cold. Caroline walks slowly up Darling Street to visit.

  Billy’s there already, hairy and boisterous, drinking tea and Southern Comfort. Mary sniffles into Kleenies but declines the bottle.

  Brought your stash, Bill?

  Sure. Hey, that’ll clear your head.

  All the arcana; the selection out of seeds, the rolling, done without attention, in Zen oneness.

  Whoop. Hey. Uh uh uh. Wanna hit, Caro?

  She hasn’t thought about dope for a long time. But today she’s in fate’s hands.

  It might improve my mood.

  Here y’ go.

  After a time she wanders outside and sits in the cool sun, relaxed, watching pretty fluorescent images.

  Caroline opens her eyes to the clouds.

  Heads. A beautiful lady of peace, quintessence of quiet calm. Men’s faces, then, strong at first, then horror & pleading and pain & terror. That passes. Noble beasts: lions, bears, a great elk, an incredible scorpion with a magnificent twisting tail (for the clouds move).

  All goes.

  Caroline closes her eyes in exhaustion. After a time she looks at the clouds again.

  The beautiful lady gazes down upon her. The men, the grandeur, the pain, the heraldry. Caroline pities a crucifix, a poor cross stuck in the hill of the sky at 60 degrees, canted, fading, fading so gradually into a pale pale image, an image Caro must strain to see, of a fine man’s face.

  The cloud has totally disappeared & there’s only blue.

  Mary’s visitors have come to sit in the sun.

  You sleeping? God, Caro, you look exhausted.

  I’d better go now. Get well soon.

  Mary waves, cloaked in a rug in the cooling sun, laughs at a joke from Billy. Caroline wanders down Darling Street, looks in the craft shop window. Bray’s bookshop is shut. Wanders on. Pleasant again.

  She drops in on Antony’s house. Everyone has left. In an empty room she finds a sleeping man & two chairs.

  They moved out, he tells her, rubbing eyes that have been watching lunchtime dreams.

  Whose are these? She sits on one of the two small but fine chairs.

  I dunno.

  Could I have them?

  Yeah. Come on, we’ll chuck ‘em in the back of my van.

  1970: working girl

  28th July

  My dear Joseph

  4 o’clock, the sun is shining in my window. Sitting on a new acquisition, a bright chair to match my bright desk. Strange circumstances.

  Today is the first time my mind has been calm in a week. The university makes me unhappy. I guess I’ll get over that—it’s my projected emotion.

  I started a waitressing job at a sleazy place at Circular Quay last night. Lots of Navy guys. Take-away chips, chicken rolls, hamburgers, greasy or dried out, & sit-down snacks and meals. The guy in charge is okay but the clientele are vile. After 10, the drunks from up the road. It won’t worry me for about 3 weeks, then I’ll throw it in. 5-12 p.m. four nights a week.

  Have a courter at present I could do without. Quite nice but…he won’t be allowed to share my lecky blanket.

  fondest love & hugs

  Caroline

  1970: problems of legitimation in late capitalism

  Shags peer

  aug 2 1970

  The gay, wild pace just never lets up. A party here yesterday at which Melbourne’s leading draft dodger and fervorous Messiah put in an appearance, along with various marxists from Latrobe university, the new hotbed of academic revolution. It was meant to be a traditional Saturday bar-b-q but rain sent us all inside. One notable revolutionary kept niggling Wagner, who’d come at my specific request and was all too obviously chatting up this post-puritan fellow’s lady wife. At one point the merrymaker poured beer all over Brian’s hapless head. The wife was not to be found.

  Finally, around 9 p.m. (drinking all the wet arvo, you’ll recall) it got too much for Brian, and he hurled a mucky plate of old spaghetti at his tormentor. The wicked communist leaped up in a murderous rage, Wagner ran into the hallway, into Martha’s bedroom. Instead of turning the knob his antagonist attempted to smash down the door, wooden panels crashing out, screams and abuse, his wife returning from the pub at the crucial moment, deflecting his rage. Incredible screaming vituperation in the hall, me quaking in my room where I’d fled for solitude before any of this had begun. Wonderful rhetoric overheard. Brian was characterized as “Zarathustra,” or more germanely if less germanly as “that fat, overweight, hermaphrodite stuffed with X chromosomes.” A highly cerebral approach, as befits a brawling intellectual. Also, I imagine, highly projective: he went on to berate his wife for fucking some tycoon socialist al
l last year in the back of a Bentley. Finally everyone went off in a huff, including most of the people who live here. I lurked and made notes in a cowardly fashion. When the coast was clear I went in and rescued Brian, who was taking his ease on Martha’s bed reading the Marquis de Sade in a banned American paperback edition.

  Our mouser has had 4 pretty kits. I watched the last one being born and got all overcome with amazement and cluckiness.

  your Friend

  Joseph

  1970: vicious rumors

  sidders

  2 August

  Whatever happened to R. D. Laing? Someone on Old Mole told me his colleagues had committed him! Tell me true—I appoint you chief investigator.

  your Mad Cobber

  1970: the decline of charismatic rationality

  seaside resorts, inc.

  8 aug 70

  dear fowl

  I have my international agents, via several LoCs to British quipu, on Laing’s mad trail. Are you putting me on? Are they putting you on? Is Laing—nothing would surprise me less—putting us all on? I would not be astonished if the reports prove accurate. I recently read not one but 2 dubious pieces by that shrunken shrink and sage: one a report in The Listener of a radio talk in which he describes how he found god; the other in the mole I think—where he argues in favor of that lunatic and discoverer of “orgone energy,” W. Reich.

  Read Mailer’s 2nd novel Barbary Shore. Pretty good, scary, crazy McCarthy-era anticommunist fascist FBI nasties monstering ex-stalinist turned true-revolutionary hero. Collapses at the end as a novel (too much political speechmaking) but a stirring work. Universally panned in 1952, always a good sign.

  Had dinner with a couple of hikes the other night and kept pushing the notion that people (workers, students, whatever) should control their own places of work, reach decisions collectively. Of course I was scoffed at as an idealist—the workers are all too stupid, I was told, too tractable. Oddly enough, the night before I had been adopting that same skeptical attitude in a devil’s advocate role when Bob was forcefully arguing for worker’s control. Actually I’m inclined to think that it’s the only way we can get out of this shitheap. I recently read and recommend a book by Herbert Kohl on The Open Classroom that takes this line in education. It certainly vindicates your approach to literature studies.

  in all foolish hope

  Joseph

  1970: eros and syphilization

  King’s Cross

  16 August

  dear beast

  Control by the workers indeed. A consummation to be craved but not on the agenda this year. After slaving for nine hours today as a true proletarian and meeting the workers face to face once more I can inform you—it’s a long way off.

  As you see I’ve changed jobs, to the Cross. The first night here proved astonishing. Having time to kill before six I wandered into shops in the X. One was a men’s wear store (thought I’d buy you a decent tie) where I fell to talking with an elderly French gentleman. We struck up conversation easily as I inevitably do with random strangers and he invited me to coffee. He had been living the past 20 years in Noumea, traveling the world between times. He arranged to meet me after work.

  So we dined and wined and I didn’t get home until after three in the morning. He was a lovely man, saddened when I would not share his bed. Through a quite fascinating evening he told me of his travels and of brothels and prostitutes in many lands. He compared and contrasted in detail the lives of the women, the houses, the rackets, the erotic films; the massages and prolonged fucking that follows them; the wonder and evil, beauty and ugliness of it all.

  Keep in mind that this man has had thirty years of exotic experience. He provided me with a detailed description of how to “play,” to which I gave amused serious attention. His dildo collection. Bottles of pills, mainly from Germany, that stimulate desire. He is becoming an old man, he said ruefully, and when one sees these beautiful geisha girls, once is not enough! He gave me some of these pills and urged me to swallow them then and there, but I refused. I was exhausted from my first day of work at the hotel and wanted my chaste bed.

  When his son was nearly 18, he took wife, son and daughter and a “paid lady” out to a lavish dinner. After the meal he left his son with the lady. He said it was worth the $50 he’d arranged to pay her, for she initiated his son fully, teaching him how a woman may prepare a man and a man ensure a woman’s pleasure.

  I felt very tempted to “play” with this wise, sweet man, and regret not having taken the opportunity. I’m sure it would have been exciting and memorable. However, too late—he went back to Noumea today.

  Later—

  You said you might come up? You didn’t sound very convincing, but make sure to let me know in good time if you do decide to visit.

  fond hugs

  Caroline

  1983: joseph’s redemption

  As clever dick Deep Thought Weekends go (and it has been, by design, an easygoing affair, with a minimum of formal programming), it has gone well enough, in Joseph’s estimation, considering how close they all are to 1984. No forces of double-thinking righteousness have broken down their doors, torn the marijuana from the lips of those so banal as still to indulge, snatched paperbacks from back pockets and incinerated them with a gush of flaming napalm, stamped on faces forever. Perhaps it is the bucolic air of the place, the Pontes’ hobby farm. Cows lowing in the morning, sheep bleating and blatting horribly, fowls yelling their sex-crazed heads off. Pity about the plumbing though.

  Joseph fights his way through the crowded main room to the lavatory set aside for the men. Three riotous fellows are crammed into the stall, firing downward shoulder to shoulder. Bladder pressing his belt, Joseph heads for the broad outdoors. I love a sunburnt country, there’s so much space to piss. There is an outside dunny here, relic of days before septic tanks but free of country flies in the cool night air. It stands like a sentry box at the end of the Pontes’ yard, surrounded by fuel tanks and pipes. A bar of light shows under its door. Another applicant with prior claim waits his turn. Bugger it.

  Joe leans one hand on a fence, unzips, listens to the hiss of his piss. He is more than half drunk. His vocal cords are sore from singing. Funny, you’d never believe how many of the words you know until a whole bunch of other people hop in and give the lead. The sky beyond the lights of the Pontes’ enormous ramshackle farmhouse is monstrously black, empty, starless. He zips up as the door of the sentry box opens. Marjory steps out. The waiting shape springs for the door. Joseph hums “They’re changing Guard at Buckingham Palace.” Marjory comes straight toward him and puts her arm about his waist.

  “Not palely loitering, Joseph?”

  “I like to get a bit in each night, Marjory.”

  “Ah, don’t we all. And how rarely do we succeed in our ambition. Sorry, that was coarse and untrue. Come and have a drink with me.” She seems as drunk as he is.

  The lights are off when they get inside; Duck Soup is screening on one whitewashed wall. Joseph finds a bottle on a table of magazines. He keeps his arm around Marjory. They share the beer. Or is it cider? Surely beer. Hell, you’re drunk, he tells himself.

  Oh Jesus, this woman with her breast against my hand, her hair in my face. I have known her too long and not enough—not at all. I can’t see her face in this light and her hair all over the place and her tongue in my mouth.

  Marjory takes his hand from her back and leads it up under her sweater. It develops a sense of direction, traversing the hollow of her armpit, interposing itself between her brassiered breast and his own chest. After a warm, shivery time, Marjory turns into him, kisses him fiercely, disengages from his hold and draws him to the corridor.

  “Have you got a room by yourself?”

  Joseph’s tongue locks. He nods his head in the semi-darkness.

  “Let’s stop quickly at my room and get something to drink.”

  She knows her way about the place. She leaves Joseph in the hallway, nips inside, half-closes t
he door, flips on the light, rummages, is out again in a trice, light off, door closed. “I thought Ray might have crashed. He must be in there watching the Marx Brothers.” There is more than exasperation in her tone. “What room are you in?”

  He tells her, taking her hand in both of his. “Have you and Ray had a falling out?”

  “You haven’t been reading the papers. That was some years ago.”

  “Well, yes, I mean—”

  They step out again into the night, cross pebbles, locate one of the small rooms that Mario Ponte has refitted from the original farmhouse stables for such large-scale social occasions as hike convocations. Ivy hangs above the lintel. Three doors down, light spills from an open door; there is a room party warming up, shouts and laughter. Joseph has not bothered to lock his door. Quickly he closes it behind them, snibs the catch.

  “Um. I don’t know if I have any glasses.”

  “Bugger your social graces, dear boy, I’ll tear the top off with my teeth and we’ll hop straight into it.”

  Joseph regards his friend with some concern. She has lines about her mouth he has never noticed before, and a heavy crease between her eyes. “About Ray, Marj—”

  “Ah, yes, Ray. He had a Night of Fire, you see.”

  It takes him a long moment. “What, the Blaise Pascal of Melbourne town?”

  “The same.”

  “You’re not serious. God spoke to him from a burning bush? To Ray?”

  “From a painting purchased prior to Vatican II from Pellegrini’s, actually.”

  Joseph’s erection cannot decide whether this is good news or bad news, and stays at halfmast, pushing with moderate force against his zip. “I thought he was dead set against eschatologies and teleological metaphysics. Or has he become a Taoist?”

  “No, a Christian. He’s been born again.”

  Joseph is aghast. He wishes to shriek with mirth but feels it would impugn the gravity of the case. “Not actually taken the plunge into the briny?”