Quipu (29 page)

The documentary was about Bangalore. It’s the sixth largest city in India, the capital of Karnataka state. The weather is said to be pleasant. You’ve heard of it, I suppose, because it was the British headquarters for fifty years from about 1830. Its name means “village of boiled beans.” I think I’ll go there. Definitely non-trendy. I’ve never even heard of anyone who’s been to Bangalore in search of truth and mystery. I won’t write, Joseph.

Not ever. This is it, kiddo. Hence the messy tears. I tried it the other way and look what’s happened. (I’m not blaming you, only the situation. The way it is with me.) So I’ll scurry about the King’s Cross hotel and make my stash and buy a ticket and say goodbye my love, my silly, my stiffnecked horrid hateful lovely love—

Caroline

joseph and the cow

I stood on the podium in the enormous Hall, looking down past the microphones into the gathering of hikes. They shuffled their feet, easing their legs and backs. Some munched on sandwiches or drank chocolate-flavored milk from Big M cartons. Behind me, drastically enhanced by an epidiascope from the small gallery reproduction on the stand, a great artist’s work loomed in light.

I tapped the microphone. Heads came up.

“Roy Lichtenstein gave everyone a nasty shock back in the sixties,” I told them, “when he blew
True Love
comic frames up to the size of walls and, by simple gigantic replication, transformed them from kitsch to fine art.”

The acoustics of the system were excellent; there was none of that momentary delayed feedback that rattles the mind through the lag at the ear.

“Pop Art made the medium the message,” I said. It did not bother me that this phrase was an icon of a school of mediating interpretation gone to dust half a generation earlier. “Printers’ half-tone dots in the cartoon were amplified to endless ranks and files of painterly flattened spheres big as fingernails.”

The lights in the hall flickered for an instant. I glanced over my shoulder. The epidiascope was still casting its great lucent shadows on the wall, the image unscarred by the momentary power surge.

“During the seventies,” I went on, “Lichtenstein extended his subversion to so many media—Surrealism, Futurism,
trompe l’oeil
—that he began to seem the Bill Blass or Trent Nathan of the decorator art biz. Yet his instinct was good,” I added, after the polite chuckling subsided. “More than a decade later, his 1972 gags are still startling enough to kick the air out of you in a belly laugh if you come on them unwarned.”

I gestured above and behind me. They had not come upon this work unwarned. It was the luminous representation of a vast canvas triptych in yellow, white, Benday dots, diagonal stripes.

The first frame showed a farmyard animal browsing contentedly. In the next, the beast was breaking up into strabismus charts. By the third, it had been rendered into a comic-book reduction of a Mondrian.

“The title,” I informed them, “is ‘Cow Going Abstract’.”

Among the burst of good humored laughter there was a splatter of applause. I waited, smiling slightly.

“Yes, good joke.” I leaned forward on the podium and when I spoke again, it was with an abrupt return to impassivity. “The real point of the piece, of course, hits you a moment later, when you notice that the cow in the first frame is already totally abstract. It is a flat array of diagrammatic elements only marginally more representational, in the illusory or mimetic sense, than the mock Mondrian.”

Like stick figures, the brights looked back up at me in the frozen postures of dream. “We are talking about Joseph Williams,” I told them pitilessly. “It ought to be clear to you by now that Joseph Williams is a Cow Going Abstract.”

the twelfth photograph

Taken from the first or second floor of a building across Darlinghurst Rd, with zoom lens, TRI-X 35 mm film pushed to 800 ASA, and barely adequate early sunrise light, the photograph angles on airborne Caroline. There is no resemblance to a bird in flight. Nor does the shot possess the stillness and layered one dimensional tranquillity of Magritte’s famous painting. Violent turbulent buffeting is bashing the boundary where Caroline stops and air begins. She is immersed in air, but its liquid does not smooth her path. Her eyelids are peeled back by its force. She has fallen already scores of meters and her intersection with the palpable air disposes her legs and arms awkwardly, contrary to the expectations of gravity and muscle. The pressures of her fall from the open window, grainy and crepuscularly open at the top of the shot, has torn her dress up over her shoulders, covering her throat and mouth, leaving visible only her husked eyes. From this angle it is evident that she is innocent of underclothing. Recently she has shaved away her public hair, so that her naked limbs and belly present a strange duality, innocent and lubricious at once. No one gazes out from the window to witness her plummet onto the painted metal of the fire hydrant below. It is an impossible photograph. Who could have taken it?

the thirteenth photograph

In this photojournalist’s routine and unpublishable Nikon pic, Caroline’s broken body is being removed from the blood-splashed King’s Cross concrete footpath by two ambulance staff. Their faces are rigid with the necessity to deny any direct connection between this torn meat and their own tired morning flesh. Caroline’s clothing has been drawn into place, but it is clear from the shape of her corpse that the hydrant has failed to show her any respect. At the very least, its crunching impact has dislocated her right shoulder, shattered half her ribs (broken and oozing through her uniform like a defrosted rack of lamb), and, most horribly, torn out her left eye.

the fourteenth photograph

This Kodak VPS blow-up could be a sample from an advertising campaign, either for the company’s range, for the Mamiya 645 camera, or perhaps in support of funerals. Details are crisp, definition superb. Although it is raining, an awning has been arranged for the protection of the principal mourners. Onlookers have fetched their own umbrellas, not all of them black. The open coffin, beside the deep, muddy grave, attracts the interest of a horde of emotional adults and children. Caroline is at the center of the photograph, her repaired face tanned with cunning cosmetics, eyes only lightly closed, lovely in a white lacy dress from the turn of the century. Mr. and Mrs. Muir stand prominently in the front of the gathering, distraught and still apparently in shock. Caroline’s father’s large hand rests on the edge of the open coffin, touching the silk, above his daughter’s shoulder. Almost out of the shot, at the rear of the crowd, drenched Joseph leans toward Lanie. His eyes are smeared with rain. Lanie wears a dark plum dress, muted and melancholy, under an incongruous transparent plastic raincoat. Her hand hangs limply beside Joseph’s. They do not touch.

ambit claims

Dead? O hell-kite! All? What! all my pretty chickens and their dam At one fell swoop? Was there no end to this damned visceral manipulation? Was not Caroline at this moment somewhere safe in Bangalore, full of beans or at least hardly defunct, seeking the meaning of life in a landscape no less alien than the right hemisphere of the brain to its left partner and rival? Ha! Dead! Impossible! It cannot be! I’d not believe it though herself should swear it. (Henry Carey, more or less, 1693?-1743)

I edged myself into this question with a paradoxical conceit, a waggish antinomy.

Humans were the only animals capable of knowing truth, and compelled by its quest, I proposed; they achieved this end by lying.

Certainly deceit was a gambit in the broad evolutionary repertoire, but by and large it was chicanery of an essentially passive kind, baffling perception. Chameleons were adroit at dissembling, stick-insects
(Diapheromera femorata
, say) at outright mendacity. Yet even the predator, actively straining for stillness under the skittish gaze of its prey, employed a passive falsehood.

People, though, tricked one another with deliberation and intent. The mismatch of stimulus and perception was wilful, informational, communicative. Map, ho hum, no longer reflected territory.

The implicit assumption in that line of thought, I noted, was that Territory
did
equal Reality. Yet how could that be? Only eidolons were known, schemata, those structures into which perceptions were slotted, out of which they were built. True, it was economical to posit a coherent, consistent Noumenon that gave rise to those patterned inputs from which minds constructed Phenomena and their experienced qualia. But it remained logically impossibly to know whether those features of the
soi-disant
Noumenon that were abstracted and represented in cognitive maps were even remotely relevant, let alone central, to the true fundamental structure of the Noumenon.

So in the first instance the map a lie misrepresented was another map. Of course, if that original map were in error, the available means of modifying it lay in positing yet another, inconsistent map—in terms of the primary map, to “lie”—and let the two compete for traffic.

Thomas Kuhn had described this procedure as the construction and competition of rival paradigms. I was prepared to be less fancy, and recognize a lie when I saw one. (But which one was the lie?)

Didn’t this leave out the moral intentions of the act, and the degree of commitment your true liar had to the propositional system—its data and their internal relations, as he accepted them—that he attempted by his falsehood to subvert? For surely a lie was a prudential evasion (unless motivated by sheer pathology) uttered within a covert meta-affirmation, its goal being, say, the attainment of power, or the avoidance of aversive consequences, in principle describable on that meta-level
in exactly the same terms
by both liar and lied-to?

Besides, there were more varieties of truth than one. Did not even this unorthodox definition apply only in those part-axiomatic realms where the Falsification Test held sway:
viz
, the austere universe of scientific discourse? While a scientific theory could reasonably be construed as a lie by the honest lights of its antagonists, I might hardly implement the same rubric in dealing with the rich ambiguities of fiction, of art in general: ambiguities that bid to resolve, with benevolent, dialectical prodigality, the contradictories of linear imposition.

Well, I bought none of this. I was convinced of the deep identity of science and art, if only because they both pertained to the same class of neural algorithms. It was the same brain that did the sums as did the petit-point, the oratory, the hunting&gathering, the nuclear physics, the philosophy and the dishes. It was the same brain, overloading, leaking ions and neurotransmitters, and running its programs haywire, that sent Caroline Muir into the madhouse and delivered unto Ray Finlay the mystical trance which passeth understanding.

The mysteries of Art! I laughed. The Muse! How unlike the crass operationalism of science, according to some. Regard the Reader, withdrawing attention from signals at skin, muscles, deep gut, delegating all that inconceivable mental power and complexity of cerebral function to a phantasmic, prompted construction of human and environmental replicas, previously schematized with almost total incompleteness by the Writer who, in a comparable state of inwardness, had employed similar hierarchies of abstraction (sub-routines all of a human brain with its grievously fallible memory, absurdly limited attention span, constipating dogma, barbarously blatant stereotypes, ploys old before Homer) to mime out an interior shadow play.

Yet the undeniable delight of this process, I told myself, was of heightened, not diminished, not reduced, not denuded, but
magnified
and robust
experience.

In part, I mused scientifically, it was due to the compression of time. An initial practitioner (the Writer) spent days, months, years engaged in the programming and interrogation of his or her sub-routines, modifying them, checking for parity errors, testing them for consistency, pith, even “validity”—and distilled the results into an input meant to be experienced full-bore by the subsequent practitioner (the Reader) in mere hours.

Add to this the artist’s specialties—verbal facility, perhaps; peculiar insight, or simply peculiar views; keen eye, ear, fancy—and the Reader obtained the frisson of living inordinately beyond his or her means. Next to this gratuity, the simple traditional pleasure of storyhearing—wish-fulfilling content—ran a beggarly second. Tinker, tailor, rich man, poor: what booted it, if the tale were well told?

So, I realized, by my earlier accounting I had here
two
lies. The first was the Writer’s: that these lay figures lived, that this schematic was more than a rudimentary sketch of a map of a map. The second was a lie shared by all the Writer’s Readers: that they were not gazing at lines of print but witnessing other lives entire; that, in the worst case, they were no longer themselves but someone other, in a denser, more selective universe.

I rebuked myself. This critique was philistine, asinine! To equate Art with Deceit was to reach for your Luger. What else could humans share except abstractions? The touch of a hand and one’s emotional joy in it (or fear!) were finally electrochemical abstractions borne to and within the brain by jostling neurotransmitters. If these abstractions were decked out with our elaborations, shading them the colors of our choice, where was the metaphysical burden? What else was feasible?

I sighed, putting the last of the photographs back on the missing hike’s study desk.

1983: the mystical tree

“It looks much prettier from up here.”

“If you discount that brown furry stuff they seem to have hung over the front of the city offices.”

Coming up to the fourteenth floor in the slightly grubby lift, crepitating from the lobby of the Queens Lodge Motor Inn, seeing Grant Moore and his portapak-toting cameraman to the opened window of the main function room, Marjory has no love left for Melbourne in December.

“Don’t be a grouch. Look, stick your head out. You’re not agoraphobic, are you?”

“You mean acrophobic, Grant. I have very few fears, none of them irrational.”

“What the fuck are they doing down there?” Grant puts his arm lightly across her shoulders. On one of the playing fields fifty meters below them and beyond the roaring traffic, several teams of brightly clad brights swirl and flow, step and halt, interpenetrate and coil apart like some Tai Chi kindergarten ballet.

“It’s a simulation game of Ray’s. Like
Dungeons and Dragons
, but more cerebral. Like chess but more fluid. I hope your team on the ground is getting some of this, it won’t be worth a peso from here.”

“They better be, or I’ll have their balls.” He squeezes her trapezium slightly with his thick, smoke-browned fingers. “You’d be surprised what we can get from up here. Good as a chopper, except for panning. Bill has his zoom right down the front of their dresses.” He gives a booming chortle. “Wanna smoke?

“I’ve given them up.”

“The other sort. We’d have to go down to my room of course.”

“If that’s what you have in mind I think you’d have to extend yourself to something for this itching I have in my nose.”

“It’s probably just your nasal septum losing its footing,” Grant tells her. “I can probably get some from Mark when he comes up after he’s shot as much of this as he can stand. What are they doing, a Rite of Spring number for Big Brother?”

“Hardly original, Grant.”

“Only four more weeks to 1984, Marjory.”

“Yes, that’s been mentioned a few times in the press. See that group in the middle? They’re flipping their scarves around so you can see the green or red lining.”

“The footy season’s over.”

Corning upon them from behind, Joseph explains, “They’re quarks and gluons.”

Bill the cameraman grunts, changes his focus slightly.

“Fuck. Do tell. Hey, I know you.”

“We met at Jean-Pierre’s bistro nine years ago.”

“During that big bash you buggers had. You’re…Joe Williams.”

“Joseph.”

“Right.” The function room is virtually empty; all the hikes not participating in the simulation are down on the playing field watching. “They’re being atoms, are they?”

“Subnuclear particles. The constituents of nuclei, of protons and neutrons.” Everyone on the grass spins, coalescing into groups of twos and threes, merging, rebounding, their scarves twining and folding, red flipping to green, yellow to red, green to yellow. It is like a mating of insects with three sexes.

“The gluons transmit what we call a ‘color’ charge. That’s what bonds the quarks together. It gets stronger the further apart they are. Close up, as you can see, the quarks and gluons are free to jostle each other about.”

He’s right; it is as if the triads are governed by an invisible cattle fence. Their members roam and flutter, switching scarves, never moving beyond arms’ breadth.

“Who are those guys in white caps? They’re breaking the rules.”

“Photons are allowed to,” Joseph says.

“If you’re gunna be like that.”

“The colored ones get together and make up heavy particles called hadrons. Photons are particles of light. Well, waves really. They transmit the electromagnetic force holding electrons in orbit around protons.” Abruptly the scarves come off, are tossed wadded through the air. Several small children dart from the edge of the field, collect them, run off. The dancers take striped caps from their pockets. To unheard music, their choreography modulates to a higher blocking. Bunches of checked caps form. Individuals in merry cherry bands run at them, hands waving; slow; touch, grope, rebound, bond.