Quipu (4 page)
Much of his work was awfully abstruse and beyond my modest attainments, yet Spot retained a sense of primal joy in his assault on the universe. One might come out into the yard with a bone from the table (for he was then living at our home under an exchange arrangement) and find him gazing raptly at the moon, his lips parted, inflamed with an innocent intoxication so much purer than his raunchy nights backstage with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I was struck then, fondly, by his ardent, wistful expression, so like Carl Sagan’s. Any comparison I might make, however, is bound to be misleading. I’d never met anyone, man or woman, who affected me so piercingly. Before I knew it, I was head over heels in love with a dog, and I am prepared to confess that at first I was just as astonished and taken aback by this discovery as was my dear bitter mother a few months later when Spot went in to announce our intentions.
1969: obituaries
Bloody Brunswick
Monday 17
Nov 69
dear Caroline
Very short note before I rush out at lunchtime to post this. Spent yesterday at Brian’s, helping crank out the latest HOT AIR (which you will find enclosed; the ink should be dry by the time you get it). I sat at my typewriter all Friday night writing a Letter of Comment for his LoC pages, a way of telling people that we’d split up. It’s on page 12.
It’s all so sad, Lovely, even though it seems quite impossible to…imagine how we could ah fuck it read the thing in the quipu.
kisses, Joseph
WORD SALAD:: Lettuce from my chums
::A singularly strange and moving letter arrived from Joe Williams after I’d run off most of this ish of HOT AIR, but I’ve remixed the SALAD to make space for it. We don’t see much of Joe these days, now that he’s a Big Time Science Journalist, and his unhappy circumstances will therefore come as a shock to many of you. There’s not much comfort to be had in words, Joseph, I know, but believe me when I say that we all share with you in your mourning::b.wagner::
It’s funny. I haven’t met most of the hikes whom Brian sends HOT AIR to, but I feel a sort of sense of family with you, at least as much of one as I’ve ever felt with any group. Despite this, I have tended to keep my private life to myself. This might seem hard for some of you to believe, having been inundated with my most passionate beliefs about politics, writing, music, and the ins and out of the School of Physics, but basically I haven’t conveyed anything close to myself since about eight years ago, when I didn’t know any better and sent some ghastly LoCs to GRUMBLING WOMBATS, which are certainly better forgotten.
It’s hard getting to the point, isn’t it? Well, taking a deep breath, I must force my fingers to the keyboard:
Two days ago, my wife Caroline died of cancer. She was buried today. I am in shock. She was a lovely, kind, poetic, sensitive person. Until the disease undermined her physical constitution, she was also a physically beautiful woman, as the few of you who met her will recall. It always seemed to me that she had something of the graceful fluid lines of bone and flesh of a French model, though her ancestry had been Australian for at least three generations. I rarely told her that she was beautiful. Now it is too late.
Those of you who never met Caro, or me, those of you who live in other States or other countries, will not be all that upset by this news, except in the general sense that we share a momentary pang at news of another’s bereavement. Those of you who encountered us once or twice, but without our orbits intersecting, will perhaps feel some more direct twinge of empathy and grief. And those few, like Brian, who knew us rather better than that, who visited our house or had us around to theirs, will perhaps be rather taken aback by the news, because they will know that what I have just written is not true.
I am not married, and never have been. Yes, I have lived with Caroline at various times, and until several days ago we shared a house not ten minutes’ walk from Brian Wagner’s roguish den. But Caroline has not been ill, not physically, and she is certainly not dead. She has relocated to Sydney, hoping to create a life for herself free of the metaphorical carcinogens that were threatening, day by day, to destroy her. These included: my own selfish impatience and lack of caring, the frightful pressures her parents subjected her to which just tore her up, her horror at finding so many of her old friends from school or university settling into “happy” mindless bourgeois marriages and baby-making, her own secret desire to do just that and my refusal to collaborate: cancers of the soul.
And she took herself away, upped and left, went away weeping, and left me weeping too, and it is just exactly as if she were dead. As if she were lying out of touch or sight in a hard wooden coffin where no sounds can be heard and there is an odor of perfume and old suits and incense.
By speaking of cancer and death, of course, I try to let myself off the hook, try to pretend for a moment that I am not at least fifty percent responsible for the destruction of our relationship, for the chilly misery I now feel, and the despairing awareness that no amount of confession of guilt, complicity and rottenness can repair what is corroded and gone between us, that Caroline (or I myself) could just as truthfully be described as dead, killed by some insidious disorder over which neither of us had any real control.
And that last assertion is probably just as much a cop-out as anything I’ve written so far. So I’ll stop. No flowers, by request.
::Joe’s letter, which he delivered by hand late on Friday night and would not tarry as I read its baffling mixture of truth and metaphor, is not the sort of thing I have been accustomed to publishing in this quipu. Maybe it should be. Joseph and Caroline are not the only victims lately. If we could all try a little harder to express what we actually feel, even if we must do so with the aid of misdirection, we might manage our personal lives somewhat more successfully::b.wagner::
1969: love is a german shepherd
Paddington
Sydney
20.11.69
My dear Joseph
At peace.
I received your quipu article yesterday. At first I was outraged. I wanted to tear you into small strips. I thought you were saying that you wished me dead (I might as well be). Then I re-read what you’d written and I think I understand. Poor Joseph, it’s the only way you know to express your feelings. Like your refusal to speak of “love.” So I take your article as I suppose you meant it, as a tribute to our relationship, to the feelings you had for me. You must admit it’s a very strange thing to read. But I suppose you would not have written it if you had felt nothing at all for me. So in the end, after crying all morning, I saw what you were getting at, and your article gave me strength.
The days have been floating past restlessly and I with them. I’m starting to loosen up, though sleep comes very intermittently.
Antony is the Great Pretender. I am very wary of him now. He has a long way to go & doesn’t know it. He thinks he’s got it all sewn up but he’s fly-papered in the bourgeois conventions he says he loathes so deeply. Every attempt to escape tangles him up further—look at what he’s got himself into with me. His dope, his drinking—these are all middle-class to the bone. I’m staying on with him because I’m lost in Sydney. I’m fond enough of him but he’s going to end up hating me for just those human flaws I share with him. I’m weak. I take pills to keep my sanity.
His ex-lady Francine is okay I suppose (fat bottom). Attractive but superficial. When I suggested leaving some of our stuff at her place, Antony was outraged. He can’t bear the thought of my imposing on her, of being there while she’s entertaining her fucking Paddo friends. He can’t accept anything of me. He thinks I’m someone else.
Can’t accept that I have my own thoughts. Have my silence. He keeps his mouth rattling away quite adequately most of the time anyway. He has a certain romantic (childish) fixation on me—Sad-Eyed Lady of the Slowlands, mother/lover or something, pale and sadly beautiful, magic sea sprite, and when that’s gone it’ll be vapor.
I’m just another tin soldier in his battle but I could change sides. Not that he’s shown me his fist—just impatience, which I ignore. I don’t really care if it all falls through as long as I have somewhere to live by then. I saw Lanie, who asked affectionately after you. She took most of the evening to recover from finding me up here. All the damaged ladies in retreat from Melbourne. She’s going to Malaysia next month with a chinese girlfriend.
A great slavering alsatian dog has just come to visit me, a docile animal.
Please, please find somewhere to live soon, you’ll go out of your senses in that place.
all my fondest love
Caroline
1975: eat your heart out
“Fantastic, Jean-Pierre,” Grant tells the camera. “Lemon crushed with just a little sugar and frozen. Fabulous. You’re watching
Le Bon Chat
, a program devoted to proving that the two fine arts of good eating and good talk have not perished, and today I’ll be conversing with two of the smartest blokes in the country—if you place any faith in I.Q. tests.”
Ray regards him bleakly.
“Dr. Ray Finlay is a computer scientist specializing in the simulation of artificial intelligence, and Joe Williams is a science journalist. An important vocation in an age dominated by technology.”
“You’d think so. Right now I’m a Commonwealth statistic.”
After the merest flicker, Moore says, “On the dole, eh? Many people would wonder if that was proof of remarkable intelligence.”
“It’s not. It’s proof of how shithouse society is.”
“Without the naughty words, you dumb fuck.” Moore grins with infectious manly zest, winking.
“It’s not. It’s proof of society’s intellectual impoverishment.”
“You think the world owes you a living?”
“I think the world, if by that you mean the economic distributive system, owes everyone a living. In return, everyone has a duty to contribute in some relevant way to sustaining the economic or spiritual well-being of the community.”
“You could work in a factory.”
“I doubt it. Terminal boredom tends to interfere with productivity. Besides, it’d be a criminal waste of fairly rare human resources to send someone like me off to a production line when I could be…Oh shit, this is…If I could—”
Grant waves his hand reassuringly. “Ease off, Joe, we can edit. The menu for this luncheon is something new, something straight from the great gastronomes of Europe. You’ve heard of
La Nouvelle Cuisine
, invented ten years ago by Chef Paul Bocuse at his magnificent three-star
Restaurant de la Pyramide
in Vienne, near Lyon.” A young woman in white peasant blouse and dark skirt clears away their sorbet glasses. “The custodians of
La Grande Cuisine
were outraged, because Bocuse simplified and clarified a whole way of life when he began experimenting with Escoffier’s famous formulas. For their pains, Bocuse and his followers were dubbed the ‘gastronomic Mafia’.”
Ray stares with growing incredulity at Joseph during this peroration. The camera is fixed on Grant Moore, who runs a short thick finger across the nail-brush of his upper lip. Jean-Pierre himself steps into view, bearing plates of aspic, all shot through with the hues of simple vegetables: celery, olive slices, shavings of carrot, herbs, capsicum, tomatoes. “It looks stunning, Jean-Pierre. Can you tell us about it?”
“I have adapted it from Roger Vergé’s
gibelotte de lapin de Provence
,” the chef tells them happily.
“And this is
La Nouvelle Cuisine?
Or is it
La Cuisine Minceur
, the brainchild of Michel Guérand at his Paris bistro
Le Pot au Feu?”
The young man looks baffled, and swallows hard. “Well, it’s neither, really. Guérand’s recipes are actually designed for people who want to lose weight. I’m aiming at the kind of cuisine that came into its own at
Le Restaurant des Frères Troisgros.”
“The ‘new-new’ cuisine, as it’s been called. Low in fats and oils, high in flavor and enjoyment. Let’s eat.”
“I could do with a knife and fork,” Ray tells the hovering chef.
“No, no. With the fingers. And watch the bones.”
“Oh, great.” Now he sees the reason for the large finger bowls and paper serviettes. The fricasseed rabbit comes out with a sucking noise, moist and cold, suitable no doubt for the screening of this program during the coming summer. It explodes in his surprised mouth with flavors that bring him near to tears. “Oh,” he says. “Great.”
“I thought we were supposed to be discussing intelligence testing,” grumbles ungracious Joseph.
“I thought you were starving,” says Ray.
1969: joseph misses out
brunswick that athens of the South
November 69
O woe and gloom and drabble me drither—all the nature of his usual cry, mark you, marking no whit, for that matter, any matter not usual. That’s how it is round this roughcut end of the earth, or so it seems.
I gather from my spies that a Postal Strike is presently or at least currently and almost without question presently also laying siege to all non-oral communication, and that when eventually it finishes (until which time, one imagines, this poor letter will languish crushed in a canvas bag, creased and cross) a hundred million pieces of mail will on the instant be funneled through the fumbling paws of posties working under stress and pressure, with a yield in losses, mutilation, hold-ups of a post-Post Strike sort.
I went to this party run by the Revolutionary Syndicalists on Saturday night with Martha and Bob. Fifty cents at the door ‘for the Cause.’ Drive ya to drink.
There was no spare bed to be had there so I taxied home to Brunswick from Kew a sadder & a poorer & yes a wiser man at four in the morning.
In the midst of the dull slugs who are the revolution’s vanguard only two of any beauty turned up: Libby and the lovely mad Quintilla (a name she must surely have devised). They came to share our huddled corner, and when they speared off together at a comparatively early hour in Libby’s mummy’s car, Libby offered me a lift. To
Brunswick?
I cried. Why, said she, it is all one to us. I declined. Fool! How drunk was I? My sense of proportion and nuance evidently deserted me at that crucial moment. That matter shall be rectified. At least looked into.
