Quipu (10 page)

RAY:

This is—

JOSEPH:

They’re not saying, Here’s a Rorschach blot, do what you like—

RAY:

This is quite plainly true, in a restricted sense. We do recreate the text as individuals, simply because no two individuals understand similarly.

JOSEPH:

I’m not sure you can even say you ‘recreate’ it.

RAY:

The text is the bedrock basis on which you work.

JOSEPH:

Yes, obviously a lot of information is actually embedded in the text proper, it possesses a predetermined structure, and so I find it hard to have all that much empathy with this view. Nonetheless, it’s a position that can be defended. Foucault’s obviously enormously concerned with it. I mean, he wrote an essay three or four years ago called ‘What is an Author?’ which often gets confused with Barthes’s essay ‘The Death of the Author.’ Both of them see their dialectical theories as emerging from the system of discourse itself, but the more they tried to obliterate the author, the more their fame as authors grew and grew.

MARJORY FINLAY:

The Writer As Masturbator.

JOSEPH:

Well, they both make a decent fist of it…Ahem. Still, there’s obviously a paradox at work. Their work seems to me drenched with the torment of their own lives.

BRIAN:

Big deal, Joseph. What else could writers write about, after all? Boring.

JOSEPH:

Well, about meaning. About how language
means.
I don’t know how useful it is; maybe it’s so truistic that—But Foucault has been fairly self-aware of this preoccupation
right from the beginning
. All of his studies, starting from his work with the insane and apparently inarticulate, have been concerned with Making Sense.

BRIAN:

With Making It.

: loitering with intent

still Brunswick yet, already

Monday 29 dec 69

well me dear old sweetheart happy new year

Melbourne is a terrible place. You were right to leave. Sunday was 101 degrees; today a grim and blowing drear.

I visited the Manchesters this afternoon. I sat and chatted and sat and waited and lounged and hungered and at length drew myself up and made for the door, only to be stayed with a nine o’clock invitation to dinner. But not stayed in fact; ran for the tram all hollow within. The chilly stupid misery of the Swanston and Flinders Street intersection, and a slow cold tram. Why can I only deal with people through the imposed distance of quipu? Ah shit.

On the edge of a new year and a new decade I am prostrate once more at your absence. Strange that I never felt this when you were present. (Um, that was meant to be a joke.) (Not funny.) I could go on at length about work, but why appal two of us? all my love, pet—stay alive

1983: talking back

A week’s dishwashing awaits Brian Wagner when he wakes. There are no clean bowls left. Grudgingly, slitting his eyes against the late morning summer sun, he fills the sink and shovels everything in, scrubbing half-heartedly at a suitable vessel. When most of its crust is gone he fishes it out and lets it drain while he looks for a dessert spoon.

His breakfast muesli has gone. With a curse he clicks on the clock radio above the refrigerator and hunts out batches of makings, fat plastic bags that have to be slashed and emptied into mouse-proof jars. As he blends his special mix, he glances at the prices on the packages and thinks profoundly on inflation. It is, he decides, primarily a means of taxing everyone’s capital by ensuring that interest rates are pushed so high that just to keep your savings indexed to real-terms parity you need to pay a third or more of the inflated margin out in tax: a hidden levy, in effect. It’s not simply a matter of bracket-creep, ordinary wage-earners being shoved up into higher tax brackets. That can be accommodated to everyone’s political advantage by regular ‘tax cuts’ that just reinstate the status quo. The status quid pro quo. A quid is still a pro, he hums. A pro is still a quid. No, ripping off inflation-boosted interest is far more sinister, the sole meaningful explanation for inflation in conspiracy terms (and what other kind is worth a moment of your time?) that Brian has yet come across.

The radio is muttering in a familiar slow, theatrically modulated yet inoffensive explanatory manner. Brian grinds a wooden spoon through his mixture (Natural unprocessed bran 43 cents, Black & Gold processed bran 81 cents, Morning Sun rolled oats 87 cents but that’s for 750 grams rather than 500, handfuls of Sunbeam currants a whopping 91 cents for 375 grams, a curious measure on the face of it, though it’s a quarter of 1.5 kilos for what that’s worth, and bits of chopped dried apricot and walnuts no identifiable price since he threw the wrappers out last week). The best prices he can find, but criminally dear. He gives himself a big bowl of it, pours milk, puts it aside to soak, goes back and slices in a couple of strawberries.

While he washes the dishes, the discussion on 3LO hots up. He shakes off suds, reaches a hand to the volume knob.

“Yes, Alan, it’s fair to say that the principal cause nowadays is mid-life crisis stress syndrome,” avers the psychiatrist from Royal Park.

“And this is as true for women as for men, now that so many women are in the work force?”

“It goes far beyond those in the formal work force, Alan. Our whole social pattern places enormous strains of self-definition on those in the 35 to 45 age group.”

Brian gets the glasses out of the way, scrubs at some of the less indurated pots. He reaches to his knees, gropes for Nifti, sprays the really crook ones with ammonia. Take that. The chemical odor bites his nose, makes him cough. Goes nicely with muesli. “We’ll take the first call,” says the anchorman. “Good morning.”

“Hello.”

A silence follows.

“Yes, you’re on. How are you coping with mid-life stress? I assume you are one of us lucky people—or do I mean unlucky—in that age group?”

For an embarrassing ten seconds there is no sound but the faint whisper of the telephone system. Brian stares at his clock with a growing sense of conviction.

“Are you still there? I think we’ve lost him, Bill. We’ll try another—”

“I can’t do anything,” Joseph Williams says through the radio. To prove his point he stops again.

The psychiatrist is clearly not used to such verbal reluctance in his media consultees. It is left to the compere to whip in, which he does with astonishing smoothness. “You can’t do anything in general, or something in particular?”

“Anything. I don’t want to leave the house.”

“I don’t blame you. If my wife didn’t push me out each morning I’d stay there all day.” He laughs to show that he means it and he doesn’t mean it. “If you don’t mind my asking, how old are you?”

“I lost count. It’s too boring. Say forty.”

“Slap bang in a mid-life crisis by the sound of it, don’t you think, Bill?”

“Of course it is impossible and improper to make diagnostic evaluations without seeing someone in the clinical setting,” Bill says, covering his tail. “Tell me, what do you do for a living?” Lagging in the headlong pace of the conversation, Joseph’s voice says. “I don’t have a wife to push me out. This is silly.”

“Are you unemployed?”

“Actually I write encyclopedias.”

“Good heavens,” says Alan with an approving laugh, “you should be the one asking us questions. I didn’t know there was a big demand for encyclopedia writers. I always imagined they had world-renowned specialists doing their entries for them.”

“Britannica does. All the major firms. The small companies use freelance researchers.”

“And what has your research turned up on the question of mid-life crisis?”

“I think I’ve got it.”

Brian’s muesli is going soggy, forgotten, as he crouches over the phone in the hall, flipping frantically for the 3LO talkback number. “Look, hello, it’s most crucial that I—”

“You will be placed in a queue, sir. Please turn off your radio or there will be problems with feedback to the transmitter.”

“I won’t know what they’re saying.”

“We pipe it through the phone to you. There are four calls ahead of you. I’ll keep count for you and let you know when you’re the next one on. Now, if I could just have your name and address for our records—”

Brian deepens his voice. “I’m afraid you don’t understand the urgency. The young man speaking on the radio right now is a psychiatric patient of mine. His name is Joseph Williams. There is a very real risk that he intends to take his own life, possibly on air. You must connect me immediately.”

“Oh.” The line goes dead. Brian leans into the kitchen, clicks his radio off. Joseph is saying something about the woman he used to live with and the doctor is making a point about the coincidence of Jungian life-stage transitions, endocrinal disruptions, and the first child of a marriage reaching adolescence. It does not sound as if they are sustaining any eternal meeting of true minds. “All right, doctor,” says the woman on the switch. “I’ve informed the program director and she’s arranging for you to be patched in. What name was it again, doctor?”

“Almeida Lima. It’s Mister, not Doctor. I’m a surgeon.”

“Didn’t you say you were a psychiatrist?”

“A psychosurgeon, madam. Please put me through now.” Lima was the first butcher to perform pre-frontal lobotomy, back in 1935. The name should give Joe a jolt to the higher centers.

“As you know, Bill,” says the wonderfully calm and adept moderator, “this morning we’ve asked Dr. Almeida Lima, a psychiatric specialist working in a slightly different area to yours, to wait for us on another line. Can you join us now, Dr. Lima?”

“Certainly. Good morning to you all.”

“I believe you have some advice for our caller? I don’t think we need to mention any names,” he adds with a merry laugh.

“Quite right,” Brian says briskly. “All I require is the proper attitude of deference in my patients, and a sharp hacksaw.”

For the third time there is a strange stretch of dead air. The producer must be wetting herself. Before the compere can speak Joseph gives a tinny scream of incredulous laughter. “Wagner, you maniac.”

“Well, you won’t answer your door or your mail. And your phone’s always off the hook. Meet me at two o’clock in the Albion. A beer would go down very—” But an anechoic blankness tells him that he has been cut off. They probably have Telecom tracing his line back at this very instant. Grinning happily, and suddenly thirsty for his morning coffee, Brian Wagner hangs up his phone and skips back into the kitchen.

1970: ‘n’ the livin’ is easy

9 January

My dear Joseph

I got rid of my admirer from across the road last night. Offered friendship but no sex, baby. Poor creature nearly cracked up. I was very cool and diplomatic. Amazing. Went out and feasted my eyes on
Les Enfants du Paradis
& loved it more than ever. It is so tragic but I didn’t cry. I don’t cry in movies any more.

I came upon Antony strolling along the street. Is he to be my tormentor?

The boss gave me a pep talk because I haven’t been “pulling my weight,” the turd. I turned on the charm as best I could and was spared the sack.

I’ve written to my expensive Melbourne shrink with a plea for help. Once again into the hands of the capitalists!

I’ve written my position paper for Women’s Liberation & the girls in the house find parts of it amusing. I must have some humor left in me yet.

fondest love Caroline

P.S. Can I say I love you?

1970: getting together

U of NSW

15 Jan 70

My dear Joseph

Christ. A hectic morning at the office. Just haven’t stopped. I cut the boss off in mid-sentence, so expect to be fired. He’s already berated me for not mixing with the other employees, by which he means ceaseless yapping about husbands, animals, hair-dos and cactus plants. They don’t, he explained, like “lone wolves.”

The Meeting! Last night. Reasonably successful. Gave my paper. It went over better than I’d anticipated & even raised a few laughs.

My topic was “Women as Cheap Labor.” They want me to expand it for release as a pamphlet. A woman from the Liquor Trades came up and congratulated me—I was ecstatic. Someone told me later that this woman is regarded as pretty radical and critical.

Right at the end everything fell apart.

We called for people to write pamphlets and work on committees for Abortion Reform, child-care centers and stuff like that.

Uproar. Misunderstandings everywhere. “We don’t know if we want to belong to your group.”

Some women started babbling that we were selling illegal pamphlets. “The law is the law.” Shit. If one goes in the clink we all go. A lot of them weren’t having a bar of this.

Even so, quite a number remain interested. This could become a significant movement. We’re having an all-day meeting next Saturday.

In total sixty or seventy woman participated. We turned away five blokes, very diplomatically. Margie didn’t come along. She thinks she’s found a guy, so I guess she thinks she doesn’t need Women’s Liberation.

Media coverage is uncertain. We were interviewed by the
Daily Telegraph
and some other papers, but we still haven’t decided on our line, how to present ourselves. There were individuals in the audience wetting themselves for fear that we’d say something publicly that they didn’t endorse. Okay, we told ‘em, discuss it with us, set up your own committees, work together with us on issues of mutual concern.

There’s a preparatory meeting on Friday, so I’ve had no time to be mad in the head. (I haven’t written to Laing yet, can’t get his address—will see the Dept of Psychiatry at the Uni, they may be able to help).

I found Antony’s residence and took some of his luggage around to him, and got back some of my things—including a guitar he obviously didn’t intend to return. No acrimony, however. I was very cool. So that’s that, thank God.

My social life? I’ve been out a few times with a painter (so-so) who lives in the Cross, divorced, mid-30s, he’s okay. Offered me a roof over my head, to keep me, that whole deal. Couldn’t come at it. Can’t bear to be touched at the moment. Will get over it sometime. I guess I’ll have to stop going out with guys. So it’s Women’s Liberation for me!