Loose Living (14 page)

This work originally appeared in the Sydney and Adelaide
Reviews
and has been rewritten and edited for publication as a book.

This book is dedicated to the memory of Michael Vanstone
,
editor of the
Sydney Review
from 1989–94, who died from leukemia. I wish also to acknowledge the editorial synergy of working not only with Michael
,
but with Christopher Pearson
,
founder and editor of the
Adelaide Review.

Both these editors offered the space and
,
through the subtleties of editorial invitation and interaction
,
caused me to explore passageways and particulars of my writing and my imagination which might not have otherwise been explored.

Michael was
,
and Christopher still is
,
an inspirational editor.

Suzanne Kiernan
,
now editor of the
Sydney Review,
carries on this tradition of editorial finesse.

I wish to thank Linda Funnell
,
my editor at Pan Macmillan
,
for sensitive advice on the unravelling and reconstruction of the various demented logics at work in this book.

Special thanks to Tony Bilson
,
Executive Chef at the Treasury Restaurant
,
Sydney Intercontinental Hotel (not associated with Bilson's Restaurant).

1
Paul Fussell,
The Boy Scout's Hand Book.

2
Sources: INSEE (the French bureau of statistics) and Project Monica, World Health Organisation.

3
I have a portable desk. In conversations with very old peasants in the
estaminets
of my village in France, I was told that much variation occurred both in law and lore about what was ‘mobile' and what belonged to the land—what was permanently attached to the earth. We have laws today about ‘fixtures' in rented houses. In the Middle Ages some dwellings were considered mobile along with stock, household goods, weapons and bees. Fruit trees which could be uprooted and carried were sometimes considered ‘mobile'. Anything that could be blown by the wind was mobile.
      Phil Patton, in his book
Made in USA
, argues that this American preoccupation with mobility, the need to be able to move quickly, lies behind the design of many American ‘portable' products.
      He traces it back to Thomas Jefferson's mobile ‘lap-top' writing desk. Jefferson designed his mobile desk and had it made of mahogany, about the size of an attaché case. It has a drawer in the side, the width of the case, with compartments for an ink well, pens, paper and writing materials.
      A wooden flap can be opened so that the flat surface of the case can be used as a writing surface or the flap itself can be fixed at an angle to provide a sloping writing surface or book holder.
      The portable desk could comfortably be used on the lap and Jefferson used it for fifty years.
      It has no handle and was probably carried under the arm.
      Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence on it. He envisioned the desk being carried ‘in the procession of our nation's birthday, as relics of the saints are in those of the church'. It is not.
      Jefferson had other portable desks made. These contained document copying machines, including an early use of carbon paper to make copies.
      He also used a polygraph, a machine which controls a second pen which mechanically replicated the document he was writing.
      My own portable desk was designed by Kurt Geiger of Italy. It is a leather-covered wooden box also the size of an attaché case.
      It is known as a ‘roll top' because it has a rounded top, a lid, which looks like a cottage loaf and folds back to present a cave-like inner compartment inside the lid.
      In this compartment I have a pewter echidna that my French translator Jean-Paul Delamotte gave me, and a small bronze sleeping cattle dog, given to me by sculptor Ester Belliss, who lived at Pola Fogal when I used Pola Fogal as a retreat.
      There is a square squat Virginia shot glass from Norfolk, Virginia (where I once had a nervous breakdown), from which I sometimes have a shot of bourbon at the end of the day while contemplating my day's work and the evening's gaiety.
      I have a clock which tells me what the time is any place in the world.
      I have an intimate photograph of my dear friend.
      I have a small adjustable brass magnifying glass which has three legs and which I can rest on a photograph to study it in magnified detail by putting my eye down on the brass rim of the magnifying glass and moving the magnifying glass about. It is something like a jeweller's glass (to be honest, I have no real use for this instrument but I like the look of it and idea of having instruments which potentially allow me to extend my vision).
      I also have a pair of collapsible binoculars and a compass, made in Italy.
      Also in the concave apartment, I have a brown box made from lacquered bamboo leaf from India which holds paper clips, etc., and which in another time would have been a gentleman's stud box (this is just standing in until I can find the box I really want).
      There is a kaleidoscope made out of a twelve-gauge shotgun cartridge. This carries memories of my hunting and cooking in the field and the primeval connection between hunting and art (a connection which I can't quite recall just now).
      And there is an acorn I stole from a squirrel in the Mall in Washington.
      Now to leave the lid.
      The wall of the case opens at forty-five degrees and makes a writing platform.
      I sometimes eat breakfast from it and it can become a bar.
      In the body of the case, sitting behind this writing platform, are four leather A4 file pockets. These carry papers I am working on. They also carry a wooden book stand, and a plastic manuscript stand.
      The manuscript stand also has two special slots for computer disks.
      I have a sliding and folding wooden bookcase which will hold about ten books fully extended and when folded can be carried in the portable desk.
      There are drugs of painkilling and tranquillising sort scattered through the case, including a small hip flask of bourbon. These exist in readiness for an anxiety crisis, which can occur at any time of the day or month or year.
      Facing directly out from the desk are many slots and pockets which hold pencils, scissors, cards, and one panel which I have fashioned into a picture frame which holds my currently favourite postcard.
      At present the card is
Mrs Jenkins
'
Late Night Dinner in Her Room Alone
(
While out in the Hall Leading to Her Room
,
Her Small Friends were Sleeping
), 1984, by Donald Roller Wilson. The painting is realism bordering on
trompe-l
'
oeil.
It is a narrative painting and the short story which accompanies it tells that Mrs Jenkins, in her loneliness, sometimes sets up a dinner table for two and serves dishes and beer to the vacant place and talks to it.
      A forward planner fits in one of the slots.
      Another slot holds To Do cards and spare systems cards.
      A brass seahorse bookmark from the Smithsonian (where I once had a ‘proper' office) makes a fine and personally symbolic decoration when not being used.
      A small Swiss army knife belongs in one of the slots. This knife has tweezers, toothpick, nail file, scissors and blade.
      Being from a new culture, I explained to my French friends that I am in a dilemma about antiques. Antiques are really borrowing the history of other people's possessions and in some cases borrowing another culture.
      They are a way of gaining easy veneration, the buying of the venerable. Yet they can occasionally be a true linkage with the past. It is a dilemma.
      I also have a dilemma about high tech v. wood and leather, which tend to be heavier and less versatile.
      Two other portable offices occur in movies. In the film
Viva Zapata
an American journalist, played by Joseph Wiseman, climbs up the hill to speak with Zapata carrying a typewriter in a portable office arrangement.
      And in Clint Eastwood's film
The Forbidden
, the itinerant writer in the west carries a leather writing outfit in a shoulder-bag.

4
It occurs to me that by talking about the Queen of Commas, and snails, I could have given offence by attaching a primary female gender figure, that is, ‘Queen', to the inherently masculine punctuation symbol of the comma, the comma being, diagrammatically speaking, a spermatozoa.
      Some might argue that my use of this combination as a source of comic writing implied that such an idea, that is, of a woman being in control of—the queen of—spermatozoa, was holding up to ridicule any suggestion of female autonomy and was a sly reassertion of male supremacy, an indirect assertion of the ‘arrogant irresponsibility' of the spermatozoa.
      It could be argued that it would have been acceptable if she had been the Queen of Full Stops—the full stop being diagrammatically vaginal, the void, the infinite dot, the mysterious black orifice of fertility and at the same time the ovum, the female germ-cell.
      It could be further argued that I should replace the Queen of Commas with the ‘Queen of Colons'.
      My reluctance to adopt that idea is obvious. That the colon is both vaginal and anal. The double orifice.
      Grammatically, the colon is the weaker form of punctuation than the single dot of the full stop. There is after all nothing as authoritative in punctuation, or as fundamental to us all, than the black dot.
      The addition of the second dot does not double the strength of the mark, it lessens it.
      Of course, it is not just the anal and vaginal representation which is present in the colon, there is again, the ‘other gap', the space between the dots which is considered by some to have an erogenous capacity deriving from both of the aforementioned anatomical connotations of the dots and deriving also from some mythical hermaphroditic past which supposes the ghostly presence of both genitalia in males and females.
      I suppose the semi-colon, which is the combination of the spermatozoa and the vaginal dot, is either heterosexual or androgynous.
      Anyhow, what I really want to say is that if I changed it to the Queen of Colons I could well be under attack for appropriation of both orifices of the female body and thus a total ‘colon-isation' of the female body.
      Some may suspect that I created this whole controversy so that I could make the gag about colon-isation.
      Within the gag lies the fable.
      Or in a Lacanian sense, the creative gap.
      Lacan is fond of saying, ‘In the gap something happens.'
      Indeed, it does. I can see all this now and thank those who have taken the trouble to bring clarity to my mind.
      But from the Queen of Commas I do not resile.
      The Queen of Commas is open to another interpretation. That by granting the Queen of Commas her authority, albeit an authority which was gently teased, I gave space to a delightful and original contemporary persona, a Queen of Spermatozoa.
      However, I have accepted the argument of my Lacanian analyst (a sister of the Duc, who flies to the
château
to attend upon me) that the unconscious is structured as a language. She and I differ in that I have stressed the role of punctuation in the ‘plan of the unconscious'. I argue that punctuation precedes language because rudimentary punctuation comes from, and is inherent in, the breathing and the crying of the child.
      Punctuation grows out of the child's stopping, starting and withholding of its breathing, and from its babble.
      Punctuation is also an organisation of silence, that is, pre-language. It is also the use of silence to ‘silently' manage language.
      The unconscious becomes structured with the arrival of language. But when the language arrives it finds the site laid out by punctuation.
      My Lacanian analyst is perturbed by my singular and peculiar championing of punctuation. In my argument I say that neurosis is the absence of happy inner punctuation, which causes the language of the unconscious to dysfunction.
      Neurosis is, in part, unhappy breathing, crying and the unhappy silences of self, which are, in turn, bad punctuation of self.
      My Lacanian analyst feared that I was becoming besieged by the work of writing. She thinks that the language of my unconscious is out of control, is, in fact, screaming.
      She suggested that, as therapy and as part of my European experience, I go to Documenta, the major contemporary art show in Kassel, and immerse myself in images rather than words.
      Documenta takes place every four or five years and This Viewer has been to the earlier shows. Documenta sees itself as a forum for the appraisal of contemporary art. It is an art fair which displays every conceivable technique of art production (not, disappointingly, every conceivable imaginative application of those techniques, however).
      If the Royal Academy summer show in London is the festival of the amateurs, then Documenta is the festival of post-modern strivings.
      The first thing which confronted This Viewer was that the organisers of the exhibition had taken the Kassel art museum collection of earlier paintings (eighteenth and nineteenth century) and spaced them around the walls with photographs of female genitalia.
      This Viewer thinks it was intended to both shock the bourgeois (ho hum) and at the same time make a reference to Gustave Courbet's painting
The Origin of Everything
(sometimes translated into English as
The Origin of the World
), a painting of the female genitalia looking up the female body from the level of the knees.
⁵
      This Viewer likes the Courbet painting. In the deranged state of This Viewer, This Viewer didn't see the female genitalia, as such, on the gallery walls in Kassel.

5
From Associated Press:
     
PARIS
: Gustave Courbet
'
s sexually explicit painting of a reclining nude was unveiled yesterday at the Orsay Museum
,
more than a century after it was commissioned by a Turkish diplomat with a penchant for erotic art.
      The Origin of the World
has been shrouded in scandal and secrecy since it was executed in 1866 for Khalil Bey
,
the Turkish ambassador to France.
     
The oil is a close-up of the torso and lower body of a young woman
,
her legs spread to reveal her genitals
,
her breasts partially covered by a sheet.
     
‘Courbet's
Origin of the World
is the most audacious example of nineteenth-century French painting
,'
the Culture Minister
,
Mr Philippe Douste-Blazy
,
told reporters. ‘It is simply grandiose.
'
Khalil Bey kept the work hidden behind a green curtain and took it out only for a select group of friends.
     
The painting's most recent owner
,
the late French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan
,
bought it in Budapest in 1955
,
but had the genitals covered by a thin wooden board decorated by Andre Masson.
      No. This Viewer saw full stops. This Viewer was thrown into a strange despair of never being able to escape from his punctuation delirium.
      This Viewer stood staring and thinking that if the female body in the photographs had been raised, This Viewer could have seen the colon. This Viewer meant the punctuation mark, not the anatomical colon.
      The ‘punctuating' of the older paintings with photographs of female genitalia also caused This Viewer to be discomfited for the American tourists who were trying to come to terms with the Documenta generally, because it was sprinkled with the usual demonising anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-US military statements (ho hum).
      Documenta also had many whirring machines and upside down videos of people screaming and much coital panting.
      This Viewer's second wave of gloom came from the fact that so many visual artists are falling back on words when they are supposed to be the makers of images.
      This Viewer doesn't draw pictures in the middle of his text. It takes long enough to master one medium without trying to master two.
      This Viewer knows that painters have been using words for a long time in the titles of their paintings the way that book writers in some cultures, This Viewer supposes, use visual design or illustration on the cover of the book.
      This Viewer doesn't mind that. And This Viewer doesn't mind them using words and letters as images.
      It's when they try to ‘say' things with words, This Viewer feels like ringing the Society of Authors and causing the mother of all demarcation disputes.
      One of the Documenta exhibits by the American Joseph Kosuth was a construction of a dictionary of quotations from Wittgenstein, Kafka, Freud, Goethe, Borges, Arendt, Foucault, Benjamin (the most over-quoted writer of the century) and Musil. Not a bad reading list, This Viewer supposes. This Viewer'd drop Musil.
      The quotations were either printed on black drapes on one floor and white drapes on another floor, hung like dust covers or shrouds over stands or written on the walls. Kosuth removed words from the quotations so that we were ‘invited' (?) to complete the mutilated texts. This Viewer was not in the mood to accept invitations from strangers. And also it was too hard for that time of the day.
      Kosuth will not let the quotations ‘make their statement'; he ‘denies their efficacy'. (Huh?)
      The point This Viewer is making is that it was difficult to escape words (and numbers, often in coloured neon tubing) at this ‘image' exhibition.
      This Viewer came across spoken words on video screens and coming out from boxes and words printed on every conceivable surface, as well as coital panting.
      By the way, This Viewer wants to say to visual artists that simply exchanging the paint brush and canvas for different technologies—video, hologram, neon tubes or whatever—is not nearly enough.
      It may be technologically inventive to use an air compressor and electronic switches to open and close panels and make them bang and hiss or give out coital panting, but in the end, like sincerity in art, it just isn't enough.
      Duchamp and his ready-mades, Joseph Cornell and his boxes, Matisse and Schwitters' collages are still ahead.
      And it is not enough to take a ready-made and multiply it by fifty. Although one room-sized installation by Cildo Meireles of Brazil which This Viewer found fascinating used two thousand working yellow clocks set at different times on the walls (This Viewer accepts that there can be two thousand different settings within one twelve-hour period), and seven thousand yellow wooden measuring sticks hanging from the ceiling.
      Some of the ‘numbers' from the measuring sticks and clocks had ‘fallen' to the floor of the work.
      This Viewer felt induced to push his way into the hanging forest of measuring sticks until rescued by a gentle, worried, German attendant.
      By the way, although This Viewer didn't believe there were seven thousand of the measuring sticks or two thousand clocks, it is a sign of some recovery of This Viewer's mental health that This Viewer didn't stop to count them. When he was a cadet reporter, This Viewer would have felt obliged to count them.
      But there was one work which seemed to resonate with him. Maybe because This Viewer exists still in a ‘pre-stabilised order'. When This Viewer talked to his Lacanian analyst about it, she turned it back to him, as usual, in the form of a question.
      ‘What was it that you were measuring,' she asked, ‘in this garden of measuring sticks? Were you trying to “measure up”?'
      Ha ha. Ha ha ha.
      Ha.
      The Lacanian analyst also told This Viewer that perhaps he hears coital panting too often, perhaps he hears it when it is not there?
      The most original thing This Viewer saw while in Kassel was not part of Documenta but was perhaps inspired by the creative field around Documenta.
      It was a Greens' propaganda display in a shop window. It was called a ‘plant fast' and they had all these potted plants in the window slowly dying for want of moisture and air.
      It was to make a point about the death of the planet, This Viewer supposes.
      On the day This Viewer saw it, the Neo-Nazis had painted swastikas on the display window. In Germany This Viewer never knows whether the swastikas are a sign of approval or disapproval.
      This Viewer returned from Germany not feeling much better about the Maastricht treaty or about the future of the universe.