Lateshows

by Frank Moorhouse

  Eskimo Depression; the Icy Weight of Life;

  Aida without the Camels;

  Notes towards a Theory of Thaumaturgy

  as applied to Panel Discussions.

  You have reached the Festival Director’s office. She is unable to come to the phone right now but if you state your name and business she will return your call at the first opportunity. Thank you for calling and wait for the beep.

  I’ll admit to the existence of some ‘bad feeling’ following my session at last year’s festival. But the Council’s inquiry into my chairing, which resulted in a life ban for me, was not conducted according to the niceties of international law. The inquiry did not allow me to call world expert witnesses on meeting procedure, did not allow me to tender the goat which caused some of the problems, did not allow me to use forensic scientists, and would not fly Nuuk, the Eskimo writer, back from Baffin Island to appear before the inquiry. It is senseless to go over the ground again but believe me, there was a point to having the goat on stage, even if in the subsequent uproar that point was lost. For me not to have had the goat on stage would have been Aida without the camels. I still maintain that stage scenery is useful in creating a mood of surprise in intellectual activity and that it is the chairperson’s prerogative to bring to a panel session those props or enhancements which he or she thinks will be thaumaturgic. To begin with, those children should not have been allowed anywhere near the waterfall. I had securely attached the hose to the fire hydrant at the front of the festival hall. I had personally placed the witches’ hats on the road around the hydrant. They were not Department of Main Roads witches’ hats. I made those witches’ hats myself. By the way, it is a minor thing, but those witches’ hats should be returned to me at the Cabaret Voltaire. There is a time for ‘going through the channels’, as you put it, and a time to just get on with the show. I also argued at the inquiry that under international law the chair at a public meeting carries certain authority (a simple example, the right to remove someone from the hall, which I did on three occasions during that session). It was with the authority of the chair, both written and unwritten, that I went ahead with the scenic illustration of Berkeley’s proposition against the existence of matter. Why wasn’t anyone on the Council prepared to trust me? Naturally, the attendants were going to ‘become alarmed’ but they are not paid to have imagination – the members of the Council are expected to have imagination, and faith in the thaumaturgic judgement of their chairpeople. Tempers were short. I had been in the hall since about three a.m. preparing for that session, hammering away, which is evidence both of how seriously I take the position and of the thoroughness with which I intended to present the panel discussion. Of course, these days the chairing role is seen as a perfunctory introduction of the speakers. My idea of a few slides of the high points in the childhood of each of the speakers and a little of the this-is-your-life presentation did not seem to me to be excessively ‘intrusive’ or ‘highly embarrassing to all concerned’. Now that I am forced to raise this a year later, it does sound trivial, but in the context of my vision as a thaumaturge, it did not seem so silly. The point of having some of the cast from Aida there at the session (but only the King, Aida, Ramades – captain of the guard, Ramfis – the high priest, and the Ethiopian prisoners) was to illustrate something about the relations between the arts and their distinctive apartness – each art’s aloneness. I assumed that as chairperson, I was at least authorised to hire a few singers. It wasn’t as if it would bankrupt the festival. And remember that it was George Gershwin’s birthday. Or has that, too, been forgotten? I was trying to bring some spangle to the occasion. Instead of being applauded for my efforts, what happens? In mid-session, in front of hundreds of people I find attendants throwing a net over me and the goat. I see the scenery which I had constructed with my own hands fall forward onto the crowd, simply because two stupid children fiddled with the fire hose connected to the waterfall. What does it matter if a few people in the front rows were becoming a little damp? That was no reason to stop the session or to have a net thrown over me. If I’d been given the two wranglers I had requested none of this would have happened. I agree that tearing the personal stereo earphones from the ears of those teenagers was not the issue. I have apologised to them. From the other matters I do not risile. I think it is unworthy of all of us to bring up the matter of Nuuk, the visiting Eskimo writer. I would not release him from the discussion to ‘do a TV show’ because that is not what we do in this country – it was not what we did in the old Workers’ Educational Association and it is not what we do at the Cabaret Voltaire. We do not deliver a paper and then dash off to ‘do a TV show’ before discussion. I don’t know what the rules are on Baffin Island, Land of the Caribou, but here you give a paper and then you stay to defend it. You do not dash off to ‘do a TV show’. I did not use ‘undue force’ in restraining him. Yes, his fur coat did come apart in my hands but that had to do with the age of the coat. And while we’re on the matter, you did not have to sit next to the man and his fur coat. That was no ordinary fur coat. That fur coat had been passed down in his tribe for five hundred years. I accept that the coat had a life force of its own and carried the spirit of the people who created it and of the bears from which it was made, and the sweat of the hunt and so forth. I acknowledge also that dry cleaners are few and far between in the Land of the Caribou but I dispute that it loses any of its sacredness or mana by being hand-washed in a mild soap. The disintegration of the coat was unfortunate and the subsequent behaviour of the goat with the coat was unfortunate also and I was happy to send a cheque to Greenpeace as part of the inquiry’s terms of settlement. But isn’t that enough? Am I to be punished forever over negligible incidents which occurred a year ago? And why does the Council always take the side of the Eskimos? Eskimos can be wrong, you know, Eskimos can be silly too. I am not ‘against Eskimos’. As it turns out, it was I who took Nuuk back to the Cabaret Voltaire. And another misconception which should be cleared up: I was not trying to be ‘ironic’. The Council has to stop saying that I was ‘trying to be ironic’. Every part of my costume had a point to it. For example, the Aboriginal kadaitcha shoes. You remember? I was wearing those kadaitcha shoes made from women’s hair stuck together with human blood. The front of the shoe is identical to the back, to prevent tracking. I was wearing the kadaitcha shoes to make a point about long interviews with writers which seem to be the fashion. Writers, it seems to me, are forever being forced to answer questions to which rightly they have no answers. It is my suspicion that those interviews can become a way of covering your tracks, of not being tracked, and that some writers cleverly use them that way. Hence my wearing of the kadaitcha shoes. Why doesn’t anyone else see the point of the kadaitcha shoes? I gave the shoes to Nuuk as a parting gift. He wore them for his dance at the Cabaret Voltaire and on the plane. They gave him great pleasure. I did not think that I would be dragged before an inquiry and told I was being ironic. As I said, it sounds rather silly now, but at the time, in the context, it made perfect sense. Nuuk said that my question ‘Did he feel the cold?’ was not offensive to him – why then should it be offensive to members of a Council inquiry? I alone realised that Nuuk was suffering perlerorneq. That means in Eskimo ‘the icy weight of life’. It is a depression which comes from being in the dark so long and cold all the time. A long winter of the soul. I was trying to joke him out of that. Hence my comments about us all being simply nihilistic thoughts existing within the brain of God. I was trying to say that to him in my broken Eskimo. Why am I forever being misunderstood? To return to the point, I merely wish to say that I would be happy to serve at this year’s festival and resume my rightful place as a chairperson and humble emissary of the Cabaret Voltaire.

  The Wind is the Breath of the Earth;

  The Morning of the Second Day of the Inquiry;

  the Legend of the Bag of Hurtful Winds.

  You have reached the Festival Director’s office. She is unable to come to the phone right now b
ut if you state your name and business she will return your call at the first opportunity. Thank you for calling and wait for the beep.

  Baffin Island calling festival, do you receive? Over. No. I don’t know if your answering machine can receive messages sent by husky-driven radiophone, but I’ll try. Why am I on Baffin Island? I was honoured to be invited to the Baffin Island Festival of Ice Arts where I will be chairing a panel. Hence the blizzard in the background, the groaning and creaking of the ice floe, the barking of the huskies. I won’t disguise the other reason for my visit to Baffin. I am here to collect an affidavit about the ructions involving the Eskimo writer, Nuuk, and my panel at last year’s festival. I want to clear my name before the next festival. I don’t want sniggering in the audience. I am having trouble getting my work done here on Baffin because of the uneven pattern of illumination caused by the tilt of the earth’s axis. I want you to hold a tennis ball in the palm of your left hand at arm’s length. At arm’s length in your right hand hold a ruler upright. Incline the ruler towards the ball. Now reverse the positions by crossing your arms. Be careful not to catch the ruler in your coat sleeve. The ruler is the earth’s axis and the ball is the sun and you have just passed from summer solstice to winter solstice in the northern hemisphere. If the ruler caught in the sleeve of your coat think of that as a bad blizzard. You can uncross your arms now and put down the ball and ruler. The varying ratio of daylight to darkness on any given day on Baffin Island is the result both of the earth’s inclination on its axis and its daily revolution. Maybe you aren’t that interested. As my contribution to the festival I am giving a demonstration of martini olive stick making. The Eskimos are rather fond of the martini, which gives them a close affinity with the Cabaret Voltaire. The best martinis in the world are made on Baffin Island. As you know the problem with the martini is that people do not chill every ingredient. On Baffin there is no trouble keeping everything chilled. Even the martini drinkers’ tongue is chilled. Returning to the wretched inquiry into my chairing. As it turns out, Nuuk was not leaving the panel to ‘do a TV show’ to avoid discussion, which I understood to be the case, and which led me to grab him by the sleeves of his fur coat and haul him back, which in turn led to the disintegration of the coat, the goat’s excitement at the smell of the coat, and the resulting chaos caused by the attendants at the festival hall throwing a net over me and the goat. No, it was the goat which unsettled Nuuk. He had not seen a goat before, let alone a goat on stage for a panel discussion. Even though I had tethered the goat to the table leg, Nuuk was perplexed by it and he took it to be a hoary marmot or a walrus. I apologise now, without reservation, to the lady mayoress whose table I later learned it was – I am sorry that the leg came off. I had hauled the table from another room for use in my experiment with St Elmo’s Fire. The point of the experiment with St Elmo’s Fire was to make a connection between the corposant and the enchantment of fiction but of course, that point too was lost. It was George Gershwin’s birthday too, something that everyone appears, conveniently, to have forgotten. But I won’t pursue that. No one told me that it was the lady mayoress’s eighteenth-century cedar banqueting table. If the attendants hadn’t panicked the goat the acid would not have spilled onto the table and onto the shoes of the panellists. Compensation has been made for the damaged shoes. About the holes in the table I can do nothing. Nuuk says the hoary marmot is not to be taken lightly. I have here on Baffin entered a hoary marmot wrestling competition for Saturday afternoon and a seal flenching competition on Sunday. You have to join in at these things. Nuuk wants me to say that it wasn’t from coward ice that he became worried by the goat – it was that he had no ‘native ear’ for this goat and whether it meant business. That is why he threw his ceremonial harpoon, which fortunately missed the goat on hire from Animal Acts Limited, but which unfortunately buried itself in the organ. Also he admits to wanting an excuse to get off the stage. The Eskimos have no word for stage or for ‘up-staging’ or for ‘stage Irish’. He did not want to become a stage Eskimo. He wanted to be off. He wanted to be off to Tony’s for a fish snack. He was curious about how the food in this country is transformed into shapes and colours which are in no way related to the birds, fish and animals from which they came. This is a magic which the Eskimos have not seen. When they eat a fish it looks like a fish and smells like a fish. (Until I came to Baffin I did not realise that Eskimos eat in fish restaurants every night.) The Council has forwarded a bill for his fish meals at Tony’s to Nuuk. But he says that he cannot pay because ‘Eskimos have no pockets’. I gather that is an Eskimo proverb. I will be teaching the Eskimos the art of martini olive stick making although timber is scarce on Baffin. Three things should be observed about the martini olive stick. It should be longer than the martini glass so that it can be twirled in a contemplative way while drinking and talking. Drinking martinis is what Eskimos call ‘leaning into the wind’ – leaning into the wind, that is, of life. The martini stick should have character as an object, and carry the dignity of the tree from which it came. Very few olive sticks remind us of the trees from which they come. It should never have one of those coloured cellophane tutus on it. Ever. That robs the tree of its dignity. The stick should also impart an undetectable essence of the forest to the drink which we know is there but which should not be discovered in the blended taste of the whole drink. Here on Baffin we talk a lot about the role of the martini and quiviannikumut. They are the same word in Eskimo and there is no easy translation, but roughly, it means ‘to feel deeply happy’. Ignorance suggests that there are no trees in the Arctic. But under the snow upon which we walk is a miniature forest of matted birches and willows. A sapling of a Richardson snow willow the thickness of a finger can contain two hundred years of growth rings. An Eskimo willow tree this old would yield about half a dozen martini olive sticks. So every two hundred years there would be wood for another six olive sticks. It is worth pondering that my olive stick whittling demonstration will use up one thousand years of Eskimo forest. I acknowledge that as a craft industry it will be problematic for the Eskimo people and the principles of conservation. Interestingly, the Eskimo word for grass translates as ‘place of insufficient snow’ and the word for picnic on the grass is ‘food shared with ants in place of insufficient snow’. There is a panel discussion about this tomorrow night – that is, in six months’ time. Nuuk wants me to tell the Eskimo joke about the ‘one-night stand’. Maybe later. Baffin is the perfect place for panel discussion. The panel discussion will involve four speakers: each has a month in which to talk, question time is a fortnight, and the interval a week. My introductory remarks will take three weeks, which they say here is an example of brevity. I have been offered a position at the Polar Cap University in Ice Studies. Here on Baffin they don’t yet understand the threat of university English departments. I pointed out to the Eskimos that at first English departments studied books to gain wisdom and knowledge, then they moved to deciding which books were wise, then to condemning some books by criticism and then to choosing which books to publish, and now they’ve taken to teaching writing so they can get the sort of writers they want to teach. Their aim is to produce not readable writing but teachable writing. The Eskimos don’t seem to under stand this threat. Story-making here is inextricably woven into a life of hunting and fishing and it would be impossible to imagine teaching story-telling if you weren’t also hunting and fishing, if you did not know the feel of the knife. Of course, it could be argued that too much of their understanding of the terrestrial is affected by what they hope or fear to find. ‘We have no beliefs,’ they are fond of saying, ‘we have only fears.’ And then they tell me that another ‘fear’ is the last thing they need, let alone a fear of university English departments. They have trouble separating time from space, which I find irritating. Especially when chairing a panel discussion. There is much wandering on and off stage and changing of the subject. I pointed out to them that human culture was a mechanism for ordering reality but they just want to talk fishing a
nd hunting. They try to tell me that totemic regard for nature can come only from hunting because only then do animals become ‘good to think’ or ‘good to imagine’. But to things closer to home. Can I go back to the morning of the second day of the inquiry into my chairing of last year’s panel? I was arguing that old maps were an expression of a wish, a guide to a dream, a suggestion of a richer life – hence the naming of places such as the Blessed Isles of the West, the Spice Islands and so on. What I wanted to say was that a panel discussion is the making of a map of the minds of the people on stage and of the people in the audience. I see myself not so much as a chairperson but as a cartographer of the intellect. As the panellists speak I see it as my duty to draw the outlines and features of the ideas – the mountains, the seas, the lakes and cultural borders of the discussion. That’s why I was using the overhead projector and the stylus and tablet of the Wang freestyle computer. I try to turn the four or five individualistic contributions into a single coherent illustrated reality. On the second morning of the wretched inquiry I was asked about my theory on the management of smoke and why I had arranged the ten pedestal fans at the front of the audience. One of the commissioners on the inquiry accused me of hedging my reply. This showed to me how limited the inquiry’s understanding was of the nature of the Question and the nature of the Answer. When and how an answer may come to a question or whether an answer could or should come to a question is a philosophical problem of the highest order. When I am asked about the pedestal fans, I hear the question but I am ‘imaging’ the God of Winds, very much like the Eskimo does, and I see myself as something of an Eskimo. I do not immediately think of cigarette smoke and ventilation. I think of the God of Winds and of the God of Fire and of the creation of the universe. There I am standing in the Council boardroom in front of the investigating commissioners all leaning back with postures of legal shrewdness. They are making private jokes on their yellow stick-on note pads and passing them to each other, sticking them where I can’t read them, smirking at their intelligent asides. Yet not one of them had the courtesy to tell me that I had a dry-cleaning label still attached to my chairing cloak. They let me go through the whole twenty-six days of the inquiry with the dry-cleaning label attached. One of them serves me a trick question about the positioning of the pedestal fans. I hear the question and I also hear the air conditioning and I image the wind. The Power of the Winds, which the pedestal fans symbolised, nay, is, caused me to stand in awe of them and of the air conditioning also. I was not hedging. I am aware that I have become something of a figure of fun among the sophisticated new generation of arts administrators, but it may surprise them to know that at the Cabaret Voltaire I am known as something of a fin-de-siècle person now. Arts administrators should also remember that Ulysses was given a bag tied with a silver string in which were all the hurtful winds of the world. Aeolus did this so that Ulysses might arrive home without being delayed by bad weather. His crew however opened the bag in the belief that it contained treasure, the winds escaped and a dreadful storm arose driving the vessel off-course … where was I? Oh yes, I would ask all new generation arts administrators to remember the legend of the hurtful winds. I saw this legend as being particularly apt as a way of understanding what went wrong at the panel session I was chairing. My panel. It is ‘my panel’ in the way that a general might talk of ‘his army’ or a lord of ‘his suzerainty’. What happens on my panel is my business. That is basic to Western civilisation. As you know I speak not only of the legal authority of the chair to remove people from the hall, to stop a panellist who is talking rubbish, but also the thaumaturgic authority – the right to inspire awe and wonder in the audience. How could there have been a power drain on the city? I had hired a generator which anticipated the additional electrical power I would need for the sound gear, arc lights, and battery of fifteen digital poetry screens. There they were, the wretched inquiry, worrying about the power drain on the city, although I noticed that they were looking at their watches and passing notes about where to have lunch. They all went off to Tony’s. I followed at a distance and sat alone at a separate table while they laughed and had what passes for intellectual conversation among that crowd. I noticed they drank Cloudy Bay. It is all right for them to drink Cloudy Bay but when I drink Cloudy Bay I not only image the cloudy bay but I become a ‘cloudy bay’. It is not a comfortable feeling. I think I successfully argued that afternoon that the role of chairperson does not begin when the speakers are empanelled but requires months of preplanning and consultation (and by the way, my Ceremony of Empanelment is being enthusiastically taken up by the Baffin Island Festival of Ice Arts). Finally, I think that there is no evidence that my efforts to keep the people singing at my session last year, while I was still in the net which had been thrown over me and the goat by the overzealous attendants, in any way impeded the ambulances and rescue workers. The huskies which are turning the radio phone generator are growing tired and I must go now. I hear my stretch-limo-sled barking. I must go now, out into the uneven pattern of illumination, against the tilt of the earth’s axis, and as always, ‘leaning into the wind’. I may be some time.