Tales of Mystery and Romance

by Frank Moorhouse

  Sitting astride the pillion seat, hands under her buttocks, we fucked.

  ‘What would you tell your children about sex?’ she asked me, pulling on her jeans.

  ‘I would preserve for them sex as a personal venture.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘That behaviour is a conspiracy of the unconscious.’

  ‘What of politics?’

  ‘For people like us, no person can represent us. The only electorate is the electorate of personal activity. Nothing guarantees freedom.’

  ‘Are you therefore unrepresented in the power arrangements?’

  ‘There is a para-government.’

  We toasted marshmallow on the wood fire. Hestia had her hand under my shirt. We could hear the tidal movement of the lake out there in the dark. I pictured in my mind a scuttling crab. And then the entire universe in a three-second flash.

  ‘What is death?’ Hestia asked, through the soundless munching of her marshmallow.

  ‘The changing of form – we become part of the living soil and continue in cycle.’

  ‘Is it painful?’

  ‘Everything in conscious and unconscious existence strives to avoid death – everything tells us that it could be nasty.’

  ‘Is there consciousness then after death?’

  ‘A different consciousness – a variety of troubled sleep.’

  ‘What of the future of the world?’

  ‘Destruction of the species.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘A date has been calculated but not released.’

  ‘Will any survive?’

  ‘A handful will escape to another planet.’

  ‘What is the purpose of life?’

  ‘The loss of consciousness of life through submersion. Most people do it very well.’

  In bed Hestia asked me if she were better or worse than former lovers. I said to her, ‘Every new sexual relationship is the unique part of a continuum.’

  ‘Do you think of others while making love to me?’

  ‘Yes – because you’re inextricably amalgamated with all former lovers – and the lovers of fantasy – we are together in the flowing of a sexual river. They come with us as they please.’

  ‘And Milton?’

  ‘Yes – you are the vessel from which we both drink.’

  ‘That is a first for me.’

  ‘You must promise to bring some of his sperm to me.’

  ‘I will. That is another first for me.’

  ‘Milton and I could have travelled a route unbelievably different to anything we will now do.’

  ‘That’s a pity.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where do you get your new certainty, your new answers?’

  ‘I’m tired of people who pretend not to have all the answers.’

  ‘Do the answers matter?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fuck me,’ she said, ‘fuck me you oracular bastard.’

  THE RITUAL OF THE STILL PHOTOGRAPH

  ‘Believe me,’ I tell Milton and Hestia’s brother, ‘I wouldn’t mind being mystical. I mean, I wouldn’t mind the change. I have earnestly and sincerely tried at times to be sort of mystical but I can’t.’

  They cast impatient looks.

  ‘I’ll read,’ I say, ‘just tell me the right books.’

  ‘It’s not like that.’

  We walk.

  ‘What are you doing now?’ I ask, explosively.

  Milton waves a quietening hand, we stop in the street, he is staring, it seems to me, at a bus stop. The bus stop outside the Museum of Arts and Sciences.

  Then he resumes walking and says, ‘I was listening to you just then without identifying – totally detached with regard to my personal life – I was enjoying an absolute truce – no intervening voice concerned with my own cares or personal preoccupations – my attention was then removed from you and I saw that bus stop in a way that I never habitually do – it gave me simultaneously a knowledge of the outside world and of myself – no separation between the world and self.’

  Hestia’s brother nods, understandingly.

  I look at the bus stop. Bus stop. Outside World. Absolute Truce.

  Jesus wept.

  ‘The trouble with Zen is that it takes life too seriously,’ I say. I watch them from the corner of my eye, wondering what they are seeing that I’m not.

  MILTON LEFT BEHIND FOUR THINGS

  The Poems of Kabir

  A series of four booth photographs, or ‘Fotos’ of himself and Hestia’s brother, bodies touching, pulling embarrassing ‘zany’ faces.

  Notes on a very cheap newsprint notebook.

  The Supreme Doctrine, by Hubert Benoit.

  He did not mean to leave these things behind? He did not know that among those at the party it would be me who found them?

  Milton says he studies mysticism because it is ‘very negotiable with the young chicks’, but this is not true. He says this to make it make sense to me. He thinks that would be a reason I would understand. It is a reason I understand but do not accept. He himself only pretends to be chauvinistic. He is terribly tender and very polymorphously perverse, I’m sure, but feels that to show these things would be interpreted as ‘strategy’ and lose him points with the Women’s Movement. He studies mysticism because he wants to be contemporary. But not only that. He wants to have his life mark-time. He wants to stop time because he feels that he has not yet lived. He always felt that university and school were not ‘living’. He also deducts time spent reading and cinema going. He wants to substitute his twenties for his youth. To switch them around. He makes this application to Time. Theories and ideologies are age-correlated. Generational. Cyclic. Astrology comes back into fashion every forty years. Ouija Boards every twenty-five years. Doomsday theories likewise. He wants to wait and catch the next cycle, as it were, the next cycle into the station. He is always waiting, saying no, I’ll catch the next ‘younger’ ideas-system. I keep wanting to say, come on, Milton, get aboard, we have to proceed to our destination.

  He is dissatisfied too with the quality of his dissatisfaction. He is frightened that what he has now is, in fact, ordinary happiness. He is frightened of being accused of ‘being happy’ because everyone in our group is supposed to be non-happy, in crisis, freaking-out, traumatised.

  Yet he wants to also have the right conversation for the Times. He worries that the undergraduates will no longer walk with him.

  He is in a double-bind with mysticism. If he is really ‘into’ it he is then, ipso facto, ‘serene’. And then he’s missed out on fashionable agony and is at odds with the style of our group. I say ‘our group’ although Milton is always in search for another group. But in the meantime he makes do with us.

  When he comes over to pick up the Poems of Kabir, The Supreme Doctrine, the scrappy notes, and the Fotos, a business card falls out of the Poems of Kabir. I pick it up. It is a card from Beppi’s Restaurant. It seems to discredit the Poems of Kabir. It is an emblem from an expensively carnal world. True, Kabir was not a monastic guru, but still, Milton snatches the card.

  Does Milton eat alone at Beppi’s marking student papers, like Henry Mayer?

  Or is Milton secretly living the Good Life.

  ‘If you’re so damn into this mysticism why did you forget your things,’ I say, ‘leave behind your masonic apron and all the other magic crap.’

  He dodges this, having realised, I think, that snatching the card was not a serene thing to do.

  He gently, laughingly, criticises my misuse of counter-culture jargon. He says I am dated. I get the emphases wrong. My constructions are wrong.

  Where is his authority for this?

  We drink champagne. He may now be mystic but he is not averse to drinking my champagne.

  ‘I am syncretic more than anything else,’ he says, ‘everyone is more syncretic now. Anyhow, to change the subject, you seem happier now, now you have all this money.’

  He doesn’t believe that. He is trying to trap me into admi
tting to a false happiness. He is probing my relationship to money. Maybe he thinks the pleasures of having money to jingle in my pocket is about as close as I’ll ever come.

  ‘Yes I am. Yes money makes me happier,’ I say, ‘it is not only the relief from stress, and the pleasures. It actually makes you happier. The very fact of having the money makes me happier. I think it is roughly proportionate to the amount of money I have – happiness.’

  He thinks I am saying this ironically. He smiles, deeply, privately, but it is not scorn, it is a smile of mellow acceptance. His smile is a card which says that he accepts frailty.

  I say that the first step in any anti-intellectual ego-defeatist, mystical system is to deny that the mystical system can be explained.

  The trouble with Zen, I say, is that it has been purposely dressed up, with hocus pocus, to make it a possession of gurus, yet, cunningly, it contains a do-it-yourself promise. It is a language trick.

  ‘You must shed certain verbs,’ Milton says, having observed me while I outbursted, ‘it’s your verbs which are fouling you up.’

  ‘Which verbs?’

  ‘You must let go of words like “decide”, “intellectualise”, “explain”.’

  These words, he says, presuppose and impose a structure on your personality and on your body rhythms.

  ‘The only concession I’ll make,’ I say, ‘is that fads, like Zen, refresh the vocabulary. We need new words and expressions. Even if the things we talk about never change.’

  This concession doesn’t actually please him. He goes into an observation full of suppressed malice.

  ‘You never experience anything, do you,’ he says to me thoughtfully, but I know the malice is there, ‘you are able to mimic by using stage props, you mimic the experience but you don’t live it. Your conversations, for instance, are not real – they are imitations of conversations.’

  ‘But fairly perfect imitations,’ I say in defence.

  ‘Yes, I’ll concede that,’ he says, ‘and I’ll admit that they can be sometimes as enjoyable as real conversations, more so, because real conversations are often not as well ordered as your imitations. Most people can’t tell the difference between real conversation and your conversation. But I can.’

  I plunge into self-doubt, trembling close to despair. Or mimicked self-doubt and a mimicked ‘trembling close to despair’. I tell of a bad lonely night watching late television where I saw a ventriloquist who could not throw his voice. A failed ventriloquist who had made his failure into an act in which the dummy begins to cough at the beginning of the act and coughs throughout the act without being able to get a word out. He coughs himself to ‘death’. He ‘dies’ during the performance. That’s me, I say. I can’t ‘think’. My teachers at school told me that I couldn’t think. So I set about developing skills which resemble ‘thinking’ in every respect. Later in life my ex-wife told me I couldn’t ‘love’. So I worked out a routine which for all intents and purposes, looks and feels and sounds like ‘love’.

  This confession impresses Milton.

  ‘It’s not the same as pretending,’ I elaborate, after thinking further about it, ‘it is not a fake. It is something else again. Another type of thing. It is not just faked thinking or faked love – it is something we do not have words for, and just as good as loving or thinking.’

  Milton disagrees. ‘It is like an undetectable forgery,’ he says, ‘the forger alone knows that the money he has is unreal.’

  No, not right, I point out, if one has never really thought or loved there can be no test of the resemblance substitutes. The real currency is unknown to the forger.

  From what, then, are the resemblances copied? I do not voice this question to Milton.

  On another occasion in the same week I ask him jealously why he was so physically close to Hestia’s brother in the Foto. Last month when I made a certain drunken sexual proposition to him he said brusquely that he wasn’t into the Gay Scene any more.

  ‘To get us both in frame,’ he replies.

  ‘No, there is more to it than that,’ I insist. Most Australian boys would rather have separate photographs taken than for their bodies to touch. Why not separate photographs?

  He will not discuss it.

  The pulling of faces in photographic booths is a flight from self. The person creates a distortion of their face so that it can never be interpreted as the Real Them. They are sometimes taught in the first photograph of the series because they are not sure when it will be taken. But more often it is a defensively expectant face that is caught. For the second there is a defiant face which challenges the camera to see into their heart. For the third and fourth their nerve fails, and they ‘pull’ faces. They need not bother. Their straight faces are not really Them either. Their smiles are pulled. Even in deadpan, so called, the muscle tension is all wrong and betrays concealment.

  We are not quite sure why we take photographs. The still photograph is not a way of recording an instant in time as much as a way of intensifying the experience then and there. The camera is an instrument for intensifying the awareness both of the photographer and of those being photographed. For the amateur the film record is incidental. Most people never look at the photographs more than once. Few photographs capture the thing anyhow, they are only a note of the thing, an aide-mémoire. Holiday photographs are our evidence, because we lack a strong sense of personal credibility. They are evidence not only for our friends that we exist, but for ourselves, evidence that we live.

  The group photograph is a testimonial of unity.

  What were Milton and Hestia’s brother doing in the Foto booth anyhow?

  It was a testament to their new alliance. A treaty. Their photograph is a treaty signed with their own images. A treaty against me.

  Did Milton perhaps plant those things, the Poems of Kabir, the booth Fotos, The Supreme Doctrine, the tatty notes, for me to find?

  And was the card from Beppi’s also planted?

  If he planted these exhibits on me was it to get me to think a certain scenario? To act out his scenario? Am I the dummy and he the ventriloquist? Am I meant to cough to death?

  In the notebooks he had names listed. It said: ‘Ring: Lance, Karrine, Hildegarde, Margit, Tina, Sheena.’

  Why would he ring them all on the same day?

  These are all post-World-War-Two type names. Under thirties. Does he in fact use mysticism to ingratiate himself with ‘young chicks’.

  When I see them both next day I say that the problem with Zen is that it attempts to evade the unsatisfactoriness of life. It doesn’t give dissatisfaction its due weight and flavour in the permanent state of things.

  The Superior Conciliatory Principle is in fact a play to deny the essence of things. The escape from the duty of certain unpopular emotions.

  They try to reconstruct the mind to eliminate unpopular feelings like impatience, frustration, irritation, doubt, anxiety, angst, boredom – by neutralising these into a higher passive state.

  ‘You have misunderstood Zen,’ Milton says.

  ‘Hasn’t everyone,’ I say archly.

  The Comprehensive Intellectual Neutrality downgrades the negative feelings.

  I argue that the eradication of these negative, unpopular ‘insect’ feelings will disturb the ecology of the psyche.

  There is no place in mysticism for ‘half-felt’ states, no place for ‘pale imitations’ and insipidity. Yet these, perhaps, are the truly human responses, natural states.

  ‘People no longer tell you mystical things or try to convey them to you,’ Milton says to me, ‘because you are so hostile and closed to this way of experiencing.’

  This scares me.

  ‘Does this mean they deny me information which may be to my salvation?’ I ask uneasily.

  ‘They will tell you when you are ready – when you can receive.’

  ‘What if they make a mistake – what if I’m ready and they don’t see it? What if I miss out through misjudgement on their part? Is there compensat
ion?’ I complain.

  ‘Just about every one of your friends has now gone through to satori, meditation, deep relaxation. That’s very sad for you,’ he says with gloating sympathy.

  I’m left to champion insipidity.

  I look at their faces. Milton’s face, Hestia’s brother’s face. Are they lying? Last year we were supposed to be non-happy people, always freaking out.

  Even then I never freaked out properly.

  ‘No one in the West has found satori,’ I challenge.

  ‘You are very unsure of yourself,’ Milton says softly, deliberately, patiently.

  ‘Do you really mean that you and the rest of the crowd have found ecstasy, deep inner harmony, and so on?’

  ‘I’m afraid so – to a large degree, yes.’

  ‘We are sad for you,’ Hestia’s brother says, the parroting runt, ‘about why you cling to your stale, restless state of mind.’

  But I thought I was the one who had gone on with my personal development, done courses, kept up my reading, international affairs, thought the unthinkable.

  ‘No,’ says Milton, ‘no, you are way back on the path of personal development. The rest of us have been open, growing.’

  I mumble that Zen and mysticism and all that stuff is just inhibited protest against the competitive capitalist system – a retreat from conventional political conflict.

  Milton says it won’t help me to reinterpret everything in the words of my own system.

  They talk about me needing to lose my ego. I say the only people I know who have ‘lost’ their ego didn’t have one to begin with. Like the irony of those who believe in astrology – they are always people who have no future. Perhaps, I say, they are looking for a future.

  Milton and Hestia’s brother ignore this.

  I say that while staying at the Black Dolphin Motel I found that I liked the West just a little more than the East. The sunset just a little more than the sunrise. Is this something about preferring the Western life in decline to the New Dawn?

  Hestia’s brother says it is a preference for death over life.

  ‘What in god’s fucking name would you know about it?’ I shout.

  ‘If you people have satori it doesn’t show,’ I say, ‘you appear no different, you do the same things. You drink as much.’