November
3
Dear Kevin,
You can’t imagine how good it was to get back! The weather
was so
beautiful the first afternoon that I decided to sit outside and sun
myself, my only distraction being the rich semi-tropical air as it
slowly
bathed my body. It was the kind of day only dreamed about in the South.
As I was sitting there, have awake, my mind far off in some rapturous
state, I happened to notice a gleam of light from the thick bush at the
back of the allotment. Hardly in a curious frame of mind, I nonetheless
rose and wandered over to the source of the distraction. Behind and
between the overgrowth of ancient banana plants, vines and tropical
weeds I saw a window. Most of the glass was gone but
there had been enough to reflect the sun and attract my attention. My
landlady - hardly the correct word - had made no mention of another
building on the property so I decided to investigate.
I went into the house and picked up a large kitchen knife. I'd seen it
there before and had thought of it more as a machete than a culinary
implement. But it was the perfect tool. In no time I had hacked away
sufficient of the brush to enable me to open a smallish but serviceable
door just below and to the left of the broken window. I forced the door
and
found myself in a dimly lit room which had an overwhelming smell of age
and
decay. There was enough light to see that the room had been an office
of some sort and
from the apparent age of the desk and the other fittings I judged it to
date from
the middle of the last century - about the time that the area had first
been settled. The smell was too
much for me so I took a pile of interesting looking ledgers from the
old desk - the only portable items in sight - and pushed my way through
the cobwebs and accumulated rubbish out into the fresh air.
I was still too enchanted with the day to worry about the ledgers so
put them aside for a later examination. The rest of the afternoon was
passed in blissful solitude. You can’t imagine how lovely it
is here,
Kevin, the flowering plants, the ubiquitous song birds and the
polychrome insects. It is easy to understand why so many from the South
having once arrived here never return.
That evening after a long, slowly consumed meal of my favourite tofu
and locally grown vegetables, and a few, necessary but unduly
protracted phone calls, I decided to view the ledgers. Unfortunately
they had been left on the desk with no covering or other efforts to
preserve them. The ledgers, the desk, the entire office in fact, had
been left as though their proprietor had gone off perhaps only for a
smoke, intending to shortly return. But somehow he must have been cut
off, perhaps dying with everything under his care left to gradually rot
into the fuse of what once had been a plantation. How strange it all
was.
The ledgers were bound in leather, good solid hide unlike the imitative
synthetic materials used today and though damaged were still intact
after all those years. Remarkable! The paper was also of very high
quality almost like a vellum and to my delight, the writing had been
done in a beautiful hand with a quill and India ink. It was faded and
mould stained but still quite legible.
After a short time I accustomed myself to the antique script and was
able to read the text as though it were print. Interestingly it was not
the type of material one would expect to find in such tomes - accounts,
records of sales and purchases etc. but a collection of tales or
stories. None of the writings were titled but before the beginning of
each - all were approximately the same length -were double rows of odd
symbols. I’m afraid I had no idea what these were but assumed
they were
either in some sort of code or an outlandish language that
I’d never
seen before. It was strange, Kevin, very strange.
The first and perhaps titular page in each ledger had apparently been
torn out but with the aid of some old letters stuck in the back of what
had been the uppermost book I was able to discover the
author’s name.
It was a Graeme Headers, apparently a very well-read man and either the
owner or manager of the plantation on which the old office had been
built. From my reading of the letters I learned that the man suffered
from a rare and debilitating disease of some kind and that his left
index finger had, from birth, been severely deformed. Though this
deformity was relatively minor the man had obviously been obsessed with
it, mentioning it quite frequently. How odd.
But to the ledgers. I have already - out of sheer enthusiasm - one of
my
characteristics you will remember, Kevin - summarised one of the tales
which I append for your interest.
I trust you and Hannah are enjoying as well as profiting from your
literary soirées at Mietta’s. I enjoyed being at
the inaugural one and
when time affords I hope to visit you once again in the South.
Regards,
Addendum:
The first tale takes
place in the future. No date is
indicated but from the context I would estimate the time to be
somewhere near the present day. The tale is written in the form of a
letter from a Mr James Wilson to a friend in a southern city - it may
be Melbourne - named Curzon Peterson, a publisher and patron of the
arts.
Curzon has sent his friend a book of short stories for comment before
final editing and publication. Evidently he has some admiration for
this friend in ‘the North’ and values his opinions
even though he
considers him to be somewhat eccentric.
What follows is a series of epistolary exchanges about one particular
story. In this story, a man, also a publisher sends a story in unedited
and semi-complete form to a friend Jake who has recently removed
himself to a small but thriving town in ‘the
North’. A state of
acrimony develops between the two because of the story. It is in the
form of a letter from a man called Jacob - though he is often referred
to as Jim - to an intimate in a southern city who is named Groggon
Hanson. Hanson has among his literary circle a
certain Grotman Hand who is an incurable drinker and opium addict.
Grotman has written a long piece of fiction about a man called William
Jameson who goes insane and destroys himself. Jameson is an avid reader
and gets hold of a novel - actually it is comes to him under somewhat
unusual circumstances but that is not relevant here. The novel is so
complex with diversionary tales within tales and characters that
resemble other characters in their names and actions that the whole
narrative dissolves into a literary hall of mirrors. Jameson becomes
obsessed with the novel thinking it must be an anagrammatic
interpretation of his own life. He spends days, then weeks and months
desperately trying to understand the novel, even going so far as to
write the names of the characters on bits of paper moving them madly
about on his desk like so many chessman but to no avail. In the end he
becomes certain that he knows which of the characters must in fact be
himself. This particular character has an ugly, misshapen face and in
the end Jameson dies horribly whilst trying to alter his own with oil
of vitriol! A bizarre ending to a bizarre tale.
I can’t tell you, Kevin, how much this story disturbs me
because I have
the uncomfortable feeling that I am somehow not unlike that Jameson
myself. By the way I have read that copy of
The Mountain by
Graham
Henderson that was given to me by a friend who, in turn, was given it
by a retired gamemaker. The gamemaker had the idea of using it as the
basis of a literary board game but became quite ill and had to be
committed to a psychiatric hospital.
I’m already on my third reading -
intriguing, most intriguing.
~
November
29 (The Lighthouse)
November
29
Dear Jennifer,
It’s been some time since I last talked to you. If you
remember the
occasion was Hannah’s party. Not being used to such goings on
and her
cordial but rampant hospitality I’m afraid I nearly exhausted
myself.
But the worst of it was the evening at the restaurant. Graham was
listening to one of my more lucid raves when we received a phone call
from Hannah inviting us to join her and Kevin at Clichy, a cosy little
restaurant in Collingwood. We got a cab and were soon there. Upon
entering the establishment I had barely time to say a word of greeting
when I was dashed to the floor by my own momentum and an inclemently
positioned pool of water. I am still recovering from the resultant
tendonitis but I also have a scar! Dear Hannah in her enthusiasm rubbed
essence of capsicine into the wound that the fall produced on my hip!
The resultant blister and necrosis is still visible. Ah for the days
when medicine was only practised by properly attired doctors and their
subordinates! All this democracy wears a bit thin. And where will it
lead? Here, in the ‘Golden Triangle’, there are
more back yard
therapists and hoodoo merchants than anywhere else in Australia. But
maybe there’s a reason for it.
The other day I drove into Byron from my home here in Suffolk. I had
prepared some sheets of poetry on my computer and took them in to be
laser printed. Rainbow Dreaming is a computer and electronic business
run by Ray Latter who is from Ballarat and the nephew of a woman I once
taught with. I always enjoy having a chat with Ray. He’s
enthusiastic
and unlike so many of the denizens of this area fairly down-to-earth.
When I entered the shop Ray was engrossed in sorting out a
customer’s
notebook computer. Ray jokingly asked me if I knew any German and as I
looked over his shoulder I could see some phrases in that language on
the screen. My German is pretty minimal but I did catch the words
Fuzzlogische Objekt
Entziffer...
something
or other. Before I could read
any further Ray changed the screen and the subject. It had nothing to
do with me but I did feel a bit annoyed that he’d engaged me
in
something and then dropped it. But I was there to get my laser printing
done and after a few false starts we managed to get my sheets printed.
As I paid Ray for the printing he made some comment about being able to
buy his lunch now. All very light-hearted. But then I let my curiosity
come in and asked him what he knew about fuzzy logic. It’s
all the go
now in engineering and I think it might have some connection to poetry.
After all words are ‘fuzzy’ and when a poet uses
them she relies on
that property for many of the effects that she creates.
Ray suddenly looked very serious but said nothing. I had to go anyway
and could see there was some problem, so I started to leave the shop.
Just as I raised my hand in farewell Ray motioned me back. He asked his
assistant to look after the shop and he led me into his back office. I
was quite mystified but Ray looked so earnest I just went along.
Then he started. He made me promise never to tell anyone what he was
about to say. My first thought was ‘What is this
nonsense?’ but by the
intensity of his look I could see that he was totally sincere so I
agreed. He said that he’d been doing some work for a secret
government
project that seconded specialist computer scientists from various
countries including Germany. Ray’s role was a relatively
minor one:
keeping their equipment in order and occasionally ordering in and
calibrating updated instruments. He told me that the work paid well but
that he was uneasy about aspects of it and, frankly, just wanted to get
it off his mind by talking to someone. For some reason my
‘discovery’
of the few words on the computer screen was all it took. I was it.
Basically the project is a refinement of work that was originally done
for the development of ‘over the horizon’ radar
arrays in the north of
Australia. The details are well and truly beyond me but as
Kay explained it computers are used to extract from masses of
apparently meaningless signals those that have some pattern. These are
then compared with known patterns and ‘objects’ are
then treated from
the data. At first this technology was used to identify the radar
images of ships, planes and other military objects. But ili.it was only
the beginning. The same techniques were soon applied to the extraction
of information from the enormous amount of coded and uncoded signals
sent around the globe by radio, telephone etc. It soon became possible
to ‘read’ the output of virtually every government
and private
communication anywhere in the world. The ultimate spy machine. Because
of the great advances in computer chip design these machines are now
totally portable and indistinguishable from the typical home computer.
But back to Byron. Some years ago, Ray wasn’t sure, but
possibly as
early as 1973, specialised surveillance equipment was installed in the
Cape Byron Lighthouse. The location was ideal. The lighthouse is on
a promontory and scans inland as well as out to sea. It was already
there, was in a relatively unpopulated area and the locals were used to
the constant rotation of the light though no one became concerned that
the lens began turning during the day as well as after dark.. The
initial experiments were relatively crude but were an attempt to build
up a profile of every ‘object’ in an area extending
twenty to thirty
kilometres from the light.
As time went on the technology ‘caught up’ as it
were with the project
and is now highly refined. A constantly altering signal is sent out
from the light as it scans the countryside. Reflected energy is picked
up at the lighthouse and analysed by computer. This is where the fuzzy
logic comes in. As information is fed into the computer, it defines
‘objects’. These objects might initially be a scan
of someone’s arm or
the bonnet of a car but once the object is created additional data can
be assigned to it and eventually the ‘object’
becomes something that is
intelligible in terms of
a person, a car, a house or whatever. Naturally the stationary
‘objects’ are usually defined before the others.
Fuzzy logic provides a
means of
assigning data to an object especially in the early stages when there
is very little corroborating information.
The end result is a database that can be used to trace the movements,
past and present of anyone within the scanned area. When this
information is integrated with bank, taxation, teller card and other
digital data an excellent tool is available for a wide variety of
governmental purposes from crime prevention and detection to the
preparation of employment suitability profiles and the resolution of
societal problems. Civil libertarians might raise an eyelid at this but
the history of technological innovation shows that if something can be
done it will be and Luddites have been and are just that.
Until we got to this point the conversation had been intense but almost
detached. It was like the death-toll in Rwanda or the number of
poisoned lakes in Sweden, awful in the true sense but distant,
intangible. Now the tone in Ray’s voice changed, the feeling
in the
room became almost dramatic.
Ray was concerned because the entire project was, in effect, an
experiment on a civilian population. Just recently he’d been
reading
through a report that he’d come across almost inadvertently.
It had
been written by a medical specialist whom the project had hired some
years before but had dispensed with after a relatively short time. His
report was disturbing. It indicated that the particular wavelengths
used by the project for its scans could be detrimental. He listed a
number of possible effects some of which were quite minor such as itchy
rashes and depilation but the one that Ray was most concerned about was
a form of dementia. After all his wife and children lived in the
scanned area. I asked him what this dementia entailed. He told me that
the sufferer could be expected to have wild delusions, such as talking
to beings from another world, thinking he could see into the past, and
ascribing magical properties to common and even toxic substances. Other
possible effects were dressing in inappropriate and bizarre clothing,
being in a constant state of anxiety about one’s health and
having
desperate fears about the environment.
After almost an hour of listening I was tired and, assuring Ray that
I’d tell no one, I left. As I went home I kept thinking that
the whole
thing might just be the product of an over-active imagination.
Hut even if it is true no one would believe it. And as for those
insidious effects who would notice them here anyway? So I
don’t feel
that I’m being dishonest by relating all this to you.
That damned scar on my side is itching something awful again - hope it
isn’t cancerous - perhaps I’d better go back to the
homoeopath.
Keep in touch!