make an imaginary addendum

You have Heep saying “humble” for the comfort of others, you have Walter Murdoch being humble for himself; there is the idea that happiness means some region of ignorance being maintained and even policed, not unacknowledged but actively defied with force and effort. Heep puts his whole life into it and is an embodiment of an innocent desire for goodness, light and truth -- not his own desire but the innocent desire of other people; he is other people's curdled innocence, and is a revenant of innocence that rots everything when he approaches it: friendship, marriage, sonliness, whatever, here he is, sort of a physical thing between yourself and the sprawling black unsolvable darkness. It is not Agnes who dulls down the horrors, it is him.

(When I think back to whoever-it-was's notion that Agnes is a totem more than she is a character, I want to see them in an invisible partnership, Heep the active repellant-of-darkness, Agnes the static repellent, and both of them occurring in orbit around David like neutrons.)

Murdoch's favourite police weapon is this phrase: “A blow-out on tripe and onions.”

Until I knew it, I was in the habit of using another formula, the saying of a character in Dickens -- in Great Expectations, if I remember rightly -- 'Wot larks!’ That, too, was a comfort; but Lady Dorothy’s formula is more invariably comforting.

Lady Dorothy, in the middle of a discussion about her friends' favourite foods, “wonderful things which only a chef of genius can prepare, and which are to be seen only on the tables of the very rich,” said, “Oh, gimme a good blow-out on tripe and onions.” Use it, says Murdoch: it will bring you back to basics.

Similarly when I read in Mr Bertrand Russell an account of the universe as modern science presents it to our view, ending with the words, ‘only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built’ -- the obvious comment that springs to one’s lips at once, is ‘Wot larks!’ But this, though comforting, is not wholly convincing. The right comment is ‘All right; and now, let’s have a blow-out on tripe and onions.’ The moment you have said that, you know that your soul is saved.

You should use it when you talk back to a book or when you rewrite a speech in your head. “To make an imaginary addendum to the Governor-General’s message, -- something like ‘To mark the universal grief, the Government House blow-out on tripe and onions has been postponed for a week’ -- relieved the tension of one’s mind.”

The formula is always inward and mental, never used aloud, and Heep's formula works best too, inside the closed system of a prison. See chapter sixty-one of David Copperfield.

various newspapers for discourses

How could he not be, I say (meaning Paterson's presence in Bertram Stevens' Anthology of Australian Verse, and Stevens in the preface referring to him as one of two poets who were writing “the first realistic Australian verse of any importance,” Lawson being the other), but then remember that Walter Murdoch left Paterson out of The Oxford Book of Australasian Verse -- defying this sentence in his own introduction: “From this gathering the reader will—or so I hope—be able to get a fair idea of the kind of poetry these lands have been fashioning.”

Here the word “fair” has two meanings. On one hand Murdoch was habitually nondogmatic; a shading like “fair” is part of his normal vocabulary; and the essay of his that used to appear in school readers (“When I was at school during the 1940s, our English readers included an essay in praise of tripe and onions,” says his grand-nephew in the introduction to a recent collection of his essays (On Rabbits, Morality, Etc (2011)) starts with modesty, confident modesty (“The essay is to prose what the lyric is to poetry […] it is brief, informal, modest” (Murdoch: The Essay)), or he is “avuncular,” as other writers have said.

The Australians have a reputation for hospitality; and the hospitality of their newspapers is simply extraordinary. For instance, I myself have, in the past few years, been given space in various newspapers for discourses on every kind of topic, from rabbits to the League of Nations, from the poetry of Keats to the proper way of killing fowls, from cabbages to kings. But, curiously enough, I seem to have omitted, hitherto, to write an essay on tripe and onions.

It is not, of course, easy to be sure of this. I could make certain by hunting through the files …

(On Tripe and Onions)

But he won't, he says. It would make him too much like the wife of Lot. The language of humility can be proud; he writes the phrase “humble common sense” and with it he can dismiss Bertrand Russell and Walter Pater very casually, without explaining why they are wrong, they are just on the wrong side of his own common sense, which is humble, almost in the Uriah Heep way, it is meant to deflect despair or some other bad reaction, “things which would depress us horribly if we had to receive them in silence.” Heep's sneer is the difference; he knows that he is defacing his aggression for the benefit of other people. Murdoch, if you take him at his word, is doing it for the sake of happiness.

watchtower, whatbloodyever

On page two hundred and sixty-seven of The Broken Shore there is a woman who thinks that a pair of police officers are Jehovah's Witnesses. "Dint I tell you to bugger off last time?" she shouts. "Comin around with yer bloody Yank religion, yer bloody tower of Pisa, leanin bloody watchtower, whatbloodyever." You are a wonderful woman, I thought: I am exhausted by my doorknockers and my conspiracy theorists, all of whom have, since I moved here, been drawn to me like magnets, telling me that the United States government is flying UFOs around Las Vegas at night or whatbloodyever, and that it has built prisons in various cities, right in the open where people can see them, surrounded by barbed wire, and that it passes laws so that it can imprison its citizens in these prick-wired pens though where the jails are located in their muds of iniquity thick as pond slime the informant cannot say.

And what large stretches of contradiction our beliefs can cover, I think, and how automatically we shorten the space between one thought and another until there is no space, being certain that prison camps exist yet not being able to even nominate the name of the ground where one can be seen in all the nudity of its ignominy by the traveller or tourist.

(I think I have said all of this before.)

This absence of information is not a problem for the conspiracy theorist, the certainty is robust, it is as if the edges of a sheet have been folded together and the sheet comprehended like this, or it is the way that very fast interstellar travel might operate one day, when the dimension of space can be folded like that sheet, as in books by Frank Herbert. So if there is a dimension called thought then we have the power to fold it already, and treat our minds like the universe, going from star to star in a black space.

I read this woman's single piece of dialogue again about three times as though I thought there was a large truth here, and as if the author would give me an insight or cure, or only satisfaction, to see someone swear at those people, the Witnesses, who knock on doors and always start with the same gambit, proposing that the world is terrible and that they can do something about it -- I fight back -- I point out the sweet gleamingness of the incessant sun and how pretty the nice clouds look and in general I am hamming it up about the uncommon loveliness on all sides, even though anyone this side of degenerative senility can see that we are in one of the ugliest suburbs of an ugly city with cracked pavements running along every street and in some places no pavements at all because the people who manage streets have decided not to include any, for whatever reason, nor have they decided to build any nature strips, and they have obstacled the concrete where you want to walk. With what? With thick poles and magazine bins.

Earlier this week we were in Pocatello where they have nature strips and look, I said, falling over with shock: nature strips! All of the houses have basement windows with little curtains and everybody without exception grows tulips. Tulips, I said.

I wonder if this useless battlefield of pavement in Las Vegas is meant to repel the homeless people with their shopping trolleys, and it does, they veer off the pavements and continue down the roadway in the bike lanes. It is hard to get anywhere unless you are in a car, and ever the drivers of cars have to go on long treks across baking car parks to reach the front doors of shops. And almost nowhere do the shops open their doors directly onto the pavement, which is inhumane and neglects the dignity of the human animal that rises up with an autonomous ease of movement; there is always a large car park in front of the doors. This suburb has not been designed to meet the requirements of any human person although a completely different species with diametrically opposed interests might do incredibly well.

Go from this star to that star, say the Witnesses, but I go to other stars, I talk about the sun and remember Walter Murdoch, the Australian essayist who wrote in the 1930s --

No new and inspired religion has come to us from the United States for over a fortnight. This is very disquieting; if there was one thing we thought we could depend on, it was the steady uninterrupted flow of American religions.

(On Sitting Still, from On Rabbits, Morality, etc.: Selected writings of Walter Murdoch.

Which leads me to the reason I didn't make a post earlier this week on Wednesday as I usually do: we were going to Elko, we ended up in Salt Lake City, and there was the enormous Temple glowing in the twilight like four Sleeping Beauties Castleses.