Quipu Read Online Free PDF Page B

his assault on the universe. One might come out into the yard with a bone from the table (for he was then living at our home under an exchange arrangement) and find him gazing raptly at the moon, his lips parted, inflamed with an innocent intoxication so much purer than his raunchy nights backstage with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I was struck then, fondly, by his ardent, wistful expression, so like Carl Sagan’s. Any comparison I might make, however, is bound to be misleading. I’d never met anyone, man or woman, who affected me so piercingly. Before I knew it, I was head over heels in love with a dog, and I am prepared to confess that at first I was just as astonished and taken aback by this discovery as was my dear bitter mother a few months later when Spot went in to announce our intentions.
    1969: obituaries
    Bloody Brunswick
    Monday 17
    Nov 69
    dear Caroline
    Very short note before I rush out at lunchtime to post this. Spent yesterday at Brian’s, helping crank out the latest HOT AIR (which you will find enclosed; the ink should be dry by the time you get it). I sat at my typewriter all Friday night writing a Letter of Comment for his LoC pages, a way of telling people that we’d split up. It’s on page 12.
    It’s all so sad, Lovely, even though it seems quite impossible to…imagine how we could ah fuck it read the thing in the quipu.
    kisses, Joseph
     
    WORD SALAD:: Lettuce from my chums
    ::A singularly strange and moving letter arrived from Joe Williams after I’d run off most of this ish of HOT AIR, but I’ve remixed the SALAD to make space for it. We don’t see much of Joe these days, now that he’s a Big Time Science Journalist, and his unhappy circumstances will therefore come as a shock to many of you. There’s not much comfort to be had in words, Joseph, I know, but believe me when I say that we all share with you in your mourning::b.wagner::
    It’s funny. I haven’t met most of the hikes whom Brian sends HOT AIR to, but I feel a sort of sense of family with you, at least as much of one as I’ve ever felt with any group. Despite this, I have tended to keep my private life to myself. This might seem hard for some of you to believe, having been inundated with my most passionate beliefs about politics, writing, music, and the ins and out of the School of Physics, but basically I haven’t conveyed anything close to myself since about eight years ago, when I didn’t know any better and sent some ghastly LoCs to GRUMBLING WOMBATS, which are certainly better forgotten.
    It’s hard getting to the point, isn’t it? Well, taking a deep breath, I must force my fingers to the keyboard:
    Two days ago, my wife Caroline died of cancer. She was buried today. I am in shock. She was a lovely, kind, poetic, sensitive person. Until the disease undermined her physical constitution, she was also a physically beautiful woman, as the few of you who met her will recall. It always seemed to me that she had something of the graceful fluid lines of bone and flesh of a French model, though her ancestry had been Australian for at least three generations. I rarely told her that she was beautiful. Now it is too late.
    Those of you who never met Caro, or me, those of you who live in other States or other countries, will not be all that upset by this news, except in the general sense that we share a momentary pang at news of another’s bereavement. Those of you who encountered us once or twice, but without our orbits intersecting, will perhaps feel some more direct twinge of empathy and grief. And those few, like Brian, who knew us rather better than that, who visited our house or had us around to theirs, will perhaps be rather taken aback by the news, because they will know that what I have just written is not true.
    I am not married, and never have been. Yes, I have lived with Caroline at various times, and until several days ago we shared a house not ten minutes’ walk from Brian Wagner’s roguish den. But Caroline