Ventiak
an island somewhere in the brain
True to form we got around to discussing the national memorial day four days after the event. Perhaps it was Rupert who helped us to the subject. His eccentric Aunt Felicity has knitted him a sweater. It is short-sleeved with a V-neck and an intricate Fairisle pattern. Wearing it with his customary blue and white striped shirt and Hutt Valley Old Boys tie, he looks the perfect image of a WWII boffin or, perhaps, one of those fair-haired, blue-eyed pilots about to launch their Spitfires into the sky above southern England. On the other hand, it may just have been that Amanda had one more gin and tonic than usual and become oddly talkative.
Whatever the reason we suddenly found her speculating on why Anzac Day has become so much more popular that in used to be. Is it because we are becoming more militant as time goes by? she wondered. Or because our world seems under threat from violent forces? Trevor, it turned out had a different theory.
'No,' he said. 'It's just the passage of time. Thirty years ago, the guys who went to World War II were the fathers of the young generation. Everybody has to rebel against their father. It stands to reason there was going to be a backlash against war and militarism. These days it's not the father's but the grandfathers and the great-grandfathers. The old palsied bloke over there in the corner - you can't rebel against him. He's kind of helpless and loveable and he fought in the War! Jeez, he's part of history.'
'Ageism,' Amanda said.
'How do you mean?' I asked.
'That's what Trevor's saying. That generation, the eighty-year-old's. We honour them because, secretly, underneath, we think they're decrepit and useless.'
'What about the Vietnam War?' Rupert asked. 'The people who fought in that aren't decrepit and useless.'
'Yes,' Trevor answered. 'But there's not enough of them to make a difference. At least, not in this part of the world. And, in any case, they'd be pushing sixty, these days, wouldn't they.'
'Nearly over the hill,' Amanda said.
'I don't think it's ageism,' Janet said. 'Those old guys with all their medals. They're really cute.'
'Patronising sentimentality,' Amanda told her.
'I don't see why.' Janice looked cross.
I could see an argument brewing, with Janice in one her hissy fits. 'Where's Felix when you need him?' I said. 'He ought to be here to give us a rousing military ode.'
'The Charge of the Light Brigade!' Trevor waved an imaginary sabre.
'Felix didn't write that,' Rupert said. 'At least, I don't think he did.'
'Tennyson,' I told him. 'Although, come it think of it, it wouldn't look out of place in Felix's collected poems.'
Janice wants to know why I haven't mentioned the review of Black Earth/White Bones in the Listener. I'm not sure myself, to be honest. I guess I've had other things on my mind.
'It was really good,' she said.
'Yes,' I agreed. 'But a bit short.'
'Don't say that. Look at what it says. '...slowburning and extraordinary'. You can't get much better than that.'
'No. It's fantastic.'
'Do you know this reviewer? Mark Peters?'
'No. I don't think so.'
'He seems a really nice man,' she said.
I caught that look in her eye.
'I suppose you want to meet him?'
'What's wrong with that?' Indignant.
'Nothing,' I said. 'Absolutely nothing.'
Today Janice asked me the difference between vanity and arrogance. A good question.
'Well,' I said. 'I think a vain person is someone who assumes that they are of great importance to you. An arrogant person is someone who thinks that you have no importance whatsoever.'
'That makes sense,' she said.
'Why do you ask?'
'I was wondering if Felix was vain or arrogant.'
'Oh,' I said, 'vain. No doubt about it. And not at all arrogant.'
'You could be both, though, eh?'
'You could. The interesting thing, though, is that the vain person needs you - even though they won't admit it. The arrogant person doesn't. It's a bit like the difference between shame and guilt. '
'How do you mean?' she asked.
'Shame is a sense that other people think badly of you. Guilt is thinking badly of yourself.'
'So a vain person feels shame and an arrogant person feels guilt?'
'That's an interesting thought,' I said. 'You might be right.'
'Felix wouldn't feel guilt,' she said. 'Only shame.'
'He is crucified by shame. Every day.'
'I know. That's why I can't talk to him about his crap poem.'
'Do you need to?' I asked.
'What? Talk to him? No, I suppose not. But I feel I ought to.'
'Why?'
'Oh, I don't know,' she said. 'I get tangled up in this stuff. What I think I ought to do and what I feel is right.'
'That's the fundamental problem of ethics,' I said. 'The difference between principles and values.'
'Really?' She looked impressed. She didn't need to be.
'Maybe,' I said. I wasn't at all sure myself, all of a sudden.
Felix has disappeared. It seems that his clock free week has already put him out of kilter with the rest of us. His muse, however, seems to be thriving.
'I found this on the kitchen table,' Janice said, handing me a piece of paper.
It was a poem in Felix's beautiful, flowing handwriting.
Your eyes are like the tender stars
That fill the night above.
Your thighs are like the plains of Mars,
A battlefield of love.
'Did he write it himself or just copy it out?' Janice asked.
'It's probably his own. It's about his usual standard.'
'Do you suppose somebody was meant to find it?'
'Possibly,' I said.
'Who? Me?'
'I don't know.'
'I'm not at all sure I like it,' she said. 'I mean, unrequited poems are really nice in a general sort of way but this one... What's this stuff about Mars?'
'Felix usually allows the rhyme to overcome the sense,' I told her.
'It's a really barren planet, isn't it?'
'He might be referring to the god of war.'
'You mean as in Anzac Day?'
'I don't think Felix knows what day it is at the moment.'
'War makes it worse.'
'Anyway,' I said. 'It might not be meant for you.'
'Who then? Amanda?'
Right on cue, Amanda walked into the room. Janice handed her the poem.
'I think this is for you,' she said.
Amanda read it, looked at Janice, then at me and burst out laughing. I don't think I've ever seen her quite so amused.
'What?' Janice asked.
The nights are drawing in and it's a little chilly on the verandah some evenings. Perhaps the temperature last night was responsible for the fact that conversation turned to that most somber of topics - time.
Janice began to speculate on how much time rules our lives.
'We do everything by the clock, don't we?' she said. 'We get up. We eat. We work. We go to sleep. It's all organised.'
'We're not born by the clock,' Trevor said.
'Caesarian babies are,' Rupert answered. 'And people who are executed die by the clock, too.'
'That's part of the punishment, isn't it?' I said.
'Tyranny!' Felix boomed.
'What is? Executions?'
'Clocks! We should abolish them! Get rid of the lot!'
'I like that,' Trevor answered.
'How would anyone keep appointments?' Janice asked.
'Easy,' Felix told her. 'You go by the sun, by your sense of the light. You say to someone 'I'll see you in mid-morning' and if you arrive and they're not there yet you sit down and read a book.'
'Not very efficient,' Rupert said.
'Efficiency is piffle! We would return to a purer, simpler time.'
'That word again,' Trevor said.
Felix was onto something, though. 'There'd be nothing to stop us having a clock free day now and again, though, would there?' I said.
'No clocks at all?' Janice asked. 'No computers or TVs?'
'Or oven timers,' Trevor said.
'You get up when you like. You eat when you're hungry. You do what you like for as long or short as you like.'
'And you're not allowed to know the time?' Amanda asked.
'No.'
I'd go mad.'
She might well do, too. Maybe we all would.
'I shall begin at once,' Felix announced, taking off his wristwatch and throwing it into the rose bushes. 'This shall be a clock fee week.'
'Good luck!' Trevor told him.
'Tell me,' Amanda says, 'this Crackpot Buddhism or whatever you call it. Is it any use to anyone?'
'How do you mean?' I ask.
'Does it make any conceivable difference to anything at all?'
'It might. If you realise that, as a conscious subject, you are your experiences, then it might change your attitudes to things.'
'Some people have some pretty awful experiences,' she says.
'And that's part of who they are.'
'Sounds like a recipe for self-pity.' Self-pity, in Amanda's view, is close to the unforgivable sin.
'Not if there was no self to pity,' I say.
'What do you mean?'
'No self to pity. No self to be important. No self to respect. No self to improve.'
'So we're stuck, according to you.'
'Maybe, we're just free. Alive in the present moment. Of course, we can do things in the present moment that affect the future. And our experiences in the present moment arise from the past. But that's all any of us are. This experience now.'
'Sounds like New Age claptrap to me,' she says.
'Just think of the teapot,' I say.
'That may be you,' she says, 'but it certainly isn't me.'
Trevor sticks his ore in now. 'Of course, the only thing that is actually in the teapot is stagnant rainwater.'
'Point taken,' I say.