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has not been ill, not physically, and she is certainly not dead. She has relocated to Sydney, hoping to create a life for herself free of the metaphorical carcinogens that were threatening, day by day, to destroy her. These included: my own selfish impatience and lack of caring, the frightful pressures her parents subjected her to which just tore her up, her horror at finding so many of her old friends from school or university settling into “happy” mindless bourgeois marriages and baby-making, her own secret desire to do just that and my refusal to collaborate: cancers of the soul.
    And she took herself away, upped and left, went away weeping, and left me weeping too, and it is just exactly as if she were dead. As if she were lying out of touch or sight in a hard wooden coffin where no sounds can be heard and there is an odor of perfume and old suits and incense.
    By speaking of cancer and death, of course, I try to let myself off the hook, try to pretend for a moment that I am not at least fifty percent responsible for the destruction of our relationship, for the chilly misery I now feel, and the despairing awareness that no amount of confession of guilt, complicity and rottenness can repair what is corroded and gone between us, that Caroline (or I myself) could just as truthfully be described as dead, killed by some insidious disorder over which neither of us had any real control.
    And that last assertion is probably just as much a cop-out as anything I’ve written so far. So I’ll stop. No flowers, by request.
    ::Joe’s letter, which he delivered by hand late on Friday night and would not tarry as I read its baffling mixture of truth and metaphor, is not the sort of thing I have been accustomed to publishing in this quipu. Maybe it should be. Joseph and Caroline are not the only victims lately. If we could all try a little harder to express what we actually feel, even if we must do so with the aid of misdirection, we might manage our personal lives somewhat more successfully::b.wagner::
    1969: love is a german shepherd
    Paddington
    Sydney
    20.11.69
    My dear Joseph
    At peace.
    I received your quipu article yesterday. At first I was outraged. I wanted to tear you into small strips. I thought you were saying that you wished me dead (I might as well be). Then I re-read what you’d written and I think I understand. Poor Joseph, it’s the only way you know to express your feelings. Like your refusal to speak of “love.” So I take your article as I suppose you meant it, as a tribute to our relationship, to the feelings you had for me. You must admit it’s a very strange thing to read. But I suppose you would not have written it if you had felt nothing at all for me. So in the end, after crying all morning, I saw what you were getting at, and your article gave me strength.
    The days have been floating past restlessly and I with them. I’m starting to loosen up, though sleep comes very intermittently.
    Antony is the Great Pretender. I am very wary of him now. He has a long way to go & doesn’t know it. He thinks he’s got it all sewn up but he’s fly-papered in the bourgeois conventions he says he loathes so deeply. Every attempt to escape tangles him up further—look at what he’s got himself into with me. His dope, his drinking—these are all middle-class to the bone. I’m staying on with him because I’m lost in Sydney. I’m fond enough of him but he’s going to end up hating me for just those human flaws I share with him. I’m weak. I take pills to keep my sanity.
    His ex-lady Francine is okay I suppose (fat bottom). Attractive but superficial. When I suggested leaving some of our stuff at her place, Antony was outraged. He can’t bear the thought of my imposing on her, of being there while she’s entertaining her fucking Paddo friends. He can’t accept anything of me. He thinks I’m someone else.
    Can’t accept that I have my own thoughts. Have my silence. He keeps his mouth rattling away quite