It was a strange text to be reading in flight, and yet strangely comforting. I underlined a sentence and noted the following information in the margin: Ground speed: 1,021 kilometres per hour. Altitude: 10,061 metres. Distance travelled: 373 kilometres. The time was 1.15PM, and there was still an estimated 10 hours and 15 minutes to go until we reached our destination.
And here is the sentence: "When a plane shoots downward out of control, its crew cramp themselves fearfully into their seats for minutes like years, expecting the crash: but the smoothness of that long dive continues to their graves. Only for survivors is there an after-pain."1
T. E. Lawrence knew of what he spoke. He had experience of speed -- and died in a motorcycle crash. I imagine the telemetry Qantas put up on the screen, the numbers flickering as the plane dives, the speed rising, the altitude falling, the distance to destination stuck weirdly where it is like a vain, dishonoured promise.
But then what exactly is the promise of speed? It strikes me that Lawrence was more honest than most, in naming death itself as the imminent thing. And it strikes me that speed is only speed if there is writing. Movement is just movement, but movement that involves a dividing up of the thing moved into segments, the marking of their destination and relative position, the measurement of their progress and state -- this is speed. The production of facts out of movement, and movement out of facts -- this is speed.
Or this, at least, is what I write in my notebook about it, on the plane home from one side of the planet to the other, after we met and talked about writing this book together. This book about speed. Or perhaps I had intentionally forgotten that in 1896 in Indiana, when someone issued the first driver's license, speed was subtextual. A car nearly took me out on a corner a few mornings back, and as fate would have it, it was in exactly the same place that my partner had been run over a year earlier.
It's New York, 1899 -- a driver is being arrested for going twelve miles an hour. Hyperdrive. It's 1997 and a biker is using a claw hammer to prise open the door of an ex-mate who's been cooking a barrel-load of speed in his kitchen. As he bursts in he can't help admiring the volatile liquids, the exquisite cross between the domestic and commercial that is the operation, that is the home living space.
I take stock. I scroll through my diary. I scroll. The kerning of the letter 'a' constantly introduces unwanted space in the narrative. It irritates me. It slows things down. And the false page break has a sentence hanging below it -- widows and orphans, an accident on the water as the fast boat skips over a piece of barely submerged debris and deflects into nothingness. Because that's what's at the end of it -- at the end of peak hour, the drama before the stock exchange closes for the day.
The rapid gesture fuses with sleep and the nightmares rush on and on and on. The faster it gets, the more it labours through the thin veins in the brain. Dilating them, interfering with the quick sparks leaping like a Forbes poem across the synaptic gap. Like the come-on of acid or strychnine. That brittle accelerating laugh. The crack up. I look to you to modulate and you are not there, where I address you. You too are volatile.
This book does not have a point at which it is authored, but a vector, these lines between. I email you 300 words, then you email me 300 words. And there is an error correction protocol: if the receiver doesn't receive within 48 hours after sending, the receiver sends the next 300 words too. As I hammer the keyboard, I can't help admiring the transient geometry of packet switching, despatching chunks of data from one side of the planet to the other. Speed perfected.
Only, as Paul Virilio famously noted, every technology programs its own accident.2 So I'm recording here the fact that this is what happened: I won the toss and kicked off this speed writing process, but your server crashed, you lost time, you asked for another 48 hours. Which reminds me of something I read in a magazine. Wait, I'll find it... here it is: "Last year 60 people dropped dead as they walked off planes at Heathrow airport -- and it wasn't the airline food."3
Economy Class Syndrome: long delays without moving your legs, blood pooling and clotting in your feet, the clots travelling to your lungs, causing a speedy death. The accident programmed by commercial jet traffic. But is the accident always a tragedy? The book is the accident of writing. Writing is a way of dividing sense up into bits, and inscribing these bits on a surface, in order to get sense moving from one place and time to another.
All those cuneiform marks -- turns out most of them were accounts of tributes to the Babylonian state. But then, the accident -- the Epic of Gilgamesh, transcribed from speech to clay, and down through the centuries, from parchment to paper. Sense moving in slomo. But I gotta tell you, it's the waiting that kills me.
Waiting for free time. Waiting for the score. Waiting for real love. Waiting for green lights. All this time that is not itself. All this time lived in anticipation of some other time. All this time that is not itself, but exists for me only because of the possibility of a time to come.
All of lived time anticipates death. All of lived time is waiting -- except when I forget that I am waiting. It's not hard to see why suicide has it's own gravity, it's own pull. It is just forgetting to wait. A tailspin of forgetting. I think this is why waiting brings out the worst in people. You see it every day. Drivers, caught in a jam, honking and yelling.
If every technology programs its own accident, what if every speed induces its own kind of waiting? What if, for every acceleration of speed, there was an equal and opposite wait that awaits us? Hell is the wait. But here is the strange thing -- how this unnatural time, this time that exists only in anticipation of another time, can become something pure. We become junkies of the wait.
Slumped blank against time, leaning on it like a prop, the waiting body is free from any demand other than readiness for the time to come. The wait can become a permanent state, not anticipating the time of action to come, but as a parallel existence, completely detached from anticipation.
Perhaps this is the pure invention of these times. Not the invention of pure speed, but the invention of pure waiting. Waiting that anticipates nothing. Time lived without anticipation of some other kind of time, but in a serene slackness devoid of any expectation. The wait, the subtext, the static that counters any report of progress. You see, you can only guess at what it will be like once the finishing line has been crossed.
Up until that point what it's like over the crest as you put the pedal to the metal, flatline the turbo, pull the plunger back so that swirl of blood does something overtly scientific, is only conjecture. The technology of break, of entering the surface, the ups and downs of the curvature, count for nothing. An answering machine played back over and over is soothing. It slows you down. But is this what you want? You tell yourself that you're killing closure.
Speed kills, take smack instead. The cat's eyes form a continuous strip of light like a copy of High Times in the toilet. You half-flush. A minor embolism. Externally, something responds rapidly. Ah, Freedom is not merely, not merely, not merely... disclose the essential long ungrounded, disclose exposure of being disclosed-ness, as such being ek-sistent, Da-sein, a chewing gum that buzzes the gums and has you busy busy busy, hoovering the grass like litigation.
And suddenly it's night, and you ignite existent theology. I believe I believe so rapidly muttered under your breath, waking no one, no one at all. What I want to know is what's in a brand name. What type do you use? At the eye of the cyclone is General Electric, and White knew this. They pulled up at the bottom of his driveway in the white Holden and yelled from the car -- we know what you're up to! The Feds are moving in.
You hear this in every Balmain hotel that's left over from the 70s. Though some say it was a Mustang. Some, that there were four poets and a professor of English in the car, others that it was entirely empty. Truth is, truth is manner, all manner of ek-sistence. We know you cared, Patrick, we know the injustice of it all got to you. We -- I -- speed-read your oeuvre and polished it off tidily this side of eighteen hours.
Sydney Harbour vibrates as Ken Done sets up another canvas just beyond the fallout from the shells of the Opera House, the colours so -- well -- vibrant and ready, colours of iron, oxygen, Sydney, "because Sydney is what I have in my blood."4 White had rust in the blood, residues of White cells nuked by speed.
Snapshots in a flawed lens: White in America, watching The Wizard of Oz while war breaks out, feeling like his novelist's vocation carried away "by the flood of history." White at war, Spengler and Dostoyevsky high-wiring through his head, with some more elemental White clinging to Judy Garland's technicolor rainbow "as the Stukas flew overhead in the desert."
White in London, where "falling bombs and Eyre's Journal started in me a longing for Australia and some kind of creative urge." A place and time of radical uncertainty, in which it was yet still possible to read at peace. White posted to HQ Fighter Command at Bentley Priory, a structure which "concealed a ganglion of nerves which reached out through the British Isles from an underground operations room."
White in the desert again, going through the pockets of dead airmen for letters, maps, diaries -- gathering intelligence. "Our activities were probably only of importance for the novelist in myself." A novelist who sees in Dickens the "intact jugular" of life that must persist, amid the detonations, at least in writing -- life's other speed. White demobbed, unlearning habits of writing acquired in intelligence work, growing "drunk cultivating a garden of words."
But perhaps there is no Patrick White the novelist without these other Whites, the ones crouching in the shadow of immense machines, of war and cinema, of movement and information. These other Whites lived in the lees of speed, speed on an industrial scale, and dreamed of another kind of desert, where figures walk again knowing that the shadows cast across their path by the sky are just a surprise of clouds. This is Francis Webb getting his reds-under-the-bed tuppence worth, though it drifted like a Cold War haze into the decimal era, as if White had platinum fillings.
There's a subtext here, of course, and one recognises it. The whites of their eyes, the blankness of the Australian canvas that just needs to be filled, the live and let live scenario turned upside down by General Electric. Oh, that last weird sentence (something vanished -- we're also getting a bit of that! which I kinda like) -- I just checked the sentmail -- has dropped into White's lived-in field, the lines of speed, speed on an industrial scale, a speed that makes the city of Sydney a beautiful network of roads and trees and chunks of plasterboard.
Ah, that bloody path by the sky as protests choke throats in Bankstown -- they'd better not wreck our Olympics with their claims claims claims! There's a press conference held in London and Germaine Greer says don't sit there that chair is reserved for -- well, for you.
This is not a problem, not a problem at all. But it's true we're having server problems and as Uni is wrapping up and students going down I'm caught in this maelstrom of work. I think the book will be brilliant and it's the big project on the horizon for me at the moment. So rest assured, within a short period of time it will be all systems go. Could... end... that would be great -- should have read:
Not at all -- I'm right into Speed Factory!!!! Like Show Girls. The film that simply everyone hated, darling. But it's true we're having server problems and as Uni is wrapping up and I'm caught in this maelstrom of work and think the book will be brilliant and it's the big project other than White on an industrial scale, and desert, where figures walk again knowing that clouds make binaries and this is all about quotas dangling over head like overheads.
Collaborative writing is like sex. Attempting to match speeds between bodies. Technical difficulties. Can't get the condom on or that bit of clothing off. My server is down; my libido, crashed. Same antimony of anxiety: why does the other not respond to this movement? Or else: what does the other's response to this movement mean? Perhaps the only difference is that it's possible still to live with the illusion that sex is not caught up in some vast machinery of speeds, whereas literature is obviously factory work. It's deadlines, pub dates -- movement on the industrial scale.
I reckon the subtext to HIV-AIDS hysteria is the recognition that sex is not private. Like writing, it's connected, in this case to a huge medical and legal apparatus, to contraceptive technology, abortion rights, age of consent law reform. Wherever there is speed, there is the virus of technical difficulties.
Ken Slessor, official war correspondent, poet of speed, struggling to rendezvous in England with Noela, his love, and get a dispatch past the censors back to the folks in Australia. But it's high time to ask: do women experience speed differently? Slessor writes women out of the beginning of the story when he describes leaving Sydney on a massive troop convoy in 1940:
"There were women on the other side of Sydney Cove, standing there dumbly in the drifts of rain, clinging to the wet iron and staring through the railings with a hungry intentness. They made no effort to wave. Their faces, white and strained and tiny in the distance, hardly moved. All through the morning I noticed them and was aware of their thin hands gripping the iron, and the rain over their knuckles and running over their wedding rings."5
Women's bodies barred from nautical vectors but no longer Lords, where it raineth in the long room and the pavilions spill saffron over the East India Company, and good ol' Josh stalks Rebecca. Ah, tastes good. Mr Speed says it's a crying shame that Warney soiled his good name like that and comes out with someone else's line -- "we are dangerous", I know, one thing being letteral and the other liter-al, we ARE at war; concurrently, the roman rack and foot clamps and oligarchy that is cricket has them snaring good wickets like deferred pain, desiring always the postscript -- that stat rather than the score, undermining team spirit as with the Great Australian Novel which must be a quick but long read that drags you through all manner of terrains.
The long and straight of it is Roman on the M roads, even country lanes sprouting again like coppice or subspace signatures beneath the carapace, the canals throwing up their stuff and the inquisitors measuring a body for chains and cage, wedging the foot, inciting cameras as the fines will go straight into the police's coffers, and The Boys is a hit in a few London cinemas -- the praise is lavish and everything is true grit and good.
The bookie makes a quick buck. A killing. A packet. An English commentator calls the atmosphere "festive". Long Wave, medium wave, short wave. Like haircuts and other cultural baggage stuck in a warehouse down by the waterfront. A dumb lawyer races towards his client in a clapped-out Pontiac. Chromed pipeware tables and chair, packed full of gear, tremble in anticipation of free houses, flex under the weight of dusty old paperbacks. Penguins, mostly. Old wartime Penguins from the 40s in regulation orange jackets. Literary modernism gone to war in servivemen's pockets. Penguin Modern Classics from the 70s in Germano Facetti covers, a Dali painting gracing the cover of Sartre's Nausea, as if the two were interchangeable. Penguin Twentieth Century Classics from the 90s, fronted mostly by nostalgic black and white photographs of a modern world well lost.
These books built empires of literary speed from the Outer Hebrides to the New Hebrides. Modern content packaged in modern form. I pick one up and read it. I become Virginia Woolf, driving, writing, rapturing the evening's shapes and colours in a Sussex landscape, "overcome by beauty extravagantly greater that one could expect... I cannot hold this -- I cannot express this -- I am overcome by it -- I am mastered."6
But not completely, out from under this mastered self appear another, that resists, that insists that self is mastery itself. Selves dispute: To master or be mastered by beauty? A third self appears and places the line of cliffs firmly in the past. "I feel life left behind even as the road is left behind." Then a fourth self, like an intermittent signal: "I feel suddenly attached, not to the past but to the future. I think of Sussex in five hundred years to come."
Out of this fissure of selves, Woolf smooths out a slipstream of an idea: "Look, I will make a little figure for your satisfaction; here he comes. Does this little figure advancing through beauty, through death, to the economical, powerful and efficient future... satisfy you?" A rattle of Virginias cry "Yes! Yes!" But then another voice airs something different: "Eggs and bacon; toast and tea; fire and bath...". The body comes to stump these flights of mind.
Comes unread as fiscal policy dictates the arts council strikes deep into the bunkers, pinpoint and stealthlike the Penguin 60s classics version of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Meditations Of A Solitary Walker has me walking as the Butcher of Baghdad amongst the many hearts of Richard Burton and date palms, the three wise men in my daughter's nativity play Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, and maybe the French President, or was that wishful thinking? He defers and condemns and makes a pact with Russia. World opinion trembles and grows solid, again.
I am Jean-Jacques saying print will map my virtual digressions: But I was still counting on the future, and I hoped that a better generation, examining more closely both the judgement pronounced against me by the present generation and its conduct towards me towards me towards me towards me, would find it easy to unravel the stratagems of those who control it and would at last see me as I really am. They laugh at Tony Benn who says in parliament -- you' re all immoral.
Headsets on and the B52s rock on. As Thoreau is prompted out of the leather bindings on State occasions, impeached over and over and over: They mistake who assert that the Yankee has few amusements, because he has not so many public holidays... the decor riddled green with envy on the opposition's mug-shots, war makes a prime minister memorable, the new generation cruise missiles actually being cheaper and more accurate, and tornadoes comin' in fast once the AA is muted, them's our boys, o war reporter, Slessor, Virginia Woolf eating asparagus. Eating feminism as if it mattered. The dust the dust and CNN hanging in there, decked up on the ministry of information, barely weighed down by flakjackets and the son et lumiere:
Thursday is the net for weddings in Iraq, they've grown used to it and know the wisdom (pearl of the other orient) behind the 20-year-old's words in the London Evening Standard: "It can't be helped when civilians get in the way" -- "How blind that cannot see serenity!" How blind that cannot see serenity How blind that cannot see serenity -- yet strangely comforting. Particularly the details. Paul Beaver, group spokesman for Jane's Defence, says in the papers that 12 Tornado strike aircraft launched attacks with Paveway III laser guided bombs, which are strengthened to penetrate concrete bunkers. Accurate to about 3 metres, they are almost as good as Tomahawk cruise missiles, which are accurate to 2 metres. Tomahawks cost ten times more than Paveways. Never mind the quality feel the width, as the South London spiv says as he slips the bolt back into the car boot.
But wait! There's more! The bombs dropped on Baghdad in 1998 are "four times" more accurate than in 1991. So they say. We'll have to wait and see. The only point to the bombing is to get the arms inspectors back into Iraq -- to assess how effective the technology was. "After all, somebody has to check on the damage caused to the weapons of mass destruction. That is the only possible endgame from the latest round of military operations."7 Get those post-Patrick White airforce intelligence types back in to measure how much progress we're making. Poets of the vector, of novel telemetries. War as the production of ever more precise facts. As Bertold Brecht already knew, "strategy has turned into surgery".8 Saddam Hussein's last card -- make the west wait for its test results. I keep buying the morning and evening editions, but the result is always a draw.
Brecht again: "The spectator's need... to be distracted from his daily warfare is continually reproduced by that daily warfare, but is just as continually in conflict with his need to be able to control his own fate." And so I wait, and anticipate. Hovering and Hoovering, a back and forth rhythm; the push of desire, the pull of anxiety. A nervous system of appliances, a network of servers.
On the way from Sydney to New York, I'm at LAX airport in Los Angeles the day before Xmas. Somebody left an unattended bag in the American Airlines terminal. The bomb squad mobilise against this unknown, and we passengers wait while the space is cordoned. Meanwhile, everything proceeds as normal in the Delta terminal next door. As if a potential bomb in the American terminal would not rip through the wall into the space of a rival airline. The bomb routine has become so much a part of everyday life that these absurdities are barely noticeable. The potential dangers of a space must be contained within limits, even if nobody knows what those limits should be.
Nobody knows when an airport or a country are really free from weapons of mass destruction. But it is important to produce the appearance of producing facts about dangers. Weapons inspectors, bomb disposal teams, fact finding missions, international observers, criminal psychiatrists, royal commissions, the grand jury, investigative journalism, smoke detectors -- the telemetry of everyday life, signals mapping the threat and thread of unpredictable movements. I log on to check the weather over Sydney, over Bagdhad. I search the heard disc for note I think I filed somewhere.
Here it is. Kathy Acker writes: "How can we, as Hannah Arendt says, even in worlds that seem to have become inhuman, remain obligated to these worlds? Obligated, for being writers, our job is to hear and put together narrations and so give meaning to what seems to be or is inhuman."9 How can we, even inside the speed factory, write in the name of a more democratic time, a more civil space? Maybe I'm just depressed by the knowledge, brought to light in a Pakistani court, that even cricket becomes corrupted. Alternatively, the corrupt make the best captains. And after all, it -- winning, that is, is only relative. A long break, a leg break, express bowling.
I pause and take stock. An age. I've collected a stack of footnotes and am tracking down the primary text at the moment. An experiment with time. The rush as Marina Warner's Joan of Arc enters my mind's eye -- it's so visual: On two counts, Joan grievously flouted the laws of Chivalry, thus endangering herself in a world that still paid lip service and bringing about part of her condemnation. Object, ego, signifier. Prayer is instant -- measured outside time. It can't even be compared to something fast -- say like the speed of light. There's no "relatively speaking". Damnation comes in an instant, maybe the instant it's repealed. Grace and Damnation are simultaneous, ever present. Like Monsanto releasing genetically modified rape seed into the environment. They'll plead guilty. It pays to.
The Book of Margery Kempe: "Nevertheless, daughter, I have ordained you to be a mirror amongst them, to have great sorrow, so that they should take example from you to have some little sorrow in their hearts for their sins, so that they might through that be saved; yet they have no love to hear of sorrow or of contrition."10 Finite. Limiting? Mass and body. Discrete variables as the analogue turns on the table. There's a child with a paper cone with a pin stuck through the tapered end. Black Sabbath crackles. A Led Zeppelin record is compelled backwards.
There's rapture in this, if you know the subtext. It might be a poem by a famous Australian poet. His rise was, well, almost rapid. The snow has been and gone. Deep below the surface of the fens the peat smoulders. At Wicken they clear the scrub so the nouns can grow incrementally. A certain kind of bumble bee will prosper amongst their determined stance. From the old tower hide we watch a variety of waterbirds settle. There are rumours of otters, tracking from watercourse to watercourse, across the fens. Nearby, the Bishop of Ely counts the collection and thinks about Maundy Money.
Have just been chatting with Tom Pynchon, but I don't use mobile telephones... wait a minute, there's someone on the other line. Sorry wrong number. Your call has been placed in a queue, and will be answered by the first available sales representative. While global capital accelerates to light speed, King of the optical fibre, consumer sovereignty waits in line. But does any speed make any sense any more without an absolute speed, against which to experience its limits, its finitude?
In Carl Dreyer's film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Joan (Maria Falconetti) stares, not at the camera, but through it, staring through light, air, celluloid, staring through retina, memory, burning into timelessness. Joan is not waiting for kangaroo court justice. She stares through us to another time. Only Antonin Artaud, in a now famous bit part, stares at Jean the way Jean stares at time. There is something inhuman about it.
If for Hannah Arendt, the problem is one of maintaining a human communication within the inhuman world of the speed factory, for Dreyer the problem is something else again. The speed factory interfaces with us via the image of the face -- it graces every screen and magazine and record cover. These faces are prosthetic extensions of the inhuman into the human world. I have no idea how a TV or a CD works, but faces smile from both, real friendly, beckoning me.
But Dreyer makes the face that stares from the speed factory's most prestigious screen, it's silver screen, one that stares into another kind of inhuman world, one not of our making. Dreyer's Joan stares out from the merely human death sentenced by the courts, and stares through to absolute death. Dreyer found a way to orient the machinery of speed, the cinematic apparatus, the grinding gears of relative speeds, to something outside their merely relative gains and waits.
Not every machine works so effectively. Dreyer's own apparatus didn't always run smooth. Or think of the legal apparatus that consigned Joan to the flames. It didn't intend thereby to make her immortal, a precocious celebrity.
One thing we didn't take into account when starting Speed Factory -- it would not just be an account of the accident, it would itself be prey to accidents, and this would slow it down. It was not, fortunately, a textual machine of much efficiency. What I propose is to end part one with these 300 words. As Cioran says, "a book should be a danger" -- the writing as much as the reading of it.11
Danger puts form at risk of deformation. To give form, to inform, requires also an element of deforming. Information is pattern with a hole in it. The paradox of the speed factory: the disorder that premises its orderings. What I now fear is writing made safe, and thereby made to serve. Writing gets pressed into service, becomes a manufacturing, not a manufracturing. "In times of war... the doctrine of 'national service' gains enormous force, which can be turned to the establishing, for peacetime, of a corresponding doctrine of service to the community."12 Which is what 'literature' has become, service to the moral order of the state -- it's textual line of defence, security.
As John Anderson wrote in the 40s: "... servility is rapidly gaining ground. The process has, of course, been greatly accelerated by the war; this might, indeed, if we abstract from particular national aims and consider the whole society of predatory nations, be described as the 'purpose' of the war. Naive persons believe, because one side is opposed to freedom, that the other side must be in favour of it." A thought worth reviving in the cruise missile age.
1 T. E. Lawrence (352087 A/c Ross), The Mint, Penguin, London, 1978, p. 42
2 Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer, Pure War, Semiotext(e), New York, 1983, pp. 30-33
3 Andrea Jones, "Dying To Fly', GQ Australia, November 1998, p. 136
4 Patrick White, Flaws in the Glass, Penguin, London, 1981, p. 149, pp. 74-5, p. 83, p. 84, p. 92, p. 96, p. 127
5 Clement Semmler (ed), The War Despatches of Kenneth Slessor, Official War Correspondent 1940-1944, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia Qld, 1987, p. 9
6 'Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car', in Virginia Woolf, The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, edited by Rachel Bowlby, Penguin Books, London, 1993, pp. 82-85
7 Paul Beaver, 'This Time, Their Hardware is Even More Lethal', Sydney Morning Herald, 19th December
8 Bertold Brecht, Journals 1934-1955, Methuen, London, 1993, p. 139, p. 82
9 Kathy Acker, Bodies of Work: Essays, Serpent's Tail, London, 1997, p. 102
10 S. B. Meech (ed) The Book of Margery Kempe, Oxford University Press, 1961
11 E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered, Arcade Publishing, New York, 1998, p67
12 John Anderson, 'The Servile State', Studies in Empirical Philosophy, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1962, pp. 328-339