ADORNMENTS

Get them up. I want every man-jack of them on deck, out of those bunks. What
I'm a sailor now? One
moment I'm in my garret
having a reasonable sleep …
But the Navy—I'll see the world. Or is it that, 'join the navy & you'll

see the sea'? They say that. They usually add, 'it can be very samey'.
All the same, I'm in.
Maybe this time it'll work
tho it didn't for my father.
He spent the War in Australia, 'soldiering'. Dreamin', I suppose, of Egypt.

Beginning in media res—do I always do that? never do that? Have I ever?
The beginning
is the beginning
wherever you start.
You take Adorno—reading him you have to laugh

You're meant to probably. Maybe these are 'comic turns',
elegant demonstrations
of Impossibility. (What is
the Latin plural
of conundra? I mean 'conundrum'. Conundra? Why don't I

look it up? You ask. But I am from that old school
that doesn't believe
in research. Still,
I have to wonder.
For him—Adorno—'intellectuals' can come only

from Wealth, assembled over generations—by generations—
their avarice &
application,
allowing the late, aberrant
butterfly to roam ‘free’, (in inverted commas), flitting authentically from apercu

to apercu—pure, unentangled, tho entangled like all of us in the horror
of social & economic
relations. I saw him, 'once',
as agressively mournful—but I see
his amusement might have been glee, a pirouetting for his friends &

colleagues. A joke about 'their difference from their kind'. Effete? Were they?
Donnish, where they weren't
shading into bohemian. Although
those terms suggest Brecht,
& Walter Benjamin. Theodor I think feared Walter's thought

would be coarsened by hanging out with Brecht. Whereas we read Benjamin more—
for his more
forceful way
with words, with concepts
with sudden jumps of logic and association. Do I know what

I'm talking about? Not usually. So. Adorno jokes—& yet he is serious.
I take him seriously.
Tho does my seriousness
—brought wriggling &
self-conscious to the table—stand for much? It's all I have,

is part of the answer. The avarice & somnolence—the careful maintenance
of accrued profit.
Bourgeois.
Giving bud finally,
or allowing flower, the hot-house blooms—that are Walter & Theodor

& the others. Not bourgeois? Who is ever not conscious
of where they stand on that?
It's not a term to use—too
easily employed
as an epithet (more or less shouted—or snarled—in contestation.

By members of the middle class against each other). As well, I have gathered
& gathered, till I
more or less 'know'
its real meaning is almost
out of reach: the banking and legal families of nineteenth-century France, Germany,

Austria. Their lives, their attitudes, you can read about—but that world is gone.
(Tho it may be coming back.)
(I'll be gone, too, soon enough—
before the middle class
are cut from work, & the workers become the unemployed or the tradies.) Gone

before I ever learned. The weirdest pale reflection of it, 'the Bourgeois world',
kept alive in
me, in others
(not 'of' the bourgeois class)—
in imaginings informed by literature, study—attaining the kinds of education

Adorno would not regard as education—uncouth, 'piecemeal-sophisticated',
piecemeal-dumb, in-
articulate. But
sorry for themselves?

Who's not? One is always of necessity 'entangled'. "Is man
not naturally
good?"—a woman asks.
"No, ma'am," Johnson replies.
"No more than a wolf!" "It gets worse!" I hear Margaret Dumont

her voice aquaver, fan busy at her neck and face.
"For the intellectual
inviolable isolation
is now the only way
of showing some measure of solidarity." The gulf between Adorno & me

won't be bridged: the embarrassment of our different words & thoughts. Impossible!
He can usually see
some double bind.
One imagines him, Adorno,
appalled—his dismay at my reading him—or, as easily, the despair

of all past ages at being read—the permanent rumble of rolling in
graves—protesting, as somebody said,
"the enormous condescension
of posterity". Fame converted
to quaintness, error. Live long enough & you'll taste it. One sees,

standing here on the shoulders, how clean this giant's ears are,
how bad the dandruff.
Shampoos have changed,
mightily. Itemising
his privileges, his inconsistencies (are there any?), his pastness

… better the absolute truth of what he says, & his fastidiousness.
'What is to be done?'
will require other texts,
other attitudes. As a poet—
that other romantic nineteenth-century category—I won't be

involved. Will he? … now it functions as a mild & pretentious
pejorative, not a
description. The guy
who gives his
Audi a wash on a Saturday, with 'quiet pride'—a phrase of John Forbes'

(Ah, yes—"a quiet pride permeates the Swedes" or someone, at
something or other,
some general societal achievement).
Anyway, he
is not a bourgeois, in Adorno's view … or ‘usage’. I wonder what

Adorno drove—a modest Skoda? or did he walk to work?
(A skateboard? ! in memory of his
California days?)
a Trabant? or
Trabant Abarth? He would be scathing at my persistent

avoidance of the main point—of any main point. It is best not to be
at all self-conscious
reading Adorno.
Just follow his ideas. He
is the point. Gig wonders if poets are not in fact just 'garrulous depressives'—

and I picture them—each like the desk-bound figure
in Goya's Sleep Of Reason picture.
Every now and then one
raises his head & holds forth
(the bats disappear from above), falters, slows, or stops dead—puts

his head on the desk again. Dark night of the soul. But Adorno—
back to him. Gig
is gently reproaching me
for my attitude to Tranter.
And I can see her points. I read the poems—for the first time

(in any number) in twenty-five years—& they didn't all seem all that good
or interesting—or even
very adult even— after years
of him posturing as the
only adult in the room.

And one looked away—I did—so as
not to
take the oath, genuflect,
or sign on for anything. I was
inevitably going to write my way. Could I have done anything else—

technique was not my special strength? And there, in these
ambivalences
lay my, um,
ambivalences. Why,
of course, should he have been any more grown up

than the rest of us? Because he said he was? Ah, Johnny T. He published
once or twice,
as John 'E' Tranter
(speaking of masks).
(Were we?) Anyway, I told him I'd figured his magazine's name

derived from 'Jack E. T.' (I'd heard Forbes call him Jack once in an argument,
in the street, in Carlton.
How literary is that. John
(Tranter) was on the footpath.
John Forbes was a-straddle his bike. Bit of a stand-off. Tranter assured me

it wasn't so. (The title.) I'm sure it was. Not that I care or think it a point against him, but
I was amused.
Tranter might have worn
many masks in his writing, I agree with Gig.
And the mask can be both mask and accurate face. Who isn't a projection most of the time

& whose projections aren't, in telling ways, authentic?
Even alone with oneself.
As a poet, you lose interest
in your self, I think—even as it's
increasingly 'all you've got'? All you've got unless you develop 'an interest',

a hobby, a favoured subject matter, 'themes'.
I'm not sure
if I am against
all these things.
Maybe against them as conscious decisions.

Though why would being un-conscious or thoughtless be preferable? So: I'm a
volatile neutral. As well as
a voluble depressive. Am I?
Am I that?
The cynicism, maybe adopted as his early manner, was one preferred face.

Back then it would have been mine too, everybody's—it made his work bracing.
The 'sentimental'
he came to treat
with a kind of ironic kindliness
more & more often. Tho he was happy enough to turn on it. Masks, as you said, Gig.

Finally, I'm beginning to feel more and more, as I suppose I expected to, that I've been
unfair to Tranter and blind
to his achievements. I'm sure
I don't like as much of his poetry
as many do, but I like more of it than I did a year ago. Is this a kind of base-line

rally between my various opinions. Things I like versus things I think are wrong or
dopey? If the analogy
is with
tennis players
my opinions, I guess, would have to coalesce into two opposing figures.

I wonder if they did in fact. Objections all of a certain sort—
Enthusiasms,
something different?
'Who cares?'
Would I like to be a systematic thinker? Barthes had a horror of system. I have

laziness. "There's no room for laziness on the tennis court!" "There
isn't? Oh.
Can I go
back to my
desk?"

Ken Bolton lives in Adelaide where he was for a long while associated with the Experimental Art Foundation & the Lee Marvin readings. His latest book is Metropole, from Puncher & Wattmann Press.

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