1989: Notes Toward an Arrangement, Volume VIII
Viscountess Viola Vorpel
I have at last gathered the disorderly manuscripts, drafts, and newspaper clippings that have been slipping about my rooms for months, a preposterous anthology of voices and epochs which, on brief inspection, appear to have been written by one person impersonating several centuries. They fill three untidy heaps upon the dining‑table—fortunately large, unfortunately occupied by the cat, who has declared especially heretical opinions of the second pile. I have labelled them only A, B, and C, and shall leave their proper naming for another afternoon. “Studies in the Manners of Knowledge,” perhaps, or “The Human Arrangement,” though both titles already sound used.
The first bundle contains the diaries, letters, and orations that float between history and invention. A noblewoman from the early eighteenth century, forever staring at her own pen as if it were a moral instrument. Another, set down in the 1830s or thereabouts, entangled in theology and candle‑wax. A conference of Edwardian gentlemen arguing about metaphysics as though it were horse registration. Later still, that deranged Duke of Mallard, 1922 by the binding, calling upon Parliament to regulate metaphysics before breakfast. Altogether, they form a kind of alternative history in which language is the only reliable empire.
The second heap is filled with comedies and creatures. The painter of ducks swims at the top, quacking with philosophical conviction. A bewildered charwoman from New South Wales ponders the possibility of Artificial Intelligence, which she imagines as a mechanical help in the laundry. Somewhere amid these pages lurk two memoranda from the Ministry of Internal Harmony and the essay from the Department of Psychological Theology, that scandal of 1956 which caused such pleasant irritation. They all belong to the same pantomime of bureaucracy and belief, half provincial, half celestial.
The third pile, heavier and flashier, concerns itself with desire—in all its social disguises. A bored English lord lecturing Parisians in 1967 on the economics of knowledge; a Sydney philanthropist setting his mother’s money on fire by founding a college for every kind of misfit; a post‑war essay titled The Gentleman’s Gentlemen, which wonders why male nudes have disappeared from public life; and an Australian schoolgirl of about 1972 dissecting theoretical physics while deciding, quite sensibly, to become an astro‑navigator. Collectively they represent peculiar faiths in freedom, beauty, and the intelligent misuse of education.
I think the book, if ever completed, might fall into three sweeping parts—Belief, Order, and Desire—though I no longer remember which text belongs where. They do connect, somehow: a long conversation about knowledge and the manners in which people worship or dodge it. Perhaps the work should appear anonymously, without commentary or dates, as though each voice were a message imprisoned in its own century. I have toyed with several titles: Perpetual Containment, The Department of Difficult Meaning, even A History of Unfinished Minds. None are satisfactory but all will do.
For the present, I have tied the piles with kitchen string and placed them in the trunk beside the spare lamp. There they will wait until I finish the Biography of the Dukes of Mallard—a delightful dynasty of confusion, scandals, and waterfowl. When that is done, I shall return to these papers and see whether they can be made to resemble a book, or at least a plausible system of madness. Until then, they are sleeping, not forgotten, like an orchestra holding a chord while its conductor enjoys an unexpectedly long lunch.
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