needless to say. She cheers our blood along the road. There is a population in these parts—a depressed population—whose survival seems to matter to her.”
“Where are they—the people she cares for?”
“Always on their guard. Each and everyone who comes from outside is suspect and they do not easily approach strangers or new arrivals. The Director-General has his agents, you see, amongst them, amongst us all. It’s (to put it mildly) a testing time. For example, despite all the talk of revolutionary theatre which one hears of these days there are totalitarian rumblings as well. There are some who venture to say that the new offer the Authorities made—the economic hand-out they were prepared to give is a sign of the times.”
“Sign of the times? What do you mean?”
“Sign of a totalitarian economic theatre. That is what I mean. Wealth may come to Namless in the wake of the Director-General but that wealth may well reflect a totalitarian brotherhood or economy of man.”
“I fear I am no economist. I do not understand.”
“Neither am I. I merely repeat the dark rumours, the dark rumours of time. The Dark Rumour is our newspaper in Namless and it says that with each economic hand-out within the proverbial nation-state the effects are to consolidate the proverbial middle class and to attract to it new and successful elements from the proverbial working class.”
“I belong to that proverbial middle class myself. Is it such a bad thing after all?”
“Thus a kind of human economic bastion is created within the state,” Knife went on as if he had not heard Goodrich, “against every so-called revolutionary underground. In the same token I read in Dark Rumour of an economic hand-out by South Africa to Malawi.”
“How does Dark Rumour editorialize this?” Goodrich was half-exasperated, half-fascinated.
“As the first step in the African continent towards a totalitarian brotherhood of man where black and white masters may well begin to sit at the same high table and feast on the same side of the fence. It’s an old story, of course, in the American hemisphere except that there it’s become patently absurd when every human economic bastion proves but another face to the American dinosaur of the twentieth century.”
“And is this the reason for the entry of the Director-General?”
“Ah,” said Knife in his dead pan voice which laughed in the dinosaur’s sleeve, “Namless has become (quite unwittingly, quite unselfconsciously) the repudiation of self-conscious ideologies. Perhaps therefore it is a laboratory of startling contrasts which intrigue the Authorities immensely. There is an emergent philosophy of revolution bound up with a re-sensing, re-sensitizing of dead monsters—the spatial potential, the architectural caveats and potentials at the heart of such apparent monsters—if one is to begin afresh from the hidden grassroots of a new age and not succumb to the inevitable temptations, the inevitable monolithic imperatives.”
“Are you quoting from Dark Rumour ?”
“I always quote from Dark Rumour. I have no opinions of my own. I cannot afford such a private luxury.” He cast a contemptuous eye at Goodrich’s diaries. “There is a guerrilla theatre now in subconscious league with the very formidable intelligences that once sought to wipe it out. Thus it is in a position to immortalize itself at last within foundations sprung from the decay of the very barbarous death-dealing capital it once feared.”
Knife’s bus rattled and Goodrich was aware of a change of scenery.
It was the same world as yesterday but a curious subtle fleshing (if that was the right word) appeared upon the rocks. Perhaps, thought Goodrich, it was something to do with the light. Whatever it was—light or film of new vegetation—it had subtly awakened the landscape, the bones of the landscape, as a sleeping but treacherous giant stirs refreshed by age-old cataclysmic dreams. (Once there had been an
“Where are they—the people she cares for?”
“Always on their guard. Each and everyone who comes from outside is suspect and they do not easily approach strangers or new arrivals. The Director-General has his agents, you see, amongst them, amongst us all. It’s (to put it mildly) a testing time. For example, despite all the talk of revolutionary theatre which one hears of these days there are totalitarian rumblings as well. There are some who venture to say that the new offer the Authorities made—the economic hand-out they were prepared to give is a sign of the times.”
“Sign of the times? What do you mean?”
“Sign of a totalitarian economic theatre. That is what I mean. Wealth may come to Namless in the wake of the Director-General but that wealth may well reflect a totalitarian brotherhood or economy of man.”
“I fear I am no economist. I do not understand.”
“Neither am I. I merely repeat the dark rumours, the dark rumours of time. The Dark Rumour is our newspaper in Namless and it says that with each economic hand-out within the proverbial nation-state the effects are to consolidate the proverbial middle class and to attract to it new and successful elements from the proverbial working class.”
“I belong to that proverbial middle class myself. Is it such a bad thing after all?”
“Thus a kind of human economic bastion is created within the state,” Knife went on as if he had not heard Goodrich, “against every so-called revolutionary underground. In the same token I read in Dark Rumour of an economic hand-out by South Africa to Malawi.”
“How does Dark Rumour editorialize this?” Goodrich was half-exasperated, half-fascinated.
“As the first step in the African continent towards a totalitarian brotherhood of man where black and white masters may well begin to sit at the same high table and feast on the same side of the fence. It’s an old story, of course, in the American hemisphere except that there it’s become patently absurd when every human economic bastion proves but another face to the American dinosaur of the twentieth century.”
“And is this the reason for the entry of the Director-General?”
“Ah,” said Knife in his dead pan voice which laughed in the dinosaur’s sleeve, “Namless has become (quite unwittingly, quite unselfconsciously) the repudiation of self-conscious ideologies. Perhaps therefore it is a laboratory of startling contrasts which intrigue the Authorities immensely. There is an emergent philosophy of revolution bound up with a re-sensing, re-sensitizing of dead monsters—the spatial potential, the architectural caveats and potentials at the heart of such apparent monsters—if one is to begin afresh from the hidden grassroots of a new age and not succumb to the inevitable temptations, the inevitable monolithic imperatives.”
“Are you quoting from Dark Rumour ?”
“I always quote from Dark Rumour. I have no opinions of my own. I cannot afford such a private luxury.” He cast a contemptuous eye at Goodrich’s diaries. “There is a guerrilla theatre now in subconscious league with the very formidable intelligences that once sought to wipe it out. Thus it is in a position to immortalize itself at last within foundations sprung from the decay of the very barbarous death-dealing capital it once feared.”
Knife’s bus rattled and Goodrich was aware of a change of scenery.
It was the same world as yesterday but a curious subtle fleshing (if that was the right word) appeared upon the rocks. Perhaps, thought Goodrich, it was something to do with the light. Whatever it was—light or film of new vegetation—it had subtly awakened the landscape, the bones of the landscape, as a sleeping but treacherous giant stirs refreshed by age-old cataclysmic dreams. (Once there had been an
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