The Contemptuary. David Foster
Josephson, cast as “the theatre director called ‘Bergman’” attention Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, explaining a condition he calls, apologetically, ‘retrospective jealousy’ which is likewise alluded to in Scenes from a Marriage, 1973.
So there clearly existed a problem, yet sexual love, as the young intuit, extends beyond one life. It pre-exists and survives us. Only because of this could we enter so willingly the servitude of marriage. The one with whom we fall in love is intriguingly familiar and fixed at the age of first sighting: he never loved who loved not at first sighting. Sex is a beastly business thus bestowing the beast’s eternal present, so that there could be no such torment as retrospective jealousy. There is only jealousy.
In the year after the screening of Scenes from a Marriage on Swedish TV the divorce rate in Sweden increased fifty percent.
None, incidentally, was ever ‘retrospectively’ jealous of a legally married spouse as he had no choice but to take the bad with the good. Bergman was twenty years older than Ullmann when she left her (psychiatrist) husband for him; a very successful ladies’ man, the theatre director called Bergman. Long life and large progeny, unusual in world history. Married five times and fathered nine children, including one with Ullmann whom he never married, but by age eighty-five he’d begun to rue the cost of the Sexual Revolution, which more or less began in Sweden and probably with him. A bit of a pandar in the working of his cinematic spell, the sexual magus, but all these sightings of Max von Sydow drew my mind to the platinum-blond decedent, because Mumbles’ funeral was held on the Tuesday after the Ullmann-cum-Bergmanfest concluded with Cries and Whispers, 1972, and when Jesus meets his mother at the Fourth Station of the Cross, which stood in the nineteen-sixties in the garden of the Presentation Retreat, she is portrayed as pretty much the same age as Jesus.
Her mandatory fecundity.
Bergman was still making movies long into the age of the digital edit; that said, Donald Fagen still writes songs that appeal to me and I would argue for Gaucho as the last great analogue studio production.
Apologies for the stench but I am rather dirty at present, even a bit on the nose with kin, as it seems I took a turn outside Jim Murphy’s Airport Cellars and certain of my daughters are keen to cite it as evidence that I can no longer care for myself on the farm, which is bullshit. Oh yes, I forget how to open the car door and found myself fumbling with the fast glass switches, but that could happen to anyone.
Some of us wear hearing aids and most of us boast dentures
We’d never drive our four-wheel drive on four-wheel drive adventures
And we’d hoped to die in the prime of life before incurring censure
But we all wound up in this nursing home afflicted with dementia
And by the bed is a Dixie cup
And you take a sip and you tough the fuck up
Bergman’s Faro farmhouse is preserved as a shrine and remains as it was at the time of the auteur’s death. It contains a video library in which the elderly Bergman could sit and watch such films as Crocodile Dundee, though maybe he didn’t actually watch that film, though he had a copy.
Maybe he couldn’t watch all of it.
Toothbrushes their uses
The platinum-blond decedent had something in his hands I’d not noticed, given they were clenched into fists and lashed with the ligature and rigor mortis was setting in. Tosh, who’d been meaning to play golf but would now have to write and submit an incident report before ceasing duty, drew my attention to it as he deployed the nine eleven: it was the end of a sharpened toothbrush, a common prison shiv. Tosh indicated puncture wounds to each of the inmate’s thighs which, in contrast to those I’d seen or thought I’d seen, were jagged and bloodied. Making no attempt to resuscitate the man, although required to do so, Tosh began marking out the perimeter using tape from the office. Each DIC must be treated as a crime scene.
‘Remps up the buzz. Any pulse?’
‘No.’
‘Good.’
‘What do you mean ramps up the buzz?’
‘This is a choke and stroke. A choke and a stroke from a man of the cloth, our Reverend Rocky Buzzacott, wirst of the wirst. Choke and a stroke gone wrong.’
‘Why isn’t the AS here? Doesn’t the OIC have to confirm from the FRO what action has been taken?’
‘Sittle down Leddy. All is under control. Duty Off has been informed and is notifying the filth.’
‘And the ambulance?’
‘Yis. Now did you require counselling?’
I did, but am still waiting as I found myself ordered by Laid-Back Lester to watch another cock in action, this time pissing into a jar. A random is generally done at the hour of Lauds when piss is least dilute. Two male officers, which back then was most, and well I recall my first rencounter with my first female officer, who’d hair like Lola in Run Lola Run, and silenced a yard full of outlaw bikies by telling them how she often pushed her husband’s bike off its stand, came into the gatehouse saying ‘who do I need to fuck to get a coffee round here?’ Last we heard of Gillian she was governing Dillwynia — in this case Tosh and me, were to watch the micturition, having first conducted a strip search, then screw a lid on the warm jar and affix a seal in the inmate’s view. The details would be written on the seal. The security seal number would be entered on a form and the inmate asked to read both form and sticker and attest the numbers matched but he couldn’t produce could he, so he had to be placed in a dry yard for two hours but we didn’t have one, so I was consigned to remain in his slot and watch he didn’t try to ‘flush’ i.e. guzzle water, all pretty pointless as rockies are rarely on the gear and seldom subjected to a random. But it got me out the way. And by the time the two hours was up, the body upstairs had been removed — I reckon Lester hadn’t even seen it — and I was sent in with mop and bucket to rid the slot of shit and semen. I told them in Rome the man had been a gasper like Michael Hutchence stroke David Carradine but they didn’t seem interested. I also thought it strange that no one had bothered to interview me, but when I remarked on this to Tosh he replied ‘You are jest a baggy.’
I didn’t ask the inmate’s name and as Tosh had removed his door tag, it wasn’t till I was driving home through Pomeroy it hit me. I had seen that head of hair. I’d seen that man before.
You could never actually count on going home till you made it out the gate.
We had some twenty-five years beforehand given each other a perfunctory nod, but we’d moved in different circles and attended different schools. I’d gone to Goulburn High (Justice and Tenacity) while he’d been at St Pat’s (Age Quod Agis). It would have been the year after I left Goulburn we met and all it amounted to was a nod of the head.
Autumn term was Michaelmas term at Sydney Uni in them days and during Easter break I came home to Goulburn on the train. I still had Brenda my Catholic girlfriend, and as all Tykes, which didn’t include me or my father, we being lapsed Tykes, ex-Tykes, would faithfully visit the Stations of the Cross, which since 1955 had meant traipsing round the Presentation Retreat, I’d said to the lovely Brenda, with a vulpine cunning, I don’t really want to be traipsing round with three thousand people come Friday, but I wouldn’t mind seeing these statues that I’ve heard so much about. See, I figured once I got her into that garden I could paw her about. Medieval Muslim writers allude to the monastery garden with a smirk, suggesting an ancient association with sex and alcohol. Up we went to Marys Mount early that Holy Week, and I recall being mightily delighted to see the garden, as I thought, deserted. Women were debarred from the monastery buildings though not from the monastery garden. Yet just as I was making my move, I heard a voice shout ‘Brenda!’
Looking up, I see a youth about my age, barefoot and wearing a long black mantle, clinging to a cross on a plinth. He is using a toothbrush to clean between the marmoreal