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I'd like to toss this idea around with you Vicky. Don't feel that you should have to engage with it at the same level which you contributed to my "Deep Space" essay. I’ll address it to you and you can choose to respond or not. I'm struggling with this idea which sort of encompasses my whole life. Let's see how I go at describing it.

When I was about 4 years of age, could have been 5, we were living in Belgrave, near where the Puffing Billy train was stationed. In fact our street was called "Station St." In those days Belgrave was just a tiny hamlet with about twenty shops, not connected to the full gauge electrified rail from Melbourne which stopped at Ferntree Gully. A bus from home to Ferntree Gully and then an hour to the city by electric train! The red rattler!

My Mum and Dad bought a house which was a lovely old-style cottage. It had an established garden with extra land which I guess must have been sub-dividable, or on two titles, because they started building a "new” house right next door to the old one. Of course as a five year old child, one does not understand the motives for such parental decisions. I guess they needed extra space in the house, because me and my sister Maureen had just been joined by baby brother John.

The old house: I still recall some aspects of this lovely cottage with its panelled walls, a small back verandah with a fuchsia tree; my baby brother John cut himself on this tree as he tried to climb over the verandah fence and had to be taken to the doctor. In fact he nearly lost the crown jewels! In the backyard there was a shrub which produced extremely tart gooseberries from which my Nanna used to make ice-cream. In those days the ice-cream would have to be made in an old fashioned ice-chest, the ice delivered by an “ice-man” carrying a large block on his shoulder, an ice hook in one hand and a hessian sack between the ice and his shoulder which he gripped with that large metal hook.

How amazing is this selective thing called memory Vicky? It is not “accurate”, it is not “precise”, it is amorphous like a dream. There are details and hazy vestiges of things I noticed at the time which I have clearly held onto in some way for 70 years! But I still have a strong memory of the house and the front and back yards, as well as some internal features like the panelled walls.

I also recall listening to the radio before going to sleep in my little bed, which was probably not much larger than a cot. I even recall a multicoloured striped blanket! This would have been the start of my music life too. I’m sure Mum and Nanna selected musical programmes to soothe me to sleep. But that is only a guess. Those radio events became much more important a few years later when we moved to Box Hill, but it was in Belgrave where my nocturnal music listening began.

When Dad’s brothers Edmond and Joseph arrived from Lebanon, we met them at Essendon Airport and brought them to Acland Street where they first lived with Dad’s sister, Aunty Adele and my Dad’s uncle,Tom. Even though he was our great-uncle, we called him Uncle Tom. I stayed at their house at Acland Street St. Kilda during summer vacations, another cottage. Sometimes these two young men would visit us at the old house in Belgrave where I used to play with a tip-truck in front of the house, a driveway at the edge of the street. Maureen and I were tossed around by these young men like chaff; we loved them and they loved us too.

My little brother John, Uncle Edmond, Maureen in his arms, and me.

Yes Vicky, that is me behind John on the trike. I think this photo was taken in the rear garden of the old house, and that little trike I had all to myself until John came along.

While the new house was being built we used to play under that house with Mum. The land sloped quite steeply from the front of the house to the rear. I recall there were many off-cuts of floorboards which Mum encouraged us to draw upon like wooden “slates". When the house was completely built to “lock-up stage”, I recall that it was quite barren, it had no furniture and no floor coverings before we moved in… the floorboards were bare...  I still recall that barren-ness clearly seventy years later!

I guess we would have still used the old ice-chest instead of a fridge, and for a bath we had to use the laundry trough, one of those concrete twin tubs which were quite common in the 1950’s. As we were still very small it was no problem for Mum to put one of us in one trough, and the other in the other tub so two of us could be bathed at the same time.

Mum was very inventive, I guess she had to be. She took Maureen and me for walks with baby brother John in a pusher. I recall one trip to Tecoma which required negotiating an extreme corner she called a “devil’s elbow”. After that I kept looking out for the Devil every time we went on that walk.

Sometimes, when we were living in the “new” house, on a Sunday evening we would walk to the bakery up the hill in the village and buy freshly baked bread. When we got home Mum would make us bread and jam with cream as a treat. A very special treat!

While we were moving into the new house a "trunk" came into my life. It was a sort of "seaman’s chest". It was not huge, but to a four or five year old child it was large and heavy. I could not have moved it on my own, but I could open it. I could also have jammed my hand in it but I don't recall that ever happening. Perhaps I was warned against that.

The vagaries of memory Vicky! I’m not sure about the shape and size of that trunk. It could have been a large domed trunk with ornate “metal bands” and metal locks. I do know for certain that a few years later when I was about ten years old living in Box Hill a large domed trunk came into my life. Mum and Dad had bought that one at an auction, they were very keen on attending auctions in those days.

That domed trunk was much too large and heavy for me to have lifted the lid when I was only five, so I don’t think that one was the one which held the books in Belgrave.

Why is this trunk so important to me Vicky? Why am I so concerned whether it was large or small? Why am I tossing around these ideas of its decoration, drabness, ornateness? Well the simple answer is that this trunk opened up my life and has never stopped opening up my life since those early days. There were many books inside it and I still have a few of them in my house today. They covered a broad range of interests though... a few tatty old encyclopedias in three volumes starting at "A" and ending about "G" in the alphabet. I wonder whatever happened to all the other missing volumes from “G” to “Z”?

Also, it contained some books in foreign languages, one was in French, one Italian, another German. There were school-books and books of poetry, grammar books, nicely bound in leather. I used the French one when I moved up to secondary school, it gave my French lessons a kick start.

This trunk also contained a book which I did not understand then, but have since worked out that it was intended to teach the reader about German calligraphy because later in life I saw those chunky letters again in books which covered that topic. It was quite different from the “grammar” books in the other languages.

There was another book which had a few photographs, quite small photos, including some of Australian Aborigines and some New Guinea natives with bones through their nostrils and fuzzy wuzzy hairstyles.Those small photos impressed me greatly. I don't think I read any of that book as I was only five years old, but I was quite absorbed by the few photos it contained.

One particular book in that trunk changed my life, not right then, but later on: Edgar Allan Poe's "Tales of Mystery and Imagination". I certainly didn't read it at five, but I did start reading it when I was about seven, when we moved to Box Hill. I was sent to a Nuns' school in Burwood, just before I went to Marcellin College in Canterbury at the age of eight.

I was at Marcellin from Grade 4 to Grade 6, and then I progressed to secondary school at the same place. I started reading a lot at Marcellin. Poe's book was seminal for me. Imagine an eight year old child filling his mind with the wondrous stories of E. A. Poe: “The Pit and the Pendulum”, “The Black Cat”. And not long after, “A Descent into The Maelstrom” and “A Premature Burial”.  Pretty weird stuff for a child to read, completely unhindered by adults! From this point of my life, now aged 75, that book seems to have changed the course of my life Vicky.

The trunk also contained a set of six large volumes which I still have in this house in my seventy-fifth year: an International University Reading Course. These volumes also had some illustrations (plates, engravings) which had great power over me. Of course I didn't really get into those volumes seriously until I was about twelve. But wow, they certainly changed me, revving up my interest in history with speeches recorded from great figures of the past, from Greek and Roman times right up to the end of 19th century... although they show no publishing date I think these six volumes were published about before 1900.

Continuing the historical theme there was novel by Lord Lytton; “Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings” which you can see in  the photo above. There was another thick volume, "Ben Hur", which I read and re-read as an adolescent. I loved that book, it fascinated me deeply; it was set in the time of Christ and fed into my Catholic education concerning the New Testament, especially the Passion of Christ. Soon after reading it I launched into Lord Lytton’s “The Last Days of Pompeii”. But I skipped over “Poet at the Breakfast Table” and  a collection of poems by Meredith!

Now, I don’t want to give you the impression Vicky that I was only reading these deeply intellectual books at that time. I was also big on comics. I was a really lucky child! I took it for granted then, but now, in these days of political correctness gone mad, molly-coddling children and spoiling them with overarching protectiveness, how lucky was I to have parents who let me do almost anything I liked, to play music, explore strange books found in a trunk, to read comics, to go to the local flicks every Saturday, and to range free and wide in the empty paddocks near our home?

Vicky, this seaman's chest or trunk, even though it may have contained only twenty or thirty books, was a Pandora's Box for the young Peter Tammer. I never found out how it came into my life. I never knew whether it came from a previous inhabitant of the old house which we were soon to be leaving for the new house, or whether it came from someone on Mum's side of the family.

Mum’s mother, Gertrude Pippey, lived with us, so the trunk could have been inherited from her departed husband, Mum's father, James Pippey. I never met Mum’s father as he’d died some years before I was born. As I said earlier, it’s also possible that my Mum and Dad had bought the trunk at an auction! They loved buying things at auctions including terrific furniture, like the first piano they bought so I could learn music when I was five!  No matter how this trunk came into my life it was of immense importance to me, just like that piano, that rich-toned Blüthner piano made in Leipzig which started me off in music. This trunk set me up for life! Not every book in this trunk, but many of them resounded through my early years at primary school, all through secondary school and even when I was at university. I was still sourcing Poe’s tales and the International Reading Course volumes while I was at Uni. Whoever the person was who left this trunk to be discovered in our Belgrave house, that unknown person certainly made a deep impression upon my life.

Another thing about those days: our school did not have a library. We had to trapse to Canterbury, just near the station, a flock of young goslings, spend half an hour at the library, and then trapse back to school… getting fined a penny if we forgot to return a book! That was where I discovered Biggles, Tarzan, William books, and many other books associated with childhood. All of these made a deep impression on me, but the Tarzan series was probably the most powerful for my imagination. Not only the adventure ones, such as “Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar” but most decidedly “Tarzan of the Apes”. I only realised how important it was for me when later in life I saw the film “Greystoke” and realised how deeply that book had impressed me as a child. Compared with other books and films about children raised in the wild, well, none of them even came close.

Vicky, let us move on a bit!  The next part of this story is that I wish to use this trunk, this Pandora’s Box, as a device which opens the universe to little Peter and takes him on a journey through life and time and space and all the knowledge of the world. For example, in the six volume set there was an article on the translations from Sumerian cuneiform tablets about Gilgamesh, the precursor to the biblical FLOOD, the Sumerian precursor to Noah. It also contained speeches by famous Romans such as Cato, and by leading figures of the French revolution e.g., Robespierre. Many others, also from famous scientists, Max Planck, Darwin. Writers from the time of Shakespeare, John Donne and Andrew Marvell. These six large volumes contained a compressed version of all the knowledge of the world, from “eyewitnesses”. People who were living through the times about which they were commenting.

I’m also struggling to deal with something much more challenging than all that... I’m not concerned only about what this trunk actually contained, but the many doors it opened to me, opening worlds to me which could not have come from anyone around me. Not one person in our family could have really opened that world to me. Neither my Nanna, nor Mum and Dad had any education which would have enabled them to understand or appreciate any of the books in that box. Only my mother's brother, Uncle Phillip, was sufficiently educated for it to have been useful to him, as he was a barrister and solicitor, but I never got any feeling from him that it was his box of books. It may have been his. Mum might have been storing it for him, but I don't think that was the case. If it had been his trunk, I think he would have asked for it back when he bought his house in Box Hill and settled down to married life with Auntie Olive.

There’s something much bigger engaging me Vicky…  I have another plan! I want to use this trunk as a vehicle for a piece of writing, a work on Daniel Defoe, Isaac Newton and Jonathan Swift. Imaginatively it is easy for me to include "Robinson Crusoe" and a life of Newton, and “Gulliver's Travels” in the trunk, even though they may or may not have been there. I was loaned “Robinson Crusoe” when I was sick in bed, recovering from an appendicitis operation at age eight; it was loaned to me by a neighbour who lived over the road from us. But so what? Why not have Gulliver hiding away in the trunk among these other volumes including the speeches of Robespierre, the Fuzzy Wuzzy's from New Guinea and the tales of E. A. Poe? Gulliver, just waiting there quietly for the time when he would be called-up, so to speak, to inflate the mind of young Peter!

Everything I have done in my life which relates to words, storytelling and essays emanates from this one experience of discovering the contents of this trunk when I was too young to know what it might mean for me.

Similarly, when my parents bought the Blüthner piano for me to learn music, and when they engaged Mr. Siedel to teach me, even though I was only taught by him for about a year...  that piano and that teacher opened up the world of music to me in an incomparable fashion, to an extent which could never have been predicted. How could my mother and father have predicted that music would become a central part of my life, so much so that I cannot imagine what my life would be like without it?

Let’s return to Defoe and Newton and Swift. This is very big stuff for me Vicky, this takes in the opposite views of the world of knowledge and imagination, all the ingredients of which are already contained in every story by Poe.

The content of the story involving those three giants of that era, is extremely challenging for me Vicky. I imagine a story which is told about both Defoe and Newton, and it will include Swift as one of its many characters: it will be a "false history". It must be false, imaginary, because I have no factual basis for it. And also, I just enjoy playing around with anachronisms.

If you’ve read some of my stories in "A Baker's Dozen" you will have seen that I enjoy mucking around with time, that time is only as real as you want it to be for the needs of the story. So with Defoe and Newton! I want them to have met, the reader will discover that Defoe is actually working as a spy for Newton in his role of Master of the Mint, which is a huge turnaround from the Isaac Newton of his earlier life when he was a hermit/scholar/inventor. How mad is this story! The real life of Newton, the real life of Defoe, these two men lived extraordinary lives which were much crazier than any book by Defoe. Swift’s life was also just as crazy as either of them, even more crazy than the life of his Gulliver. And these geezers all lived through the same period in the same capital of England, London, although Swift was banished to Ireland for some courtly “indiscretions”.

I guess you can see why this immense idea is a bit intimidating for me Vicky. I start and I stop. I pick it up and I put it down. These old chaps appear in various scenes in my imagination: Newton chides Defoe for wasting his life and his energy on trivial matters, writing stories about silly people, such as this Crusoe who becomes shipwrecked on an island which Newton refuses to believe in, even though Defoe has already confessed to Newton that he heard the story from a sailor whom he was spying on, while on a mission under instructions from Newton. I also imagine Newton threatening to send Defoe back to prison, from which he claims to have rescued Defoe so that he might be of service to the Crown! So that he might serve some useful purpose in an otherwise wasted life! And Defoe, smitten by Newton’s accusations, asks him nervously if there was not just one little part of the book which struck him.

To his great surprise Newton offers his thoughts on the chapter where Crusoe becomes ill in his cave. Where he became so sick with fever that he hallucinates, has his conversations with God, and also converses with his own father who gets muddled up with God, forgetting to make his scratched marks on the wall during the passing days of his fever. This scene seems to have struck a deep chord with Newton. He tells Defoe that he experienced something similar one time, “Oh, many years before”, when he suffered an “episode” which baffled him. He became ill, had visions, lost all sense of reality, he had no idea what was happening to him, he could not distinguish what was real in his rooms from what was unreal in his imaginings, all things were merging in his mind, day after day. “To tell the truth, Defoe, I was mortally ill! I just didn’t know that I was ill, I only understood that later when I began to recover. There was no person there to assist me at that time. When I came good, well, a little better, I could see that I had virtually destroyed my rooms, everything was in disarray. I had made a huge mess of everything. The clean-up was no small matter. I had to keep it all secret from my neighbours in case I might be sent down from the university and lose my stipend!”

He confides in Defoe that he too had turned to God during this terrible time. He seems terribly embarrassed to admit this. In their previous meetings Newton has never revealed much about himself. Now he tells Defoe how he begged God not to let him die. How he promised to be good. How he promised God he would serve him well, for ever after, if only God would not let him die. And God let him live, so now he must do everything he can possibly do to repay God for his great salvation! 

He tells Defoe about a peculiar event which occurred during his illness when he thought he was being crushed into the floorboards by the light coming through his window. He was lying prostrate on the floor, he didn’t know how long he had been there, when a beam of light started to pass over his prone body. Now for the great Isaac Newton, light was no small matter. Throughout his life he had given a lot of thought to light, but he had never felt it as a crushing force.

This light had immense force. He couldn’t bear it. It was crushing him to smithereens. It was dissolving his body into tiny parts and these parts were being pressed into the very floorboards. He begged God to take this light away from him, “Dear God, please leave me alone! I cannot endure your light!” Eventually, it seemed like an eternity, the beam of light passed over him, reaching into another corner of the room, and then he saw the tremendous mess which had occurred in the course of those few days. Then he faced the clean up! And then he started out on a new phase in his life which must be a life of worth!

I think Vicky that this unexpected and deeply personal revelation from Newton might have brought things to a standstill. Where to go from here? Well, Sir Isaac would probably have composed himself and gone on with his normal business, a new mission for his trusty Defoe which will take him to Ireland. Apparently he expects Defoe to arrange a meeting with Swift, to present him with a secret letter from “a high place”. He doesn’t explain the background to this letter to Defoe, merely intimating that it comes from “the highest source”. Newton is quite concerned about old Swift, because he thinks Swift is a little unbalanced, a self-destructing machine, but also immensely intelligent and engaging, now banished to the wilds of Ireland because he had somehow offended the Queen!

He asks Defoe how his sea-legs are. Defoe is by now quite perturbed. His land-legs are not too good, bad veins are popping up all over the place, in places you would least expect them to be, and although he is no medical man, he senses that these veins are a critical issue for his health and well-being. He would like to tell Sir Isaac that he is not the right sort of person to be sent over the sea, but he knows that when Sir Isaac has an idea in his mind he is intractable. Nevertheless he is so perturbed about the possibility of a sea-voyage that he tells Sir Isaac he fears that his sea-legs are no longer fit for the sea!

Sir Isaac will not let this pass. He persists and bullies Defoe into describing the parlous condition of his veins. This gives Sir Isaac plenty of room to manoeuvre so he asks Defoe what does he know about veins anyhow? Is he a surgeon?  Does he know anything about the circulation of the blood? Has he read Harvey’s lovely little monograph De Motu Cordis? “If you experienced no great trouble walking from your lodgings to this place today Defoe, why should you not take a little trip by sea to Ireland? It’s only a very small adventure, not at all as dangerous as your Crusoe chap’s expedition!“

How can Defoe possibly say no to Sir Isaac? Defoe is a guy who likes to get along with everyone, and that may be the secret to his writing about people of all classes and occupations, while Sir Isaac simply doesn’t get along with anyone, he just orders everyone around during this new phase of his life. People need to be ordered around because otherwise they would simply drift and vacillate. A little order is a good thing, and most of these silly people need a lot of it in their lives.

So poor old Defoe, who simply hates travelling but who is extremely good at imagining it and writing about it, is now packed off to Dublin to find Dean Swift in his digs or in a tavern where they engage in a literary gentlemen’s tete-a-tete. It’s a good fit... Sir Isaac was right to bring them together, they clearly admire each other’s work, they imbibe a little more than they should and they make unkindly remarks about old Newton and his foibles! I imagine Jonathan Swift would have a fine nickname for Sir Isaac, possibly “old bossy boots” or maybe something Biblical, yes that would be much better, there are many possibilities here.

Where does it go from there Vicky? I don’t know! I imagine Defoe is horrified to see Swift has one eye almost popping out of his skull, and that he is keeping company with a little girl who is his “housekeeper” which looks mighty suspicious to Defoe, but he doesn’t say anything about it. He must return to England and continue to serve his master, the Master of the Mint, who has rescued him from Debtor’s Prison, given him a new lease of life so that he can continue to write works such as “Moll Flanders” and “A Journal of the Plague Year”, as if writing one little masterpiece called “Robinson Crusoe” were not work enough for one lifetime!

Why am I attracted to these three elderly geezers Vicky? Well, part of it is my fascination with each of them from various stages of my life, and then one day it dawned upon me that they possibly could have met each other. I think that was about eight years ago. And since then it has played on my mind. I think Newton is fascinated by Defoe, sees him as immensely talented, a sort of wastrel, but redeemable. I think Newton sees Swift as “irredeemable”.

Newton has taken a fatherly interest in Defoe, which makes sense because he has no family, but he is cautious about him, concerned for him. He has selected Defoe to be his spy because he appreciates Defoe's inventiveness, his ability to mix with people of all classes, but he fears Defoe's imagination... he can't see how Defoe can write convincingly about an island he has never been to, and he can't see how Defoe can "describe the psychology", which has not been invented yet, of a man who becomes that island!

So Defoe continues to do all of Newton's dirty work, spying, to protect the kingdom from those horrible people who engage in counterfeit: people who set out to debase the currency of the realm. Newton is highly qualified for the job of Master of the Mint as he was previously a keen alchemist and he would often try to turn base metals into gold, which is how he poisoned himself in his digs!  But now his knowledge and skills as a metallurgist are being put to good use testing the purity of gold and silver coinage. For the Monarch! For the good of the country!

And of course all these old geezers, they are all in the trunk together. They are in there with the Sumerian version of Noah, they happily chat with Edgar Allan Poe in between “the taking of tea and ices”. Newton is intrigued that Mr. Poe has explained a cosmic puzzle concerning light from the stars which seems to have eluded him. But Goethe disagrees vehemently. He chats with Poe and with Lord Kelvin. He loves Lord Kelvin’s ideas concerning absolute temperatures. He also chats with Lavoisier. They have lots of laughs. They make jokes about Robespierre and his argument "Against Capital Punishment" which was proclaimed just one year before he became the butcher of the Revolution, sending Danton and all his other enemies to the guillotine, including Lavoisier himself.

So Vicky, that's it in a nutshell. Except for one thing I forgot to mention: uncertainty. As you know Uncertainty is only one thing, but you can't have it without Certainty and that makes it two things.

And how can two be one or one be two? And how can one God be One and indivisible and yet be three-in-one? Well Peter's Ice-cream used to produce a two-in-one variety didn't they. So why not a three-in-one God?

Certainty is very important to this story because everything in the story is uncertain... just as everything in knowledge was uncertain until Newton and others opened up better ways of seeing the forces of the Universe, and Poe imagined the Universe unfolding from a very small beginning, smaller than a pea, like the Big Bang, more than a hundred years before that theory came into serious science. And is that theory now any more "certain"?

And it’s also about the uncertainty of memory, the fact that people who may witness the same event can give completely contradictory accounts of that event. Why should that be so? Because things happen in ways which convey different messages, and if people witness these events they interpret parts of those events with different loadings or biases of “significance”. They see the event as if through different filters. Defoe might ask Sir Isaac how he found out about his book, “A Journal of the Plague Year” which Newton says is full of unreliable source material, old stories and foggy memories of people who think they know what happened but cannot be absolutely certain!

Sir Isaac might admit to rifling through Defoe’s rooms while he was away on the  mission to meet Swift, so Defoe now understands that Newton has examined everything in his life while he was away! Defoe might ask Sir Isaac if he plans to block the publication of his book and Sir Isaac might answer, “No Defoe, I certainly do not intend any such thing! It is quite useful to our mutual arrangements that people may continue to think of you as an inveterate scribbler, just as you are, and consequently they will not notice the work you are doing for the Mint which has a much greater purpose”.

Imagine this Vicky: Newton chides Defoe, repeating some of the names which Swift and Defoe had called him, “In absentia! Old bossy boots! Behind my back Defoe, most unfriendly! Not a nice way to repay someone who has plucked you from a dungeon!”

Defoe is shocked to find that Newton has actually discovered such incriminating information about that meeting which he thought was private. So, embarrassed and guiltily he asks Sir Isaac how he could possibly have come by such information. Sir Isaac alludes to the wench who seemed to be Swift’s little playmate, and how she appeared to be quite witless, which in fact is not the case at all. She has proven to be a most reliable correspondent and keeps Newton up to date with all that is happening in Ireland, including some hilarious accounts of Swift’s sermons where he interprets Biblical passages in the most alarming ways and which, if he is not careful, will end him up in big trouble!

The world of knowledge versus the world of fiction which divides people within nations, and which divides nations from other nations, which has always done so in all human cultures and consciousness. Exactly as it does in our world today when we cannot be sure of any event which is reported via the media! How many layers of information and misinformation permeate every media statement on any given subject! The conflict between what is knowable and measurable compared with what is not known “so far” but which possibly will be known at some time in the future. Just as this conflict between the known and the imagined also pervaded the lives of Defoe, Newton and Swift.

How am I ever going to achieve this imaginary novel Vicky? I may have bitten off more than I can chew, but I can't be certain!

PT

April Fool’s Day, 2018

75 Orbits done and dusted!