Ambrose Ambles

 Twelve Caesars.. Book one.

Introduction.

I am going to use this site to post, in weekly installments of around 5000. words, a book that I have written over the years..It is a “travelling history” of a facsimili of myself and those travels…for much of it is fiction and while the narrator is named “Christopher Corridini”, he like many other writer’s creations is a reflection of the author’s own character..and his blundering or awakening moments are but the scraps of memory of the author’s journey…for what was Joyce’s “Bloom” or “Dedalus” but extensions of the author himself…Bloom when bumbling along, Dedalus when in pensive or reflective mood..likewise Lawson’s “Steelman and Smith”, opposites yet one..so too is my Corridini as he tries to fathom the brutal intentions of a rapacious society.

I am going to introduce what I call “proletariat writing”..ie; story and content that follows and flows from oral telling of tale..from the lips to the page, creating, I am hoping, an “immediacy” of speech and freshness of allegory..where sometimes the real story can be found in the "atmosphere"of the listeners or readers.. The writings contained within this compendium have evolved as both stories and themes over the many years I have spent trying to convey feelings toward the corrupt and degenerate middle-classes..a class I feel no longer has either moral nor ethical qualities to continue to govern and decide our collective fates and it is in these scribblings that I found universal voice over those years that created a continuety of word and direction and you will see it as you progress the pages.

I wish you all the best in your journey.

Joseph Carli.

Let us begin the tale:

                                                           Twelve Caesars.

A disgust with a social class that has all but destroyed both our humanity and the natural world in its scrambling for riches and avarice beyond even a level of sanity and absurdity that cannot, in even the lesser cases be tolerated.

Who or what steered the life and fortunes of Christopher Corridini..was it chance or circumstance..and also that of his parents and grandparents with a growing family impoverished by the circumstances of the Great Depression..what were the chances of a working-class family pre and post WW2. To make a good life for their family?

“Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of government; they make a desolation and call it peace”..

Tacitus ; Calgacus’ speech to his troops. (AD 85)

                                            Part one :    Christopher Corridini.

                                            Part two :    Raconteur.

                                            Part three : Twelve Caesars.

                                            Part four :   Discourses on the “Stations”.

                                            Part five :    I give you my Tribe.                                                                                  

Let the condemnation begin!

To the working men and women of this world, this book is dedicated…may you seek reparation from your tormentors and deliver to them the justice they so richly deserve..

                                           WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE!

                                       

                                                                 By..

                                                           Joseph Carli.

Book One.

(primo)

Christopher Corridini.

My name is Christopher Corridini…in case you forget..I have an Anglo’ first name and an Italian surname because my mother, who was of Anglo-Celtic ancestry, didn’t mind the dago in the surname, but couldn’t abide with the Italian version of a Christian name…so I am NOT “Christofo”, but Christopher..I feature as the young boy in the early years of this story..It is I who am the Raconteur taking you on a story-telling journey in The Middle Years..those years of living dangerously. I lived through all those and subsequent years to now arrive at my seventieth year My parents are deceased, all those aged relatives are deceased..as are many of the people I grew up under…teachers, tradesmen, workers, wives and mothers..I am on my own now…things decidedly have changed…but not my allegiance to my working-class roots..My father was a stone-mason/bricklayer and I trained as a carpenter..I hold my class upbringing as a testament to the solidarity needed for a healthy, stable society.

But I despise to the pit of Sheol, the middle-classes.

 The Tower.

He fell,

As mighty edifices do fall,

And death made a mockery of him,

As it makes mockery of us all.

But I was just a child of Shinar,

On the plain where The Tower was built.

Bored with a sedentary life,

They hungered for something to adore.

It sprung from the soil a shimmering phallal,

Upon it they lavished their skills

And they named it Babel.

Oh, how it climbed toward the heavens!

While we fed off the spoils of Mother Earth,

The fruits and wines that gave us birth

With n’aer a thought of impending death,

So was the pride full in our hearts.

I asked of my Father, a mason there,

“What the reason for The Tower?”

“In your wildest dreams” he said “you will not want,

And in your steps you will not falter,

We have built and paved a path to heaven,

We have gilded mankind’s altar.

Precious stones from far Afghanistan,

Quoins of coloured marbles of Kazakhstan

Pearls from the depths of The Euxine Sea,

Onyx and alabaster barged down the Nile,

These riches have we brought to thee!

Heaven is our gate, Hell below our feet,

We stand poised to challenge the Gods

Never more to yield to a defeat.”

I was a child of Shinar when the Tower they built,

And never was there a more united cry,

A more singular and determined voice,

“Babel!” they cried, “Babel! You are ours!”,

Voices like sea-waves crashing eternal upon a beach.

And they built onwards and upwards that mighty tower,

The riches of the Earth they did devour,

With no thought of rest…nor honour,

We poured all into that mighty edifice.

Our leaders, as toward heaven it thrust,

They called down to us, encouraged us,

“This is of you” they softly called.

“This is by you” they softly persuaded.

“This is for you” they softly whispered.

And that triple reassurance won us,

And we worked and laboured for that goal,

“Babel, Babel!” we cried and we worshipped the ideal,

And we never wondered when our own plates went empty

Why some others were always filled,

Why THEY were able to lavish aplenty,

While our plains and wells went dry….

Then it fell.

As soft as a tremor, violent as a quake,

It fell because of one small mistake.

It fell when we suddenly came to see,

After climbing, climbing so high in that ecstasy,

Those Gods whose heaven we were calling home,

Were neither singular..nor divine,

But were a made creation of our own!

WE made the Gods of OUR own image,

NOT the Gods of us!

WE made heaven of OUR own wants and desires,

Our leaders fed us of our own language,

And fanned and fuelled our tangled runes,

Spoke in riddles of strange but familiar sounds,

Until we could no more understand their tongue,

And then we saw..our work there was done.

We cast away our tools,

Cursed each other as fools,

And wept….

“Oh Babel, Babel..why has thou forsaken us”.

But too late..too late..it is gone, it is bust..

Babel, our hopes, our dreams, our lusts,

Babel, our creation, our immortal soul,

Has but gone to dust….

We were children of Shinar when first The Tower was built,

We are adults now…awash in a sea of guilt.

As a person of bronchial difficulties when a young man, I discovered that if I placed my thumbs gently into the nasal cavities and flared my nostrils with this manipulation, my inhale of breathe through the nose would be enhanced..and as a bonus, the extra air rushing through would dry the nasal discharge and alleviated the continued blowing of my nose that often resulted in a soreness and reddening of my skin there…so to allow the continued…enjoyment…of this new found discovery, I would softly scrunch pieces of facial tissue paper into a blunt, conical shape and insert these into the nostrils to hold them open…the resulting appearance gave me the look..in abstract..of a dragon with flames shooting from it’s nose..

“I trust you are not going to go out in public looking like THAT!”  my mother admonished…

Of course I never even considered such..but this was an example of the small but important discoveries that made my life more comfortable…for THAT was my primary objective in life..: Comfort…or rather..: The avoidance of discomfort.

“Nov course nort” I replied with a nasal blockage twang “Nyou think I worn’t to look nstupid”.

The other discovery I stumbled upon in my younger years and continued right into old age, was the practice of when removing my clothes at night, I would NOT take the garments off in a singular manner..that is; one at a time, but rather keep them coupled by removing undershirt, shirt and jumper (in winter) in one complete batch..so to speak..and shuck them over my shoulder to sit open-throated, so to speak, ready to slip on again in the same order come morning on the floor near my bed…the same for trousers and shoes and socks…small things, yes..but things nether the less that made for more comf….no…made for less discomfort…less discomfort…there IS a difference….and again, mother had to be made aware of my preference for this form of dressing lest she uncaringly kicked the clothing into the corner of my room with a disgusted..:

“You’ve had these same clothes on for the last week…for God’s sake, they are starting to smell!”

“Only to YOU”…I would sulkily reply “I find them just worn in to my body shape..it takes about a week to get them just right.”

Of course, these little quirks of behaviour were the ones familiar to the young years..and even if they did roll over into older age, there were others gathered up upon the way through life that I would apply and maintain to keep the ferocious wolves of discomfort from my door.

These “discomforts” were not only restricted to physical things, like clothing or mechanical devices like the car or power tools…particularly tape-measures which would after prolonged use break down and the inner spring that retracted the tape suddenly slip within the device and not allow the tape to go back and one would be left with the full eight metres of rattling/crackling, crinkling useless measure all a-jumble in one’s arms…a most distressing situation when one was a tradesman…solved by having at least three or four tape measures available so that the one measure was not relied upon at any one time and reduce the possibility of being left with a jumbled mess and no tape-measure…or even into things concerning food, like taste or too hot, either spicily or temperature wise…I even developed a dislike in my later years for getting wet..not to the detriment of washing oneself, but in going for a swim or when the relatives came to visit from interstate and everyone wanted to go to the beach and wade in the waters of the low tide…a youth of growing up by the sea left me with an aversion for both the smell and the salty residue on skin of sea-water…but these discomforts also extended into my emotional life, those feelings of emotional discomfort when confronted with, say, sickness or the death of a friend or family member…having to attend funeral and wake and all those moments of (sometimes) false sympathy and the lauding to the heavens of someone even disliked when living…for in my mind, grief is like poetry…it was best internalised and experienced within one’s own body and mind…and of course, there was my first marriage with a wife who embraced enthusiastically .. religiously ..the principles of “New Age” philosophy..to the extent she became an apostle of one American guru ridiculously re-named Joice Sleeeby…the “Joice” there to rhyme both in spelling and sound with “Voice”..as in her blurb pamphlet; “The Voice of Joice!”…and the extra “e” in her surname so as to emphasise by phonetic extension, as is the usual practice of pultroonish “gurus”, the self-importance of her presence.

This worshipping of New Age practices involved the acute discomfort to myself of attending workshops where it seemed the main emphasis besides the passing from person to person of a “talking-stick” of a locally gathered tree-twig with a chook-feather attached, secured with plaited wool thread to the stick that was supposed to have some sort of symbolic meaning..was on turning adjectives into nouns..as in adding a “ness” to the adjective..so that “Well”, became “wellness”..and “Whole”, became “wholeness”..as with the “wholeness” of the thing….It was in the rolling off the tongue action at one workshop by this Joice Sleeeby of such “ness” words that I couldn’t help but slip in my own ness-word..

“Lochness” I blurted out before I could stop myself..the fraternity of new-age disciples all turned frowning to me..”..The monster…y’know?..I..I..just thought of it..” I mumbled…but it was clear the guru thought otherwise and after the session was seen to have a quiet chat with my wife.

“I am not prepared to stay in a relationship with you unless you pay more attention to what Joice is teaching us”..she sternly announced after the workshop……..and I had to agree with her and that was the beginning of the end of THAT marriage….actually, the relationship began to slip away with the recent moving of house and family to a suburb with a lower status postcode…it being a very difficult situation, y’know, to rise in social status from a lowly postcode…from, 5251 to 5152…you can see the difference, surely?…the lower the number, the higher the status..my wife harboured secret aspirations for the last of those numbered postcodes, and was prepared to sacrifice almost anything regarding our relationship to gain it! Added to THAT little obstacle was the erection by myself of a “naming of residence” sign for the new house as : “The Tradesman’s Rest”..signifying my retirement from the continuous slog of endless building work now that we had freehold ownership on our own house…it was not appreciated by the spouse who would like to construct a lifestyle to which she imagined she could comfortably become accustomed..

But also those continued demands to attend new-age workshops became increasingly farcical..and the trips to such locations, sometimes after a hard day’s physical work started to grate on my nerves…particularly as they were sometimes so absurd..

There ought to be a rider attached to that response on the “happiest day of your life”, with the assurance of ; ”I will……….provided! (see section 31-a…clause 19)”….I say that because when I first entered into that ‘contract’, I went from a Bachelor whose only adult affliction was a terminal case of “lateral spine” with the attitude that most physical complaints could be cured with a good book and a good lie down to a co-habiting consumer of health foods, fads and fantasies!

But, like any dutiful spouse, I partnered this new opinion of the infallibility of “wholeness medicine” with all the best intentions.. no-one has ever attacked a nice, healthy bowl of tofu and brown rice with as much gusto as myself!….and I can honestly say to this day that the road to hell was never more solidly paved!

But don’t get me wrong, I hold as deep suspicions about “orthodox” medicine….and I have memories of the family doctor  (whose child had the same Christian name as myself and also suffered from asthma) using me as a guinea-pig for any new industrial/medical concoction dreamed up as a ‘cure’….”…and he seemed such a nice chap” as my mother would say.

While the orthodox doctor may indeed bury their mistakes, the alternative pickle theirs! Having had everything from suction cups to dubious creams and healing hands smeared all over my skin, over more than a decade of compliant naivety, I have to say that such applied medicine is by far the preferred option to the plethora of applied psychology of the “empowering guru”! Yes…ah yes!…I suffered from that one too….why are they always smiling?….I gaze at my empty wallet now and I am enlightened, for while even Jesus and Socrates struggled to realise the nexus between philosophy and pecuniary interest, with the modern “practitioner”it is a seamless weld!….

When one looks back over those wide plains of time and life-experience, the entire schmozzle can best be seen as a sort of  Key-stone cops bugger-up overlaid with the closing theme music from the “Benny Hill Show”…you know : Yah dah dadadadah….!

I wasn’t going to regale you with any tales but one springs to mind that will reveal all…

Our family was “encouraged” to take part in a “circle-dance” in the first moon cycle on the beach at Largs Bay..This dance was to encourage good karma to enter the soul of our bodies for the benefit of spiritual enlightenment…..I suspect…We were sitting on the sand there at the bottom of the steps waiting for “Marcie” who at that moment appeared at the top of the steps… “Oh look!..” one person whispered, “She isn’t wearing her glasses….you know, she’s been taking that potion to strengthen her vision and she has been seeing “Joice” about ‘overcoming with  her mind’ so she can stop using her glasses”….Indeed, there she was, hand on the rail stepping elegantly with pointed toe straight toward us measured step by step with all the grace of a queen….we sat there in silence, in awe….then at the foot of the steps, while staring dead straight at us not more than fifteen feet away, she suddenly threw a leftie and started to walk away up the beach!…….yes..yes…blind as a bat!….”Marcie, Marcie” we called…………..

There will always be those who cannot help but seek out the oracle and worship the idol, but of course, one would be foolish to dismiss out of hand the beneficial uses of organic compounds and comforting meditations, alas, I am always drawn to a maxim from my father…: “Doctors, priests and lawyers..; one will ruin your health, one will ruin your soul and the other your pocket!” Mind you, with this “lateral spine” I suffer from, what I wouldn’t give for a damn good massage!

And in truth and in the long run, it was that driving ambition to have control by my first wife that opened up the most sublime and ingenious insight to a philosophy that would seal the direction of my destination toward an elimination of social discomfort and solve that most complex of conundrums plaguing modern life..; decisions, decisions, decisions?…which, where or what to choose?

How many times have we asked ourselves why we did a certain action, the result of which ended up detrimental to our wellbeing…no, not wellness…well-being..? After the building of several family homes and the trials and tribulations from a failed marriage which resulted in the loss of accrued collateral from the division of material possessions, this question vexed my mind for many nights. Why, I asked himself, after fulfilling the bourgeois social obligations of work, marriage, children, a home built, could things from so far outside my sphere of influence and decision making bring the whole construct crashing down without so much as a squeak of support from that very society whose “rules of engagement” I obeyed to the letter?

Chance, I decided, played a more important role in the affairs of humanity than has been given credit for..as a matter of fact, I reflected, chance is an integral part of this modern social engineered society..’yers pays yer’s money and yers takes yer chances’ the modern-day catch-cry of civilised society. This momentary diversion in my thoughts brought back an incident in younger bachelor days when I would happily place a bet on the horses. These wagers were a “penny-punter” affair as my gambling money was a quite small amount. I would ‘study the form’ on race day, a Saturday, pick the horses and go to the Totalizer Agency and place the bets then retire to the hotel to have some beers with my mates and listen to the races. These wagers were usually unsatisfactory in a winning sense and I began to wonder on the worth of studying the form of the horses…it seemed that chance, or the machinations of “fixed races” played a bigger part than the mere record of past races of any one horse..so I decided to try a different approach, partly bought on by a laziness in continuing to try to pick a specific winner and also by a simple mathematical sum…that being that in the usual fifteen horse race, there were four chances of a payout on the ticket..: First plus place, second and third…so that made the chances of getting at least ONE payout of whatever amount a roughly one in four chance if just picking a random number. But how does one pick a random number without being influenced by the opinion of the forms or the tipsters?…simple..: one takes one suite of a deck of cards..Ace to King..that makes thirteen, throw in two jokers and you got your fifteen runners..shuffle and then turn over a card and bet on the random number that turns up..three cards for winner, second and third…of course you mark the jokers for differentiation..admitedly, it was not the most complex of equations.

While this method seem absurd and quite simplistic, it worked!…I started getting extraordinary results using the method…not only winners, but daily doubles and quinellas!…even to the point where one delightful Saturday won myself enough money to purchase a cheap, second-hand car that only needed a few patches of sheet-metal pop-riveted on and “bogged” to cover the rust in the door panels..and bango! Bob’s your uncle!

This good fortune continued on for a few months, albeit in a still penny-punter way till, in an attempt to try and increase the chance of winning, I started to consult once again the form of the horses whose numbers I had randomly picked with the cards and started to change bets from those I considered hopeless to others with better form…and it was this betrayal of the God of fortune that broke my run of luck and I eventually gave gambling on the horses away completely.. acknowledging with a mea-culpa admission that my greed had let me down. .but the lesson with chance was learned.. There is considerable opinion behind the thesis that there is no pattern to chance..but in personal conclusion, I have decided that the pattern of chance is identifiable in that it HAS NO PATTERN….and THAT is the secret to managing chance…ie; you play chance with chance.

And it was this lesson with chance that I now ruminated upon in regards that bigger gamble of fortune..: Life.

“What was the point” I mused “of planning, plotting a course, making choices regarding one’s budget and work balances to only have all those best laid plans come to nought?”…and I calculated there and then that with so many millions of other people likewise scheming, planning and choosing, and in the end being manipulated by forces so far outside their sphere of control or influence, the multitude of variables that overlap, collide and determine one’s life are so legion, so multitudinous, one might as well NOT make life-changing decisions based on a false premise that we are all on a “level playing field” and in point of fact, make it a clear objective to do the opposite of – like the horse racing form – trying to pick a winner..

The conclusion I came to and which influenced ALL future decisions in my life was to not try to pre-empt an outcome, but to actually …do nothing!……just sit tight in patience, riding out the storm of chance, waiting for the dust to settle on the fracas of life around us and then to just select the best of what remained..which, as experience of the many years that had passed since I made my fortunate discovery, was the best and most beneficial decision I could have made.

I am now convinced at this my seventieth year, that civilisation as we know it is not a carefully constructed edifice, evolved from a conscious intellectual desire, but rather the result of a period of benevolent calm after military conquest and secured by the political and military power of an ethnically superior force…and then that ethnicity impresses its cultural bias via a perverted education system upon those peoples under its control…sure, it will tolerate to a certain level other cultural incursions into its dominant governance, but only until such exterior philosophy begins to gain an upper hand..and then it will either try to absorb it and twist it to conform into the dominant creed, or it will then crush it..for the ruling order knows through historical precedence that its survival as the cultural leader depends upon its capacity to justify applied laws that while appearing fair-for-all, really only satisfy in the main those citizens who fully support the cultural superiority of the governing body…and in the end, it is as Chairman Mao correctly stated, and the Roman Emperors in their own times and ways rightly understood..: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”….If we look to the conservative parties, we see example in the way so many can and do snub the decisions and opinions of the judiciary, knowing full well that the bluff of the judiciary can be called because even THAT esteemed authority only exists (in truth) at the pleasure of the ruling military power…be that power overt or covert..benign or malignant..it is there..at the ready.

To be continued. . .