Turn Left at Venus Read online

  The two of them understood that immigrants like them were considered not quite acceptable by those who never considered themselves descended from unwanted immigrants, those who called themselves ‘settlers’, or had no need to call themselves anything, they were simply entitled to be.

  Each of them had a schoolfriend who gossiped with her, telling tales about the others at school just as the friend no doubt went back to the others with her tales of us. Never a friend like you and I are friends. The schoolfriend doesn’t really know about us, and that means that that one’s not that close a friend, more just someone because they sit next to you in the class where the teacher can’t stop anyone from talking, or you pass notes. Not like you and me, we met on the boat.

  Leyla had gone to ballet classes for years.

  Ada had been reading every moment she could.

  Something the other could not enter.

  Ada knew something about her father.

  He was an anarchist and he had been imprisoned for his beliefs.

  Knowledge like a cloud that reformed and drifted away as you tried to draw its shape.

  He had died in prison but he was always a good man. She must not ask about him, not yet. One day her mother would tell her everything.

  In this world you could be put in gaol just for what you believed. Something huge and powerful would always try to silence you. Ada had learned to call it The State.

  If anarchism was how society worked, people agreed on the rules they’d live by, no coercion.

  Her father, she saw in her mind, energised by idealism and love of humanity, stood on cold grey street corners handing out pamphlets printed by a hand press, impelled by a sense of mission, of rightness. People read his pamphlets and were ignited, by revolutionary zeal or a wicked fear of it. He was against The State that wanted to silence everyone and everything that did not obey it. More than that, he was for each person’s freedom, that’s what anarchism meant. She found it in the encyclopedia in the library. Anarchism meant ‘without authority’. It came from a Greek word. Ada knew some things about the ancient Greeks – gods, heroes, marble statues, democracy, Olympus, Olympic Games, philosophers, civilisation. It’s as if those people were not people like we are, they lived in such a different way, they had no machines and no gunpowder, their stories were sung to each other not written in books; was it possible to even imagine their lives?

  In prison, what would have happened? Ada doesn’t even know when he died, not exactly or how. She had an idea he ‘took his own life’, for she recalled that once her mother made a point of denying it, but if he did Ada thought it was brave, a triumph, a way to win. When her mother was all right again, the full story would be told.

  In later life she won’t remember quite how she found out the little she knew; she thinks it was from overhearing her mother and others.

  He had held her when she was a small child, a candleflame memory that flickered and died, from that time whose remembering had been obliterated.

  He had had his wishes for her.

  She had had to forget, made to forget by those who thought they could only go on living if memory were vanquished.

  ‘Of course I’m going to be rather wealthy and quite wellknown,’ Leyla declared.

  Ada found herself a bit shocked at first, or just surprised. Was this a worthy ambition? Ada did not have words for her ineffable ambitions. To transcend, to know, to create, to be free, to be understood. To make something understood. She hadn’t worked it out even that much. She knew she needed to find words.

  But Leyla wanted the same kinds of things.

  Ada couldn’t tell anyone else things like that. The mother had ideas but felt defeated, bereft, made to live in a living hell. At some point, Ada understood her father had died. Her mother wouldn’t talk to her, and Ada had continued her reading and read only in English. Her mother began to find happiness with another man. Ada’s Intermediate Certificate exam was close by then.

  Leyla and Ada would meet everyone they wanted to meet. Artists, philosophers, musicians.

  Or did Ada ever say? Say what she wanted to be, to do? Did Leyla say? Like anyone who goes to school they were aware that they were preparing for a future. They lived for their future, calling upon that future to deliver the experiences they wanted to the women they intended to be. They would bust out of the world of restraint that was life when you were still at school.

  Their future lay glittering beyond a dark bend, and though they could not see it directly the glow it cast off was visible.

  In the tree they decided to leave school the moment they were both legally able.

  Once, they must have thought that they would finish school, once thought that they never weren’t going to, they were clever girls who passed exams easily enough. But why stay at school. You could go to the School of Life.

  Maybe that light from the future always illuminated that other possibility: to become independent women at the earliest possible moment.

  Neither of them wanted to go to another educational institution, where there was always only one correct answer. Life would be their teacher, their examination. There were jobs in the city that paid for the rooms for rent, and things besides, if you had to buy any things.

  You never went shopping then in today’s sense of going out to see if you could come across anything you felt like buying.

  You got a job, they knew that much, and when it was time to do it they’d know how.

  As soon as they were old enough they would go to the city, lead the life they wanted to lead. Leyla would be a dancer and all kinds of things that she would or would not name; ‘I can do so many things,’ she said, and Ada would become a writer and nothing else, once she had experienced life.

  ‘I will get experience,’ said Ada. ‘One day. Then I’ll be a writer.’

  Leyla said, ‘I could be the most beautiful writer. I won’t be only a dancer. I will use all my talents. I will be an inspiration. I will awaken and influence. I will be worshipped.’

  There was a sense that experience defied authority.

  Experience, a word laden with what could make you smile knowingly.

  Do you want to stay a virgin? How does it have to be? Whatever they said, it was a version of ‘perfect’. How would that perfect make itself known? Do you know anyone who has? No, not old married people, very funny; like anyone from school?

  Ada said, ‘People don’t have to get married.’

  Leyla said, ‘As an artist you can live the way you want.’

  Ada said, ‘You can’t make rules about love.’

  Leyla said, ‘Love doesn’t have rules.’

  Ada said, ‘People should be free. ’

  Leyla said, ‘Free love is the only way.’

  Ada said, ‘Love freely.’

  They were solemn, they laughed.

  8

  PORTAL: ANARCHISM

  Anarchism is a system that people who don’t want to be part of a system can be part of. Dissenters are valued as a way for the system to check itself.

  Anarchism is chaotic. OK. So is capitalism. So is everything. Existence is basically chaotic.

  Also, what is more chaotic than “the market”?

  Remember Bakunin: privileged positions always kill the heart and mind.

  As long as there is an idea called Anarchism there will always be Statism. As long as people call themselves Atheists then God or the Gods are maintained. As long as people declare themselves Gender-fluid, gender categories will be perpetuated. To oppose something is to keep it going. So Ligeti has done as much as anyone to perpetuate the status quo.

  There is a distinction. There’s the way anarchism is in our world, which is a reaction. And there’s the way the society on Lueshira works, which does not call itself anarchist, as it only knows itself the way it is.

  You can’t define anarchism. Anarchists themselves, taken as a whole, disagree among themselves about what anarchism actually is. There’s another thread here from a while back about anarc
hism in Turn Left At Venus

  Where not to tell the joke about how you know where the anarchist in the room is

  We’ve all heard someone use the phrase.

  People came to use the phrase turn left at Venus to indicate that there were actual directions to another planet on which the story takes place.

  Even some who read the novel, or said they had read it, they used the term this way.

  But the passage in the book from which Ligeti took the title explained that you did not arrive at Lueshira by following directions in three-dimensional space, you did not ‘go straight ahead then turn left at Venus’, you only could arrive at Lueshira once you had traveled in a way that enabled you to enter dimensions beyond, different from, the usual space and time.

  Which some people understood. And so when those people said ‘turn left at Venus’ they meant it with a kind of irony, they meant ‘leave your usual way of seeing things behind’.

  ‘Turn left at Venus’ also meant, ‘don’t do what you’re doing, you’re doing it wrong’.

  Some people said ‘left turn at Venus’ and meant whatever they meant, sometimes just ‘don’t get lost’ or ‘go the right way’.

  Or ‘turn left at Venus’ meant ‘open your mind’ or ‘you are not making any sense’

  What makes Ligeti’s novels valuable for the kind of re-evaluation this ReTreat Series offers both the academic scholar and the general reader is the thought experiment they present, one which continues to remain in the realm of the hypothetical. What would a society be like if it were free of patriarchal gender categories? How would people relate to each other if unequal gender relationships did not exist? Ligeti’s own gender is a matter of speculation; but we do know what matters to this writer: questions of social relationships and social orders. Science fiction is usually understood as stories of space travel, often with hostile and violent encounters, or of technology, featuring weapons and machines. Ligeti’s work belongs to a different tradition, and is arguably one of the founders of this tradition’s characteristics: speculative fiction that does not assume stereotypical heteronormative or diversity-phobic social and personal arrangements.

  Even the best-known male science fiction writers might be accomplished imaginers of what it would be like to fly to the Moon or beyond our galaxy, or to have robots that make all human labour automated and then might want to be counted as human too, or to have awesome superpowers, or to take civilisation to the brink of destruction … but generally until the 1970s (and to some extent until the present) the boys set their futuristic stories in worlds where males go out to conquer and struggle, and women stay home to keep house and raise the children, or, as if this would be progress, women become the sexy side-kick, maybe the extra-terrestrial kinkster, or space-suited domestic partner (sub-categories: supportive or clueless).

  A.L. Ligeti’s Turn Left At Venus was one of the earliest and most ground-breaking works in the countering movement: science fiction more concerned with social arrangements and social relationships,

  Threads with most recent posts:

  Do we have to regulate, to categorise, is it all a way of control?

  Are gender categories a way for The System to control us?

  How do you enforce rules if there is no hierarchy?

  Free love and other ideals in Ligeti’s books

  Did Ligeti’s ideas about anarchism change after Turn Left At Venus?

  Anarchism: principles and pitfalls

  What Ligeti had imagined, anyway, was the connectedness, its illusionary quality where it is most real, 1/2

  the real extent of it beyond what is considered real. 2/2 What Ligeti had imagined: later declared prescient. Its our present! We r attached 2 our devices, we can contact anybody, find out anything.

  It’s a novel from its own time. No-one had invited The Stranger to Lueshira but he assumed every right to land there and question all 1/3

  its habits and customs, to closely examine whatever he noticed, to inspect and assess any aspects of the culture that his curiosity or 2/3

  necessity brought to his attention. 3/3

  Who else just loves the idea of MahLila as The Stranger?

  9

  THE CLUB; CHARLES

  There must have been a first time they danced together at the Club of All Nations. Ada took the lead position and did not so much lead as act as an anchor for the flourishes and swirls of Leyla’s steps. They danced as if they had together learned how. Ada found herself able to dance. Many nights of the week they put on all their petticoats, the hoops and the nets, to sway to the jazzy rhythms at the club.

  Ada and Leyla were the two girls who always came here together, danced together, were friendly with everyone but remained as contained and protected in their girlfriend coupledom as any couple or group who were there at the club to be there with each other.

  Two men came as a pair to ask them to dance, led them about with graceful aplomb for the whole song, then brought them back together again, thanked them nicely, and returned to converse over a drink with each other. On weekends a trio played lively dance music, polkas and foxtrots. And the Americans, the Americans had brought their music with them and some of them stayed or returned when the war was over.

  There was the time the American group came to the club late at night after they had done their paying gig at, what was it then, the Hilton? – there playing to the quietly seated audience the obligatory crooner sets, but here now late at night were oh so welcome to come and join the trio at the bandstand, and, to some, welcome to take over, depending on who was playing.

  It’s always good to see musicians working with each other. It’s as if Ada had always known that; memory is inevitably tinged with future knowledge.

  The music and the voices filled the space, the sound of a sense of freedom, relief, of a recent narrow escape, a very proximate threat. An unspoken, unacknowledged presence outside was the possibility of terror, loss, recurrence.

  Once you were inside the club there was no outside.

  No more of the world of streets, assimilation, employment.

  In the club you were not in Australia. That went without saying. But everyone knew it. Everyone had stepped out of Australia to step in here. In here we are all nations for the sake of the name of our club, but really in here we have no nations at all, the nations of our past no longer exist and we can claim only historical, theoretical connections to our past nations, all nationalisms are imaginary. In the club people made up a world, a new world, a new Europe, a united nations, a cosmopolitan enclave whose borders enclosed a domain they each brought into being with their presence. As if the club were a nation of its own.

  But no one should say this was not being in Australia. This was what Australia looked like in here. But it was a secret, shadow, parallel Australia invisible to the entitled Australia that knew itself as the only real one. Ada, who could make herself invisible, found an invisible world.

  Some Australian women discovered the club because they had travelled to the Continent or meant to do so and they had read French novels and basked in the natural gallantry of foreign men who obligingly performed their signature courtesy – the kissing of hands was a welcome deed.

  There were the other few people who had migrated to the club from within this country; they were foreigners of a different sort; they came to meet each other. They were the men Ada and Leyla called Les Messieurs (Ada and Leyla had done well in French at school).

  They could tell that Les Messieurs also watched and assessed and recognised.

  This was nearly a century ago, but remembering life is like remembering dreams. The earlier part is more vivid even if the later part was more recently dreamed.

  Though with dreams you are left wondering if things did happen in order at all in the first place or somehow all at once. And, live long enough you wonder it about your memories of life. Do things really happen one after another? If memory distorts chronology and duration, is it more or less attuned to reality?
r />   Early in the week a melancholy Hungarian with long moustaches flowing off the sides of his chin played the piano, sometimes turning pages of some sheet music, and mostly in accomplished, self-involved improvisation, mixing classical music with folk-ish tunes and lines of melody from crooners’ ballads, Chopin with the czardas, attempting every possible variation in tempo, playing slow passages with almost unbearable long intervals between notes and then a sudden attack with a furious polka rhythm, a riotous outbreak of relief and exuberance. Dancers stumbled, found his new rhythm.

  Once in a while he was joined by players on strings, someone who had brought their violin or oud to the club tonight, because on certain nights, or because. Who were they? In what conservatoires and concert halls and carnivals, what music academies, in what festive streets had they once learned and practised? No answer was expected, such questions were not asked, prior existence was everyone’s secret in here. The melancholy Hungarian’s attack at the keyboard came out of a strange assurance that did not evidently refer to any response for he did not acknowledge any, even while the bubble that enclosed him included the part of everyone there that was affected by the music. He seemed to be in his own world, within an enclosure of concentration, never seemed to speak to anyone, he appeared only at the piano, disappeared when he had finished playing.

  It had become very late and some of the lights had been turned off; there were a few people left, dotted round the room, some at the mostly empty tables, or maybe by now anyone else who had not left was leaning on the wooden bar at the side of the room, and out in the kitchen they stopped their cleaning up and came inside for a while, and sometimes some disconsolate couple was still dancing on the now dark dance floor, with inexpressible sadness for absences and losses and for the dancing of their haunting past. Or it was Ada and Leyla dancing now in a slow moody private way; if those others liked to look, you were kind enough to give them something to look at, but everyone would leave you alone. It was that time of night, it was that kind of night, it was that kind of place. Out there in the menacing outside you might not be left alone, you surely could not count on it. Inside the club, even a bomb from the sky would not penetrate.