Strange to tell it appears this Sydney writer of “Wifedom Mrs Orwell’s Invisble Life” ^! also enrolled in the Uni of WA’s External Studies Sociology1A course in February 1974 and much preferring child, youth, young adult, middle-years and seniors’ learning over Chicago School, @MIT @Harvard and United States Information Service Programmed Living & Government-approved Consumption-habits for Sexual and Maternal Fulfilment model gave it away after 6 weeks of fraught study and ridiculous if not entirely pointless household arguments..

▸To benefit from the work of someone who is invisible and unpaid and whom it is not necessary to thank because it is their inescapable purpose in life to attend to you, is to be able to imagine that you accomplished what you did alone and unaided – whether you wrested a fortune from a conquered isle, or words from the void. Invisible workers require no pay or gratitude, beyond perhaps an entire, heartfelt sentence in a preface, thanking ‘my wife.’

▸It is a phenomenal advantage to the writerly imaginatiuon to think this way. The first task of the imagination, for a writer, is the creation of the writing self. It’s quite a job, and it helps to have two of you at it: she, believing in you, so you, too, believe in yourself. This nurtured self is then mother to the work. And the work, in turn, becomes evidence of a self: I made, therefore I am. And in that sentence she disappears.

▸Writers are notoriously unstable elements, lacking a sound core, and are prone, without support, to falling into our own empty centres. If you have someone in your orbit, you feel like the nucleus. If there’s an audience you must be the star. …

▸..The individual man can be the loveliestᵛⱽ; the system will still benefit him without his having to lift a finger or a whip, or change the sheets. This is a story I tell against myself. And against the system that made this self, as well as my husband’s, and put her into his service.

▸Wifedom is a wicked magic trick that we have learned to play on ourselves. I want to expose how it is done and so take its wicked, tricking power away.◂

John is the West Pac, SEA, HK, China &c FE Russia Trisphere Scholar-educator, Australia

Dedication of this document to the memory of Karen Silkwood, a Nuclear Power techie murdered by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation on 13 November 1974

^! the body of this essay is from the Chapter, Free, pp 53 AND 57 with my enormous throbbi.. nah thanks to the author

ⱽ ᵛ global macro humanisation students, Discuss, incl rfrnce to authorial typographical error re acculturation and socialisation; micro coders or runic scholars, Do have a lively tutorial or ‘Science-in-the-pub’ sesh on vⱽ/ ᵛv differentiation