Murmur Page 2

  *

  There is a picture book in the Royal Infirmary waiting room. I think it is an attempt to improve me, or to give the sickly reasons to get well (art, culture, all of it waiting to be appreciated!) should medicine struggle to oblige. It contains a reproduction of Poussin’s The Triumph of David. I was struck by the painting, which I did not know. In particular I was struck by the fact that the young Israelite and the waxy outsized head of Goliath, the slain Philistine, wore similar expressions. They seemed sad, as if they had glimpsed, beyond the immediate joy and horror, echoes of the act in history—its wave-like propagation of revenge.

  *

  A gardener, today, laying out the common beds for the council: “A whole mob of crows died in the meadow a few years ago. They did autopsies, because it was such an unusual event. But they died of old age. They were about seventeen.” Christopher’s age.

  *

  That life has arisen on this planet might be regarded as a matter for amazement. That it should arise on many others would be, on the face of it, if true, even more amazing. The repeated escape from, as Schrödinger puts it, “atomic chaos” would be not just one sense-defying statistical fluctuation but a whole series of them. It would be like throwing handfuls of sand into the wind and finding, when the grains are settled, tiny replicas of the Taj Mahal, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the temple complex of Angkor Wat upon the ground. It would be very lovely, but unlikely. Luckily for us, however, the statistical system of the universe has about it a marvelous impurity, which is that it functions also as a dynamical system or mechanism for the maintenance and reproduction of order over long stretches of time. Or, to be disappointingly precise, the prolonged illusion of order, because the statistics of thermal disorder are all still there in the background and, like suspicious tax officers, they will get to us in the end. The art of living then, on this view, is simply that of defying them for as long as possible, until equilibrium, which isn’t as nice as it sounds, is restored.

  *

  The alarming truth is that you can’t grasp your own condition, though you suspect that something is wrong. You see yourself on the edge of a black hole, or a bowl, or a cauldron, whereas, in reality, you have disappeared down inside it.

  *

  You know your social life is in trouble when you spend the evening reading an article on puzzles called “Recreational Topology.” I don’t have any kind of social life. It’s topologically invariant under many deformations, you might say, although probably only someone without a social life would bother to say that.

  *

  The other part of my rehabilitation, or punishment, or both, consists of fortnightly meetings with a psychoanalyst, Dr. Anthony Stallbrook. I have approached this with circumspection. I find, however, that it is not as I had been led to expect. He is a most sympathetic, comfortably tiny person with fuzz around the ears and a pate that shines like a lamp in his study and lights the way to two armchairs. No couch. We chat. We go for walks and trips. We are not supposed to go for walks and trips, but then he does not believe in his assignment, that homosexuals require any rehabilitation, or that there is time to be lost where friendship is concerned. Neither does his wife. We are planning a trip to Brighton. Our sessions together founder somewhat on the reef of his presuppositions: I have searched my conscience for repressed feelings and find none. I loved Christopher and had fantasized about a future that involved us living and working together. He took me seriously. I am quite sure that I never fooled myself into believing that he felt intimately about me as I felt about him. His friendship would have been enough. My fantasies were outrageously Platonic, and I have never stopped loving him. At the same time, I am haunted by his presence, molecular, gaseous, call it what you will—and the nearness of his voice and person, on the lip of conscious experience, is a constant anxiety made worse by my own changes. He is as near to me as I am near to the person I used to be, and both persons are irretrievable.

  Dr. Stallbrook often asks me how I feel. I reply that I do not know. How does one feel? It is one of the imponderables. I am better equipped to say what it is that I feel, and that is mysterious enough. For I feel that I am a man stripped of manhood, a being but not a body. Like the Invisible Man, I put on clothes to give myself a stable form. I’m at some point of disclosure between the real and the abstract—changing and shifting, trying to stay close to the transformation, not to flee it. I have the conviction that I am now something like x—a variable. We discuss dreams, and in the course of these discussions I have come to see dream figures as other sets of variables. How else should one account for the odd conviction we have in dreams that the strangers we encounter are “really” people we know?

  What gets us from one expression of the variable to another?

  There is a leap from the inorganic to the organic. There is a leap from one valency to another, and there is a leap from one person’s thought to the thought of others. The world is full of discrete motes, probabilistic states, and gaps. Only a wave can take us from one to the other; or a force or flow; or perhaps a field. When I look in the mirror, I think, thrice, “Is it me? Is it not me? Is it not me, yet?”

  Dr. Stallbrook encourages me to write. It is like making a will, he says—eminently sensible. If you’ve signed your papers and made a will, you know there will be an end. You have already witnessed it, so to speak. And people who make this definite accommodation with their end, with the prospect of death—who get it in writing—live longer. He says this with a matter-of-factness I can’t help liking.

  *

  Julius and others belabor me with questions about thinking machines and the parallels between chains of neurons in the brain and the relationship of the controlling mechanism to output and feedback in digital computers. I want fair play for the computer, of course. I feel, as he does, that “understanding” in a machine is a function of the relationship between its rules. Recursion may turn out to be reflection in both the optical and the philosophical senses of the word. Who knows what machines may end up “thinking”? But I am privately skeptical of too wide an application of the personifying tendency. One knows oneself to be aware and infers from others—from behavior, yes, but also from the body or the instrument that produces the behavior—that they are similarly cognizant. One can’t go on from there to supposing that awareness itself is necessary, however. Hasn’t it struck most of us at one time or another that much of life is a pointless algorithm, an evolutionary process without an interpreter? On a smaller scale, too, a process such as simple addition has human “meaning” only because I am there to observe it and call it “addition.” And yet it certainly happens. Perhaps the larger process, too, is unmeaningful. If life works, it works. The character of physical law as it extends to biological material is that it should underpin the way cells and systems operate, and that is all.

  That sounds pleasingly final, but it won’t do. I know that. Things don’t always add up. I can tell you that it is asymmetrical motion at the molecular level that picks out an axis for patterned development in a sphere of cells—that turns a sphere into an embryo—but I cannot satisfy the person who goes on asking “why?” That person is the halfwit in a public lecture. That person is a child. And that person is also me. The Church says: “People come in search of meaning, and to have their fears and anxieties allayed.” But to think you can be finally satisfied on these points, or to imagine you can satisfy others, is the source of the misgiving.

  *

  I have this strange idea. Christopher left school without saying goodbye. His parents came to pick him up and I saw them get in the Daimler. I was in the upper gallery, working on some diagonals. I looked askance, through the window, and there they were, thanking the headmaster, hurrying away. I heard no more from Christopher or his mother, with whom I imagined myself friendly, until the notice of his death. I had not known he was consumptive. He had cold hands.

  This is the idea. We, Chris and I, were reprimanded for scrumping apples from the trees that overhung
the chaplain’s garden. They belonged to Fowle’s fruiterers. We were punished and interviewed separately. I think he was told to avoid me. I think he was told no good could come of our friendship, because of what I am, or rather, because of what, then, it was suggested I would become. I am not effeminate, but I am mannered. I am a homosexual, and I suppose that much was clear to the masters. In particular, I think it was impressed on Chris that some polluting disaster would befall me, and if only he had asked “why?,” my future ghost might have told him.

  *

  Dr. Stallbrook makes many notes as we go along, talking and arguing, and it has crossed my mind that patients of different stripes must react differently to this. I confess I find it irritating. I do not like being “marked,” or having my papers tampered with editorially, or submitting to a “clinical” opinion I am not in a position to check. (I was displeased when I found out that I had been circumcised.) And if his notes are, as he claims, “for his eyes only,” then they are unfalsifiable. They may well proceed from a psychoanalytic theory. But how is the theory being tested or controlled? How can it be said to be scientific? He is unflappable, of course. It is not that kind of theory, he says; it is, rather, theoria, from the Greek, meaning “contemplation.” The look of point-missingly clever satisfaction on his face! Anyway, he is not telling the truth. I am a criminal. He is writing reports and sending them off.

  The whole premise is childish, like the schoolboy who covers his work with his elbow to prevent his neighbor cheating. I told him this.

  “I’m really not trying to hide anything, Alec,” he laughed. “I just don’t think you’d benefit from reading my notes. My job is to help you encounter yourself.”

  I replied, in a bit of a torrent: “Balls. This is passing the buck. This is what my father saw in India all the time—Europeans waving their hands and saying, ‘But the unrest is native and has nothing to do with us.’ You are not an impartial observer, Dr. Stallbrook. The observer is a participant, as the great revolution in quantum physics has taught us. Consider now that I am the set of notes that you wish to read. I might as well ask: how are you to benefit from reading me? Shall we condemn ourselves to solipsism? The two sides of an equation must meet if they are to balance. You are dodging the issue. What you want is for me not to press too deeply, not to ask for things you cannot give, not to question your authority. And that is unfair.”

  “What do you mean?”

  At this point, I lost my temper. “The assumption of science is that things are discoverable. Things that belong in problems of logic that are not in principle resolvable belong in a separate category. Things that do not admit of rational argument in another—God, for instance. But things that are just hidden, or powers that are reserved for no good reason because someone ‘says so,’ are the work of the bloody devil! They are a cryptic burden to us all—”

  I was half out of my chair, and sat back heavily, because I’d come upon one of my own restrictions and couldn’t believe I’d hidden it so effectively from myself.

  The Act constrains me, of course. Aspects of my working past are always to be concealed from Dr. Stallbrook. With the result that I am confined to addressing my personal life—aspects of which are presumably concealed from me.

  Noticing my discomfiture, Anthony asked me what I was thinking. He sounded very kind, and I wanted to equal him in cooperation. Whenever I have not been able to persuade someone, I have tried to cooperate. I take this view even in respect of my conviction. One should meet bad manners with good grace.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I respect a necessary authority. But I do not like dodges or masquerades. Puzzles, yes. Masquerades, no.”

  “Is this a masquerade?”

  “No.” And I was sullenly silent for a while, thinking distractedly and angrily that civilized England is a masquerade. The War Room is a masquerade when the real thing is far away. Psychoanalysts are doubtless persons of integrity, but persons of integrity may still be pawns. There is usually some rule governing our voluntary actions that we either do not know about or are unwilling to acknowledge—the motives of the companies that pay our salaries and ask us to do things, the real function of justice, and so on. “No,” I continued, “but this is nevertheless a game with prohibitions we are playing, and one in which you have the advantage. Your opinion of me counts, whatever I say. If you were to decide that I constituted a danger to society, you could have me locked away in a mental institution. But I cannot affect what happens to you. And the further disadvantage to me is that there are things I simply cannot tell you, because I have given my word to others—others in authority—and even the confidences of our arrangement shall not tempt me, because a secret is a personal vow of custody. It cannot be handed over to someone else for safekeeping. And now you will think I am being unfair, and even obstructive.”

  “No,” said Dr. Stallbrook, carefully, “that is not what I think.”

  We brooded for a while, and the tension eased.

  *

  Also: just because something is discoverable doesn’t mean one has any idea of how the discovering is to be done. One experiments, and sometimes there is a breakthrough and sometimes one has to admit defeat. How is one consciously to encounter one’s subconscious? The gap is unbridgeable, it seems to me.

  Love is a gap. I used to look at Chris while we were tinkering with chemicals and I’d carry on a conversation, adjusting retorts, making notes, apologizing. Thinking all the while: this must be possible; clearly it is, for others manage it. But how?

  *

  Tolstoy’s accounts of Borodino and Austerlitz show us what real war is like: no one knows what the orders are or who is winning. No one has any idea what to do. Soldiers are permitted to kill each other and are maddened, sooner or later, by the realization that someone else, somewhere relatively comfortable, thinks this is the right thing for them to do. And we are not so far from that kind of chaos in everyday life, really. I walk down the street toward the Infirmary, every Wednesday, and I go in and wait and sit down and everyone is quite polite, and I am played with by the law and turned into a sexless person. The most extraordinary thing is done behind a nice white screen. And the nurse who injects me does it with a good will, because she has been told that it is her job. She doubtless thinks of herself as a freely choosing agent. She likes to think she does her job well, but at the same time she is just doing her job. (One hears this a lot.) That means she does not take ultimate responsibility for her actions, because those kinds of decisions are taken, or absorbed, by more powerful persons, like Tolstoy’s generals, who know what they are doing. She sees no contradiction between this and her own intuitive sense of agency.

  She goes home to her parents’ house and has her tea. They have put up some new frieze wallpaper with a ribbon of classical-looking dancing figures where a picture rail might have been. It looks pretty and I wonder how often the family has looked at the actual figures in the frieze, copied from vases in the British Museum by some impish and bored designer. The figures are a) playing music, b) killing their enemies, and c) engaged in exotic but mechanical sexual relations.

  We agree not to look. It is a simple but profound contract of the collective subconscious with the truth. If you speak the truth, or do something that indicates how human beings function, regardless of the law, regardless of moral superstition, then people will turn against you, and you must never underestimate how fearful and weak most people in a large body, like a government, or a university, or even an office, actually are. Once you have been isolated in this way, you can be dismissed.

  *

  I wish people who believe in God could believe in him a little less fervently—could see him as a metaphor for the boundedness of our physical existences and the problem of the mental, which is physical, too, but perhaps in a way we don’t understand.

  *

  “You’re doing tremendously well!” or even “You’re looking well on it” means: “Please don’t tell me any more about your plight, but instead r
eassure me that I don’t have to worry about this.” Similarly, hilariously, “We know what it’s like. We’ve just had the most awful trouble with …” means: “We are not going to help you.”

  But they are helping, my neighbors, and I am cruel. They want me to teach their son chess. He is a pleasant chap with no great aptitude (yet) for the game, or for calculation in general, and I suspect that he likes the barley water at the end of our lessons most of all. He stumbles over my name, and speaks inaudibly, which I find upsetting.

  *

  Doctors can be terribly self-important without realizing it because they get to point and diagnose, and if they’re pointing at you then of course that means you’re not pointing at them. Pointers are an odd lot. They want the triumphant power of clarifying something, of accusation, but they’re also jealously private. They don’t want to be pointed out themselves: it’s a sort of nightmare for them, which leads to them pointing at others more and more often, more and more vehemently. I tend to do it when I get cross. It’s an extremely unappealing habit born of heaven knows what guilt and insecurity. But I don’t do it so much now—now that I’ve been pointed out once and for all, as it were. Perhaps I’ve realized I just don’t feel guilty of this so-called crime. The whole thing is … pointless. It rather frees one up.

  Stallbrook is at least intelligent. The endocrinologist at the Infirmary told me, “These are conservative measures. The hormone is effective rather than strong. There shouldn’t be side effects.” It is effective, but in a way that doesn’t have effects.

  *

  I liked the Fun Fair and Festival Pleasure Gardens, but I love the old fairs more.