by Mike Voyce
“What you see is a pattern of symmetry.
The two axes of concentration of energy and duration of events mean we show the physical world running on the downward curve, obeying Entropy. Life and ideas do the opposite; they are in dimensions or frames of reference that can’t be defined in space. Here you find the power of the mind and the power of life.
Life, Art, Religion Philosophy, all emotions and ideas, lie on the second curve. Not only are they outside your physical laws, they’re moving ever faster and more powerfully as time goes on.”
Was I demanding too much of John?
There was a pause, not a very long pause.
“Nothing exists outside your first curve. Everything exists within the law of Entropy and anything which appears to contradict this is just a local eddy.”
These were staggering words. They stopped me in my tracks, was John really saying not just that Art, Philosophy and Religion are illusion but that his science, even Life itself, is just a local eddy? ‘Tell that to a culture of bacilli’, I thought, but I didn’t say it. At least it wasn’t just me but all life on Earth John dismissed.
A law is a law; it leaves no room for any “local eddy”. Newton’s law of Entropy is proved by the fact that you will never, not almost never, but actually never, find pieces of pot lying on the floor which form themselves into a cup and jump up onto a table. On the other hand, the reverse is quite frequently seen (Acknowledgements to Professor Hawking).
My anger at John’s short-sightedness surprised me. It seems I was a believer in Spirit. The truth of what I said is obvious, but what it might mean for individuals is another matter. I can’t prove that you or I will survive death, though, you’ll appreciate; I was coming to think we might.
The time travel of H.G. Wells and Isaac Azimov surrounded my childhood. Only as an adult could I see the gradient on that ‘matter energy’ curve makes time travel impossible; things can never regain enough energy to go backwards through Time. The Mind, on the other hand, can. For life the future is always more powerful than the past. What about memory? I always assumed memory is something we carry with us, but maybe we don’t need to. Maybe we go back in time to pick it up, projecting images onto the screen of our minds, like a hologram. Maybe this is what I was doing with Edward. He needn’t be part of my past; my mind was simply going back through Time to pick him up. Perhaps memory is nothing less than time travel.
.
I hardly had time for all this. The talk with John set a train of thought running, but it was Angharad I’d called to see. Eventually I cornered her in a private conversation. I wanted to ask her about Sarah.
How long does a holiday last? Angharad knew Sarah and knew the friends she went away with. If I were invited into a major project, far from extending a holiday I’d more likely cancel it. Sarah was an enigma. Was she always this casual? Was she uninterested? Did she understand what I was trying to do? In those days she discussed everything with Angharad. I was determined to ask her. Sarah had been away for six weeks and nobody knew when she’d be back.
“You have to know her. She is, actually, treating a patient; L..... has been suicidal for years, at last Sarah got through to her, she’s taking the chance to reinforce her progress. Besides, she needs a break from the surgery.”
What could I say? L..... was one of the rich friends she’d gone to stay with. But it’s easy to be dubious about ‘treatment’ with a dozen other people in a Mediterranean villa. My face showed my thoughts.
Angharad took my arm and sat me down.
“Don’t always be so impatient. You think she’s the right person don’t you? The research hasn’t actually started yet has it? It can actually wait can’t it? If she’s the right person keep it open for her.”
I agreed. Reluctantly, I agreed.
“I won’t be a minute.”
She was off to root in a draw somewhere in another room, coming back with an armful of photographs, some in albums, some loose, many quite old.
“I want to show you Sarah.”
Angharad had collected a life story in that mass of photographs. There were pictures of Sarah and of both of them when they’d been nurses together as teenagers, of their weddings, of their children growing up, graduations and christenings. There were pictures of Sarah’s estranged husband, of cars and houses, photographs of their life histories.
There was one of Sarah’s wedding in the late 1960s, showing her black, cascading curls arranged neatly under a large brimmed hat; her short, waist less coat emphasising her long legs. What I noticed was her self-consciousness.
Angharad gave me a commentary for each picture, it took quite some time. Sitting on the floor amongst the clutter, I never knew what a great deal could be contained on just so many pieces of card.
In all those pictures Sarah seemed to be trying so terribly hard. Well we all looked gauche when we were young, and it made me smile to hear Angharad sounding so protective, there was something about Sarah that made you want to protect her.
She had married young and stayed married for a long time, separating after more than twenty years. Her husband was portrayed to me as a brute; amongst all his other faults he was against her career as a hypnotherapist. This was the last straw and final cause of their separation, at least according to Angharad.
There was something about that wedding photo. I was reluctant to put it down. I listened to Angharad, but there was something in the image of that young bride, an echo of the teenager in my vision of the toddler and her mother. Was it her eyes that reminded me so much, or something in the curve of her mouth and the way she held her head? When the thought came to me I pushed it away, unwanted fantasy.
Once again the demands of others shaped the day, our privacy was invaded and the photos. were all put away. Angharad had done her best.
Sunday’s the day I see my daughter and the rest of my time was spent with her. I rounded her up from some distant part of Angharad’s house and we set off, to make the most of our limited time together. Debbie is such a joy; her spontaneity drove away all my cares, even John's intransigent stupidity.
The way back from her mother’s house leads passed Stafford Castle. Maybe I stopped at the castle gates just to ruminate on the day. It was early autumn, the nights were drawing in and the first leaves were falling. The air was damp and cold but it wasn’t just this which made me shiver.
There’s a long avenue of trees leading up from the road to the castle keep and leaf mould and the demolition rubble of centuries bound the hard earth track between. The path itself has been much cleared by would-be historians from the local secondary schools. As I walked under the dripping shade of those great trees, I wondered what I thought I was doing.
Walking, alone in the dusk, I should have been walking back through Time. There was every reason to time travel in my mind’s eye, with all that was spinning round my head, but too much of the present adhered to the castle drive and too much of the day still stuck to my mind. I saw the rubble and felt the damp when I should have felt for the past.
I was walking over nine hundred years of history. The original Stafford castle was part of the town but, not long after the Norman Conquest, rebel Saxons burnt it down. A new and vast military complex was built here, a little out of the town, not just to control Stafford but the whole of central England. As the danger of resistance faded it was given to one of William the Conqueror’s lieutenants, the first of the Staffords and Edward’s ancestor.
Over the centuries stone replaced the first wooden palisades and the military centre became a family home. As the Middle-Ages wore on it became rooted in the land and its people.
Parliamentarians demolished it during the Civil War, seeking to erase the traditions for which it stood. I remember a civil engineer once telling me what a good job they did and what problems it made for later builders. For all that, the castle has been rebuilt and twice demolished again since then, and successive families have lived in it since Edward’s time.
The p
resent ruin has little to do with the de Staffords and no sense of Edward clung to its walls. There is no doubt he would have lived here, some times, but this was not his real home. For him you would have to look elsewhere.
I stayed long enough to smoke a cigarette and admire the commanding view of the countryside. It really is a superb site.
What else could I expect? Yet, I did come back, much later, with very different experiences. Then my mind walked back in Time to a time that seemed to be long, long ago, to the unrecognised image of a girl, her face looking down from a castle window, wistfully smiling. Maybe she was looking down at Edward. I don’t know. But on this damp, September day I retraced my steps to the car and left without a backward glance, depressed and frustrated.
***