by James Greer
Or maybe I imagined everything. Maybe I was the only one who saw in Albion the ideal, the template of the possible. Here was no loud music, no chattering of drunk students, no neon brightness against which we shaded our lives with banalities and manufactured dramas and a slurry of lies and evasions. Here it was possible to be myself, because here my eccentricities were well known and accepted. I was a little crazy, but we were all a little crazy; craziness was the general condition at Albion, the done thing, the starting point. For the others this may have been a put-on. But not for me. For me Albion was freedom in a way that the bars could never be freedom, that an ordinary after-hours party at someone’s house could never be freedom, because someone else’s house entails abiding by someone else’s proprieties, or notions of propriety, of not doing something embarrassing, whether to oneself or to another. At Albion you couldn’t be embarrassing. Embarrassment didn’t exist by firelight, in an absolutely neutral zone—neutral in the way I had always held myself neutral, apart from the intimate lives of my friends. Here I no longer needed to maintain that neutrality because the place maintained it for me, and I could speak my mind, and act my mind, and inhabit the space around me naturally, without constraint except insofar as I wished to impose upon myself, naturally, without regard for social norms or expectations. Maybe, as I say, the whole thing, the idea of Albion, was only a fantasy, an extension of my own silly dreams about how and why to live. But while it lasted it was a very beautiful fantasy.
The girl’s grief was not at all soothed by this sort of blathering. How could it be? She kept her head down between her knees and wept uncontrollably. There never was a real Gorgon; there was only a prophylactic ugly face formalized into a mask. The ugly face at the mouth of the bag symbolizes that the secrets of the alphabet, which are the real contents of the bag, are not to be misused or divulged. How seductive that fantasy was to me, to Fiat Lux, to a girl who’d consigned herself to shadows and moreover loved her shadow-life, who loved ideas and words and the things beyond ideas and words that were only represented by ideas, and by words—which representation, or rather the long and strange history of the development of that representation, because I don’t think of etymology as random, if you look at anything like Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding or Müller’s Science of Language, you can see that the process of assigning word to idea has been anything but random, has been a careful and constantly evolving process, one might even call it the common secret project of humanity—in the Platonic sense of the ideal, which is not dissimilar, I’ve always thought, to the Christian Science notion of Divine Truth as opposed to Mortal Error, which is one reason I’ve always had an easy time accepting the existence of absolutes, and consequently of ideas beyond words. But here I was, at Albion, seeing ideas as more than words, as a sequence of little realities that might, I believed at the time and still believe, if certain things had happened or rather not happened, evolve into a bigger reality, a sustaining shadowless Real Life pregnant with possibility.
“Much of the modern history of technology and science might be characterized as a continual increase in the amount of energy available through fire and brought under human control. Most of the increased available energy has come from ever greater amounts and kinds of fires.
—Encyclopedia Britannica
The miraculous child set a riddle, based on a knowledge not only of British and Irish mythology, but the Greek New Testament and Septuagint, the Hebrew Scriptures and Apocrypha, and Latin and Greek mythology. The answer to the riddle is a list of names, claimed to be the original names of the Ogham alphabet, which is found in numerous inscriptions in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, and the Isle of Man, some of them pre-Christian. It may also have been current in Britain where, according to Julius Caesar, the Druids of Gaul went for their university training in secret doctrine. He is a mighty hunter and makes rain, when it is needed, by rattling an oak club thunderously in a hollow oak and stirring a pool with an oak branch, and so attracting thunderstorms by sympathetic magic. That Vulcan gave arrows unto Apollo and Diana the fourth day after their Nativities, according to Gentile Theology, may paffe for no blinde apprehenfion of the Creation of the Sunne and the Moon, in the work of the fourth day; when the diffufed light contracted into Orbes, and fhooting rayes, of thofe Luminaries.
I have to lie down, below the level of the window sill, to smoke. I remember reading about de Gaulle during World War Two, that when he traveled by plane at night, and the plane’s lights were blacked out to avoid being spotted by enemy aircraft, he refused not to smoke. So an eagle-eyed Luftwaffe pilot might have spotted him by the small orange glow from the tip of his cigarette. Obviously, no one ever did. But I don’t have a general’s guts. No matter what Kurt said.
I have been writing for almost three days straight. I state that merely as fact, as an objective observation. I’m not bragging. I wish that I had leisure to polish, correct, edit, rewrite. All writing is rewriting. So whatever I’m doing here, stands to reason, is not writing. I’m moving my pen over the page as fast as I can; my hand keeps cramping, and parts have gone numb, maybe for good, and there was a blister on my middle finger that popped and blood drooled down my arm but now it’s nicely callused. I have not slept at all. I haven’t eaten much—a couple of tins of tuna and some wheat crackers. I have drunk a fair amount of wine, because that is the only way I seem to be able to stay awake, which makes no sense but I believe it to be true and therefore it has become true.
I’m scared, all the time. Right now, I’m terrified. Because of what I have done, because of what I now have to do, and because if anyone finds out either of these two things before I’m ready I will end up in jail or dead. Worse than that, I will have failed. I’m prepared to accept jail or death, but not failure. That’s over-dramatic and self-important and also true. Or it’s neither over-dramatic nor self-important—because at stake is the future of the world, in the most mundane sense—and still true.
Oh, my sea-green incorruptible! Poor sallow Kurt. No longer orbiting our orbicle of jasp. By whose agency were you removed? By me. By Fiat Lux, who never before did anything of note, who never did anything, whose life was quiet and whose head was full of words and who would never have believed that she’d end up on the run, in hiding, a murderess, an accomplice.
Life is full of such surprises. The simplest turn in the smoothest road can be fraught with sudden danger, just as the most hazardous journey can pass without incident. It’s safer to fly than drive, but most accidents happen in the bathroom. Timing is everything. There’s never a right time for anything. Fortune doesn’t exist, and the alignment of stars and moon has no bearing on the tides of individual affairs. Out of the routine rocks of day-to-day existence you can eventually hack, with great effort and a blunt tool, a shallow windbreak, but if you try it alone it won’t last, trust me.
Notebook Nine
5.
• Though I’m unable to get down to the office much these days, doesn’t mean I spend my days in idleness. Not long after the doctor’s daily visit, and my daily injection to combat the sciatica that has troubled me ever since the Selfridge flight, I was back to work on the vacuum system that has never functioned properly owing to its many defects of construction. Basic principles: These are so much more apparent after the morphine takes effect, just as in early years our use of opium enabled us to visualize certain wind tunnel results even before we had constructed the wind tunnel! I should not say our use of opium. I should not lie to myself here in my own private journal. Will rarely smoked, and disapproved of my own use to the extent that I had to adopt a number of undignified subterfuges to keep him from suspecting the frequency, or more precisely volume, of my habit. Were it not for Charlie Taylor’s faithful service—extending even to his regular bold excursions to the Negro section of town on my behalf. Not that these were entirely selfish trips; but I was more than happy to fund his harmless infatuation with reefer (and, for all I know, darker pleasures) in return for a ready supply
of opium and Charlie’s priceless discretion.
• To think of the time and energy I expended planning and devising hideaways for my opium here at Albion, only to have Will pass away before construction could begin. Still, these trompe l’oeil gimcracks served a useful purpose after K. moved in, though for a different reason. Again, the fault’s mine, for introducing her to this pernicious habit: Though I do not regard as a vice something so evidently useful, and further cannot conceive of a Creator who would provide His offspring with a tool and then deny us its application. But with K. I think the tool (that is to say, the habit), over time, became an end in itself, and not an end toward good but one that perhaps changed her in some essential way, from a woman who understood and valued the virtue of family above all else to one in whom this virtue had become unhinged and replaced by fidelity to the brand of selfish individualism that I have always found abhorrent; to such an extent that I was driven to use the secrets of Albion, not to conceal my habit from my brothers and the bishop, but to conceal my opium from my sister. Was this the reason she left? Was this why she abandoned me to the isolationist hell of my house on the hill? Well, it didn’t help.
• There remains no earthly reason why a system of built-in tubes, connected to a central vacuum pump of sufficient power that wherever one inserts the connecting device, in this case simply a length of rubber hose with brush on one end and a metal collar on the other, activated by a simple electrical contact, should not function as cleanly, forgive the pun, as the cumbersome and inefficient machine Carrie now must drag from room to room in this impossibly large and ridiculously empty palace. In the ideal mental state to which the morphine has now enabled me—different in quality from the opium in ways that only an experienced user would understand—to see the larger problem, which now seems clear as Mad River on a summer’s day: Albion simply does not produce enough dirt for a vacuum cleaner to operate with any degree of confidence in its own abilities. All machines, I see now, have a personality not unlike the human soul, though of course not the same thing at all, because man creates machines, whereas God creates man. But just as our souls are not visible or even readily apparent, except in the refuge of faith, so the personality of a machine is not apparent, to itself at least. But I created this thing, and just as God can peer into the deepest recess of the human soul, so can I see and understand the personality of my machines. In this case, the vacuum system. Which suffers from insecurity, due to its perceived inadequacy, even though the problem’s obviously not with the cleaner but with the cleaner’s environment. Problem: How do I communicate to the vacuum system? Again, the parallels with human problems regarding God strike me; just as we are unable clearly to distinguish the voice of our Maker from among the babble that invades, even here, in the relative silence of Albion, both our waking and sleeping lives, how would my machine understand what I’m trying to tell it? I can hear its prayers as clearly were they my own: I can pity my machine for its lack of comprehension. But I have not yet figured out a way to make my language comprehensible to it. I may have to devise a language for my machines—not just the vacuum system but the furnaces, plumbing, and wiring, everything—so as to make my intentions known. So as to ease their suffering, for they do suffer, and it does pain me. The thought occurs to me, however: This may not be an easy task. If over the millennia God has not been able (or willing, I should concede, because that may be the reason, after all, and a great part of the teaching of our faith, of most faiths, concerns the reasons why the Lord may not wish to communicate directly with us—one of the main reasons, if I remember the Bishop’s teaching rightly, is that we shall surely die) to develop a system of language suitable for two-way talking, as for instance English, or the telephone, then my attempts, should I decide as I now find myself inclined to do, to devise a Lingua Machina, so to speak, may not immediately bear fruit, may consume what few useful hours remain to me.
6.
• These halls echo with lead-footed memories. Especially now, late at night, when I’m unable to sleep and the fire in the main room has died to embers, and the swashbuckling romantic novel lies at my feet, its spine broken. I can remember being happy here. I can remember being happy. That happiness more often than not took the form of other people—the Bishop, K., even Loren before he died, and of course Ivonette and the children, all gone, swept away in the flood. Not literally, of course, the flood was thirty-five years ago and although we did lose a good deal of invaluable photographs and notes, drawings, ephemera, from our downtown office, we lost no people. I don’t think—I’m not sure this is right but at my age I’m not sure it matters—too many people lost too many people in the Great Flood of 1913. Mostly a physicaldamage phenomenon or Act of God. That God should act in such a destructive way: never understood. Man is destructive enough on his own, without help. We have destroyed enough in my lifetime alone to fill the graveyards of the world twice over. That’s a witticism. I should not indulge in witticisms.
• I do still believe, I do, that the airplane will prove in time an instrument of peace. Seems clear to me that we are headed for a socialist society, because that arrangement’s the only one that makes any sense, in fairness to all, in justice to all. Perhaps that’s a pun: injustice to all? I don’t believe in puns. I do not. Someone once asked me: But surely you are a capitalist, Mr. Wright? And my reply, which now I think of it, was a good reply, and which still holds true, was on the order of: Absolutely. Every penny I receive comes from capital. I have no paying job. But for a long time I’ve had grave doubts about the justice of getting interest for the use of money. Probably it’s wrong to pay interest. The fellow then says: But without capitalism and the profit motive, whither inventions? I had to chuckle. Back then, in many instances when I was amused, I would chuckle. Nowadays it is rare that I do so. Most certainly if a profit motive were necessary for invention, I told this man, my brother and I would not have invented the airplane. Our chief concern was always to get money to put into it, not take money out of it. We were at it for the sport. Yes, well, that’s fine, he replies, but here you are, the picture postcard of rugged individualism and hard work, two boys with no money, no influence, no advantage, you start at the bottom and you come up flying. If that’s not an argument for capitalism, he says, for what the French call laissez-faire, I don’t know what is. Hah! I rejoindered. We did have advantages in youth. Great advantages. You mean to say your family was wealthy? he asked. No, wealth might have been a disadvantage, says I. The great thing for us was growing up in a family where there was much encouragement to intellectual curiosity. If not for that, we would never have gotten interested in the printing business, or the bicycle, or for that matter in the idea of flight.
• Another time I was asked: What was your greatest difficulty in solving the problem of machine-powered flight? Or something along those lines. And the answer? I can’t remember the answer. No, I do remember the answer, but now that I think back it strikes me as something of a wisecrack, and not a proper answer. There was no greatest difficulty, only innumerable small ones, each interfering with the other, was along the line of what I replied. I will sit here on the couch in front of this fire, which casts a shimmer on the damask walls, and a red glimmer on the red stain of the floors and the doors. Took special pains to acquire that shade of red. The workmen were not at first interested in the exact right shade. I made them interested. I will sit here and smoke my pipe filled with a mixture of tobacco and opium leaf, or leaves, and I will consider the grandeur of this house, every detail of which I oversaw personally, because a house is a temple for the body in the way a body is a temple for the soul. The windows of a house are the windows through which the windows of the soul perceive or are shown or see the world, and the world, in my experience, looks back. The most frightening moments in a man’s life are when he cannot see the world looking back, or when he imagines for an instant that there is no world at all to see or be seen. That the connections he has forged in the root cellar of his brain are phantasms, and no
t real, and further that nothing at all is real, not even the machine that he flew for twelve elongated seconds over the freezing sand at Kitty Hawk almost fortyfive years ago. That event did not happen. That event could not have happened, because the idea of flight is ridiculous, because all ideas are ridiculous, and moreover unsanitary. What I have done with my reading glasses, I have removed one temple so that I may apply or withdraw them with facility. I do not believe in wasting time. That’s exactly the answer I should have given. That, my good fellow, is the greatest difficulty with solving the problem of flight. The greatest difficulty with solving any problem: convincing yourself that the problem exists.
Notebook Ten
The night swarmed over Amanda Early stepping past the privet hedge and onto the sidewalk. A strong scent of azaleas, carried on the breeze, drew her attention to the sky, streaked with scudding clouds. Sum of the stars, and moon. Higher math. Wide white moon low in the dark sky, you can see the shine of its rim under a shank of backlit cloud. Not many stars: covered by clouds, or moonlight.
Amanda turned the corner from Morton west onto Oak Street. A starling swooped from maple to telephone pole, dark flying triangle, iridescing faintly in a buzzing white blare of streetlight. Sunset was iced-licorice melting, dusky red spread over the crosshatched mesh of the porch screen, the lawn chair’s broken webbing, laminated limbs brushed with ruddy twilight. Word he used: crepuscular. Shouldn’t have let him. Just what part of no was giving him trouble? A car passed by slowly, its tires bouncing on the uneven cobblestones of the recently reconstructed street. Since they tore up the tar the road is hard to walk on; the bricks underneath are uneven, broken and scarred, stamped with the company name Newtonville Brick which seems more like a statement than a company name. But I don’t know a statement of what. Down Oak to the small square of grass between the fire station and the corner of Wyoming and Brown. The grass was wet with unabsorbed rain from yesterday’s storm, even in the dark she could see the wetness glistening around the ridges of her boots, just above the rim of the rubber soles. When I swing my arms like this it must look funny to other people. Marching, marching.