The mandala was a diagram of this new self, a symbol of order which Jung’s patients were encouraged to draw during periods of psychic recovery. The protective outer circle and the strict inner square bound and subdued the lawless powers roaming the psychological darkness, which within each mandala the patients could depict as they liked. In fully washable crayon. Jung had understood that with the self there is no linear development, only a kind of circumambulation.
‘Basically,’ Moholy said, laying it flat on the desk, ‘it’s a map.’
Jung used to draw his own personal mandala on a daily basis, a mental hygiene as regular as cleaning his teeth. It was the map of his personality, which was always changing, and also the whole Universe, one and the same.
‘That’s not the type of map I had in mind,’ Moholy said, reaching into his desk-drawer for a black-handled magnifying glass. ‘I think this is a geographical map. Look at these marks.’
We both crouched low over the table. At one level, I knew this was barmy, but Jung had made his great discoveries by believing whatever mad people believed, and, under magnification, Moholy was sure he could see several tiny holes in the cloth, like pin-pricks, each one in the centre of a small embroidered rectangle. He fetched a second desk-lamp, with a green shade. There was just the suggestion, at various points on the cloth, of the curve of different-sized circles, as if the holes had been made by the point of a compass.
‘Now that,’ Moholy said, ‘would truly be interesting. But what does it actually map?’
‘Maybe it’s just a cloth.’
Moholy revolved the circle of silk a half-turn, then another quarter. ‘Something round, I imagine.’
‘Or something square.’
‘You know, this could be just the missing piece I’ve been looking for. The silk was with Becket. I knew there was something important about Becket. Maybe this was it. There must be some sort of connection between our Swiss relics and this particular piece of material. Watch this.’
Moholy took off his jacket and pushed up his shirtsleeves, then rummaged through the desk before securing them with red elastic bands. He also brought out a yellow retractable tape-measure, and very carefully measured the width of the knee-cap I was claiming as Jung. He noted the measurement, then put the bone aside. If the mandala was a map, as Moholy was suggesting, or a puzzle, then Jung’s knee-cap could be some kind of indicator, or arrow. Moholy’s hands went inside the drawer again, and brought out a brass compass with points on each extended arm. Taking care, he positioned the compass precisely on the cloth.
The large square sewn inside the circle, he’d decided, could represent the square surface area of a cemetery, not unlike Geneva’s Cimetière des Rois.
‘You’ve been there, haven’t you?’
‘I have.’
‘And it’s square.’
‘It is.’
The hand-embroidered rectangles inside the square corresponded to the location of selected graves in the cemetery, and this particular mandala was the kind of map in which X marked the spot. Except there was no obvious X. The indicators, the arrows which would reveal X, had something to do with Becket and Jung, and perhaps other bones Moholy already owned.
Becket would have particular significance, as it was his toe which was found wrapped inside the mandala. Jung’s knee-cap was also involved, as the mandala pointed back to Jung as clearly as a signature.
Both of these bones had a unique length, or reach. Once Moholy had noted that measurement, he used it as the diameter of a circle he could describe with his compass. Starting at the entrance of the Cimetière des Rois, just as an example, and taking the measurement of the first bone, say Becket’s toe, a circle could be drawn whose diameter was determined by this specific relic of Becket.
The Geneva graves weren’t in regular rows, a neatness rarely permitted except to the military, in wartime. The circumference of the circle determined by Becket’s toe would therefore run through the exact centre of only one other grave. This second grave wasn’t yet X, not yet the location of the secret. It was simply the centre of a second circle, its diameter measured according to the length of another specified bone from that particular grave. The circumference of this next circle would also run through the centre of only one further grave. And so on.
It was like history. The correct sequence of bones, from the right people in the right order (and only one order would do), would eventually lead to X, the secret of how to live, that unique solution which fuelled the obsession of scholars. To collectors of relics, as to priests, to scientists and bar-room philosophers and analytical psychologists, it was always tempting to seek every answer in a single glorious revelation.
‘Jung’s knee-cap must be close to the last bone,’ Moholy said, his eyes at the level of the table as he swung round the compass. ‘It must be so. If Jung designed the map, as a puzzle of his own invention, he’d also make damn sure he was the most important piece. That’s the way he was.’
Moholy twisted one final stiff-legged stride with the compass, and then sat back, eyebrows raised. ‘Ah. Yes. That would make sense.’
I took a closer look, and saw that the further point of the compass was stabbed directly into an embroidered rectangle at the top left-hand corner of the square woven inside the mandala.
‘Quite masterly,’ Moholy said, ‘I think I see it. Yes, I definitely see it now. How ingenious.’
‘What is? What can you see?’
‘Forget about James Joyce. I’ve changed my mind. Forget Joyce completely. I want you to have a go at John Calvin.’
If earlier I’d thought I was off my trolley, now I knew it for certain. It was one thing to give credence to the power of relics, and to follow Jung’s defiant example of believing the unbelievable, but my already stretched credulity had reached its outer limits.
‘Why?’ I asked, paranoid and desperate for electrotherapy. I simply couldn’t allow myself to go along with this madness – where were the pads and chains, the sopping bedsheets? ‘Just tell me why. Why bother with different people? You only need one body. I can get you one body. Not a problem. Maybe I can get you two, which is all you’ll ever need. You already have the confidence of your clients. Let them choose whoever they want from the catalogue, and then give them some bones. Any bones. It doesn’t matter. Buy a skeleton from Pakistan, or steal one from a teaching hospital. You see what I’m saying? The clients won’t know the difference. All bones look alike. Everyone’s the same.’
Moholy was running his finger through some objects in a leather trinket box on the corner of the desk: some buttons, an ivory crucifix, a chipped blue scarab. He picked out a small metal key, and used it to point at me.
‘James, you’ve got a lot to learn.’
He turned and inserted the key into a mirror behind the desk, which was actually (and now obviously) a medicine cabinet. I’d probably avoided looking too closely, until now, because of the mirror.
‘It’s not the bones,’ he said. ‘It’s what the bones do.’
Inside the cabinet, on mirror-backed shelves, there were two rows of clear glass jars, with silver tops and plain white labels hand-scripted in Indian ink. The labels had a simple elegance: just the name, black on white, in copper-plate. Sir Humphry Davy was in a jar on the top row at the left. At the bottom on the right, the label said Jean Piaget. Each clear bottle was full of round white pills, like ordinary aspirin.
‘Now do you understand?’
No matter how small the relic, the grace of the whole body remained intact. Each pill needed only the tiniest fraction of bone-dust to be sold on in the best of faith. ‘Oh yes,’ Moholy said. ‘We’re pretty busy with the pestle and mortar.’
He closed and locked the cabinet. ‘Switzerland’s only the start. If the business continues to grow, we can look to expand into Père Lachaise, Kensal Green, Glasnevin. The world of the dead is, frankly, our oyster.’
I excavated my ear with my little finger, and found the results unappealing. ‘You don’t th
ink it’s wrong to dig up dead people?’
‘Don’t be absurd. Hardly anyone believes it makes any difference. We’re providing a service, saving a few of the more culturally significant bones while we actually can.’
‘From what?’
‘The future. Time itself. And next on the list it’s Calvin. Can I count on your help?’
It was like being invited to Vienna by Freud. I was scared of going, and anxious about seeming ignorant, but I wasn’t prepared to fall behind in what might possibly become one of the great modern movements of the brand-new century. Still, I had to be persuaded.
‘You’re a nobody,’ Moholy said. ‘Is that what you want? For the rest of your life?’
I still didn’t answer.
‘Don’t forget I own your apartment. I could change the locks. Then where would you go?’
‘To the cemetery,’ I said. ‘I’ll go to the cemetery. I’ll get you John Calvin.’
‘As soon as you can, please. As soon as it stops raining. And James?’
‘Yes?’
‘Take Jung with you. He’s giving me a headache.’
He spun the flat knee-cap across the table, and I caught it in my flapping hands. ‘Thanks.’
‘Don’t mention it. You look like you could use him.’
I left the van at the gallery and walked home with Jung between my palms, touching him to my chest and sometimes to my forehead, like an Eastern beggar pleading for alms. What had I done now?
On Plainpalais, scarecrows had been planted in rows across the urban expanse of gravel. Farmers with big red hands leant on staffs and ate sandwiches and watched the office girls go by. It was therefore only natural that the Swiss interior ministry had called up coachloads of police in full military anti-riot gear, including protective plastic shields and helmets and shin-guards. The large black aerosol took a drink from a flask.
The police coaches blocked my road home, so I made a detour via the Pont du Mont Blanc. The drizzle here was snow in the mountains, which soon melted, making the green Rhone run icy and fast beneath the low city bridge. I stood at the rail, looking downstream at the poplar trees of the Île Rousseau, and made a layman’s analysis of Moholy. His parents had fled to Geneva from Budapest in ’56. According to Rifka, Moholy could provide a convincing eye-witness account of an only child living in a one-room flat with his mother, owning nothing, having nothing.
‘Now he has everything,’ Rifka had said, ‘money and culture, yet the world still diminishes. It shrinks to a tiny disc of fulfilled desire. Perfect, but very small.’
‘But perfect.’
‘But small.’
‘I don’t feel sorry for him.’
‘No,’ Rifka said, ‘not many people do. It takes a particular openness of mind. He’s very lonely. His attention wanders, usually between suicide and religion.’
Moholy was lucky and not happy. He had everything most people wanted, and yet still he wasn’t happy. He’d come from Hungary with nothing, and he knew it was wrong to be lucky and unhappy, and knowing it to be wrong felt like the beginning of spiritual awareness. There was something else, always something more, and that’s what he was trying to find.
Back at the flat, as soon as I opened the door, I knew that she’d gone. Her case, everything. She’d left a message on the table, and it basically said she’d gone. It also said she didn’t understand me, and that even though she still believed I was essentially a decent person, I was acting out of character.
At first, I took it quite positively. According to Jung, sexual freedom could have great therapeutic value, in direct proportion to the attractiveness of his female patients, his fragile and willing Jungfrauen. Now was perhaps an appropriate moment for me to accept the impossibility of monogamy as a route to self-realisation, and recall that every Sunday Jung invited his longest-standing mistress, Toni Wolff, to a dinner cooked by his wife. That was more like it. That was the way to do it.
And anyway, honestly, Helena was totally impossible. She had such high expectations, such unrealistic standards. I was already at theology college when we met. She should have realised the weirdness she was getting involved with. It wasn’t my fault. Or rather, what I meant, there was an unbridgeable psychological disparity between women and men
I stood for a while, head empty. I ran a bath, but forgot to put the plug in. I listened to an electric fly on the window, off more often than on. I fell apart. And all my previous falling apart suddenly looked like a strategic retreat. This was the wheels coming off, and not just the wheels. I was coming apart in bits, bit then bit then bit. I was having a breakdown, a real, certifiable, Burghölzli-strength, italicised gefühlsbetonter Vorstellungskomplex.
I crawled into the bed which Helena had left only that morning, and I curled up in my oversized suit beneath the duvet, my head completely covered, Jung between my palms between my knees. I regressed. I went looking for Mum. I fled a cruel world which denied me understanding. And I was by no means the most difficult of her children to understand.
By 1908, a year ago already, not yet reconciled to his father’s death, Jung called a halt. He stopped, and went to live in his boathouse on the shores of Lake Zurich, where inside himself he could find no more urgent ambition than the building of miniature villages from pebbles.
So that was alright then. Insomnia, stomach trouble and a continuous sense of being possessed by spirits reduced him to a state of withdrawal. His search for Selbst was tearing him apart, and he dreamed deep caves full of broken bones and mummified crusaders; dead, yet somehow not quite dead.
And very soon, because I wasn’t experienced in severe emotional distress, nor heavy drinking nor late nights in cemeteries, I fell asleep. As an adolescent, whenever I felt confused and depressed, and a little mad with the teenage, this was how I’d attempt to solve my problems. There was something honest about adolescence, probably its confusion. Any other response seemed a sham.
I dreamed a journey. I didn’t have much choice. Moholy had threatened to throw me out, so I phoned for an air-ticket, grabbed my toothbrush and a spare cardigan, and made my excuses to the church committee. It was an unplanned journey, and, even though nobody knew I was coming, there was a pulpit on the shuttle-bus, and I thought: life’s a bit like that.
At the airport, I tapped Jung’s knee-cap between my fingers and my wrist, making the mystical sound of a half-castanet clacking. I blithely approached the metal detector, handed over my keys and coins and Swiss-army penknife, and walked calmly on, bones hidden all through my body, while the X-ray machine showed up my superficial toothpaste. How Much Is That Dog?
I flew easyJet to the Land of the Dead, and the hostess smiled down at me, checking my seat-belt and back-rest.
– This is all connected with your dad, isn’t it?
– I don’t think it is.
– Digging up bones. Resurrecting the Dead. Surely.
And I accepted her pillow of additional comfort, which fell
unreachably to the floor. Half asleep, turning in my economy seat, head at changing angles against the plastic window, I shuffled images of stones and gods and bones and earth.
Was it really a goldmine?
It was a journey.
Over the Channel, the view was eternal sunshine on a sea of cloud. This would explain why so many ex-airline pilots joined the clergy. It was like being blinded by angels, by the personality of God. The clouds evaporated at the coast, and between England’s edge and London I counted the swimming-pools, always a Welcome surprise. I looked out for them far below, chemical blue between lucky gardens and golf-courses.
– You’re not a lucky man, are you, James?’
The smiling hostess was back, carrying a tray interleaved with individual packets of cashews. I liked cashew nuts.
– It changed when I started trying to be good.
– You were a bastard to your dad, you know.
– He was a bastard to Mum.
– I wonder. I wonder if he was.
– I tried to make it up to him, at the end. I wanted to do the right thing.
– I know. I know all about that.
Something had gone desperately wrong with the ticketing. I arrived at Heathrow, which wasn’t my destination. I had no visa for England, no passport, and the scandal was: they let me in.
I walked straight in, looking dreadful from lack of sleep, obvious in my clerical collar, carrying two bin-bags of assorted bones. I knew the secret. They let me in because I was a recognisable English type: over-educated, disorientated, ineffectual. I had the patterned background of my many years at choir-school, and a character battered by an education ideal for a career on another planet. Such as nineteenth-century India.
They waved me in. They said: Come on in, James, we know your weak-kneed choir-school sort, and have nothing to fear from the likes of you. Welcome.
Customs waved me through, and that wasn’t what I wanted.
But then it was the journey itself which mattered. The plane on its own was far too easy, so I took a cross-Channel passenger ferry from Heathrow Terminal 2, and on the observation deck, as the ferry pulled away, the plane and the boat seemed like an over-insistence on the old-fashioned notion that England was separate from everywhere else. And further away than you’d think. I stood with the rail in my stomach, gazing at the air traffic control tower, the wheeling gulls, and God on the sea in rays.
The sea-air smelled of chip-fat, and tonight’s on-board band, Twice as Nice, looped through speakers from deck to deck. Life is an Ocean, they sang.
Well maybe it was, I thought, and maybe it wasn’t.
And You Are a Boat.
Secretly, I knew everything.
It looked pretty rough out there. I went inside, and the guts of these boats were floating malls. It cheered me to see so many youngsters not falling for it. They weren’t buying a thing, not cinema tickets or self-service burger meals, not magazines, or soft toys, not even premium lemonade with a single figure percentage of real organic lemons. There was a change going on, an awakening, a kind of reformation. They were putting up a fight to be themselves on the journey of life, and they even ignored the bells and whistles of the arcade games, except Manx Racer, because that was a lot of fun.
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