This energy, known as ionizing radiation, can pass through gas, liquid and even solid matter.
1895. Nearing the turn of the century, Wilhelm Röntgen observes the existence of X rays as they emanate from a glowing cathode tube. In this strange light, the old vision of the world begins to vanish. What an anomalous phenomenon, that matter should produce light. Light that can penetrate hard surfaces and make an image of what lies inside. Yet perhaps this should not be surprising. We who are material beings are always making images of ourselves and try, in this way, to reach the core of our existence.
We live in a lattice of myths. Stories which manifest the meaning of our lives and at the same time define for us the circumference of the imaginal world. What is it we are free to imagine? In the year that X rays are discovered, new images are transgressing old definitions. Just as the boundary between matter and energy begins to blur, so the line between masculine and feminine wavers. Though it is yet to be published, Colette has written her first novel. In its pages, women dress like men, make love with women, celebrate erotic pleasure. Oscar Wilde has written an opera called Salomé. A photograph shows him dressed as the heroine, reclining as he reveals a sensuous, rounded belly. The poems he writes make thinly veiled reference to an erotic force between men.
The material origin of human experience and behavior can be located in these rapidly moving changes.
At the end of the First World War, looking backward, it is common to make an idyll of what came before, and to presume that the war itself brought about the end of an old order. But that order was already shifting. One can almost see them, great phantom audiences, filling the theatre. Stylishly dressed, they radiate the ebullience of fashion and class, laughing, applauding, delighting in Wilde’s merciless wit, as his lines expose the hypocrisy of Victorian marriage and morals. The Importance of Being Earnest opens early in 1895. But despite its astonishing success it is soon to close. Change is never without interruption. In May of the same year, Wilde will be put on trial for homosexuality. In passing sentence the judge announces that he shares a common sense of indignation at the nature of these charges.
Soon it is discovered that this radiation has profound implications for all living organisms, including the human body.
In this case, what is called common sense is part of an intricate structure of propriety in the course of disintegration. But this does not make society more amenable to Wilde’s vision. The bearer of an augury is often punished. One has only to think of Cassandra. Her punishment was to be unheard. This may seem mild. Unless you understand how such a high, insinuating song can wreak havoc on the singer when it is not heard.
Cassandra was thought mad. Under certain circumstances, madness can come from prophetic overtones, half-heard memories, or dreams that captivate the inner voice. In 1893, the year Hugh Trenchard sailed for India and two years before Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment began, another man, who for his own reasons would become famous, bound himself into captivity because of certain dreams he had which assaulted his idea of what was proper. He was Daniel Paul Schreber, son of the pedagogue Dr. Daniel Gottlieb Moritz Schreber.
The doctor’s son dreamed that he wanted to be a woman, in his words, succumbing to intercourse. For these dreams he incarcerated himself in a psychiatric clinic at Leipzig. One cannot help but suspect that he followed the same course his father would have taken for him. And perhaps also he was following the sense of justice which he himself delivered as chief judge in the high court of Dresden.
One wonders then, are all those who judge homosexuality afraid of their own dreams? The suggestion has been made that Heinrich Himmler, who put his own nephew to death for a homosexual transgression, possessed a hidden homosexuality himself. But I am troubled by this explanation, which, in the end, seems to be no explanation at all. Is there anyone who does not, at least in imagination, transgress the boundaries of sexual identity? Rather, as I enter the atmosphere of Daniel Schreber’s vigilance, I sense that the world he lived in and its conventions are like a house of cards balanced on the maintenance of silence about a secret life of both mind and body which, if spoken, might make the whole structure collapse. For to imagine homosexuality would be to imagine the entirety of this secret life and through these images call to consciousness the full force of its being: a territory as dense and obscure as matter once was to the conventional mind but nonetheless physically present, and alive.
The slight negative charge maintained by all the body’s cells exists because the interior substances of the cell hold slightly more negative ions than the fluid outside.
It is 1896. Second-Lieutenant Hugh Trenchard is one of ten thousand British officers stationed in India. Here as head of a platoon in the Punjab, he is rediscovering a sense of purpose. Though one day far into the future he will play a crucial role in history’s decision to make civilians a principal target of warfare, he has come to India shaken, uncertain who he is or what he should make of his life. It was a terrible shame to weather. There was no warning, not even a hint, until the sudden summons home from school. His father, a barrister, had made a bad investment. The bankruptcy was complete. He stood before the family estate he would have inherited while all that was inside was disgorged. His father’s desk, the dining chairs, the silver, even his own butterfly collection and the rifle with which he had shot his first bird, the prized kingfisher, all put up for public auction. The shame had shattered him. But now the vigor, respect, discipline of a new life surround him. His identity is finally secure. This is where he belongs.
Character and the eventual shape a life assumes cannot be understood in isolation from the social circumstances which surround a life. Even the body falls very early under the influence of convention. Gender, notions of propriety, the requirements of class can be said to create a second body that, almost like a suit of clothes, exists as an outer layer to the natural body of birth.
I am looking at one of the many photographs taken of Hugh Trenchard during his celebrated military career. Posed with a group of soldiers and statesmen just after the First World War, his face leaps out from the crowd. It is his eyes which are most animate. They are, as the common saying goes, on fire. And yet, at the same time, about and around his body, large in relation to his small head, there is a kind of torpor, a strange stubbornness, the slight suggestion of a body pulled in two directions.
Subtle though they are, there are indications of an inner conflict in his earliest years. He is, for instance, just nine years old when he succeeds in shooting a bird in flight. Yet he is not entirely happy. This bird he has killed—the brilliantly colored kingfisher—is his favorite. And there is this, too: his love for butterflies. Is it because in the sunlight, leaping through the air, these creatures mirror the flames in his eyes? And does he feel an equal anguish when, taking possession of each trophy, he stills the dazzling wings?
These are not perhaps remarkable crises in the life of a boy of his class in late Victorian England. The delicacy of childhood must lead to manhood. Boys born to this circumstance will be schooled to master their surroundings, through ceremonies of hunting and riding. What will shape this boy and lead him to play his part in history belongs not so much to the realm of the extraordinary as to that unremarkable background through which a whole class of Englishmen will inherit dominion over a steadily growing portion of the earth.
He is proud of his ancestry. Raoul de Trenchard, the knight who fought on the winning side in the Battle of Hastings. And that other Trenchard who was a member of Parliament under Charles I, and the other who served as Secretary of State under William II. For several generations the men in his family have been soldiers and lawyers. Is there any question then that he will be one too? The unbrokenness of the line must be comforting. His father, a respected barrister, has an office in the same street in Taunton where his great-grandfather practiced, the common law he practices now going back to the Norman invasion, the legal language he uses back to the Roman Empire. When Henry Trenchard goes to court
he wears the robe and wig that generations of English barristers before him have worn.
Through splitting or fission, the ionization of cells leads to a chain of microscopic events, which one may witness in the end as death by cancer, or the birth of a deformed child.
I am picturing Hugh then as he sits in the back of the courtroom to watch his father at work. He is looking at the white curls of his father’s wig. Counting them. Because the proceedings are dull. One man after another stands to speak but he scarcely knows what they are saying or cares.
In fact, his father hardly seems to care himself. Like that other lawyer who practiced in the vale of Taunton, the fictional lawyer of Dickens’s Bleak House, Henry Trenchard is not passionate about the distinction between right and wrong. He is so well connected to the stream of things. Why trouble safe waters? The order of the cosmos is known and he is fortunate to occupy the place in it he does.
But safety is not compelling to a boy, full of energy and high spirits. Perhaps one day when his parents are out he tries on his father’s wig and robe. Dressed like this, he may spend a few moments looking at himself in the mirror. Yet the clothes do not fit. The robe is too hot; it is long and trips his feet and the wig falls over his eyes. He is soon tired of this game. His thoughts are drawn outdoors. That exploding glimmer of color in the sunlight. The brightness that amazes his eyes. He is almost dancing as he leaves the darkened rooms and starts into the green world surrounding the house. Though he will not go far into that country. He is still his father’s son.
Tradition gives one the feeling that life is predictable. Yet, in a period of rapid change, tradition can be like a plank of wood, once part of a bridge extending over the water, but now connected to nothing, an illusion of solidity moving randomly in the rushing stream. The turn of the century was a time of transformation in more than one part of the world.
Hugh Trenchard was just thirteen years old in 1888 when Mohandas Gandhi, then nineteen, first set foot on English soil. In that year he traveled to London to study English law. In my mind, while Hugh plays in the gardens of his father’s estate, I am imagining Gandhi in one of his rented rooms, standing before the mirror, taking ten minutes (as he tells us he did in his autobiography) to comb his hair properly. He is wearing the dark suit he bought on Bond Street, his bowler hat and his silk tie.
Does the image he sees of himself shining back from the mirror fascinate him? He donned his first English clothes, a white flannel suit, in order to make the trip from Bombay to Southampton. Aside from a few months spent in Bombay to prepare for this trip, he has spent his whole life in rural Indian villages. In his family home there were no mirrors. Now he has learned to sit on a chair in the English manner and take his meals at a table, using knife and fork instead of his hands. And he is studying ballroom dancing, elocution, as well as English history, culture, law. He is becoming, in his own description, more English than an Englishman.
Is he suddenly giddy then, if even for a moment, on encountering this new self? It would be perhaps akin to Oscar Wilde seeing himself in the mirror as Salomé, a woman from another culture, another century. Yet the costume, strange as it is, brings forth qualities within him he somehow always sensed were there, though he may not have named them.
Is it the same now with Gandhi? The self he has taken on is more familiar than we might suppose, the unmistakable manifestation of a submerged identity, one among many possible men within him whose outlines have become clear and recognizable at last. After all, English customs have been making inroads into Indian life since even before 1858 when India became part of the British Empire. He is here to study law because an old family friend, a man of the Brahman caste, advised the family that only by becoming an English barrister could he hope to win the position his father had once held as dewan, or governor, of his province.
The ironies of an intermingled culture have followed him to London. An indifferent student who, like Hugh Trenchard, preferred action to words, he never learned Sanskrit sufficiently to be able to study the Bhagavad Gita. But here in an English translation by William Arnold, entitled Celestial Song, he is reading the Gita for the first time.
As he looks at his image in the glass, is he thinking of the transience of life? How one self, one identity, can so easily supplant another? It is what Krishna says to Arjuna, urging him into battle. Worn out garments are shed by the body: Worn out bodies are shed by the dweller within the body. New bodies are donned by the dweller like garments. Even his name, Gandhi, meaning grocer after the trade of his great-grandfather in his native tongue of Gujarati, came to him through English custom. Before the British bureaucracy demanded this usage, Indians did not use surnames.
And there is also this. His mother’s tolerance. The devotion with which she has always fasted and followed the rules of ahimsa, never to kill any living being, and yet at the same time, the passion with which her children were taught a respect for other religions, such as the Muslim faith practiced by many in Gandhi’s own village. A certain tolerance for difference has been part of his birthright. And the transformation he observes in the mirror must, at one and the same time, deepen and be graced by this tolerance.
Unlike other cells, the charge of the nerve cell does not remain stable. If a nerve is stimulated, the polarities inside and outside the cell reverse.
Many years into the future when Gandhi will lead a famous movement against Britain’s domination of India, he will teach his followers to hate oppression but never the oppressor. Will it be easier for him to summon compassion for the English because he himself once inhabited an English body? Between himself and other Englishmen he must have found certain similarities. Farfetched as it may seem, one can even see some resemblance between Gandhi and Hugh Trenchard. There is the poor academic record they share, though both are sons of professional men, the Gandhi family caste in India being roughly equivalent to the Trenchard’s class in Great Britain. Both young men begin life with no inheritance. Both sons are told what profession they must follow by their families. Just as Hugh Trenchard experienced some conflict over shooting a bird, Gandhi is conflicted about the practice of ahimsa, the vow never to harm a living being. He has experimented with eating meat. But, realizing that to continue this practice he must lie to his parents, he has stopped. Above all other ethics, he believes most passionately in honesty. And this too he shares with Trenchard, who will one day be known as a bluntly truthful man, and as a child takes the family motto, Know thyself, to heart. And there is this too. It can be seen in the photographs that remain of both men. A certain fire in the eyes.
Thinking about Hugh Trenchard as a young man, the question came to me, where did this fire go? There were, of course, the pranks. The public schools were famous for them. Hugh’s brother blew up the fountain in front of his school. Hugh himself helped a group of boys put a donkey in the headmaster’s bed. But, faced with his studies, the life goes out of him. His family has already given up the idea that he might become a barrister like his father. The only alternative then is the military, and when one day, passing Harrods, Hugh tells his father he would like to own a department store, his parents, horrified by the prospect of a son in trade, rush him into a school designed to help him prepare for the examinations he will need to pass in order to become an officer. But even here there are books, lessons, charts he must memorize. Faced with this task, he is flaccid. Though his father’s bankruptcy increases the urgency of his need to train for a profession, this event only seems to make him a duller student. He is animated only at games.
I can see him now on the playing field. He is captain of the rugby team, his favorite sport. The ball moves as quickly as any thought. There is nothing predictable about it. His wits are quick now, and his mind, enlivened, moves like liquid through his arms, his legs. Sunlight, shadow, leaves turning at the edge of the field, cold air are not apart from his body. Here the invisible heaviness which before muffled all his movements has disappeared. In a split second he has kicked the ball through the g
oal and hears his own voice, shouting.
But if he has succeeded in escaping the discourse of law, another more subtle argument, the common law of gender, possesses him. Even his wildness is trapped in this form. And the net which catches him is large. How a man should look. What he might say or admit to feeling. How he should stand or walk, gesture. What games he should play. And to what end. Since the Olympic games in ancient Greece, sports have been used to make boys into soldiers. On the battlefield in World War I, in the struggle he will one day join, soldiers will kick a soccer ball toward the enemy line. It is during a spell of training in Scotland with the Kincardine artillery that Hugh learns how much like a sport battle is. Now he applies himself to his studies and finally passes the necessary tests. Within a year he is in India.
Cricket, tennis, squash, field hockey, golf, polo—India at the turn of the century is dotted with English playing fields. Even in the Himalayas at 11,000 feet, the British have built a golf course, the most highly prized golf bag being an elephant’s penis, provided the trophy has been shot by its owner.
Hugh Trenchard has organized a polo team in his regiment and won the Viceroy’s gold medal in the All-India Rifle Club. He is happy in India. During a four-month leave he wanders through mountains, waking each day to the songs of strange birds. It is as if the colors, sights, sounds have washed his senses; he says he feels born again. Yet still something is missing. He has not been sent here only to play. He wants to see fire.
Every regiment is sent on a tour of duty to the Khyber Pass. But because of a fall from a horse during a steeplechase, he has missed his regiment’s expedition against the Afridi tribesmen. And he is disappointed, having nearly given up hope that he will ever do battle, when suddenly hope comes from an unexpected direction. A smoldering conflict between Dutch and British settlers in South Africa has escalated. The Boer Republic has demanded the removal of British troops and the British have refused. On October 11, 1899, the Boer Republic declares war on England.
A Chorus of Stones Page 19