Thinks...

by David Lodge

  I went back into the garden and told the rest that I was sorry but I had to go to bed before I fell asleep on my feet, and would they let themselves out of the house quietly when they were as tired as I was. Upon which they all bade me cheerfully goodnight, and settled down for a few more hours. But they had all gone this morning, and the dishes and glasses were stacked up by the sink, washed and dried, as if by fairies.

  11.25 P.M. Some good news at last! Well, encouraging, anyway. I feel I must restrain my joy, in case it turns out to be a false hope. (Superstition again.) Messenger was in sparkling form tonight, presiding over the opening of the conference – a mainly social occasion: reception with drinks followed by dinner followed by a cash bar. The conference is being held in Avon House, a facility rather like an airport hotel on the north side of the campus, purpose-built to accommodate events of this kind and money-making ‘post-experience’ courses. As soon as I came into the big lounge where the reception was being held, and caught sight of Messenger moving among the delegates, smiling, shaking hands, slapping shoulders, laughing and joking, I knew things must have gone well in Harley Street. Carrie was there too, in one of her billowing silk kaftans, looking tired and less elated, but smiling calmly. As I moved through the throng towards them I saw Professor Douglass – it was hard to miss him in his dark suit and polished black shoes. Most of the delegates – the male ones anyway, and there weren’t many women – were casually, not to say sloppily, dressed in open-necked sports shirts or tee-shirts and baggy cotton trousers. Some even wore trainers. I had got accustomed to the grunge style of dressing favoured by Messenger’s students and most of his colleagues, but it seems to be the international style in cognitive science and associated disciplines.

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said to Douglass. He looked startled, and blushed. ‘On what?’ he said. ‘On winning the Duck Race, of course.’ ‘Oh that,’ he said dismissively. ‘The prize was a case of champagne, and I don’t drink.’ ‘The conference seems to have got off to a good start,’ I said, looking round. ‘Have you had much to do with the planning?’ ‘More than I would have wished,’ he said. ‘Our leader has been away most of the week. I’m told he was in hospital for tests. Is he ill?’ There was an eager inquisitiveness in his tone that I didn’t like. ‘I really couldn’t say,’ I said, and moved on through the babbling mêlée towards Messenger.

  He managed to murmur in my ear, ‘Good news, Halib thinks it’s probably a hydatid cyst.’ But as I said, ‘What’s that?’ he was accosted by a bearded American in a lime-green sports jacket and red polo shirt. ‘I’ll explain later,’ Messenger said, before introducing me to Steve Rosenbaum, of the University of Colorado, who is giving a paper on ‘Building a Functioning Mind’. ‘And are you really building one?’ I asked. ‘Sure,’ he said confidently. ‘And what does it think about?’ I asked. ‘Only about automobile parts, at the present time,’ he said. ‘We’re building it for General Motors.’ ‘Helen has a different interest in the mind,’ Messenger said. ‘She’s a novelist.’ ‘That right? Crime fiction?’ said Professor Rosenbaum. I said no, I was afraid I didn’t even read it. ‘Elmore Leonard’s my favourite,’ he said. ‘You should check him out.’ I promised to do so, and moved on to greet Carrie.

  We kissed on both cheeks. It was the first time we had met face to face since she flew off to California, and in a way it was a relief to me to do so on a big social occasion. So much had happened since then of which she was unaware, of which she must remain unaware, and I was not altogether confident that I would still be able to perform the role of friend and confidante convincingly. It was easier to practise first in public. ‘I gather from Ralph that the consultation in London went well,’ I said. (I stopped myself just in time from referring to him too familiarly as ‘Messenger’.) ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We mustn’t count our chickens, but it’s looking hopeful. This guy inspires confidence.’ She wouldn’t volunteer any more information and I could hardly ply her with further questions, so I was left in a state of frustration and suspense. I was seated at dinner at the same table as Messenger and Carrie, but not near them. I was between two neurobiologists who gave up the attempt to make conversation with me about halfway through the soup and then talked across me about their respective experiments on monkeys. This evidently entailed slicing off bits of their brains and seeing what difference it made to their behaviour. When I remarked that it sounded horribly cruel they assured me that the brain feels no pain. A curious paradox, that the organ that tells us we are in pain feels no pain itself.

  Messenger made a speech full of in-jokes that went over my head but seemed to amuse most of the other people present. Soon after dinner Carrie went home. As we parted I said I would stay on for a little while to get my conference legs. She looked puzzled, as well she might, by this ponderous trope. ‘As in sea-legs,’ I explained. ‘Oh, yeah. Right. Well, I’m bushed. It’s been a long day. Do me a favour, Helen, would you? Make sure Messenger doesn’t stay long.’ I agreed readily – it was the perfect excuse for me to seek him out in the bar.

  He was at a table with a group of delegates, and he waved me over to join them. They were all men except for a slim dark girl sitting next to him, whose conference lapel badge identified her as Ludmila Lisk, from the Carolinian University, Prague. She said nothing, but followed the conversation avidly, her dark alert eyes flicking from speaker to speaker. The group around the table changed as people came and went, but she sat on, frugally sipping her glass of lager. Messenger introduced her jocularly as someone who had given him a guided tour of Prague. I asked her if she was giving a paper at the conference. She shook her head and said, ‘No, a poster.’ I gathered that at a certain time in the programme the more junior or less distinguished conferees display illustrated accounts of their research called ‘posters’. After a while Messenger, who was drinking straight tonic water himself, asked if anyone wanted another drink. I said, ‘I’m going, Ralph, and I promised Carrie that I would send you home first.’ ‘Yes, maybe I should call it a night,’ he said. Ludmila looked at me with frank hostility as we said goodnight and left the bar.

  ‘Did you sleep with that girl in Prague?’ I said, as we left the building. ‘No, of course not,’ he said. ‘What makes you ask?’ ‘She seemed to attach herself to you like a leech,’ I said. ‘She’s hoping I’ll give her a post-doc job here,’ he said. ‘And will you?’ I said. ‘I might,’ he said, ‘if I’m still around.’ Immediately I felt ashamed that my first question when we were alone at last had not been the one I had been waiting to ask all evening, but a petty discharge of jealousy. ‘You said the consultation was good news,’ I said. ‘Well, it was encouraging,’ he said, ‘but I won’t know how encouraging till next week.’ ‘Tell me all about it,’ I said. ‘I’ll walk with you to your car.’

  We walked across the campus to the Centre, where his car was parked. It was a fine, dry night, with a moon. The thud of bass-notes came from the Student Union where an end-of-session ball was in progress, and down by the lake young people in long strapless frocks and dinner-jackets canoodled and cavorted. A man in shirtsleeves tipped back his head to drink wine from a bottle, and then hurled the bottle into the lake, shattering the reflection of the moon. ‘Halib is a little round bald-headed Asian guy,’ Messenger said. ‘He doesn’t look too impressive at first sight. He’s so short I should think he has to stand on a stool to operate. But as soon as he gets into gear, you trust him. He took the X-rays and scans and ultrasound data I’d brought with me from Bath, and pored over them for a long while, then he examined me. It was the most searching physical examination I’ve had. His fingers seemed to get deep into my abdominal cavity, it was as if I could feel them moving about inside me. When I was dressed Carrie and I – she was with me all this time – waited for him to speak. You can imagine the tension. His first question was, ‘Have you ever been in close contact with dogs or sheep, Professor Messenger?’ Carrie said afterwards it was about the last thing in the world she expected him to say. But of course the answer wa
s yes – I told you the other day, I worked on a sheep farm in Yorkshire when I was a sixthformer. He looked pleased when I told him. ‘I think this may be a hydatid cyst,’ he said. ‘It’s caused by ingesting the eggs of the dog parasite Echinococcus granulosus – tapeworm, as it’s commonly known. If you happened to swallow any infected water . . .’ ‘I used to swim with the dogs,’ I said. ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘That increases the probability. There’s a simple blood test which should tell us.’ He took a sample off me before we left. We should get the result early next week,’ Messenger concluded.

  ‘And if it is a whatsitsname cyst?’ I said. ‘What then?’

  ‘It can be surgically removed. But first they shrink it with drugs, and Halib says they’ve had good results with a new one lately. Sometimes the cyst disappears entirely.’

  ‘And is it really possible that you’ve had it all these years?’ I said.

  ‘Apparently,’ he said.

  ‘Well, that’s marvellous news,’ I said.

  ‘It is if it’s true,’ he said.

  ‘Shouldn’t the other man, Henderson, have thought of it?’

  ‘Yes, he should,’ Messenger said. ‘Carrie was absolutely right about him.’

  We approached the Centre’s car-park. On the second floor, under the grooved dome, a solitary window was illuminated through a half-closed venetian blind. ‘Duggers at work on his algorithms,’ Messenger said.

  ‘Kiss me, Messenger,’ I said. He didn’t reply, staring up at the window. In the moonlight his face seemed carved of marble. ‘Messenger,’ I said. ‘What?’ he said absently. ‘Kiss me.’ He looked around to check that we were unobserved, then drew me into the shadow of a wall, and we kissed. But his mind seemed to be on something else. His cyst, probably.

  SUNDAY 1ST JUNE. It’s late – 10.30 p.m. I’ve just come in, feeling exhausted and panicky. Exhausted by two days’ non-stop discussion of consciousness, and panicky at the thought of having to say something about it at the last session tomorrow afternoon.

  The conference programme goes on all day from 9.30 in the morning to 6 o’clock in the evening, alternating big plenary lectures held in the main auditorium with smaller seminars running simultaneously in thematic streams, when you have to choose between papers on artificial intelligence or cognitive psychology or neurobiology or a catchall category called Alternative Approaches. Choosing is difficult, especially when you know little or nothing about the speakers or their topics, and I’ve found myself trapped in some impenetrably boring sessions in consequence. I don’t think I’m the only one to suffer in this way, though, because occasionally some bold spirit will get up in the middle of a talk and leave the room, presumably hoping to find a more interesting seminar elsewhere in the building, but I lack the nerve to follow their example.

  There are breaks for morning coffee and lunch and afternoon tea, but the talk goes on unremittingly in these intervals too. The presence of the TV crew has contributed to the atmosphere of feverish debate. They cruise the anterooms and corridors between lectures and seminars, interviewing speakers and eavesdropping on conversations. You can see people becoming aware that they are being filmed, as the long sound-boom, with its muffled mike dangling from the end like a dead animal, hovers over their heads, and they start to perform for the benefit of the camera. The filming of the plenary sessions has required extra lighting which makes the auditorium hot and stuffy, adding to one’s fatigue. Sometimes I longed to go and lie down somewhere in a cool dark place, but I slogged dutifully up and down the corridors and staircases of Avon House (unfortunately two of the lifts are out of order) to be enlightened on ‘The Prefrontal Cortex as a Basic Constituent of the Self’. ‘The Unification of Cognitive and Phenomenological Approaches to Consciousness’, ‘Emergence of Emotional Expression in Robots’, ‘The Theory of Relativity and the Cognitive Binding Problem’, etc., etc. There was a paper, which I missed but wish I had heard, entitled ‘Is the Brain like a Bucket of Shot or More like a Bowl of Jelly?’ By the end of the first day mine was definitely more like jelly. I took notes, but when I looked at them afterwards I could barely understand them or remember what they referred to. ‘Afference, Efference, Ex-afference, Re-afference . . . Schema=reproducible co-activation of neurones . . . Synergetic view of brain opposed to Cartesian . . . Dynamical process, interactions, self-drive . . . Buddhist meditation neural firing measured at 4ohz . . .’ What could these jottings mean? There were occasional lucid sentences, generally of an anecdotal kind. ‘Pain in phantom limbs surgically amputated under anaesthetic less acute than in limbs lost in accidental injury . . . Speaker from the floor claimed she developed a different concept of her “self” when she moved from America to Norway and learned Norwegian . . .’ And best of all, ‘Correspondent to Lewis Carroll on reading Jabberwocky: “It seems to fill my head with ideas, but I don’t know what they are.”’ My sentiments exactly, at the end of the first day.

  Today there were more lectures and seminars and this evening the poster session, at which about thirty or forty additional explorations of consciousness were summarized and illustrated on freestanding noticeboards, with their authors standing beside them ready to answer questions, like stall holders eager to sell their wares to passing customers in some informational bazaar. ‘A phase-state approach to quantum neurodynamics and its relation to the space-time domain of neural coding mechanisms.’ ‘Subjective time-flow: effects of pre-operative medication and general anaesthesia.’ ‘From quanta to qualia.’ ‘The effects of Kriya Yoga on the brain’s electrical activity.’ ‘Modelling learning behaviour in autonomous agents.’ That one belonged to Ludmila Lisk, thin and sharp as a knife in a tight black dress and high-heeled shoes. It seemed to have something to do with simulated children’s games. She was explaining it animatedly to Professor Rosenbaum, and flashed me a perfunctory social smile over his shoulder as I passed. Rosenbaum gave his paper today on ‘Building a Functioning Mind’. It seems to be a computer program that will take over some of the functions of human managers, and eventually all of them. He admitted under questioning that it would never be able to see or hear or move about, and could only communicate by Email. ‘But, hey, lots of my friends are like that,’ he quipped. The more I hear at this conference, the more convinced I become that cognitive science is light years away from replicating the real nature of thought, but I simply don’t have the competence or the confidence to say so in public.

  I sought out Messenger and tried to get out of speaking at the last session. ‘Let me off,’ I pleaded. ‘I don’t know what to say. I haven’t understood half of what I’ve heard. I shall make a fool of myself, and it’ll all be recorded by the TV people.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Just say what you think about the problem of consciousness.’ ‘Is that all?’ I said ironically. ‘Tell us how it looks from a literary perspective,’ he said. ‘People will be interested. They’ve never had that before. They won’t throw brickbats.’ ‘They’ll ask me questions, though,’ I said, ‘and I won’t be able to answer them.’ ‘No they won’t,’ he said. ‘There won’t be any time for questions.’ Well, it was a relief to know that, anyway. And I’ve only got to speak for fifteen minutes.

  What I need is a text, something to anchor my thoughts, to stop me waffling. Say I took a bit of Henry James, and analysed that, as an example of the literary representation of consciousness. Strether by the river . . . ? No, it’s been done. Kate Croy at the beginning of Wings, then. No, it’s too easy, too limited an exercise. What an anticlimax at the end of three days’ high-level scientific discussion, a piece of routine practical criticism. The text ought to be about consciousness, not just a representation of consciousness.

  Funny how one cares about these things, how desperately one wishes to make a good impression, how frightened one is of failure. It’s pure vanity of course. Or perhaps, to be kinder on oneself, professional pride. There are so many other more important things in my life to worry about, and yet what matters most to me at the moment is thinking of something cl
ever to say at the last session tomorrow. Messenger’s the same – totally wrapped up in the conference, paying attention to every speaker, making sure everything is going smoothly, schmoozing his star speakers, keeping the TV people happy. Nobody would guess that he’s waiting for the result of a blood test that could mean the difference between life and death. I suppose it’s a blessing really, that we both have something to distract us.

  I’ve decided to come home at lunchtime tomorrow, skip the early afternoon seminars and use the time to prepare my talk. But if I’m going to weave it around a text I shall have to get it duplicated tomorrow morning. Or better still, transferred on to transparencies. Every speaker at the conference has used an overhead projector. This, apparently, is standard practice among scientists, but it’s a novelty to me. In all my years at Oxford I don’t think I ever attended a lecture on English literature where the lecturer used an overhead projector to show an illustrative diagram, or a list of dates, or quotations from the work under discussion, or any other visual aid. If you were lucky, you got a smudgy stencilled handout. The speakers at this conference however all have a summary version of their talk prepared on transparencies, which they peel off from their backing sheets with practised ease and lay on the OHP, page by page, as they proceed, speaking in a semi-improvised, informal way to the visual display. The appearance of the transparencies varies. Sometimes they are immaculately printed and beautifully laid out, like the pages of a book, and sometimes they are scribbled by hand in feltpens of different colours, scarcely legible, but giving an exciting impression of having been produced in a burst of creativity the night before. I have no intention of speaking without a carefully prepared script, especially in the presence of television cameras, but it would be nice to have slides as well, if only to distract attention from myself from time to time.