SYLVIE'S RIDDLE
Page 9
'Nova was the word Galileo used. Nova stella, a new star. He saw one in 1604. A novel light off there in the firmament, to be riddled and equated and named. But we have made distinctions he'd never even dreamt of, so we have added super-nova. Which isn't a new star at all, of course, but a dying one. The manifestation in the visible spectrum of an apocalyptic terminus. Something so vast its distance is an integral part of its perception, and we arrive along with the belated shower of light to write its obituary. The life of stars, you see. Your life in the stars. And it's true: the horoscopists have a point after all. We are made out of material which a celestial body provided, cooked in the fire of its mighty collapse. We're all of us stars really. We've all blazed with light up there in our time. It wasn't only Elvis shining in his sequin suit as we bent our necks to catch him. We've all been brilliant up there once, however dull we've become in the interim down here since.
'This one in the picture they call 1987 A. It fair takes your breath away, doesn't it, the mystical soul of the modem astronomer. Confronted by one of the most imponderable events ever perceived by humankind, the unmistakable flash and blaze of fate in the heavens, our contemporary mental cosmonaut reaches deep into his innermost region and announces this rubric to his litany: 1987 A. Remark the lyricism that engulfs him when he finally encounters wonder. I..9..8..7. And A of course. Don't forget alpha, the birth-letter to which our supernova constitutes an omega. 1987 A. Maybe it sounds better chanted in Aramaic. Who knows, it might describe an occult harmony, a Pythagorean cave hidden deep in the psyche. Or it might be simply another postscript to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.'
He stopped there and looked out carefully as though trying to fathom whether or not their eyes might have started to glaze. How many little dead stars off there in the lecture hall, as the scientist plays Copemicus to the elliptical orbits of their attention? These our revels now are ended, Sylvie thought. Time to switch off the projector, Tom. Time for coffee. Time to leave the universe. Or was it to rejoin it?
'It was excellent,' she said as she poured him his coffee. 'No photons, no images. The miniaturisation of reality.'
'They often take their time arriving. I'm interested in your work, what I've heard of it. How about a drink some time?'
'Fine. Check your diary and give me a ring.' She tried to remember whether or not he was married. There'd been that bit about the head on the pillow that had once filled you with hope. He was tall and blond and attractive, though perhaps a little too aware of the fact. He liked to put it about a bit, didn't he? Alison had told her about him. Said he wasn't to be trusted; there'd been some trouble with a student. Might make a change from tall dark Owen, all the same, or small greying Henry, wouldn't it? We're only talking about a drink, for God's sake. Still, you'd better decide what you're going to do in life, girl, or you might find you're already doing it before any decision gets made. And what would Daddy have had to say about that?
The Memory Book
He ordered a pint and sat down next to two middle-aged men, sitting before their drinks with that curious British demeanour of stoicism in the face of the task that lies ahead. Half of the pint gone; only another half to go. We can get there. As Owen was opening the book, the man nearest to him spoke.
'You remember those signs that used to say PLEASE TAKE YOUR RUBBISH HOME WITH YOU?'
'Mmm.'
'My daughter appears to have taken that rather literally.
Which is why I'm about to acquire a primitive hunter-gatherer for a son-in-law. Encountered on a caravan site, I believe.'
'What does he do?'
'Drugs.'
Owen was already turning back the pages of the book inside himself. He was aware that there was a sensation growing. It wasn't a memory, not yet, because it wasn't fully focused yet. It might have been a memory once; it would be again. Before very long, he suspected. At the moment it was a region of darkness, growing in intensity. Does darkness have intensity, or is that only light? He couldn't remember. Have to ask Johnny, Johnny knew all about optics. He kept turning the pages, as though looking for a title. There seemed to be many illustrations of the different shapes memory had travelled under: Plato's wax tablet, a house with different rooms, each one filled with its own accoutrements, palaces, abbeys, ceaseless hunger, and the derangement it was now beginning to suffer from lack of physical contact with any other creatures, human or canine, none of this signified anything whatsoever to the little girl. Which was why, when the back door was inadvertently left open late one afternoon, she tottered out and kept walking on her stout little legs until she came within the chain's growling circle.
Martin held the paper before Henry and Henry looked at the photograph. She'd needed eighty-seven stitches to sew her head back up and stop it from leaking blood the way a smashed tomato in the road bleeds juices. There was still a query hovering over her survival. The dog without a name had already been destroyed. Mr Patel was in the process of being charged with wanton cruelty to a domestic animal, and there was now no more barking in the night along the avenue. Henry continued to stare at the photograph in silence, long after Martin had gone, leaving the paper with him.
Henry sometimes wondered if there might have been a change of lighting - in the world, he meant, not in his gallery. In there the lighting was exactly the same as it has been the day he moved in: a little dim unless the sun shone through one of the crooked windows. But he thought it might have grown fractionally darker outside. He only caught fragments of the news, but it seemed that people over the world had taken to mass slaughter with a fresh enthusiasm. We were all off again, it seemed. Fate's appetite for flesh was as strong as ever.
He went and sat in the Picasso Room. The eyes of the minotaur were on him. They were all hungry, that was for sure, but for what? What would their food be this time? cathedrals, a computer, a holograph, a palimpsest, an archaeological dig, Freud's magical writing pad, and, over and over again, a labyrinth. Was there a minotaur sitting at the heart of this fucking labyrinth then, or only Henry Allardyce with a glass of red wine? He closed the book and sat staring at the bar. Something was about to arrive and he knew it.
*
Sylvie put the video Ali had given her into its machine. A young girl was walking up and down, or trying to. Her legs were bent out of shape, and her gait was a constant battle not to fall over. As she struggled a voice-over began.
You have I00,000 goes at it before you get it right. Then your mind stores that particular manoeuvre - left leg up as right leg goes down again - and you stop falling over. That's fine. You’re only twelve months old. You have all the time in the world and energy to burn.
But what if you're not twelve months, but twelve years old, and your legs still don't work right? They never have. You never walk farther than a hundred metres. You go to school in a wheelchair. And you don't have energy to bum because you're already burning up far too much of it to force your body through the irregular movements that constitute your abnormal gait? What then?
Still the little girl struggled up and down, this way then that. This little girl's bipedal locomotion is so poor that she never walks far. We view her on a video. What can we do? The girl has splints, but she doesn't like wearing them. In the trade we call this 'non-compliance'; it's far from uncommon. The splints are large, and hardly fashionable. Physiotherapy? We're doing that, but it won't make much difference. Surgery is possible, but the parents are unenthusiastic. Results are not guaranteed and the scarring would be permanent.
What is our narrative of expectation? That's all about the expenditure of energy, which in a precise sense is the 'cost' of this disability. It is surely an oddity of human history how often we come to understand ourselves as a result of studying our own creations. These days we negotiate neuroscience by comparing the functioning of a computer with that of a brain. In the nineteenth century we studied the steam engines we had built, so as to maximise their efficiency. What did any system do with the energy put into it? It converted some into work, th
e rest it lost. Whenever a steam engine transmitted heat to its surroundings it was losing energy, which in a machine of perfect efficiency it would have turned into work instead. Such studies led to the formulation of the laws of thermodynamics. And we can look at the body as a system of energy conversion in the same way. Statistics tell us the approximate amount of energy you should be expending by walking. If your legs have been buckled since infancy then this amount will show as much higher than normal. Everything costs too much. Daily life is simply too expensive. And it will get more expensive the older the girl gets.
And then there was no more voice-over, only the film of the little girl making her painful and ungainly way up and down the lab, this way and that, with legs buckled too far out of shape for their purpose. The persistence of vision, the afterlife of images. Sylvie watched it in silence.
Euland
As Sylvie began the long incline that pointed down towards the Birkenhead Tunnel, she was listening to that tape of Paul Darcy which her student had lent her. The song, in a minor key, achieved some curious effects by combining unexpected instruments. There was an acoustic guitar, a soprano sax:
There's been an earthquake in the Philippines, a flash flood in NYC
Everybody's searching high and low, no one notices me
Headlights hit the windows, nervous drinkers hit the floor
Sirens are wailing, please tell me who they're wailing for
The labyrinth's alive tonight as silence is transformed into heat
I heard somebody shout they're turning mystery to meat
I can hear the angry wind pounding and pounding on the door
Blindfolds and chains, and the traffic's ever-growing roar
He'd obviously been reading some of her books, looking at some of her pictures. Maybe he'd been having an affair with Henry too. There was no copyright on this material. The student had also given her a book about him. It appeared to have been written by a once-faithful roadie, pimp and all- round servicer of Darcy's requirements.
The writer tried to remember at one point how many women he must have put Darcy's way. Going down to the auditorium during the interval to pick up the chosen creatures and get them back-stage passes with a minimum of fuss. To let them in to the light behind the darkness; or was it the dark behind the light? For at least one three-month period, pander and lord were both only too aware that each one of these chosen creatures was being infected with a non-specific, but undoubtedly anti-social, virus. Not that this stopped Darcy going at it like a rat up a drainpipe. As his Boswell now put it: 'Paul Darcy is an unscrupulous fucker, but on a good night, he's still one of the best singers in the world.' And in between getting pissed, getting stoned, and getting laid, he obviously read a lot. Everybody's in this bloody labyrinth these days, she thought, and made a mental note to phone Henry later.
Sylvie spent the first few hours of the day in the Signum's library. This was the heart of the building, and the real reason it existed at all. Friedrich Euland, a refugee from Vienna in the 1930s, had chosen to risk the bombs falling on his precious book collection in Liverpool rather than have them fall on his precious book collection in London. He had come to detest all crowds and Liverpool was smaller; it was as simple as that. His British devotee, James Almond, who subsequently wrote his intellectual biography, Euland: Melancholy Anatomist, doubted that Euland had gone out much by that stage in any case, his psychological condition being so severe that the only place he could feel comfortable was surrounded by his books and prints. No air-raid warnings would ever have evacuated him. Almond argued, with some conviction, that Euland's disablement for normal life facilitated his thought. He drew parallels with Darwin and Proust. Sylvie was sitting under the alabaster bust. Euland was a small man, with a large moustache, his gaze fixed perennially elsewhere; anywhere, it seemed, but here.
He had gathered together a rewarding collection of scientific images from over the centuries. She had picked up some of her obsessions from him, though he would surely have been astounded at the destinations she was now carrying them towards. We constellate reality, form images of it, challenge it, destroy it, form new images, but certain motifs seem to remain constant. The question was this: when technology trans- formed the possibilities of image-making, did this alter our underlying psychology, or merely amplify it? Had the pictures from the Hubble Telescope changed our sense of being in the world, or merely extended it by powers of ten? Once only the monarch was the centre of the circle of the world, his or her face impressed on every coin. Then technology had permitted all sorts of new images, a proliferation of them beyond any anticipation, and what had we done with those images? Had we displaced the notion that anyone was the centre of the circle of the world, or merely multiplied it? The astonishing fecundity of the images of musical celebrities, even their voices at the centre of those circles of the world that were once black vinyl and now shiny metal, playing from millions of machines all over the world, little gleaming tabernacles, this fecundity of voice-imprinting and image-making hadn't necessarily shifted the basic psychic parameters at all. She suspected that this was what Euland had come to believe by the end, and she believed it too. What did we call them, as they shone up there, and we crooked our necks? Stars. What did we call Elvis? The king. How brightly they had shone, and how everyone had bent the knee, offered the body, paid the coin. We were still in a glittering kingdom, living with the afterlife of images.
Euland had no doubt that worship, often of the most murderous variety, was an ineradicable part of the human mind. But what had we left ourselves to worship, in the vast clearings of modernity? The world of commodities, according to Euland, expressed itself philosophically not in the works of Marx and Engels, but in the words of nihilism. Unattributable makings issuing from the engine of manufacture, an engine without purpose except to enlarge its own productiveness. This machine of creation made commodities the way, in Darwin's scheme, the blind idiot called Nature made creatures - some for life, others for destruction, with no moral filament to distinguish between them, except their 'fitness for survival', a phrase Euland could never encounter without horror, because it made him fear that Nazism was not a hideous deformation, but an emanation from the brute core of human existence itself.
He had become greatly preoccupied after the war with the figure of Magda Goebbels. He felt that she had stepped out of Euripides and into the history of Europe: Medea slaughtering her children, not because she was in a rage at Jason any more, but simply at the thought of a world without Hitler, a de- Nazified world unfit to inherit her little ones. So she poisoned her beloved chicks and then allowed herself to be put to death in turn. She had once, noted Euland, been thought the most famous mother in Germany. Beautiful children spawned by her malignant dwarf of a husband.
The book before her was Euland's Notebooks and Papers.
Sylvie often returned to them, and then extrapolated at a rate that had begun to alarm even her. What she was trying to do now was link images and mirrors. The technological link was simple: speculum and speculation, mirrors in telescopes and miscroscopes, facilitating images and the de-coding of images, mirrors in cameras doing the same. She was less convinced that the psychological aspect had been properly broached.
For years in the 1960s every time a young man looked in the mirror he wanted to be one of those four faces; the four faces of the Beatles. Or maybe the Stones. Or Dylan. And every time a girl looked into a mirror she wanted to have one of those same faces looking back at her. And yet John Lennon had to spend the rest of his life trying to find a man there, a human being, no more, no less. A man whose father had walked out on him, and whose mother had been killed by a speeding police car. He knew that the image, whatever its proliferation in millions upon millions of copies, could never replace the face in the mirror. You finally had to come back in solitude to that. The persistence of that vision was irreversible. 'I'm just an ordinary man,' the Beatle cried, to universal incredulity. And yet in one sense of course, he was, for what el
se could he be? And what did Bob Dylan see when he looked in the mirror? Did he see Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota? Or something entirely different? Did he really see the myth he'd made of himself? Did the same creature come out of the labyrinth as had once gone in?
When the Christian looks at the figure on the cross he sees lots of suffering behind and plenty more on its way. Inescapable anguish and suffering. So offer it all up to God. But what did William Blake see? Glory. Resplendent glory. That's what he said, and there seems no reason to disbelieve him. And what did the Easter Islanders see when they stared up at those vast stony gods they themselves had hewn to palliate the powers that would destroy them anyway? They saw the vast nails that held earth to heaven, and would never come loose. The whole of the island was a mirror to the skies. Were all images mirrors then, to some extent? Did they all simply reflect our beliefs, our wishes and our pain?
Euland saw with great vividness that the ancient categories of rhetoric, the facility to blind and deafen the moral faculties with persuasive power, hadn't been in any way negated or even diluted by modem technologies of communication; they had simply grown greater and greater. He found due cause for terror here. He knew the voices of Hitler and Goebbels, the husband this time not the wife; they had been planted in his head by the radio, but no radio signals could ever take them out again. He had meditated long and hard on the lethal temptation of all verbal magic harnessed to power: a fake enchantment for a disenchanted world, a simplification of reality resulting in murder. A new mirror from which you would emerge transformed, an image replicated over and over again, shaping a new reality, a new kingdom, a new Reich. And you would be one of many. Your identity could be reflected in everyone else's. A consonance of images, since all dissonant ones would have been eradicated. There was one thing of which he had no doubt: in the iconography of power, the sacrifice of any member of the ruling group was always the brief preface to a much greater sacrifice of those outside it.