SYLVIE'S RIDDLE

by WALL, ALAN

  *

  They sat together at the table in silence for a few minutes, then Owen started laughing. Owen had a winning laugh; it swooped, levitated, settled on unexpected objects. John joined in, and then Sylvie.

  'Why are we laughing?' she said finally. 'Why not?'

  The waiter came over to the laughing table. 'Can I take your order?'

  'I know what I want,' Owen said. 'Pasta penne. '

  'I'll have the Bolognese,’ John said.

  'Can I ask what's in the vegetarian pizza?' Sylvie asked. The waiter shrugged. 'Lots of vegetables.'

  'Fair enough. I'll have that then.'

  'White wine or red?'

  'I'll stick with water tonight,' Sylvie said.

  'Red all right, Owen? We'll have a carafe of the red.'

  'How's your mother, by the way?' John asked and Owen smiled.

  'You're so good at pleasantries, John.' Why did Owen look so attractive tonight? Was it because he was on his way out of her life, or was it that his new-found freedom had lit him up? His mirada fuerte was blazing. Wouldn't have too much trouble picking up some young piece around Chester; but then he never did have much trouble, did he?

  'She's not too bad, thanks, John. Still studying her Krishnamurti, trying to make the many one.'

  'Who isn't?' Owen asked.

  'I don't think I am,' John said. 'I think I prefer the one to be many. Like George Oppen I believe in the shipwreck of the singular.'

  'You met him once, didn't you? Krishnamurti.'

  'Yes. I think I must have been about sixteen. There was some huge marquee, I remember that, and all these crowds of hushed and excited people wandering about. We managed to get a seat up near the dais. And after what seemed hours the little man came out, dressed like a landowner from the pages of Country Life, in a nicely-cut tweed jacket and cavalry twills. He spoke for so long I finally dozed off. I remember a lot of phrases like "Not to be in love with something but simply to be in love, in the state of it." But for as long as I was awake I couldn't take my eyes off his hair.

  As she drove me back later my mother seemed torn between her new state of spiritual elevation, and her disgruntlement with her feckless daughter. "You fell asleep," she said. "How could you do that?" "Because I was tired," I said. "You can get tired any time. It's not every day you get to see Krishnamurti. See him, be in his presence, listen to his wisdom." "So why does he do that with his hair then, if he's so wise?" "What?" "Come on, mother, don't tell me you didn't notice. He kept going on about there being no secrets that can be kept from the questing spirit, so why does he go to all that trouble to comb his white hair over his bald patch? You can see it from a mile away; you don't have to be on the astral plane. So why's he so desperate to keep that a secret then?"

  'My mother never quite forgave me for that. If it had been me in the burning building and Krishnamurti, she'd definitely have saved him and left me for cinders. Left me to find a spiritual purging in the flames. Not like your mother, eh Owen?'

  'No, with mine it was Jesus all the way.'

  'So she went round forgiving people all the time, did she?'

  'On the contrary, she thought the forgiveness side of things in Christianity had been seriously over-promoted. She was keen to emphasize the other side of Jesus: maledictions on fig trees, booting money-lenders out of the temple. Get thee behind me, Satan.

  Actually, to be fair, there were only two things my mother absolutely couldn't stand: unpunctuality and sinners. But then since nobody is always exactly on time, and only Jesus and his mother lived a life entirely without sin, what this actually amounted to was that my mother never liked anyone much. Not for long anyway. She certainly never liked me. Every so often she might tilt a little towards one endearing soul or another, but soon enough he'd turn up five minutes late, or be spotted talking to a member of the opposite sex in an unregulated zone, and that would be his name erased for ever from the book of life. Found it hard now to fathom what she'd ever seen in him in the first place. A man so slovenly he couldn't even set his watch; a fornicator soliciting strangers he encountered at the kerbside. Another foot- soldier in the devil' s army, desperate and woe-begone. "We'LL still be keeping him as our doctor though, won't we, Mum?" I'd ask, desperate for a bit of continuity. "We'll keep him as our doctor for the moment, until a more spiritually salubrious practitioner turns up.'"

  'Why was she like that?' John always had to find the reason behind things; he never believed anything could be arbitrary.

  'My Dad, I suppose. The old man had a fish and chip shop in Swansea. He also had a penis that never stayed zippered for more than ten hours at a time. Took a couple of years after they were married before Mum realised what had been going on. It was one night when he'd taken the dog for a walk. Used to go down around the graveyard. Mum didn't like it down there. Thought it was creepy. That's probably why he went. Very long walks, that dog used to get. Anyway the dog came back this time, minus Dad. So Mum went off on a search for once. Went to the pub, obvious first port-of-call, but he wasn't there. Finally galvanized herself to go down to the graveyard, and spotted Dad, up against one of the larger catacombs, having a knee-trembler with a local floozie. That's when she took to the Gospel in earnest.'

  'You never told me that, Owen.'

  'Didn't I? Probably thought you were too young in those days.'

  'I've aged, obviously.' So are you a chip off the old block, my husband? Is it no more than the inescapability of genetics? Or was that the choice you thought life had presented you with, Bible-thumping or fornication? Why had he never told her about his father? She'd even met the old fellow. Was he still at it, down in Swansea? Or had he finally achieved a state of senile detumescence?

  The odd thing was, when the evening finally came to a close, she wanted to go back with them both to John's flat. She didn't want to sleep with either of them, only to lie on a separate bed and talk into the small hours. Without being touched. \as that such an unreasonable request? Didn't seem to be one that could be fulfilled, anyway, so she didn't bother making it.

  Marks of Light

  Henry had taken out the photographs of all his wives now, and laid them across the table in the Picasso Room.

  He picked up one of his first wife Isabella, lying on the beach, her eyes shut. It made him think of her when she was sleeping: she was such a tidy, regulated sort of a person. Only at night did curious sighs and coded signals start to escape from her mouth. So many complaints. A murmurous little riot between the sheets. The hermetic protest her soul permitted itself while Isabella's daytime mind was on the blink. When the god of money finally closed his eyes. She had creatures locked inside her who never saw the light of day. So when her mind had been switched off when these hidden creatures could wander at last through the deserted playground of her spirit, so many dead streets left vacant in the hours of darkness, they all spoke at once in urgent whispers. Henry used to lie there and listen, fascinated, beguiled. He'd wanted to meet them; wanted to run a phrenological hand across their little skulls to locate the bumps, so that he might map the miniature topographies of their souls. But come the morning they would all be safely locked away once more inside the businesswoman's brain. Isabella of course simply denied their existence.

  In the photographs of Laura, she was always provocative, but then in this particular instance, the photographs were merely recording reality. In one she had started to pull the T-shirt up over her breasts, and as Henry recalled, he hadn't spent much longer with his eye to the viewfinder.

  And then Eleanor. Eleanor simply smiled. Whatever happened to her, she smiled. You didn't have to ask Eleanor to smile, because she was already doing it. So much pain in her life; so many smiles.

  He seemed to spend more and more hours alone in the Picasso Room. What separate worlds Picasso's men and women inhabit. They even look at each other in different languages. Light a candle in your heart, Henry, and trim its wick in solitude. Let the wounded minotaur retire into his labyrinth.

  Go
out for a walk, man. And so he did. He stopped when he reached the pub by the river. Should it be a pint by the water-front, watching the Severn go by? That seemed like a good idea. Hadn't had a glass of wine all day; he'd wanted one, but he'd run out, and couldn't be bothered going out to buy any more. He sat down next to two young men, with close-cropped skulls. Neither of you can carry off the skinhead style like Miriam French, he thought, but he kept his thought to himself. One of the young men was talking in low, urgent tones.

  'I'm going to kill that fucking dog of his, if it does it again in my garden.' The other's voice became quieter. 'They're tooled-up.'

  'Tooled-up?'

  'Armed.'

  'Ah.'

  'They don't bring their work home with them, like. Not so as I've heard. But I think it might be better if you don't mention about killing his dog. He might get a bit touchy about that.'

  'Just go down the pet shop and get myself a pooper-scooper, you mean?'

  'Might be the best idea, to be honest.'

  'You're probably right.'

  And the Severn rolled on. It had seen off the Romans. It'll see us off as well, Henry thought. With our dogs beside us. All our dead drowned dogs beside us, as we make for the exit.

  When Henry arrived home that night he went and looked in the mirror. What he saw was very much not Pablo Picasso. For one thing he had more hair than Picasso, and he was taller. But there was no mirada fuerte, no facility for bewitching the beloved object.

  'Can you not resign yourself to sharing the sheets with no one?' Henry asked himself. He didn't hear any answer so he went and sat in the Picasso Room until he fell asleep.

  Genius

  Sylvie had prepared her lecture. She had to make a real effort now to set off to the Institute. She was counting the days until the end of term. She was doing everything in her power to avoid Hamish. There had been no call from Tom Helsey. Down she went through the tunnel, with a million tons of water overhead. Even the radio cut out.

  She sat cross-legged on the table before them. She had her jeans on so Lionel had nothing to really focus on and was looking out of the window.

  'Geniuses. They have become an indispensable requirement of modernity, and often the main protagonists in our hunt for the significance of life. Part psychopomp, those figures who walk ahead and lead us to the Underworld, and part shaman to climb up the axis mundi and re-locate us in the centre of reality, they do some of our living, much of our thinking, and a great deal of our creating for us. In the world of show-business they are sometimes expected to suffer and die on our behalf too, like briefly glamorized redeemers. I've shown you that image of the minotaur; bewildered and defeated as the spectators look on. Well imagine John Lennon in the street in New York, with all the bullets in his body, stumbling backwards as the spectators stare.

  'Let's look at two images for our purposes this morning. One is a picture of scientific genius and one of artistic genius. We might find they have more in common as part of our world-view than we would imagine.'

  She switched on the overhead projector and slid the first image into place.

  'This image of Einstein with electrodes attached to his head has come to symbolise the mysterious fact of genius, the unquantifiable sprite that's locked away inside the cerebellum. In an essay in his book Mythologies Roland Barthes pondered the meaning of this photograph. While all the wires linked Einstein up to his monitoring machinery, he'd been asked to think of relativity. This was presumably to send the maximum pulse waves coursing down the lines. The implication was clearly that, for the rest of us, thinking might emit a relatively meagre electro-magnetic signal, but when Einstein really got down to it, the intellect re-arranged every single force-field around it. The iconographic implication of the image seems to me more significant: we are being presented with the idea of genius as magical interiority. The shadowed world we inhabit is about to be illuminated by the gleaming singularity of Albert Einstein's mind. Time, place and circumstance are irrelevant, as this reproduction of the scene of thought in a laboratory many years later and elsewhere clearly indicates. The freakishly charged individual, intellectually potent beyond expectation, engages with the world and re-creates it for our understanding. But the facts of the matter are quite different.' Come on Lionel, stop looking out of the bloody window; I'm trying to tell you something important here. Should have worn my skirt, shouldn't I: then at least his head would be pointing in the right direction.

  'The truth is that Einstein's intellectual development is inseparable from his time and circle: inseparable from his mathematics teacher Josef Zametzer, for example, and his Uncle Jacob, who was involved professionally with the latest electro technology, and was much in evidence as the partner of Einstein's father in a joint business they both ran in Munich. There was also the poor

  Jewish student Max Talmey, who lent the youthful Einstein popular guides to science. What becomes even more striking in retrospect, as Galison shows so clearly, is that his work at the Berne Patent Office, apart from offering the young physicist the intellectual leisure he was later to joke about, also provided him with material for his work on relativity. He was dealing with lots of applications for patents relating to the co-ordination of time-signals. His genius came out of his implication in the world; not his dissociation from it. Relativity was a conceptual response to a set of contemporary problems. What Einstein proved was that all local times were valid, since neither space nor time could be assigned an absolute value. It was a question of fully understanding the rules of conversion from one context to another.

  'We work in the context where we find ourselves. None of this is to deny that Einstein had genius; it is only to try to understand what genius is and how it works, and how we form images of it. Our first caveman could constellate, remember; but he couldn't constellate a plough, because he hadn't made one yet. But take one last look at the image. What it is telling us is that the light shines from within. It will illuminate the dark outside.

  'Now if the dishevelled, beslippered, pipe-smoking distraction of Einstein's baggy features meant scientific genius for the last century, the face of Picasso undoubtedly came to mean its artistic counterpart. A vulgar detestation of Cubism and Surrealism undoubtedly helped promote him as the manic Spanish dwarf of what is known to so many as modem art. Picasso became the emblematic figure of artistic genius for our time, as Einstein became the image of the scientific variety. A single vignette of their faces is enough to signify their meaning: their physiognomies are so potent, words are not required. Their appearances have become signs.

  'Picasso, with that special stare of his, is about to transform reality. In one film he even paints with light. The same magical interiority is at work, since Picasso had neither a visible subject nor, it appeared, even a visible medium. Not even canvas or a lump of clay. Because we become one with the medium of the film in the process of watching it, the film itself as a medium gives the impression of being nothing at all, or at least being merely the medium of our thoughts; it is the materialisation of insubstantiality. Like the ether which Poincare retained and Einstein discarded, its substance is hypothetical. Picasso creates out of nothing then, ex nihilo, precisely as God was said to do by orthodox theology. Einstein had already established that nothing in the universe could move faster than the speed of light, so the fact that Picasso could make images, and most compelling images too, out of light itself moving freely through the air from a torch in his hand, with nothing to prompt him but his own bright interiority, meant that his artistic spirit travelled as speedily as anything in creation ever could. He was spirit then, that ruah or pneuma of the first page of Genesis:

  And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. In the relative world of mundanity, he had reached the actual speed of creation. The photons of genius were being emitted from him, and we were left behind to study their traces, since we are unable to travel with the same velocity.

  'There was a lon
g tradition before modem optics really began with Newton, which interpreted vision as coming from inside; we projected a light upon the objects we saw. The light then was referred to as lux, not the lumen of modem physics. Now I would suggest that we have retained this discredited concept hermetically, in our notion of genius. Over the next week I want you to look at the photographic iconography of genius. That includes the world of popular culture. I think you might be surprised at the recurrent patterns of expectation and portrayal.'

  Lenses and Constellations

  Alla lens knows, Owen, is focal length and framing. It can't know anything else. So if I'm to convey that the lens is moving towards knowledge, then it will have to be by one of those means.'

  'What about filters?'

  'They're just a way of telling the lens that it knows less than it really does.'

  John was setting up his camera and tripod so that they pointed to the window of his flat. He had placed a chair immediately before the window. That's where Owen was going to sit.

  The confusion in framing means that the lens doesn't know where to settle, and a confusion of focus means that the lens can't relate to the material it's been presented with. Now if you sit on that chair and speak and I can hear your words clearly, but you are out of focus, then the words are in a definable relation to reality, but not the image. Or a part of the image might be. For example, the roofs over the canal there, they can be in focus, while you're not. What would that tell us?'

  'I don't know.'

  'Neither do I. Let's find out.'

  'You didn't tell me about this. I've not written anything.'

  'For once, I'm going to handle you the way you normally handle me. If you're around here disturbing my peace of mind all day, you can earn your keep.reality. In one film he even paints with light. The same magical interiority is at work, since Picasso had neither a visible subject nor, it appeared, even a visible medium. Not even canvas or a lump of clay. Because we become one with the medium of the film in the process of watching it, the film itself as a medium gives the impression of being nothing at all, or at least being merely the medium of our thoughts; it is the materialisation of insubstantiality. Like the ether which Poincare retained and Einstein discarded, its substance is hypothetical. Picasso creates out of nothing then, ex nihilo, precisely as God was said to do by orthodox theology. Einstein had already established that nothing in the universe could move faster than the speed of light, so the fact that Picasso could make images, and most compelling images too, out of light itself moving freely through the air from a torch in his hand, with nothing to prompt him but his own bright interiority, meant that his artistic spirit travelled as speedily as anything in creation ever could. He was spirit then, that ruah or pneuma of the first page of Genesis: