by Luke Davies
I remember once reading about an argument creationists employed to try to debunk the theory of evolution. How can an eye, they argued, develop in stages, towards being an eye, without functioning as an eye? But I know that the spirit can develop by just such bizarre leaps. It’s called punctuated equilibrium. Nothing much happens for a long time, and then everything happens at once.
In November there are strikes and street protests all over France. I’m a little too busy coping with shop transactions and the day-to-day challenge of living to understand very clearly the subtleties of European trade economics and the mood of the French people. It’s as if electrodes are attached all over my skin, infusing me with new sensations, and the strikes are only one of a thousand things to take in.
Then in December there’s a general strike of all the transport workers in Paris. The metro, the RER, the buses all shut down. The universities cancel all classes and many businesses close for the duration. The city sighs at the uninvited break. Cars disappear from the streets. It’s a miniholiday. The Parisians actually seem relaxed. The mairie of Paris makes available, free to the public, the tourist barges, the bateaux-mouches. It’s not much in terms of getting around but I decide to make use of this odd form of transport.
It’s a cold still evening and in a cafe I overhear a woman at the next table saying, ‘It might snow tonight.’ I go back to my apartment and luxuriate in the central heating. When I wake in the morning my eyes snap open and I am immediately, fully awake, without grogginess. I know that something is different but for a moment I’m not sure what it could be. I sniff hard and smell a sharp tang in the air.
‘This is it!’ I exclaim. ‘This must be it!’ I jump out of bed. My body is light as if I am filled with helium. But I look out the window and it is not snowing yet.
Still, it’s a light I have never seen before. The sky is heavy with brilliant white clouds. When I look directly into the centre of the clouds their edges contain flecks of silver. So in Paris it is true about silver linings!
I climb into the shower. ‘Please God, please God, let it snow today,’ I say. Even though He quite possibly does not exist, He is my special friend whenever I am keen about things. The bathroom fills with steam.
The streets of the Latin Quarter are eerily empty. I am warm in my boots and overcoat but I can see that the asphalt is iron cold. It is eight o’clock in the morning. For two or three minutes I walk down the centre of Rue St Jacques and not a single car comes towards me. The brittle air is tinged with blueness: the colour of expectancy.
I stop in at Le WeekEnd Brasserie and take a table overlooking the street. The occasional car moves by but the usually hectic intersection is relatively still. I watch the rugged-up workers unloading the truck across the road at the fruit shop. Pallets of summer: clementines from Portugal, glowing bright orange like buns deep inside an oven; passionfruits from Kenya; mangoes from the Ivory Coast; huge Spanish strawberries.
I read my book for a while. When I look up, a white flake flutters to the ground in slow motion. For a moment I think it is a piece of fluff or feather-down from someone shaking a quilt out a window. Then more flakes are falling and I know it is snowing. Suddenly the intersection is draped in this soft downwardness of white.
I have encountered a new marvel. I sit absolutely still with my palms pressed flat on the table and a pot of tea in front of me. Steam rises from the spout. The wide expanse of concertina window acts as a frame on the street scene being swished into whiteness. I know that the moment will not last forever so the next best thing is to be calm and keep my eyes wide open. I sink into a reverie of acute awareness brought on by the lowering of heartbeat and pulse.
I study the snow. Soon, I know, I will walk outside to touch it, in case it doesn’t last too long. But for the moment I simply watch it. I try to focus on individual snowdrops; then I try to take in the whole scene. It’s a windless day. I realise that the snowflakes do not flutter like leaves or feathers. Rather, they seem to fall to earth with a gentle and resigned heaviness. And yet at the very next instant I think of them as near-weightless things brushed over some ledge in the sky and moving towards earth with only the faintest of responses to the laws of gravity.
A car moves along the street and for a moment the flakes horizontal with the line traced by its passing roof tumble and jiggle in the turbulence of its slipstream. An invisible cone of heat rises from the exhaust pipe of the fruit truck and the snowflakes jostle to move away from that too. But despite these minor fluctuations, the intersection of Rue Gay Lussac and Rue St Jacques, seen from Le WeekEnd Brasserie, is an arena that contains this endless repetition of white falling lazily upon itself.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
—I try to remember the words to Frost’s poem, but it’s more than thirteen years ago, I realise, since I studied it in school. I had loved it then, and it had intensified my desire to see snow. The words start to return in fragments and then larger blocks.
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The downy flake settles itself on the intersection. I order another pot of tea and the snow continues to steadily fall as if ready now to take its time and fall forever.
For a long time I watch it. I pay the bill and walk outside. I’m wearing a Mambo beanie and a black mohair scarf. The first snowflakes I’ve ever felt in my life brush against my face. I have read once that there may be an invigorating, even mystical order to the haphazard profusion and variable shapes of snowflakes. Laws according to which they form. Everybody knows that no single snowflake is ever the same. So the idea of laws creating these endless differences strikes me as odd. It’s the word ‘laws’ that doesn’t fit. Snowflakes can be symmetrical but not in a Euclidian sense. They appear symmetrical but this doesn’t stand up to closer inspection. Their development is irregular and fractal, and patterns of repetition appear on different scales.
I learn this from one of the books my father gave me. I will only realise retrospectively that it was his last gift to me. It is ironic to think of myself in Paris, reading his books about unstable systems as he moved inexorably towards his own chaos on Kilauea. I remember, too, that in the months before I left for Paris, he would corner me and rave on with summaries of his latest scientific readings. I imagine now that what he was doing was clinging to something concrete in order to ward off the night. And yet in the strange worlds of chaos and quantum theory that with all his great autistic love he opened up to me, the concrete is hardly the point.
I remember that one of our last conversations, the week I left for Paris, was about snowflakes.
‘Signatures,’ Tom had said to me that day, in one of those moments when he rambled yet was lucid enough that at least a thread could be followed. ‘It’s all signatures. I mean, everything leaves a signature. From evolution—fossil paleontology, divergent traits in related species, what have you—to love affairs, the damage that we carry like frowns and wrinkles on the soul.’
I said nothing, wanting to squirm in my seat but feeling it my duty to remain and listen.
‘Signatures everywhere,’ he continued. ‘You know what I read today? Snowflakes, each one different. Think about snowflakes. Snowflakes are the records of the changing circumstances the ice encountered during its descent. At first, you think about that, I mean really contemplate it, you think that’s extraordinary. You think that is simply a stunning and a beautiful fact. And in one way, it is. But then you realise, everything is a record of its descent through circumstances. Absolutely everything is inscribing its own story on itself. And everything is descent.’
There was a long silence. It seemed to me that a great battle was roiling inside my father, between his own understanding of his ideas and h
is ability to enjoy what they actually meant in the real world.
‘But that, of course, makes it no less wondrous. As they fall through the atmosphere they release, you know, heat. And so that creates a charge that attracts other ice molecules. One tip or another begins picking up molecules from the air. The incredible thing is that the whole system, the crystal, exhibits a preference to grow symmetrically in six directions at once. A microscopic preference. Not real symmetry, of course. You can’t attain that, since each flight down to the ground is a different path through different events. And somewhere along the line, the thing has burst forth into a snowflake.’
‘That’s good, Dad. That’s interesting. You tell the most beautiful stories. Tell me another one.’
‘Ah, Isabelle,’ he’d said then, beginning to cry, ‘come here and give your old dad a hug.’ He ruffled my hair as we embraced. ‘I haven’t been much good for you, have I?’ My face was buried in his shoulder, as it had been so often in times of joy.
‘You’ve been fine, Dad. The best. And you’ll be all right.’
I didn’t believe it. I felt sick in the stomach. But I knew I had to go to Paris. There was nothing I, or Tess, or anyone, could do. Save wait, perhaps. Tess treated him with tender forbearance all this time, as if certain one day he would wake up. I held out a faint hope that the old Tom would return but in any case had some waters to traverse in my own life. Hugging him at that moment, I might well have been throwing streamers from the deck of the liner.
My father’s interest in the snowflakes makes the snowflakes seem special right now as they brush across my face on Rue St Jacques. The feeling is sharper than I have imagined it would be, like tiny arrows of cold stinging my cheeks. When I hold out my hands, aware that I stand on the corner of the street as a six-year-old girl might stand in an attitude of wonder, the flakes land on my open palms but I feel no impact, however minute. No weight. It’s as if the snowflakes are optical illusions, tricks of the light brought on by a winter mirage; as if they don’t exist, other than for the fact that after a few seconds my hands begin to feel cold. I see snowflakes in the air but when I look at the palm of my hand there are nothing but little splinters of ice quickly melting to rivulets of water.
I walk hands in pockets to the Seine through the soft cold morning. I imagine Matt walking beside me, his arm slipped through mine. For an instant I feel myself to be a sparrow, my shallow panicked panting the best my miniature lungs can muster, my tiny heart ready to explode.
It’s been more than a year and a half since he died. I yearn again for that richer love: the mutual desire, open-armed and unencumbered, for the presence of the other in our lives. Rilke said that the highest task and privilege of a relationship was ‘that each should stand guard over the other’s solitude’. I am getting tired now of guarding my own.
I reach the bottom of Rue St Jacques. Across the river to my right the snow is dancing in wisps and whirls around the spire of the Notre Dame cathedral, which has been cleaned after six hundred years and stands aloof like a stone ghost against the whiteness. I descend the stone stairs of the Quai de Montebello.
I wait in the small queue that has formed on the stone bank beneath the Pont au Double. The flakes of snow are pure white as they fall into the dark steel emptiness of the river; the flowing water, matte liquid, sponging up all of the day’s meagre supplies of available colour and reflecting none back. At any given moment hundreds of snowflakes drop listlessly from the sky and make their tiny dimples on the surface of the water. And instantly they disappear, though the eye follows automatically in the direction of the water, expecting to see that whiteness continue. The absorption is absolute. The snowflakes fall and then are simply not there, but the river flows on regardless. Love flows past like this flowing water.
On the bateau-mouche I stand on the foredeck, protected from the snow by an eave. The complete silence of the city unnerves me. The falling snow curves towards the bow of the boat.
Up to the right the Louvre floats past. For hundreds of years the French kings and queens lived in the serene stone palace. And yet what I would like is to be relieved of the weight of history.
When eventually I arrive back at my apartment, a short boat ride back and a cold walk later, I am glad for the central heating and walk around in T-shirt and jeans. The snow continues to fall steadily, so that when I look outside I am struck with delight at its presence. I read for hours. The afternoon turns dark early and I make soup and watch weird French television and feel I am hibernating safe and secure in the softest of cocoons.
All day the snow has invigorated me and now suddenly, at nine at night, I feel a comforting exhaustion deep in my bones. I fall into bed and am asleep within minutes. I dream I am a passenger on a ship, some kind of icebreaker. I am dropped off on the edge of Antarctica. The ship departs. There are no goodbyes. I am to spend the winter alone on a continent of ice. I am some kind of caretaker and must look after the equipment: Caterpillar tractors, generators, Nissan huts. Almost immediately snow begins to settle on these things and they disappear. There is a key used to unlock all the machinery and operate it. I plant a small flag to mark out the spot where the key is already disappearing under the snow and ice. When the ice melts in summer the key will not be hard to find.
In the dream I am alone for the whole of winter but I make a wonderful discovery. It’s a freak of nature, a warm current rising up from deep in the Southern Ocean and lapping the edges of the ice continent. I find to my surprise and joy that it’s possible to swim in a knee-to-elbow wetsuit. I wear fins and goggles and a snorkel and pass my time exploring the warm stream around the edges of the ice. Under the water is an abundance of coral and brightly coloured seaweeds and marine life. I take a video camera underwater and know that when summer comes and the icebreaker returns to pick me up I will be able to take this film back with me. The light comes through into the water, a splendid blue reflected off the shelves of overhanging ice.
In the morning I wake from the dream to a white sky and utter silence. I look out the window, my fingertips tingling with excitement, to a world of curves. Down on the street there is not a straight line in sight. I’ve never seen anything like it before. It is not snowing as steadily as yesterday. The air is filled with small flurries of flakes. Each flake jiggles and swirls as if connected to invisible strings.
After showering and dressing I walk out into the street and the curved world. Everything is described by circles and arcs of circles. The snow has moulded all perpendiculars into a softness I am not prepared for. The gutters are little more than undulations in whiteness between sidewalk and road. Parked cars are half hidden under bulbous blankets of snow. The thin trunks of bare trees flow gracefully to the ground, fetlocks white.
The whole world is padded. A car flows past; but other than the faint hiss of its tyres on the dirty melted snow, it makes no sound at all. The snow is a sound absorber, a vast organic muffler on the clanging of the day, each single flake soaking up the ambient noise that is afoot and that ricochets all day from source to deflected surface to ear. The air is cleaner and clearer, as if the departure of noise from the atmosphere has left a looming void in which nothing resides but hope.
I sigh. It strikes me that I have never before realised that happiness and sadness can coexist in the one body at the same time. I crouch down to a small snowdrift and pad together a snowball. My first snowball. The camera in my mind clicks. One for the family album. I stand up, snowball in hand, and quickly my hand becomes uncomfortably cold. There is no one to play with. I survey the street: pretty and white and empty. I lob the snowball like a hand grenade and in the middle of the intersection it explodes with a thud and a puff. Hands in pockets, hungry for coffee and croissant, I walk towards Le WeekEnd.
Volcano
AND ALL THE WHILE MY FATHER CONTINUED TO CRUMBLE away. I went so far inside my head in Paris that he disappeared somewhere near its far-distant edges; for the mind is an enormous hall, much bigger than the earth itself.
I have told this story in a rambling way. I cannot help it. The wind blows through that cavernous mind and on it float fragments of aromas, half familiar, half remembered. We sniff our way back towards them but the paths are not straight. I forgot to mention that in my early months in Paris, my father had sent me a letter. It was for the most part an attempt at normal pleasantries; I imagine the enormous effort with which he fought through the Melleril and the other drugs to make his syntax work. He mentioned he’d been reading about the Jainist religion from ancient India. It never surprised me, the directions his reading took.
‘What distinguishes it from all other world religions is its rigorous fatalism,’ he wrote. ‘The holy man Gosala, founder of an offshoot of Jainism, believed that human effort is ineffective. There is no cause, there is no motive, for the corruption of beings; beings are corrupted without cause or motive. There is no cause for the purity of beings; beings are purified without cause or motive. There is no act performed by oneself. There is no act performed by another. There is no human act. There is no force. There is no energy. There is no human vigour. There is no human courage. All living things are without will, without force, without energy. They evolve by the effort of destiny, of contingencies, of accidents, and by their own state. The Buddha, a contemporary of Gosala, thought this attitude was criminal. I’m not so sure myself. It is a curiously, attractively, neutral scheme of things—almost scientifically neutral—though a little bit frightening. For every action there’s a negative reaction. So the less we act, the less negativity we cause. At any rate, sacrifice and surrender are surely the garments in which we clothe our final rest and the long repose.’
Well, that’s my father’s position, clearer than I can state it. Like so much else at this time, I expelled the more worrisome aspects of the letter from my mind. We are all, to a greater or lesser extent, obsessed with our more immediate surroundings, with ourselves.