Cassavetes was wearing black leggings, and thick socks, and a long, floral dress which swirled about as she moved. Her long dark hair was held in place with a floral scarf. She looked like a younger version of the woman in Solete’s painting. Except that woman had been tenuous and pensive, and Cassavetes was firm and unyielding. She spoke with great conviction. She made slightly intimidating eye contact. Anthony faded into his blanket. Occasionally he sneezed. So she turned her gaze onto me.
She rustled through the papers and found a photograph of Solete. He was young, tall and blond, standing with his arm around Asta Rose, who I recognised from the photos in his room. He was wearing a white suit, a boater with a striped ribbon.
‘He looks happy,’ I said.
‘He was an exceptionally happy man. Didn’t you find?’
‘Yes, I did. Or, at least, stoical.’
‘No, no he wasn’t a stoic. Foolish materialist fools. Don’t you think? All is lost, we’re done for, best put a brave face on it. Fools!’
‘What, you mean, you’ve got the answer?’ said Yorke, in a distant voice. I looked across at him. He had stopped shivering but he looked deeply white. ‘Do pass it on,’ he said. Still struggling.
‘My father was an academic,’ said Cassavetes, ignoring Anthony. ‘He was hugely involved with Egyptian archaeology. Spent his life digging in sand. Stuck to his fingers. Said it got in his lungs. He hated it. Coughed out sand, even when he came home. Vomited sand. Anyway, my father as you can imagine really hated sand, but he always went back, dug away again. Found minuscule relics.’
‘Relics again,’ said Anthony.
‘Yes, but you can find a relic and understand nothing about the society,’ said Cassavetes. ‘The relic is just a thing – and then – you invent, often. My father got in terrible trouble for inventing. But I stood by him. It turned out he hadn’t invented anything. Everyone else, all the stoics, had just got it all wrong. They were so concerned with their own funny worldview, they couldn’t fathom the minds of the Ancient Egyptians. You can get trapped, can’t you? Funny, isn’t it? Tragic for my father but laced with irony. Did you know Solete well?’
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘What about you, shivering man?’ she said, to Anthony. ‘Why are you here?’
‘You tell me,’ said Anthony. ‘I walk from scrap to scrap. I am cold.’
‘Perhaps you are a clue,’ said Cassavetes.
‘Why is your boat called Hypatia?’ said Anthony.
*
Cassavetes leaned back and paused. The hurricane lantern swayed again, so her face became a mask, theatrical shadows around her eyes. And thus, we arrived into Cassavetes’s theory of everything – as told through the story of Hypatia. Like Port, she had a prevailing theme. Anthony was still rubbing his arms and shivering, but now he settled down, reclining against the wall, as if he was glad he didn’t have to venture outside. As Cassavetes spoke she moved her fingers, and the candlelight projected them across the walls, so they were magnified and animated, like a lantern show.
*
Hypatia was a consummate genius, Cassavetes explained. History was generally mistaken about anything that mattered, and this was why Hypatia languished mainly in obscurity. Born sometime between 350–370 ad, she was tutored by her brilliant father, Theon, who recognised the talents of his daughter. Theon had a post at the museum in Alexandria, where he taught mathematics, physics and astronomy. Through her father, Hypatia became familiar with the works of Plotinus, Aristotle and Plato, as well as with Euclidian geometry.
Hypatia imagined the starry expanse wherein reside the forces of the universe, interior virtues. In line with the teachings of Plato and Plotinus, she believed that there is an ultimate reality, beyond the reach of thought or language. In life, we may aim towards this ultimate reality, yet we can never fully grasp it and it can never be precisely described.
Hypatia was staggeringly beautiful, but she also took drastic measures to disperse the effects of her beauty on her students. To one mystified acolyte, she revealed her soiled undergarments, and explained, on this basis, the fleeting and insufficient nature of the physical realm.
Hypatia, in her study, in a room overlooking the sea.
A few centuries later Alhazen will be in Cairo, imbibing the dust that blows in from the desert, and pondering the nature of perception. Hypatia is less moved by dust, but particles and integers fill her with awe. She believes you might relay the mysteries of the universe in numbers. And yet, this is not invention, she claims; it is an acknowledgement of the eternal realities. Numbers are inherent to the mystery around her. The mysteries are mathematical and numbers recur throughout nature – in the repetitions of the planet, as it turns in space, and in the repetitions of the diurnal round, twenty-four hours, light and darkness. Referring back to Ancient Babylonians, Sumerians, long lost tribes again, Hypatia understands that there are twelve hours in the day, twelve hours in the night, and, with reference to the later work of Ptolemy, sixty minutes in an hour, sixty seconds in a minute. Her finite life is composed of increments.
*
As a neoPlatonist, Hypatia attracts the suspicion of the Christian authorities. In 412 ad, Cyril becomes patriarch of Alexandria. The Roman prefect there is Orestes, a friend of Hypatia. Cyril wants to assert the power of the church; Orestes seeks to defend the boundaries of the state.
Their feud has become increasingly acrimonious. Hypatia’s friendship with Orestes, combined with her supposedly pagan views, and her refusal to supplant the realm of Platonic forms for the Christian realm of the spirit, makes her a focal point for the unrest. There are struggles between Christians and non-Christians. In one such riot, Hypatia is attacked by a mob of Christians who jeer at her, call her a pagan. She is torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church. Her flesh is scraped from her bones with oyster shells, and her quivering limbs are delivered to the flames.
*
Cyril, who worked so hard to incite the hordes to this act of psychotic murder, is later canonised by a grateful church.
*
In 391 AD, the library at Alexandria was burnt to the ground, by another crowd of fanatic monks, under orders from Archbishop Theophilus. In 529 AD, Plato’s Academy was closed by Justinian. Such Platonic lines of enquiry were no longer approved. Thought must be constrained by truth, of course.
*
Nearly a millennium later, we might imagine Raphael finishing his School of Athens fresco. Perhaps a few esteemed church elders arrive to view this work, to ensure that it is sufficiently pious. One particularly devout and worshipful bishop asks Raphael why he has placed a woman between Heraclitus and Diogenes. This must be a mistake, says the bishop. A woman! Raphael explains that the offending woman is Hypatia, the most famous student of the School of Athens. Naturally, the good bishop insists that this aberrant female is immediately removed. Knowledge of her runs counter to the belief of the faithful! Otherwise the picture is acceptable.
Thus are rectitude and propriety maintained, throughout history, by our anointed sages.
*
‘So that was the story of Hypatia and why I named my boat after her,’ Cassavetes was saying. ‘After her and all the other wise women burnt at the stake because they were assumed to be wrong and evil, by those who were wrong and evil themselves. And that’s why when people knock on my door in the dwindling dusk, with the cold winds blasting in from the north I tell them to go away. Unless they have good reason to come and see me.’
‘Did we have good reason?’ I said.
‘You were friends of Solete. And that man has no spine for the cold.’ She turned to Anthony, who was still huddled in the shadows. From the shadows, he nodded. ‘I’m much better now,’ he said. ‘Though naturally very sorry about Hypatia. Terrible scene.’
I looked at her store of books. Plotinus. Plato. Hypatia, of course. De Colore by Grosseteste.
‘Do you move your boat along the river?’ Anthony was saying.
‘Rarely,’
said Cassavetes. ‘This is an old town, but I like the way it whines and hums. Too much silence makes my head ache.’
‘O’Donovan says it’s all just a joke,’ said Anthony. ‘The Field Guide to Reality. A paradox.’
‘Well, O’Donovan, whoever he is, could be right. Or wrong. He sounds as if he’s likely to be wrong. Enunciators are generally wrong.’
‘An enunciator being?’
‘A person who enunciates. Idiots, in general.’
‘But, haven’t we been – enunciating? Just now?’ said Anthony.
‘Depends on the way you do it, as with everything. You should go to the mechanical magicians. Solete liked to visit them. The worst offenders. Here . . .’
Like Roland Port before her, Cassavetes wrote down something on a piece of paper. Another scrap. She handed it to me, though Yorke put out his hand. When I read it in the flickering candlelight it said:
Benighted men of little meaning.
The mechanical magicians are at 32 Swinbrook Lane
‘But don’t go too far,’ she said.
Yes, right, I almost said. Absolutely. Not too far.
‘But will they actually help?’ said Anthony.
‘What do you mean by help?’
That was impossible to answer. So we all went up onto the bank, and I thanked Cassavetes, while Anthony murmured along. Because it was so dark and drear, she offered us a lantern. ‘You can return it to me later this week,’ she said. ‘I’ll be around.’
I thanked her and took the lantern, promising to bring it back. I could see Anthony was starting to shiver again.
‘Why did Solete associate with the mechanical magicians?’ I said. ‘If you think they are such fools?’
‘The fool thinks he is wise, the wise man knows he’s a fool,’ said Cassavetes. ‘Then you have the wise man, who knows he is a fool, and therefore occasionally gets confused and consorts with genuine fools who are infinitely more foolish than he is – because of course he is not a fool but a wise man, after all.’
I didn’t really know how to respond.
‘It’s a category error,’ said Cassavetes.
*
The wind hissed along the banks, and Yorke was hurrying along, so I had to hurry as well just to stay beside him. The moon was beautiful and injurious, I had been told. The moon invoked a shadow religion, the old religion of the pagans, who were snuffed out by marauding tribes with their new censorious gods. Hypatia deferred to shadows from the Platonic era, and then she was condemned, and hurled into the flames.
A boat moved slowly along, its stern lights casting a faint reddish glow on the water. It retreated upstream, towards the west. Beyond the meadow, the city hummed, referring a background glow of orange light into the ether. The mist swirled above, dispersing and accumulating again. We moved onto a dry, frosted path, towards the bridge into Jericho.
‘He only wants to infect you with his preoccupations,’ said Anthony. ‘Like a contagious invalid. A plague carrier,’ he added.
‘Why say that?’
‘Solete was jolted by the immense indifference of the skies, the shocking realisation of the limitations to our lives. It had all been fine for generations. Not fine, of course, people lived and died and lost those they loved, and their babies died in droves and they mourned, they spent their lives in a state of perpetual mourning. And death was not in the background, something you try to ignore, it was prevalent, all the time. But they had a kind of faith, in something else, a consolatory elsewhere, and perhaps that helped. Then something changed the human imagination, and celestial wraiths were banished and Solete fell into the abyss, that’s all.’
‘You mean, he suffered from a general crisis of faith?’
‘Undoubtedly. He wanted certainty. Couldn’t find it. So decided to drag everyone else in. Piss them off as well.’
A train hammered along the tracks, causing flocks of birds to issue from the silhouetted trees. Mist curdling across the white lake. Millions of years.
*
In the darkness, we became conspiratorial. Yorke told me that when he was a child he played a game. With his brother, Robert, he imagined – in the dreamscape of childhood, in which fantasy and reality are elided – that the river beyond his house – the Avon, outside Bristol – had powers to reincarnate the dead. One day, they took a dead mouse and threw it into the water. They went back the following day to await the return. Sometimes the animals did not reveal themselves, and thus, you might say with cold logic, could not be said categorically to have returned, but like scientists and practitioners through the ages this failed to deter Anthony and his brother. They simply imagined that the animals had returned elsewhere, to some other point, and they prepared themselves for the next experiment. They threw another animal into the water, and returned the following day. Anthony couldn’t remember why they always waited twenty-four hours, or how precise the elapse was. He remembered the animals returned at sunset. Symbolically this was quite illogical; you might expect them to return instead, if it were even feasible that they might return at all, at dawn, a new beginning, and so on. But quibbling about the relative plausibility of elements within an implausible scenario seems futile. Anthony and his brother dallied with their improbable experiments in reincarnation for some years and then, their mother died, and of course they realised, the dead don’t return, the loss is complete. And you can sit and chant by the river, and if this consoles you then that’s fine, but it does nothing to change the bewildering permutations of reality around you.
*
‘I’m very sorry about your mother,’ I said. He received the obligatory phrase.
‘No one ever gets over the death of a parent,’ he said.
‘But you carry on. You are even happy, often, and you realise this is what your beloved parent would have wanted. They didn’t want you to spend the rest of your life bereft and forlorn. They birthed you and hoped that you might be happy despite mortal asperities and despite any further vicissitudes that might be reserved particularly for you. It is of course completely usual.’
‘But you were children.’ I had been sufficiently demolished by the death of my father, and I was an autonomous adult, who had lived apart from him for years. But to lose a parent, when you were dependent, and you saw them every day, and then suddenly – nothing! The completeness of the loss must be far more shocking, I thought. I was trying to say something like that, but he interjected. He sounded impatient.
‘Time has a way of blurring the distinctions between young and old. In the past, long ago, my mother disappeared.’
‘What happened to your brother?’
‘He became accounts manager for a family-owned stationery firm in Norbiton,’ said Anthony. ‘He has four kids. He’s mainly happy.’
‘I lost my father too,’ I said. ‘A couple of years ago.’
‘You didn’t lose him, that’s an erroneous cliché.’
I hadn’t expected the usual platitudes. Not from this shuffling wind-chilled man. But, I had perhaps expected – some vague expression of remorse.
‘It’s a convention, obviously,’ I said, rebuffed. ‘Why be awkward?’
‘I just meant, it wasn’t your fault. You didn’t mislay him, by carelessness. Did you?’
‘It’s an expression!’ I was abruptly furious. There were many possible causes of my fury – the vagaries of mist, the equal or perhaps even greater indeterminacy of existence and then Yorke’s foolish precision with language, which seemed ludicrous, especially in the circumstances! Especially in response to something as insane as death!
‘Get a coat, for a start,’ I said. ‘And don’t talk to me about grammatical precision again. You’re a scholar. You’re a professional fraudster.’
‘I am not,’ he said. He was looking across at me. Perhaps he had even slowed down, to register my fury.
‘You’re effectively a liar. A fantasist!’
*
That produced a pause. For a while we walked inside the pause, which spread a
s the darkness spread across the meadow. Animals punctuated the silence, as if they were trying to help – a last flurry of birdsong and unknown beasts rustling through the hedgerows. All nature chorused and then, suddenly, fell silent. The pause swept across the darkened fields.
Yorke was hastening along again, shuddering and occasionally stumbling on the hard ground.
The treacherous moon rose above the houses, filling the mist with injurious light.
*
On the streets, other people moved along. Bustling, with temerity. ‘Got to get to the fucking you know,’ said one man to another as they hastened past.
‘It just isn’t right. That tumbling gait.’
‘Pagans.’
The mist, smudging every sound I heard. I blamed the elements then I blamed my own hyperactive imagination. The two men were absorbed into the prevailing whiteness. The pause by now was such a leviathan that it squatted above the houses and threatened even to drink the mist.
‘Are you offended?’ I said, eventually. Even though I was offended first.
‘Not remotely,’ said Anthony, sounding offended. ‘Why would I be offended?’
He walked away, into the mist.
*
That night I shivered in my bed, and heard cars sliding down the smothered street, and neighbours creaking inside their houses. I drifted in and out of sleep. I was angry about the conversation with Yorke. Then I thought it was a way of transferring other causes of irritation, and really his words had been nothing. He had been trying to tell me – it wasn’t my fault. Just as it wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.
Everyone was blameless, he had meant to say. He just phrased it badly.
I was soothing myself with this reinterpretation, and concluding that this was quite right, and tomorrow I would apologise for misunderstanding him, but how would I do that, I thought? I wasn’t even allowed into the college, that hallowed sanctuary! So that made me angry again. And I wondered why he was hanging around anyway? With his bizarre dress code and his frankly rigid views on the proper use of language . . .? Why?
A Field Guide to Reality Page 7