While I was musing on that question, I fell asleep . . .
*
So I dreamed I was standing in a room, in front of a fire. Sparks leapt like fireflies, smoke streamed upwards to the sky.
I was with Solete, in his house, as he gathered his notes, burnt them in the fireplace. I could smell the ash, I warmed my hands on the flames. When the fire had died, and the last scraps were piles of grey ash, I heard the water lapping the shore, and the soft sound of voices. The door to the bedroom was forced open, and the wind was full of dust. And Solete sank to the floor, curling his arms above his head.
He felt himself being lifted by two sets of hands. He felt a splash of water on his ankles, and then he was in a boat. Two men were smoking quietly, their faces obscured, speaking a language he didn’t understand. They rowed him slowly downstream, and he saw the fluted ornaments, and smelt the sickly dew of perfume. The pale moon above him.
For a moment it was so beautiful that in my dream, I wept.
Now, when I woke to the residual blankness of the sky, I had to make an effort to summon myself, and then to determine what was real and what was not. I was definitely not Solete, that was clear. I was not standing in his room and watching him being – carried away. I was not on the wind-lashed meadow, listening to the pained cries of waterfowl. Instead, voices gurgled through the wall, and my landlady was rummaging briskly in the corridor, slamming doors. I moved to the window and looked out but that didn’t clarify much. The street was mist-laden and once more predominantly white. Cars moved into further regions of whiteness.
I found my watch and succumbed to ritual haste.
*
In the café the hordes were ill-tempered. I ran around distributing food – to people who worked in the museum, who bickered in the lecture halls, and the students with their scowls and scarves – I ladled beans onto plates, handed them to random people, as they brayed back at me –
‘More beans please . . . Call that a portion of chips? I don’t like milk, no milk for me . . . No bloody milk, were you not listening? Have you become inattentive? How could you?’
How could I?
*
Again, I was late. Subliminal reluctance. Hardly even subliminal. Reluctance ingrained into my being. There were things I wanted to say back to these vociferous hordes, but I wasn’t sure they really wanted to hear them.
Well, sir – perception is a prevailing mystery of thought.
I didn’t think that would go down well at all.
Instead I said: ‘Shall I write up the specials on the board?’ I made sure the bottles were in the fridge and all turned the same way, labels showing, I put more coffee in the coffee machine, I poured out coffee for some hoary old gentleman in loafers . . .
Who said, ‘Thank you dear’ as I said, ‘Thank you sir.’ I took the money from his hoary old fingers, opened up the till, gave him his change . . .
Clink clink go the coffee spoons, and there’s the whirring of some industrial cleaning device in the kitchen, and the cook rages through the hatch, ‘Get the stuff out now. It’s going cold!’ Then the illustrious denizens of Oxford really will revolt . . . Smash the place, storm the kitchen, massacre the chefs . . .
*
Chips sir? Beans sir? Fried egg or poached madam? Did you know I had a dream last night? I was Solete, or was I standing beside him? I’m not entirely sure . . . And suddenly – in my dream, I think – I was here, in this café once again, dishing out baked beans, chips, asking you if you want ketchup or any other sauces – madam, I really think you were there too – I’m sure of it – your irritable gaze and this silk thing you’ve wound around your neck – that too – and we were just discussing whether you wanted the burger or the chicken, and whether the chicken had been cooked today – yes, even in this transcendental ghost zone, you were particular about the freshness of your meat, I remember it so well – and then – well! There was a whooshing sound – a strange, disturbing whoosh and then suddenly – whoosh – you vanished! Sorry to say, you were first to go! And then – carnage – everything got smashed and fell apart, the whole edifice crumbled, cracked was the roof, shattered were the windows, and I –
Well, I have to confess, then I woke up . . . And now I’m here!
*
I kept looking at the door, and I wondered if I was expecting Solete, or Yorke. Somehow I felt nervous, as if someone might soon appear. I kept getting distracted, and then, suddenly, I was recalled, by a reasonable request from a customer or, increasingly, a complaint.
Ah yes, bread and butter, of course, there’s an extra charge, fifty pence, is that alright . . . Oh alright, no I understand entirely . . . Yes I’m so sorry you feel that’s exorbitant . . .
I’m just so so sorry.
Good luck . . . Farewell . . .
*
It ran on, and on . . . I tried to remember the categories of separation. On one hand, my dreams, the fantastical bedlam of unconscious thought. On the other, the material aspects of the waking day. In this tangible present, I had to attend to – for example – the woman pitching in with a committed complaint about her burger. She was very upset about some aspect of this thing, so I said, ‘Yes, of course, I’m so sorry, let me take that for you . . .’ Then there was the man who couldn’t get down the steps – so off I went, apologising profusely, dreadful indeed . . .
When I emerged from the café, the mist was sparkling in the sunlight. I walked towards the north along roads lined with gothic mansions. For a while I cursed Yorke for being so capricious. How was I meant to understand him? Even this single individual was obscure to me, and then there were the shadowy legions of the dead, and so many traces, clues, signs, all these moments when reality seemed to jump – and to where? From where? I had Cassavetes’s scrap of paper in my gloved hand. Benighted men of little meaning. The mechanical magicians . . . That was hardly reassuring! What was ‘little meaning?’ Was it better than ‘no meaning at all?’ But worse than ‘masses of meaning’? Why were they benighted, anyway?
*
Buses hammering alongside me. Cyclists dodging the traffic. There were the usual gargoyles above, and ornamental turrets, high arched windows. Swinbrook Lane was a semi-bucolic enclave, built for long-vanished dons. Now it was full of oligarchs and celebrities who had run away from London. Or perhaps they lived in London too, came here for the weekends. Anything was possible when you had a Range Rover with the number plate SOV 13T. That made things pretty clear. There was a walled garden, full of spiny yuccas and rhododendrons. Robins perched on fragile branches, blackbirds trilling far above. Aside from this, the mechanical magicians were somehow still resident in a white Georgian mansion, an anomaly among redbrick temples. There was an imperious gate with a buzzer. I was told by a melancholy voice to wait, and someone would come to let me in. After a long time, a man walked towards me. He was swaddled in scarves, and limping noticeably. When we shook hands he told me he was called Richard Mortimer, and he was very sorry to hear that Solete was no longer with us. A fine euphemism! The professor had been a distinguished associate of the museum and so now Mortimer wondered if I would like a tour?
*
We went through a marble hall, littered with busts of the eminent, in creepy white marble. Then we ascended in a silver lift. Meanwhile Mortimer rustled in his smart suit, and tugged his ear. He was like an uncertain, overgrown child. But then, aren’t we all, in truth?
At the next floor, the lift stopped, the door opened.
‘We keep an archive,’ said Mortimer. ‘It’s a museum of past theories. Scientific theories rise and fall. Like people. The thing is to accumulate evidence. Wouldn’t you say?’
‘Did Solete come here a lot?’
‘He was a frequent and welcome guest.’
*
The museum was layered into eras of history, and epochs of thought, and then there were further categories within the layers. Mortimer toured me for a while through vast rooms filled with significant objects. We stood beside
glass cases, looking at the exhibits.
(a) A jug, a pot, a shattered plinth. A boat of small proportions, decayed. A knife, a spoon, some broken bowls. Coins of many eras, heads of emperors and kings and queens, ragged edges, tarnished. Innumerable shards, fragments, ceramic scraps, glassware, old green bottles –
A casket, clasps decayed, empty when opened –
Animal bones, disordered, midden-waste –
(b) Photograph: the remnants of many graves, disordered.
(c) Foundations of a wood henge, running in a circle with the circumference incorporating the banks of the river, Mesopotamia, Pie Hall, Nightingale Hall – photographic evidence – wooden foundations decayed.
(d) Relics too lichen-stained and degraded for salvation, almost indistinguishable from the surrounding earth.
(e) A stick, inserted into the ground, wherein a shadow was apprehended by the Ancient Egyptians and thereby the curvature of the planet.
(f) A sundial from the Ancient Egyptians, wherein the regions of daylight were divided into twelve hours, unequal in length depending on the season.
(g) Mathematical instruments from which the great Ptolemy in The Almagest was able to divide the globe into increments.
(h) The first mechanical clock indicating fixed minutes.
We walked through one echoing room and another, and through these serried regions of the past. Steadily, the soft voice of Richard Mortimer urged me along. He was telling me about the earliest scientific experiments in Oxford, and how Grosseteste was one of the pioneers of experimental rather than purely conceptual process, along with Roger Bacon thereafter, and of course this radically altered what you placed in your museum. You were no longer confined to the purely theoretical, as Aristotle was, for example. You had tangible proof of your theories. These theories changed all the time, which made it a nightmare for a curator.
I made noises expressing deep sympathy.
*
This was a museum of answered questions, and questions that had never been answered but had eventually been castigated as the wrong questions, and abandoned. Unanswered.
And also, answers that had turned out to be the wrong answers to the right questions.
*
First, humans imagined the sun circling the fixed earth, and all the stars moving across the night sky. Then reality changed, they changed, and they imagined the earth moving around the sun. And all the stars in orbit, and everything became a great moving circulating force field of universal matter and within this force field were great patches which were gaps –
They called these gaps the Ether –
And the Ether was Real.
Until it was abandoned and became unreal, and was never mentioned again, except by poets and lunatics.
And so, the Ether became something else, and was named – Dark Matter, and Dark Energy. Still no one knew precisely what it was, but they assumed it was not Ether, and had other qualities suggested by these other names.
*
Then the theories changed again, and again.
*
The universe as a series of triangles.
The universe defined by hypothetical one-dimensional subatomic particles having the dynamic properties of a flexible loop, called cosmic string.
The universe expanding.
The universe contracting.
The universe as infinite.
The universe as finite.
Time as linear and constant throughout the ages.
Time as relative.
*
Light emanating from the eye, and illuminating the objects we apprehend.
The objects emanating light into the eye.
Everything being illuminated by the eye. Or, reality as luminous, the eye as the passive recipient of such luminosity.
Darkness as the perpetual state of everything.
The great ages of reality, represented in the stars. Cumulative light, from the long distant past. Background radiation from the origins of time.
*
This was a museum of madmen who had been condemned and castigated and even executed on the grounds of heresy and madness, and later been revered and commemorated.
Theoreticians, alchemists, physicists, cartographers, genius women who were duly murdered –
(i) Roger Bacon, running through the hostile crowds, dreaming of shadows and of flying machines. Baiting his contemporaries until they denounced him.
(j) William of Ockham, harried by almost everyone.
(k) Galileo, condemned by the inquisition. This man devised an apparatus which permitted the eye to see further than anyone else had ever seen before, all the way to the distant galaxies. Whether the eye emanated light or whether light was drawn into the eye, the eye could now see further and further into the ancient regions of the past – through this ingenious device –
For which Galileo was summarily condemned –
Forced to recant.
The Sun goes round the Earth, he said. He bowed his head. Inquisitors around him, ready to send him away for execution.
Antiquity was correct, and the Church.
(Galileo later recanted his recantation.)
*
The layered museum was like a dream, in which people came and went, from room to room, then vanished into the depths of space.
(l) We were standing by a portrait of Robert Grosseteste, who took his knowledge from Aristotle –
From Arabian scholars –
From long-lost magicians of nether-realms who could no longer be summoned even with the most advanced spells –
‘Yes, Robert Grosseteste,’ said Mortimer. ‘A central figure in the medieval era.’
Robert Grosseteste looked severe and slightly haunted. As if he had a premonition. Or, as if his stomach pained him.
(m) Roger Bacon’s flying machine, a full-size replica, recreated from his original plans. A sail, ballasted by floating balls. A floating pendulum, coursing through the clouds.
‘Incredible,’ said Mortimer. ‘Of course, it doesn’t actually fly.’
(n) You might faint at the historical invention of these mechanical magicians.
(o) I was already feeling light-headed. The museum of so many layers, which were not yet concluded.
(p) My eyes fired out light, and light streamed into my head. And the dust was voluble, it squeaked.
(q) Amidst the squeak I heard Mortimer saying, ‘Of course, our museum is not complete. Even the past, we cannot represent. And then the current epoch moves too swiftly. And then there is the Future – a great blank space, before us. Always. And when it is not before us, then it is no longer the future.’
We had arrived at the penultimate floor, and a sign said: THE PREVAILING MYSTERY IS LIGHT . . .
(r) Newton said: as Stones by falling upon Water put the Water into an undulating motion, and all Bodies by percussion excite vibrations in the air: so the rays of Light, by impinging on any refracting surface, excite vibrations in the refracting or reflecting medium or substance, and by exciting them agitate the solid parts of the refracting or reflecting body, and by agitating them cause the body to grow warm or hot . . .
He also said that light consists of rays, and coloured rings . . . that light passes through the long-gone Ether.
(s) Thomas Young, a Quaker, built on Newton’s work in the early nineteenth century. Thus, he used the word ‘undulation’, in preference to ‘vibration’, and he believed in the existence of a plastic ether and the undulations caused by luminous bodies.
He saw waves dispersing in deep water, and applied this vision to his undulatory theory of light . . .
(t) Using silver chloride-treated paper beneath coloured slabs of glass, mica and gems, Mary Somerville conducted experiments on the Sun’s ‘chemical rays’. On the grounds of her biological sex, she was not allowed to trouble the Royal Society with her work, so her husband, William, submitted her paper entitled, ‘On the Magnetizing Power of the More Refrangible Solar Rays’. The distinguished authorities ma
de him a fellow . . .
(u) Later in the nineteenth century, Augustin Cauchy was concerned with internal stress. Like Young, he imagined the ether as the medium responsible for light. The ether was as tangible, as true, as the sea.
(v) Soon after, the French polymath Jules-Henri Poincaré decided that the ether was not real at all.
(w) Mortimer was moving away. Besides, the history was partial, he explained. ‘The final floor, above, is always empty, to represent what we do not know, what lies beyond.’
‘Ingenious,’ I said.
‘Waste of space,’ said Mortimer. ‘But, I don’t make the decisions.’
*
He was the tenant, not the owner, he said, as we walked into another room, with huge windows, and a misty view of Swinbrook Lane – Gothic turrets, gargoyles braying at the clouds. The mechanical magicians were waiting for us on the penultimate floor. They had taken a short break from their work, but they couldn’t talk for long. They had to anticipate the future, before it became the present and then slipped into the perpetual darkness of the Past.
(x) ‘Professor McConnell. Professor Glamorgan. Professor Agnew. Professor Strayte,’ Mortimer was saying. I saw them first as an array of corduroy limbs. This was clearly unfair, a wild generalisation. Professor Strayte looked portly and eminent. Professor McConnell was younger, slightly irascible, with auburn hair. She was not even wearing corduroy, not a scrap! Professor Glamorgan had curly black hair, rubicund features. His corduroy was stained and torn, a deliberate or accidental refusal of formality. Professor Agnew was the youngest of them, with red hair and a sardonic expression. He was typing something into a computer. He glanced up, nodded, then resumed.
They stood on the shoulders of the past, they teetered on the brink of the future. Mortimer handed me over. He was going back downstairs, again, he said. No no, I mustn’t get up. I shook his hand and thanked him. Nervous and hurried, he went away, tugging on his ear.
A Field Guide to Reality Page 8