(y) The Professors told me their prevailing theories, as I nodded politely.
‘The universe is incalculable by contemporary instruments, so it is the instruments that must change.’ – Professor Strayte.
‘There is no such thing as the present, in terms of clock time; it ends as soon as it has begun. And all we have is clock time.’ – Professor McConnell.
‘On the contrary, clock time is a phenomenal illusion, though a useful one.’ – Professor Glamorgan.
‘Time is intrinsic but the way we measure it is not.’ – Professor Strayte.
‘Neither is intrinsic. You are in the grip of an illusion.’ Professor Glamorgan.
‘It is easy to castigate the tangible as illusory; harder to discern the reality of the tangible.’ – Professor Strayte.
*
In the midst of this, already, it was clear that Professor Agnew didn’t say much. He was still typing. When I asked what he was doing, he explained that he was chirruping in the cyber-ether, the world within which everything must move, though it is invisible.
‘The parallel intangible,’ said Professor Strayte.
‘We must not accord reality to that which is fundamentally a construct,’ said Professor Glamorgan.
‘In existence I conduct my experiments,’ said Professor McConnell. ‘My life is empirical fact.’
*
When I mentioned that I had known Solete, they all fell silent and even Agnew even stopped typing and looked at me.
‘He loved the museum. Charted it and mapped it. It made him smile,’ said Glamorgan. ‘The illusions of yester-year. The disappearance of everything that we once held to be indelible. Disappearance as the norm.’
‘We must vanish, mustn’t we?’ said McConnell. She turned to me, so I nodded politely. ‘And yet, Solete’s work will survive. That’s the wonderful thing. And why we constructed our museum.’
‘But it hasn’t survived,’ I said. ‘That’s precisely the problem. It’s not there. Anywhere. It’s vanished, in fact. Along with Solete.’
This made them mutter. McConnell looked pretty irritable. ‘You’ve lost his great work?’
‘No no, not lost. Never found.’
‘Tantamount to lost, I’d say.’ McConnell wasn’t ceding the point. ‘And it’s really outrageous. Poor man. Did a rival steal it? Before you got there! You should have persuaded him to hand it over, before he died.’
‘But perhaps Solete handed it over himself?’ said Glamorgan.
‘Would anyone else know?’ I asked.
That set them on a course of earnest speculation. Some people might know, but it was not quite certain who they might be.
*
Agnew explained that Solete often came there and that he interrogated them about their research. Strayte, for example, was researching the origins of the universe. Contemporary systems of analysis were inadequate but they were hopeful new methods would emerge in his lifetime. Glamorgan believed that time was non-uniform, that only when we dispensed with Newtonian theories of analysis would we stand a chance of perceiving reality as it really is. Really. And in truth. McConnell believed that time began again and again, over and over and there was not one big bang but many. Infinite numbers of big bangs and, therefore, infinite numbers of possible universes, and one universe might just be very slightly different from another. Just in minuscule elements, barely noticeable to someone who – improbably – dropped in from another universe. You would just discern the slight anomalies, and nothing else. The people, the places, the basic elements might be the same, just very minor distinctions.
‘Nonsense,’ said Strayte. ‘Complete gibberish. McConnell’s theory takes a mathematical possibility and suggests reality proceeds in line with maths. But this is delusional, for the most part.’
‘Or completely in line with reality,’ said McConnell.
Agnew sat in the cyber-ether sunning himself and perceiving manifestations of futurity as they ebbed and flowed. ‘I am interested in the virtual deliverance of the human condition,’ said Agnew. ‘I mean, that humans will be saved by our own creations, the cyber-ether pre-eminent among them.’
‘If you stop calling it The Cyber-Ether and call it The Cyber-Matter then does it fundamentally change, or does it stay the same?’ said McConnell. Agnew refused to write that down.
‘How does the cyber-ether save us?’ said Strayte.
‘By fostering communication between the living and the dead,’ said Agnew.
*
Everyone paused for a moment.
Agnew shrugged. ‘In a sense,’ he added. ‘You should go and see the Society of the Universal Chrysanthemum. Solete was so whacked out on native perversity – sorry, but he was, and I liked the man – he could quite easily have given them his great work.’
‘Those abject nutters?’ said Strayte. ‘Why not just tell her to go and score some dope from the nearest hippy and succumb to confusion?’
‘I’ve already visited a hippy,’ I said. ‘And why do you academics always talk about dope?’
‘The Society of the Universal Chrysanthemum aren’t really hippies,’ said Agnew. ‘It’s just a different way of being.’
‘They believe in ascent and that mankind can fly,’ said Strayte.
‘Mankind can fly,’ I said.
‘They mean without mechanical assistance, obviously. Just spiritually. Or perhaps it’s a big arm-flapping metaphor. That’s how those kind of freaks normally justify deviations from sense,’ said Strayte.
‘Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof,’ said McConnell. She offered to take me to the ultimate floor: the Future.
‘Shouldn’t that be impossible?’ I said.
‘Symbolism is not literal,’ she said. ‘Don’t you understand anything?’
‘Obviously, I do. I understand some things,’ I said. I was even slightly offended. She realised, and smiled an apology.
*
The ultimate floor was white, to symbolise – perhaps – the blank spaces on the metaphysical maps. Scientific regions as yet uncharted. Incantations as yet unspoken.
(z) The Zero of the Future. (Nothing Yet.)
So, we went from one empty room to another, each with a beautiful view of trees dividing the blank sky. I was trying to explain to McConnell that I didn’t entirely understand. I had been with Cassavetes. She shrugged, she had no idea who Cassavetes was. Solete’s various friends had not exactly mixed. They were incoherent, which seemed to have been his point. Or, he moved freely among them, but they refused to acknowledge each other. Where, for example, was Hypatia of Alexandria?
‘Yes, yes,’ said McConnell. ‘No need to worry about her. She’s down there. It’s just, there’s so much clutter. Not everything is immediately obvious. One good thing about the future: there’s nothing here. But, another good thing: we know that soon there will be.’
‘But the future goes down, doesn’t it?’ I said. ‘As soon as it is. It can’t be here, once it is, it automatically has to go below.’
That didn’t bother her at all. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Everything goes down. Rivers go downstream. And the virtual clock ticks down. And –’
‘Hot air rises?’
‘Until it cools, and then descends.’
*
McConnell didn’t know where the Field Guide was. Her colleagues didn’t know either. Back at the table of present findings, they said they were bemused. The situation was not certain.
‘But,’ said Agnew. ‘It will be. One day.’
Monument of serenity, I thought.
*
I passed Mortimer at the gate, who wasn’t serene at all. He was twitching and emanating a general atmosphere of deep uncertainty. But that was why he was right down, on the lowest floor, I assumed. He was in the depths, knowing almost nothing, that was his role. Not to know. And therefore, to permit.
I waved goodbye to Mortimer, who limped away. Then I walked onto Banbury Road again. My only lead was the Society of the Universal Chrysa
nthemum. At least that meant I didn’t have to prevaricate.
I walked west, towards the Isis.
*
John Locke, the seventeenth-century philosopher, wrote his name as Lock. He was a mechanical magician long ago; I had seen a portrait of him on an early floor of the museum. He was a fellow of Aristotle Hall, and he kept his deepest thoughts concealed from others. He was known for personal secrecy. A contemporary, Humphrey Prideaux, described him thus:
*
‘Not a word ever drops from his mouth that discovers any thing of his heart within . . . He seems to be a man of very good converse, and that we have of him with content; as for what else he is he keeps it to himselfe, and therefore troubles not us with it nor we him.’ He was a veritable ‘master of taciturnity.’
*
When Locke was in the middle of a project he would let no one enter his chamber.
Locke eventually pronounced his view of reality, and he suggested that we are born empty, and vacant. A taciturn poet, he used the image of the blank sheet of paper. We garner knowledge from sense experience, from perceiving the world beyond us. Yet, if perception is unreliable, and mysterious itself, then how can we be certain that our knowledge of the world is anything other than a personal illusion?
In silence, Locke passes across Aristotle meadow, towards the Isis. Geese are honking on the banks, and cows rustle through the grass. The Isis is still; it is a cold January day. Locke sees the world as a blank page, but as soon as we are born, impressions strike us, and are inscribed. Our personalities are created by experiences alone. There is nothing that precedes us: no intrinsic self, or neo-Platonic realm in which we are all-knowing. We are born without preconceptions, and we must gradually apprehend the world. We ascend from the beginning, the lowest point, to the heights of knowledge. Locke believed, faithfully, in progress. The child is blank. Life is a process of accumulation, from an original point, far below. From nothing to something, and then, we return, to nothing again.
Yet, Locke had high hopes for the afterlife; the knowledge gained in life was, apparently, perpetual. Perhaps that was how he would have understood the Future, the blank spaces at the top of the museum.
Heaven as a series of white rooms.
Light is the natural agent that stimulates sight and makes things visible. The world is illuminated, and, thus, we see. Visible light, we might continue, is electromagnetic radiation whose wavelength falls within the range to which the human retina responds, i.e. between about 390 nm (violet light) and 740 nm (red). White light consists of a roughly equal mixture of all visible wavelengths, which can be separated to yield the colours of the spectrum, as was first demonstrated conclusively by Newton. In the twentieth century it has become apparent that light consists of energy quanta called photons that behave partly like waves and partly like particles. The velocity of light in a vacuum is 299,792 km per second.
*
Mortimer had given me a pamphlet, representing the latest mechanical theories of light. Or thereabouts. Something that was regarded as almost certain. I was reading it and trying to understand. Solete had gone into the darkness and taken his secrets with him. He had left some joke clues. Or perhaps they were serious. The further joke was that I couldn’t tell. Then I had visited his monument of serenity. I was trying to follow the path, or force the clues to fit events. Sometimes I believed that he was mocking me. But that was grandiose, in itself.
*
Solete, or the mechanical magicians, had sent me back to the river again. The Society of the Universal Chrysanthemum was in the far north, just before the Isis flowed beyond the remit of the city. I walked through residential gargoyle mansions, and over a bridge towards a muddy river path. The city was beset by water, mired in a marsh.
This perplexed the clerics, and made them cough. Today the mist was full of broken sunlight. I passed an ancient water meadow, frost-whitened. I tried to call Yorke but he wasn’t answering. Then I was angry with him, because he had offended me first. O’Donovan, instead, had left a message, asking me to call him. But I didn’t feel like speaking to O’Donovan.
The silver river twined past fallen tree trunks, and matted stretches of frozen ground. Willows dangled their branches in the water. The sun flared behind clouds and then abruptly dwindled. At a weir, the river spat out spray. I walked into the grounds of a large, half-ruined house, its garden running down to the water. The Society of the Universal Chrysanthemum was apparently established here, in this Tudor building. Once, visitors might have arrived by boat, from London, to visit a great lord. These days, the place was crumbling, the timbers were bent, the roof was full of holes. I wandered around the melancholy building, looking for someone who might be able to explain what the chrysanthemum was and why it was universal.
A door had been left ajar, so I went inside, calling, ‘Hello? Hello?’
I had entered an interior courtyard, with a small fountain. There were doors opening off the courtyard, and the roof was open to the cold white sky. Beside the fountain was a small spindly tree, and on the walls were paintings representing animals and plants. A moon was drawn with all its stages superimposed. There was a man drawn as a series of pictures, in which the elements changed – different aspects of his past had been selected in each picture and were seen to determine a different present and a different future. Every image was laced with echoes, possibilities.
A sunken-eyed woman appeared. She had copious quantities of matted black hair, twisted beautifully into thick plaits, and she was wearing a long red dress. I explained why I was there, and followed her into a conservatory, with hanging plants and wicker chairs. She told me to take a seat, and went to speak to someone else. No sooner had I sat down than a man arrived, who explained that he was not the head of their society, but he would try to answer my questions. He was a moderately plump, barrel-chested character, wearing a black suit. He was called Michael, he explained. He introduced me to his wife, Thea, the woman who had greeted me at first. There was a stillness to the place which quite distressed me.
I asked what the Universal Chrysanthemum was, and Thea said that it was pointless to explain, because at the point at which you understood the name you knew it anyway.
‘You are within, and therefore, you don’t need to know.’
That clearly didn’t help at all.
*
They offered me some tea and I said yes, politely. I felt the enterprise was already futile and I should go as soon as I could. We went into another muralled room, where the prevailing theme was the seasons:
The rise and fall of leaves –
The trees in bloom and then becoming golden and russet and generally autumnal.
Then the dying of the year, the stripped and plaintive branches.
‘Lord Priddy is the leader of this society,’ said Thea.
‘Another blissfulle patriarche,’ I said. They looked at me with sorrow in their eyes, and poured more tea.
Psychotropic tea.
I hadn’t even considered the possibility.
Events thereafter were a little strange.
*
The Society of the Universal Chrysanthemum has many mysteries that doubtless remain hidden, to me, but at least I can say that, if you do pay them a visit then don’t, in any sense, drink the tea.
As soon as I had drunk the first cup, Thea told me her name was really Thys, and Michael told me that the thing I must absolutely remember was Id It oh. I was trying to get him to clarify what the hell he meant by this, but he just repeated it again.
Id It oh
There’s nothing more infuriating than someone repeating a phrase over and over again when you have expressly asked him to make himself more intelligible. But after a while Michael stopped repeating this meaningless phrase and instead became abruptly and quite surprisingly meaningful. He said:
How can one awaken? How can one escape this sleep?
Meanwhile, a tall thin man in a white suit entered the room. The murals were going through their s
easons, but the pace was getting a little frenetic. I wasn’t really sure why the murals had to move in this eager spinning way, as if they were urging the seasons on, years were rising and falling, time was passing. Now the man in the suit introduced himself as Lord Priddy and said, ‘I hear you knew Solete?’
‘Yes, yes I did,’ I said. I was making a big effort to stop the room spinning. In the midst of such centrifugal force, I said, ‘I was trying to find his Field Guide.’
‘His great work?’ said Priddy.
Yes, said the trees. I said yes. Michael said:
Id It oh
– until I blocked him out again.
‘Right,’ said Priddy. ‘Well. We often discussed his great work. Often. Solete was a valued visitor. He always had his own idiosyncratic take on things, wouldn’t you say? Made him different from everyone else.’
‘As idiosyncrasy does, indeed,’ I said.
‘And he talked a lot about where he would put the work, so it was safe, when he died,’ said Lord Priddy.
‘Yes, did he? Well, it would be wonderful if you – I mean.
Where was I?’
‘Did you drink the tea?’ said Priddy.
‘Yes, yes, I did.’
‘Did they ask you before they gave it to you?’
‘No, they just went straight ahead.’
‘That was very foolish of them. But they are foolish.’
Thys looked foolish. Michael said, Id It oh.
‘I can only apologise. You should be prepared to travel now,’ said Priddy.
‘Shall I go back home?’
‘No no, just wait here. Just remember, if it eats you, it’s not actually real.’
‘What’s not actually real?’
He didn’t reply.
‘If what eats me?’ I said.
He didn’t reply to that either. He was completely unforthcoming. ‘Can you hear me?’ I said again, beginning to panic.
‘And whatever you do, just keep calm.’
Priddy vanished. Everyone vanished. The murals kept spinning through the years. And time passed, aeons. Ages were expended as I sat there trying not to panic. I was alone. And suddenly the walls were dissolved by the passing of time, and I was blasted across the universe.
A Field Guide to Reality Page 9