As we approached, Grosseteste said to me, conversationally, ‘The drawing of an eye. Have you seen Platter’s anatomical treatise of 1583, for example?’
I tried to explain that I had not.
‘Look at the human eye according to Platter. Of course, he enumerates it. Or rather with letters of the alphabet, he denotes the relative parts. The crystalline humour, the vitreous humour, the aqueous humour, and so on. But the important thing is that Platter’s eye is an inverted pinecone, with its scales closed. It needs the Light to open it up.’
‘Light opens the pinecone?’ I said.
‘Light permits you to see.’
Then he was drunk by the shadows and everything changed again.
This time I really woke with a start. I was so cold, my teeth were chattering. ‘Solete?’ I said. I was huddled in a thick blanket and I was still wet. I sneezed several times, and coughed so hard my ribs began to ache. I was certainly feverish, and as my eyes adjusted to the dark I saw – a scene of shadows – Alhazen, Grosseteste, and Bacon – but they receded now, and took their leave. The last to go was Solete. He was wearing his hat, stooping a little as he went. I tried to call him back, but he drifted slowly away.
*
I was in Solete’s house, in his cold living room. It seemed I had slept on the sofa. I had no idea how I had arrived here, I was struggling to regain any ordinary sense of continuity. Something had jumped. I was sweaty and cold then hot. I stumbled to my feet, aware that I could barely move, and tried to draw the curtains. It was that shady period, before dawn. The moon was dwindling, but the sun had not yet risen. The shadows were long, and the shores of the river looked eerie and silver-white.
I turned back to the ascetic room, the picture above the mantelpiece. The shabby sofa. I was wondering what to do, when Anthony entered, along with Petrovka and O’Donovan. Petrovka was elegant as ever in deep noir and O’Donovan had gone for another strident clash of colours. Another meaningful tie, which nonetheless I failed to interpret. He was shaking his head at me, expressing mild pity.
‘What happened to you? Have you just arrived?’ Anthony interrupted, ‘The porter hammered on my door at five a.m. He said you sounded dreadfully agitated, and you were heading for the Cherwell. I assume he thought you were about to throw yourself in.’
‘No no, Cassavetes did that already,’ I said. ‘Well, strictly speaking, that was a different river. But, same principle.’
That made Petrovka shake her head as well. They started ministering warm clothes, blankets, more blankets, warm drinks. There was a long interlude while they were kind and I sweated and shivered. Everyone kept saying it would be fine. It was so reassuring, this general chorus of optimism, that I started to forget the impossible events of the night. In the daylight realm, we reassert ourselves, we say, ‘This can be’ and, ‘This cannot be.’ Diligently, I applied myself. They were helping me along, Petrovka and O’Donovan, while Anthony stood back, looking – uncertain. But that was his thing, I began to realise. No such feelings of doubt attached themselves to Petrovka. ‘You’ve been under such a lot of strain,’ she said, with conviction. That was probable, but then, what about her? She was taut with overarching anxiety, and O’Donovan kept biting his fingers.
‘Still looking?’ I said.
‘We live in hope,’ said O’Donovan. He sat down on the sofa beside me, moving my blanket, tucking me in. I felt instantly aggrieved, that he was so fastidious and proximate. Petrovka sat in the armchair beside me, on the edge of her seat, as if she was waiting for something. Both of them had an urgent look about them. Anthony glanced towards me and smiled. I tried to smile back, but I was too feverish, and I shuddered instead.
‘I filed all of Solete’s leftover academic papers,’ O’Donovan was saying. ‘Took forever. He was not exactly organised. Sasha and I thought we’d make a book of his essays,’ he said. ‘Just to serve the bastard right. A desperate measure but what else can we do?’
‘You really mustn’t defame him, in his own house,’ said Anthony from the doorway.
‘It’s not his house anymore,’ said O’Donovan.
‘Anyway, our houses are never really our own,’ said Petrovka.
O’Donovan went to make more coffee. Petrovka explained they were planning a memorial event. A few eminent professors. They would collate the essays. Drinks and vol au vents. Speeches. It would be supremely tasteful, of course.
‘Of course,’ said Anthony, nodding along.
‘If you’d like to come, I’m sure Churchwood would be delighted,’ said Petrovka, to me, and then she waved towards Anthony.
‘So kind,’ he murmured. ‘I’m overjoyed.’
‘Light,’ I said. ‘Rainbows. How many colours does a rainbow have?’
‘Seven,’ said Petrovka. ‘Of course.’
‘Of course,’ said Anthony, with a slight smirk. ‘Couldn’t be more obvious.’
Now O’Donovan entered with coffee cups on a tray, like a perfect host. As he handed them around it seemed we had returned to quotidian reality. The reality to which Solete had failed to supply a guide. The reality he had not mapped. The stuff we should be sure of, but are not. Where we reside, while we reside anywhere.
Here.
*
I was certain, it had resumed. After a brief glitch, an anomaly, we were back to the usual. I would shake off this fever if I drank the coffee down, and stayed in bed for a week, and then I’d go back – all the way back – to the normal and usual – and the café – and I’d work harder. I’d stay in my box –
The box –
For Eliade –
*
Then, quite abruptly, I knew.
*
I walked into the whitewashed corridor, towards the pinecone. Anthony jumped up and followed me, and that made Petrovka and O’Donovan nervous, so they came along too, holding their coffee cups, as if we were all off to a staff meeting. ‘What is it?’ they said. I was just thinking how I might answer that reasonable question when we all saw that behind the pinecone was a door.
‘Perspective,’ I said. ‘The pinecone – Platter’s eye. Permits you to see. The thing we need to see is –’
That got Petrovka and O’Donovan really perturbed, they started tugging and heaving at the great plinth, shoving it around with a complete lack of decorum.
Then I opened the door.
*
In the dim light of a sputtering bulb, we walked along a corridor and then stood at the top of a staircase. We all went downwards, in silence, and walked in single file along a lower corridor. This was a surprising edifice, an elongated cellar, the walls shrill with damp. We arrived at a further door, and I pushed it open and turned on the light.
The cellar echoed, cavernously, and was almost empty. The room was circular, the roof was slightly domed. The smell was musty, aged. Yet the place was abandoned. A few scraps of paper were lying on the floor. There were a couple of old chests of drawers, but when I went to look inside them, they were full of dust and mildew.
‘How extraordinary,’ said O’Donovan, wandering around, peering up at the ceiling. ‘The roof, of course, meets the ground above. Where does it come out? Is it that slightly curved bit, by the bridge? What the hell did they keep in here? Not wine, they were clerics, after all. Was it the icehouse?’
‘Solete worked for years to plan his Field Guide,’ I said.
‘Oh God,’ said O’Donovan.
‘At first, like all those long-gone maniacs he aimed at crafting a definitive portrait of reality. A single representative version: The Truth. But then he realised, they were all completely wrong. Their collective error was that each maniac, a.k.a. authority of the past, genuinely believed that their particular bonkers theory would encapsulate all reality, all history. Solete understood that the fundamental flaw of such a system – and in this he surpassed Plato, Aristotle, Alhazen and Grosseteste – was himself. He could only make one guide to reality and it would be, not a representation of general reality, at all, but a re
presentation of himself.’
‘Nothing wrong with that,’ said Petrovka.
‘Oh for Christ’s sake, tell me he wrote an account of his dilemmas, a diary, anything,’ said O’Donovan.
Both of them were looking faintly appalled. But they were going to get much more appalled. We had hardly begun. It was an empty room, and the walls were covered with moss and fungus. Variegated and quite beautiful fungus but still, it wasn’t what they had expected. I thought by now I should be able to explain things more clearly. After everything I’d seen. And all the enunciators!
I said, ‘Solete came to believe that the fundamental mystery and central property of reality is light. We wake to the morning each day, and we turn our faces to the sun. We subsist within this field of light and colour. And yet, the speed of light is not constant. Light is not constant. Everything about it is bizarre and preposterous. The rainbow has three or four colours during the whole of classical history. Then Newton says it has five colours. Then he changes his mind, and says it has seven. A visible force, as Bacon proposed. But visible in completely different ways, depending on when you are. Where you are. And fundamentally unknowable. And yet, it is everything we see. Gradually it sent him over the edge.’
‘Bacon?’ said Petrovka.
‘Solete. He abandoned his plans. Perhaps he even went mad. Slightly, or entirely. And he realised, the endeavour was mad. Certainty was raging mad. He had been mad all his life. You could say at the end of his life he was more sane than he’d ever been. Depending on how you see things.’
This made Petrovka very nervous. ‘What do you mean, abandoned his plans?’
‘Instead, he made something,’ I said. ‘He got that mad-woman Cassavetes to help him. And on that basis, of being helped and even actually guided by a madwoman, he made a thing, not a book. It was fundamentally – well, it was basically about – light.’
‘Oh shit,’ said O’Donovan. ‘Fuck and shit.’
*
I looked across at Anthony and realised he was smiling. I had never seen him so jovial. The atmosphere of defeat had gone and suddenly he looked – almost – young. Not quite; he sustained a few traces of the average whipping that life metes out to almost everyone, but some of the creases and tangles had been smoothed away. In response to a cue I hadn’t yet discerned, Anthony switched off the light, and the atmosphere of the room changed. The curved dome of the cellar had been adapted, and seven holes, of different sizes, had been inlaid. As we stood there, day was breaking beyond the cellar, and the natural light of the sun flared. Seven rays of light seeped through the holes, and clouds of dust floated along these beams of light.
‘Naturally the main reference is to Solomon’s seven pillars of wisdom,’ said Anthony. I saw he was smiling, broadly by now. ‘These signify the seven sephiroth of the supra-celestial world, which are the seven measures of the fabric of the celestial and inferior worlds, in which are contained the Ideas of all things both in the celestial and inferior worlds. This should be clear?’
I said it was completely clear as anything.
*
We all stood, watching the beams of light progress, and occasionally fade. When the sun went behind a cloud, shadows spread from the walls.
When the sun returned, the dust shone like fire.
As Alhazen had watched the dust floating along rays of light, the contours of light becoming visible, so we stood, and watched. We watched with varying degrees of appreciation.
‘Shining dust, oh fucking hell,’ said O’Donovan. ‘Dust shines. In the light. I mean, Christ alive?’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Petrovka. ‘What the hell was he even thinking?’
‘There’s nothing to understand,’ I said. ‘It’s a Field Guide to Reality, made from light and shadows. There are seven beams of light, descending. But the dust never quite descends, it drifts. Each beam of light represents a moment in history. But, the point is, you have no idea which is which. They are completely interchangeable. Of course! Atomies! Bits of stuff! Particles! Things! Many things.
So many, you lose track. Entirely.’
‘Are you fucking joking?’ said O’Donovan. ‘Is this actually a joke?’
‘You’re the one, Patrick, who has spent so much time assuring us it was a joke, that Solete was the perfect trickster, and now you’re claiming to be surprised?’ said Petrovka.
‘He became uncertain, he got stuck, a terrible idea for a scholar,’ said O’Donovan. ‘He went mad.’
‘And I have been saying that, from the beginning,’ said Petrovka. But she didn’t look particularly pleased. She wandered across the floor, breaking through one of the rays of light, disturbing the clouds. O’Donovan followed her, but I noticed he stepped carefully around the rays. They went to look at the scraps. The broken drawers. They made a great noise dragging them open, then slamming them shut again. They were still hoping for something more tangible than dust.
A sorry affair, they were saying to each other.
The madness of a lone scholar. Well, a joke if you’re feeling sick. Otherwise, a tragedy. Wouldn’t you say? They continued along these lines as they slammed the drawers and picked through the scraps.
Of course, after the death of his wife – well, you don’t necessarily recover, do you?
I heard O’Donovan saying, ‘I pity the man, but still. Really!’
Meanwhile dust shone, reality shifted in line with the movement of clouds – light and shadow . . .
Unknown layers of time, immeasurable theories, and worlds, and realities, simultaneously represented and effaced.
*
O’Donovan lifted up his head and announced that he really had to go.
‘It is time,’ he said. ‘If anything, it’s overdue.’
‘Me too,’ said Petrovka.
She shook my hand, formally. O’Donovan joined in. He slapped me on the back, but he lacked his former zeal. ‘It’s a shame,’ he said.
‘We just wanted something complete,’ said Petrovka.
‘It is complete,’ said Anthony, from the corner. ‘How much more complete do you need?’
‘You know what I mean, Anthony,’ said Petrovka. ‘And it’s not funny, to stand around, pouring scorn.’
‘Yes, get a fucking grip,’ said O’Donovan, joining in. ‘Otherwise, Churchwood will omit to renew your status.’
‘Oh well,’ said Anthony.
He was smiling to himself as O’Donovan abandoned the argument, and went to the door. They had the collection of essays to launch. Did I mind? ‘We might just call it A Field Guide to Reality. A joke,’ said O’Donovan. ‘You know, Solete might have approved.’
‘Do you mind?’ said Petrovka.
I assured her that I really didn’t mind. ‘It’s not even certain you have them anyway,’ I explained, helpfully. ‘There were other paths that may have vanished. At least, for a while.’
They nodded politely, and went upstairs.
*
For a while I heard the dull thud of their footsteps, and then there was silence. From O’Donovan and Petrovka, at least. Meanwhile Anthony was advancing another theory.
‘He got tired of the ancient men of history, droning on. Bores with beards. Or cassocks. On and on. Anyway he erased them all. It was sabotage!’
‘He said a lot of things.’
Anthony was fixed on his theory of academic immolation. He walked around, staring at the ceiling and muttering to himself.
Clouds of dust descended, and were flamed into brightness, and then faded again. Individual particles shone, and then became assimilated into a general cloud. I thought of Cassavetes and her muttered phrase. Millions of years is the name . . . Otherwise said, millions of years is the name . . . I thought about the vastness of measurable time, and those who dwell for a while within the linear frame. And then they are dispersed? Who knows?
Solete said he had failed. And yet – I wondered if this was merely the failure intrinsic to anything. All comes to dust. And he would have failed,
harder and worse besides, if he had lied and created his mendacious, adamantine book. The more he discovered about reality, the more he understood that he could never define it, absolutely.
I thought of Petrovka and O’Donovan, publishing their collection, and staging their consolatory event. Giving speeches. Standing at the college pulpit and generally exonerating themselves. They would be severely rebuked but then, they’d forget all about this epoch. They would gain their desires.
*
The thing about Solete’s chamber of dust, the main thing, was that it was incredibly beautiful. It gleamed and sparkled. It was the crazy beauty of particles that are normally invisible, of diaphaneity. We stood there, whirled around with remnants, and traces, and the abandoned schemes of Solete. He had gone mad, or he had perceived infinity. He had gathered everything, and lived within the richness of his contemplation and, in the end –
He refused his former truths, and went beyond them –
To the infinities of quanta, or atomies.
To the anonymous reaches of time and space.
Grosseteste walks along the dark and sinuous river, until he finds himself at Mesopotamia again. He slips into his study, and resumes.
Solete rises each morning, and goes towards the river, and waits.
Everything drifts backwards, and Grosseteste is in the draughty hall again, sitting with Bacon, Marsh, Duns Scotus and Ockham. Their shadows surge across the walls, as they lean towards the sputtering flames. They exchange their theories, as they always will. Bacon, the Marvellous Doctor, explains that reality is composed of shifting patterns of light.
And Aristotle is wrong.
Ockham dismisses universals, and the company starts, once more, in horror.
Poor Duns Scotus is buried alive again.
A Field Guide to Reality Page 14