by Tim Robinson
‘You know what then. That welling-up of uncertainty, that strange averted face on everything – as if one impossibly saw how things look when one isn’t looking at them. That emptying feeling that all the radii along which my world flows in to me were suddenly converging elsewhere; as if my centre of gravity had been stolen away, and I was falling out of myself towards it. Of course it often happens that I suddenly decide to have a drink before going home and I dodge down here; but never before, that turning-inside-out of space; it pulled me down like a whirlpool.’
‘Yes, that was it. But I was still alone all that time – or maybe I felt that too was inside-out, and everyone else was collectively “alone from me”, if that makes sense.’
‘And things only came to rest in some precarious equilibrium when we saw each other …’
‘… as if that stabilized the falling apart.’
‘It all rests on the knife-edge of our seeing each other?’
‘And if we turn away from each other again?’
‘Dare you try the experiment? Of course we are no longer so naïve as to think that one of us would disappear, and that it could be me, flung into the dustbin of nothingness. No, but we – I speak for myself – we would feel a sense of loss, and now I want to delay it.’
‘We get on well then, you and I, at least under the liberating drug of impossibility. We have a lot in common; everything, in fact. All our friends are mutual friends. A pity the condition of us seeing each other is that we don’t see anyone else or let anyone see us.’
‘Clearly it’s doomed to be the most secret of friendships. We meet in a ruin; I mean the ruin of our everyday logic – though it is amazing how much of the system stands even after the foundation-stone, the concept of identity, has been wrenched out. Or does that just show that the whole structure is as flimsy as theatrical canvas anyway, and we had never noticed? So we meet in a ruin of some sort; it stands, but a glance from an outsider would bring it down.’
‘And it halves us in its fall.’
‘… which means, at present we are doubled? By taking thought a man can double his stature?’
‘But we took no thought! If I had done it by taking thought, by taking a terrified walk on the waters of consciousness
‘… each step supported on the upturned sole of your reflection’s foot, as if we were tempting each other further and further out from shore, on waters so still as to give a perfect image
‘… so still neither of us knows if what we see below is endless depths of clarity or a reflected emptiness
‘What a vertiginous conception! But as you were going to say, we are both for instance left-handed; neither of us is the product of reflection. No, in fact nothing is imaged in tranquillity; rather the waters are thrown into restlessness and confusion by an inexplicable event. I am not “facing myself”, I am facing an impossibility – I would say “my impossibility”, if I could attach any sense to the phrase.’
‘If you could attach a sense to the phrase you would be halfway to explaining this episode (but why do we assume it’s only an episode?); you want to reduce it to an allegory, to situate it – that is, me – in some literary or philosophical dimension, and so lose me. I insist: I am not an image; I belong in the same space as yourself. Which is where we have to face the impossible.’
‘One way of facing it is by assuming it’s an episode. We dare not doubt that.’
‘No, the alternative is a relationship inconceivably closer than any marriage, one that could be ended only by murder or suicide. There’s no divorce of self from self on the grounds of mutual weariness, even if it mounts to loathing over the years. Could I ever keep a secret from you? Could I ever surprise you, I wonder?’
‘It’s my deepest faith in myself that I can and will again surprise myself. If you killed that, I should kill you. And I can’t face that death.’
‘No, not that death.’
‘But if my inseparable companion were to double my solitariness …’
‘And if you were perpetually there, not just “interrupting” but with your question, whatever it is, dinning out all other concerns
‘Weariness; you used the word.’
‘So quickly our moment of intoxication fades!’
‘Yes. Yes, I want you not to be. I want you not to be, now. And you could as well not be – is that your question, in truth?’
‘The improbabilities we have no choice but to make ourselves out of? It seems they came up twice rather than once, rather than never at all. Or is it that, since we believe the Universe keeps no accounts, if subtraction had happened today instead of addition, no mistake would have been made? No, I don’t come with a question. And it would be delusion, even a comfort, for me to think that you came with a question, however deep and troubling. What can I say? You came, and I can make nothing of it.’
‘Life’s revenge, perhaps.’
‘And now, if not self-delusion, we would welcome a sleep from such awareness.’
‘Well, we have only to close our eyes. At least we hope that’s so. As usual we put our trust in the omnipotence of thoughtlessness!’
‘We fall back on the pillows of the “as usual”. But should we expect to be called out of sleep again some day?’
‘To call out of our sleep, maybe. We can’t ask such questions any more, I think; we are in waiting upon the event. So, are you ready?’
‘Strange that we haven’t actually touched each other. The thought doesn’t even cross our minds until the moment of leave-taking, as if the impossibility of it were self-evident.’
‘To touch each other! Mutual annihilation, if we are self and anti-self; total destruction of our world. But look, I can reach out my hand like this, you can reach out yours towards mine
‘No nearer!’
‘You feel it? The tension, the turbulent field of force plucking at your hand?’
‘Hatred would be less frightening, even love. But this totally unfamiliar storm in the fingertips, I can’t even name it. My hand’s trembling.’
‘Another little movement, a couple of inches, and we would touch. Flashpoint! A sensation, maybe beyond pain or pleasure. But we won’t, not this time, at least. We draw back, each into himself.’
‘Leaving something unconsummated, so it feels to me. But leaving ourselves unconsumed, at any rate!’
‘Two doubting Thomases, unconsumed by doubt. So, now we will close our eyes. I don’t know if there will be that hunting and that falling again?’
‘From second to second we abandon ourselves to the tides of the impossible. This coming second is no different. So close your eyes.’
‘You never bought me that drink.’
You laugh.
Close your eyes.
You are alone.
Two Reminiscences of London, 1970
I. A Spy among the Living
A cardboard oblong:
AT TEN TONIGHT
YOU WILL BE WELCOME
and an address. The house is so dark and silent I tilt the card towards the streetlight to verify the number. Sodium-flecked laurel bushes, two pillars shedding scales of plaster, a big doorknob of dull brass. The little metal box by the bellpush echoes my name in a whisper, the latch is released, and I push the door open into a hallway without a lightbulb. An unspecific greeting falls from the vaguely lit heights of a tall square stairwell.
Upstairs I find people who pretend to know me; they take my coat and hand me a glass. Their gestures hint at ritual. I sense the relaxed awareness of a moment of transition: a gathering about to call itself to order, a meeting evolving into a party. Was something decided before I came? Will something be announced after I leave? But the moment is indefinitely prolonged; it spreads and hangs in the warm smoky air.
At opposite ends of a room full of listeners to a quiet music some indefinable congruence reveals as a couple the two whose home this is. The sense of the occasion is gently sustained and patterned between their two presences, like the colours between the closed wings
of a butterfly, but of themselves and their relationship nothing authorizes description.
I move to the place I choose in the array, the top step of a spiral staircase in a corner. The room above is a glass polyhedron touched on one face by small triangular leaves drawn out of the darkness by its lights. Overhead, the illuminated half of a poplar spire, black sky, restless stars; below me, a cryptic geometry of relationships, and the music ever recurring to its own riddles.
Later, late arrivals, laughter, reconstellations, conversations. I rove and listen. Faceless pronouns:
‘They, I and it …’
‘… or this other, us …’
‘I, someone …’ and anonymous phrases:
‘The perfect crime!’
‘Swallowed your tongue?’
‘… sorts and conditions
Out of the flux I catch two voices composing a narrative:
‘… herded into a room.’
‘Muddy, hungry after the battle, I imagine. How did they treat you, the enemy?’
‘As you shall hear. Nothing for a long time; then they told us someone was coming.’
‘So you borrowed a comb from the guards
‘… and shuffled ourselves into some sort of a line.’
‘Why?’
‘We had to ask ourselves that before long! But the officer’s role was well played, whether or not it was adopted in response to our stance.’
‘Up the rank before your faces, down it behind your backs, I suppose, the way they do. Not impressed of course: muddy, hungry, defeated — was any one of you singled out?’
‘No individual reprimands. A collective condemnation, delivered out of deep thought, standing in the doorway about to leave. The guards translated the verdict for us later: that we were in the wrong order; that if we were not in the right order for the next day’s visitation we would be shot.’
‘And you were left: locked in with the puzzle for the night! Endless possibilities! Did you opt for chance?’
‘Unattractive odds! No, we began to debate: rank, height, age, muscle, nerve, brain …’
‘The obvious, the conventional, the satirical, the whimsical, the profound, the ludicrous …’
‘We bewildered ourselves among the criteria of criteria. It was a long night.’
‘And in the chill of dawn?’
‘… reached a position of some dignity. We would decline to present ourselves in any order. We would present ourselves in the greatest disorder the confines of the room would allow.’
‘Very fine, very fine! Applause
I turn to trace another dialogue at right angles to the first:
‘… dental or mental, for some reason opened my mouth wider than usual before the mirror, and saw them on the back of my tongue! Marks!’
‘Like writing?’
‘Like writing, said someone I showed them to at a party.’
‘I was there! It was me!’
‘It was you! You were there! Like the beginning of a word, continued out of sight down my throat!’
‘We peered and speculated; we could make nothing of it.’
‘A word of wisdom, obviously, something unutterable.’
‘Your secret name perhaps, but we couldn’t even decipher your secret initial.’
‘What liberties you all took, with your flippant gnoses!’
‘How we all hung on your lips that night!’
The tale is whirled away in laughter, exposing a quieter exchange:
‘… the murder, and I was called in.’
‘Who but you, the crack cracker of the crux!’
‘I, so wise after so many events – so many that all I recall of the circumstances of this is the classical closure of its setting.’
‘The snow-bound country house, the aeroplane midway in an Atlantic crossing?’
‘A sealed universe of some sort. A finite number of suspects, all available for questioning.’
‘The one not available for questioning, then, not a suspect?’
‘The corpse dead, the deed murder; no doubt about it, though I forget the facts that exclude the doubt.’
‘Just the situation you relish, then. I foresee it all; lines of reasoning converge on the culprit, inexorably, as the voices of a fugue converge on silence. Tell me the story.’
‘If only I could! Such inescapable evidences, prompting such acrobatic intuitions, confirmed by such rigorous deductions – I would love to display them!’
‘Oh, any competent hack could provide. But you remember their logical form?’
‘The successive elimination of possibilities. One by one the suspects cleared, until only one remains.’
‘No direct evidence against that one?’
‘Nothing but this sum of negatives, leaving one positive. Of course before clapping on the handcuffs I checked my case scrupulously. And something strange came to light.’
‘A flawed link in your chain of zeros?’
‘No, rather a further proof of the power of my method. An intricate recombination of the facts that exonerated the others proved the innocence of the remaining one.’
‘Leaving none!’
‘Leaving none. It was one of those beautiful mathematical situations – the Bridges of Königsburg, the Quintic Equation – in which one can demonstrate, not the solution, but the insolubility of the problem.’
The traitor is driven to his deed by suspicion of himself. Excluded from the sense of these reminiscences I turn inwards, and begin to compose my report:
Out of our several solitudes we each bring a bee, hoping for a swarm. Or a twig, and build a little cage; will the fire break out of it? We each bring a feather to this feather duster, pretend it’s a bird, a flock of birds that dusts the sky. What do we take home? Dust, crooked scratches, stings. What poisons we exchange, sucking these wounds! And yet we grope along these maps inscribed on our flesh to further meetings, and meeting soon becomes mutual intoxication. Is this us, aloft on a wing that shades the city? Such honey in our kisses! The fire in such good heart! We melt together and are gently baked into a cake that savours its own fragrance. If any should leave us now, our forgetting of them would be the seal upon our secrecy, the little plate swivelled across the keyhole. So how could we ever be betrayed? We lay aside our cryptonyms and deal out identities like cards on parting. Next day the little pasteboard blanks lie on our desks like diagrams of oblivion: it is delicious ritual to cup them in our hands and evoke pale lettering with our warm breath. Now our friendships triangulate the city; at last we know where we are. As to who we are, what cannot be shared must be cut out! Only joint guilt can bind us together, and the total of our self-suppressions will constitute the necessary murder.
But how these wounds smart when we are not in each other’s soothing hands! Who will revenge the piecemeal crime? Each is tensed to betray; a momentary fear of being overlooked is enough to snap a link. Then the net begins to rot. Looks of indifference are intercepted, forged confidences detected, scattered limbs disinterred. Our order unravels, the sociable triangles lose their shape, a ragged perimeter recedes from each of us into a blurred horizon. Each is soon alone again, in the cell, facing the question.
A change in the atmosphere recalls my attention. Our hosts seem abstracted; one is blindly turning the pages of a book with little flicks of sound as regular as a clock’s tick, the other has stroked rough a patch of the carpet and scans it as if it were a printed page. Between their two absences the gathering wavers and lapses. An anecdote is briefly wound up as we look for our coats:
‘Leaving the two outsiders: you and the body!’
‘Neither any longer merely the notional prerequisite for a case. Strange how the search for its cause shrouds a fact. The others dismissed, we were for the first time face to face.’
Laughter stifles another tale on the stairs:
‘What licence for diagnosis and prognosis too!’
‘Oh, cancerous prophecies! Nothing would do but excision, dumbness, death!’
; … and, groping along the dark hall:
‘We waited all day, but nobody came. Merely, word was sent, towards evening, that we were all to be shot.’
I walk down the street with others, part from them as soon as I can and circle back to station myself in a dark drive opposite the house. I see the last two guests ushered out by a figure indistinct in the hallway. They go off with their arms about each other, exclaiming at the cold. They pause to laugh at each other’s faces yellowed by the streetlamp. They kiss. I hear their laughter again after they have turned the corner. The street is deserted. I note the distribution of lights in the house: ground floor quite black, bright slits between curtains in two first-floor windows, a muted glow in the gable above. The glass dome is hidden by the pitched roof, but I can make out the vague tower of light caught up from it by the poplar tree.
Frost. My own spectre hangs before my lips.
The lights change in no way throughout the night. At dawn a lorry shatters the silence. I break away, and run through numb streets to the bus-stop.
II. The University of the Woods
A poster:
BIRDSONG & LOGIC
A LECTURE
AT 5 P.M. TODAY
tacked to a tree at the edge of the wood. Five p.m. is now, chilly dusk. Words are started among the rustling bushes: ‘Over here! Follow the path!’ The bushes reach above our heads, we lose each other. ‘Climb trees!’ We rediscover ourselves held up into the light by thin birches. Bulky black overcoats among quivering twigs, we exchange amusement and surprise. There are others farther off, a rookery. The lecturer is in a limbless oak, among ivy. He begins.
Is thought a calculus? A calculus a stone? Thrown at a bird, let fall to sound a well, used in a wall against a wind? Admit the wind! To fence a field? Consider the territoriality of knowledge: the don defines afield (the territori ality of birds, we’ll say), assumes a stance (his axiom: each bird sings only ‘I am here!’), deploys his arms (poor scarecrow, the birds are flown already), and lets his yield define himself. ‘I am my place!’ he sings, and produces proofs: ‘The song’s assurance dwindles with distance from the perch; each bird and its neighbour meet in equivocation and make their mutual boundary the locus of equal unconviction. Thus the land is parcelled out by blackbirds, thus by robins, thus by thrushes, in mutually invisible systems of exclusions…’ But Doctor Intelligence Discarnate views this from above, sees what is not to be seen (the crow’s border crossing the wren’s domain, linnetdom within chaffinchshire), discovers his hard calculus to hand and with it guards his empty coverts. Logic, not Song, is ritual attack! (Song is the riddle that turns upon itself.) If you are your thesis, best perfect its defences, disguise guilty inclusions, claim originality, defend your bounds against encroachment. For above all else you fear encirclement, the hell of being understood, analyzed, part refuted, part absorbed and reinterpreted within a greater whole in which a fragmentary occluded you lives on, forced to chime your thinking with another’s. Are you perhaps the defect in your objectivity, the vulnerable centre? Then exclude yourself, renounce your place in the winged flux, become impenetrable, a stone, at rest in the safety of complete disjunction from your kind.