by Tim Robinson
‘Something called Cantor Dust. Cantor was a mad mathematician Benny had read about. It would look like a line of dust-particles, but if you took a microscope to one of them it would turn out to be made up of a line of even smaller particles, and each of those would be a line of yet smaller ones. God knows what Cantor invented it for – to prove something about infinity in the little, I suppose. But for Benny it was an image of memory. There are whole years of one’s life one remembers little or nothing about, and in the periods you do remember there are forgotten times, gaps. And so on down to the most vividly recalled incidents; they are riddled with lost details.’
‘And the longer you live the more worm-eaten the past becomes, I fear. I’d forgotten Cantor Dust. Well then, dust to dust! Why not try to sweep up a bit of it, in memory of Benny? Write it as a letter to Joy. She must be retired by now, but the College would forward it. Or else dig out that copy I suspect you took.’
‘No, memory-dust it would have to be. If enough of it subsists …’
II
Dear Joy
We heard from Mrs R. of Benny’s death. I didn’t write straight away as I wanted to wait for a quiet time in which to think about him, and about you, because you were both very special to us and if we haven’t kept in touch it’s a failing on our side, I know. I mean that it doesn’t mean we are forgetting you, just that so much has happened since that has been so complicated – for good and ill – I didn’t want to just baldly state it in letters and the effort of explaining and expressing it all felt too much, something one put off. So I fell out of the habit of letters, though we relished the occasional note from you, and Benny’s jokey cards. And M as you know only puts pen to paper under duress.
But we’ve often talked about how you helped us find our feet when we came out to the College, and then led us into that Aegean world that was almost too bright for us at first, and felt precarious somehow, and the better for being so. ‘We are all living on the rim of a volcano nowadays’ – that’s what Benny wrote in the visitors’ book of the taverna on Santorini. He was always looking for perfect moments, and he could give himself to them in a way we couldn’t imitate because we were afraid of them shattering themselves. He loved explosions. That old fisherman Dimitri in Naxos, Benny used to pretend he was the last surviving witness of the Santorini eruption in whatever BC, when all those delicate Cycladic statuettes went up in the air. Benny had long conversations with him about the sea and storms and fishing even though they had only four words in common – ‘whsh-whsh-whsh’ for calm weather, ‘pshooooo-pshooooo’ for a storm, ‘ssssssssh’ for a fuse, ‘boooom’ for dynamite. No, Benny told me that last one was always in capitals, ‘BOOOOOOM’. And he said D’s description of the eruption as seen from Naxos in the minutes before the tidal wave swept over it was superb, using only the same four words.
D was delighted to find someone to listen to him mumbling on about the old days, and especially when B asked him to take us dynamite-fishing. He hadn’t done it for years, I think because he couldn’t dive to collect the fish and the local lads were too much under the eyes of the police to risk it. The illegality of it attracted Benny, the planning, us all sneaking out of the village by different routes before dawn, meeting up at one of those tiny whitewashed chapels dotted over the hillsides (religious conveniences, B called them) where D prayed to the Madonna for a long time, then down to that hidden-away beach. I remember so clearly the reek of that bagful of squashed-up cheese and anchovies D flung out into the deep water to attract the fish. Then we sat and waited for sunrise, everything was silvery, we watched the little waves fitting themselves into the details of the shoreline and had an absurd conversation about whether any two waves had ever broken in exactly the same way. You – Fraulein Freude was your nickname with the language-students; did you know that? – you quoted Faust proposing that if ever he was caught saying to the moment, Stay, you are so beautiful, then Hell could have him. And we agreed that if the Universe should ever repeat itself in any of its parts or periods it would be instantly snatched out of existence, and deservedly.
Then the sun came up to warm us and the rocks turned honey-colour, and D started to prepare a stick of dynamite. It was like a bar of toffee, I thought. And there was a little brass cartridge of gelignite, the detonator, which had to be bitten firmly onto the end of the fuse. Poor toothless D looked at each of us in turn, pretending to inspect our teeth, and handed the thing to Benny. It was a test of course, and B was so anxious to prove himself he almost bit the wrong end and we all leaned forward to him with arms outstretched crying ‘No!’ I don’t suppose there was any real danger, but I saw you were shaken. But Benny just pulled a long face, imitating our landlady, and said ‘There’s many a fine young lad hanging around the Piraeus without a head through that mistake!’ Then D tied the detonator to the dynamite and lit the fuse and blew on it till it was sparkling away, and flung the lot as far as he could into the middle of the bay. Nothing happened for a couple of seconds, and then came the solid satisfying BOOOOM, and a slim column of water rose into the air, glittering, and hung there, and in my mind it hangs there yet, it was so beautiful. And it was as if we could hear the sound rushing away from us up the hillside and out to sea like, Benny said afterwards, the voice that went all over the Mediterranean once, crying ‘The Great God Pan is dead!’
Then, action! B and I waded out and dived as deep as we could after the fish. I had goggles on, and I saw hundreds of tiny fish hanging motionless in the water like the crystals of a chandelier, and a few big fish on the bottom. But it was too deep for us. We almost burst ourselves trying again and again to get down to them. Benny came up spouting with laughter and crying ‘We’re not Tritons!’ D was disgusted; any of those muscular local foreshore loafers could have done it. But we were too excited by the spectacle to fret over a few fish. And by then we were ravenous, we wanted to get back for breakfast.
There was a strange end to the escapade. I think you and M had gone on ahead and were out of sight by the time we had collected some reasonable-sized fish that washed ashore. As we came home along the coast B touched my arm silently to make me look back, and there was Dimitri standing up on a rock at the top of the beach and staring at the sea. He was too far away for us to read his face but he was as rigid as a statue. Then, as we watched, he lit the fuse on the last of his dynamite, and ran down the shore and flung it into the water, and without even waiting for the explosion turned his back on it and went off inland by himself. And somehow we knew he’d never go dynamiting again.
Well, I don’t know why I’ve written all that out, or if I should post it. A memory, and perhaps you remember it all differently. But you can say, surely, in gratitude to the past, that you too have holidayed in Arcadia, whatever happened later.
Will you write and tell us about your life since?
We are both well and keep busy.
M joins with me in sending you our love and best wishes for the future.
Three Notes on the Elgin Marbles
I
Headless, but still maintaining the poses of life. Having no heads, with our imaginary heads we imagine that we have heads.
DEMETER, GODDESS OF GROWING CORN, WAS
SHOWN RESTING HER CHIN (NOW MISSING)
UPON HER HAND. IN GREEK ART THIS WAS
A CONVENTIONAL GESTURE OF MOURNING.
HER GRIEF IS
one might think, not
FOR HER DAUGHTER, PERSEPHONE, WHO WAS
ABDUCTED BY THE GOD OF THE UNDERWORLD
but for her own lost features and those of the other Immortals seated by her: Zeus, and his consort Hera who
LOOKS TOWARDS HIM DRAWING BACK HER VEIL
IN THE TRADITIONAL GESTURE OF THE BRIDE
revealing that her face is a broken stone.
Heads were particularly targeted by the fifth-century iconoclasts who broke the spirit of paganism to make the temple into a Christian church. On the panels representing
THE BATTLE OF LAPITHS AND CENT
AURS
the combatants have lopped each other until they lack brains to direct their blows and limbs to grasp their weapons, but still fight on.
THE HEAD IS MISSING BUT ONCE LOOKED TOWARDS
THE CENTRE OF THE PEDIMENT. SHE IS PERHAPS
HESTIA, GODDESS OF THE HEARTH.
The figures of other members of the Greek pantheon she would have recognized on this eastern pediment were torn down to make room for the porch of the church, and no longer exist.
Under Turkish rule the church became a magazine for troops garrisoning the Acropolis. During the Venetian siege of 1687 it was shelled, and the gunpowder stored in it exploded. Walls burst outwards, flinging down the frieze of the Panathenaic procession above them. This solemn and joyous celebration of the Goddess of Wisdom by the people of her city is now reduced to a parade of amputees. Among these veterans
FOUR GIRLS WALK IN PROCESSION CARRYING JUGS.
Two of them, victims of napalm, are seared meat from hips to shoulders. Some youths are shown driving cattle; the realistic attitude of one of these sacrificial beasts
IS THOUGHT TO HAVE INSPIRED KEATS TO
WRITE IN HIS ‘ODE ON A GRECIAN URN’ OF
‘THAT HEIFER LOWING TO THE SKIES’.
But if the animal’s head is twisted upwards in a spasm it is because her rump has been beaten into a mass of scabs. One of the chariot teams in the procession
HAS SUFFERED PARTICULARLY. ONLY THE MIDDLE
AND REAR QUARTERS OF THE HORSES ARE VISIBLE.
Of another,
THE CHARIOTEER AND FOOT SOLDIER ARE
LOST ALL BUT FOR THEIR HANDS
which stretch into existence as if reaching through the bars of a prison window to grasp at air.
The Venetians dragged down as booty what statues still survived on the western pediment, and wrecked them in doing so. These figures are reduced to frightful gobbets.
A FRAGMENT OF POSEIDON’S
POWERFUL TORSO IS IN ATHENS
and what we see here is a chest cavity full of stone.
IRIS WAS A MESSENGER GOD – SHE WAS WINGED
but the roots of her wings are empty sockets now. Some of these personages have lost their identities, and more. A drawing predating the explosion shows one of them, perhaps Oreithyia, lover of Boreas, the god of the north wind, holding her twin children.
THE TORSO OF ONE SON IS DISPLAYED
IN AN ADJOINING ROOM.
Throughout the eighteenth century the heaps of masonry were quarried by lime-burners and pedlars of souvenirs. Gentlemen making the Grand Tour carried home choice pieces.
RIGHT BREAST OF A DRAPED FIGURE.
The curiosity cabinets of Europe were laden with exiled body-parts.
RIGHT FOOT OF A LAPITH WOMAN.
In 1801 Lord Elgin’s men began to remove whatever seemed worth taking.
FRAGMENT OF A LOWER LEG.
Hundreds of tons of carved stone were crated up, shipped to England, stored here and there for years, sold to the government, sorted, labelled and exposed in the British Museum.
THE FEET OF HERMES ARE DISPLAYED SEPARATELY.
These scraps ache with separation.
ONE OF AMPHITRITE’S ARMS IS IN A SHOWCASE
IN AN ADJOINING ROOM.
Fossilized sighs lie under glass.
VARIOUS GROUPS OF PEDESTRIANS WALKED AHEAD
OF THE CHARIOTS. THE SURVIVING FRAGMENTS
ARE MAINLY IN ATHENS.
What life they have is in abeyance, encisted, sustained only by the remote chances of reintegration.
THE TORSO WAS IN THE ELGIN COLLECTION WHILE
THE HEAD WAS FORMERLY AT CHATSWORTH HOUSE.
A SUBSTANTIAL FRAGMENT OF SCULPTURE IN ATHENS
HAS ALSO BEEN SHOWN TO JOIN WITH THIS
agonized limbless
TORSO
which now wears its head on a neck ringed with a dark groove as if a cord has been tightened round it.
II
To see these lumps of rock as they are, disregarding their seductive portraiture of mortal and immortal beings as they should be, is counterintuitive. It feels unnatural, even perverse, to withdraw one’s attention from the lovely representation of flesh and fabric, and concentrate on the areas of crude stone. Vision is repelled by these patches like water by grease. Their texture baffles the eye and is difficult to characterize. On a scale of tenths of an inch it looks like blunt, opaque, half-crushed crystals; on a scale of a hands width it shows irregular scallopings, so shallow in places they are scarcely traceable, as if this damage itself had suffered damage. A sedimentary geology, little metamorphosed from its origins in seabed muds. Raw material. Bedrock. Matrix. The underworld of matter, in which, to grow, the cornseed must pass half the year. The random outcroppings of this enigmatic substrate interact strangely with surfaces worked and polished to reflect public meanings. In one panel the grain of the rock is horizontal; it replaces the lower parts and legs of a rank of horses with a speed-blur so that they seem to pour off the edge into a sink-hole formed by a missing corner of the next slab. Elsewhere two badly eroded horsemen are seen as if through heavy rain slanting across them from behind; they lean back into it with mute endurance. Another rider’s features have been obliterated apart from an earhole and one eye, which together provide a widely spaced pair of eyes to a streaky oriental dragon-mask. A horse’s muzzle has been truncated obliquely; the remains of the deep slit of the mouth appear in the cross-section, which looks like a torn slice of bread. It is natural to think of the complement of this sad circus of mutilated creatures as the sum total of all that has been detached from it since its creation: labelled and boxed ankles, noses and earlobes in museum store-rooms, unidentifiable nuggets shovelled aside and carted off to be thrown into the foundations of walls, abraded particles blowing in dust around the world – all retrievable in thought, down to the half-dozen molecules I saw a visitor wipe off a horse’s mane with a touch of the finger a moment ago as I sat, still as a statue, ruminating in a corner of the Parthenon Rooms. The Greek ideal — virility harmonized by grace, femininity energized by virtue, the animal suffused with nobility — is so familiar an inheritance that our mental restoration of these carvings is a reflex of thought. Unhesitatingly we make good the blemishes, round out lost substance, match notional left with extant right hands. But let us suspend the assumption that it is our task to restore all this stone to its former state. Why put a head on this hacked neck, rather than an arm bearing a shield, or a horse’s leg? The attachment need not come from the repertoire of ancient Athens. It could be an elephant’s trunk or the tentacles of a squid. It could be vegetable, architectural, mechanical, of any age or provenance. All the scars of all these marbles could be the rooting-places of one vast jungle of incoherent forms, investing the British Museum, overgrowing London, packing the whole of space. There is no need to explore this fantasy further; we live in its entrails. Or we can let these scars tell us that, of two conjoined twins, one, the less viable, has been ablated, to save the other. On which side of the knifeblade was our universe? Were we the sacrificial victims, the not-unblemished beasts, left with a ruined body in a history dying of its birth? If so, then elsewhere, in that radically disjoint alternative future, the promise of the Panathenaea is fulfilled. Millennia of millennia have already passed in that dawn-lit realm, of which the Greek vision was a faint prefiguration. If we wandered into it in a dream we would find we lacked the evolved senses and mentality to comprehend anything of it. A half-formed phrase, almost meaningless, might remain with us on our wakening: something about the world as the grey eye of wisdom; something about
III
Oh broken girl of the Parthenon
who wears the lucid flow of time
whose bare feet kiss our world
you know why beauty must be carved in heartbreak
but you do not tell us, lest you break our hearts.
Notes
The Festival of Creation Written in the ’60s, and based on some experiences
I had, and others I didn’t, in Malaya and Thailand in ’56.
So and Springrice Improvised over three nights, in about 1965, to soothe my insomniac bedmate, starting from two motifs: an episode of cheating in examinations, from one of Ernest Bramah’s Kai Lung stories; and Malraux’s observation, in La Tentation de l’Occident, that whereas skulls in Western ghost stories float along at head-height, in Chinese stories they roll on the ground. Published in The Recorder, New York, Fall 2001.
The River A response to reports of the Bangladesh–Pakistan War.
The Ephemeron 1974. Suggested by a dream. The garden is that of the house of my childhood in Yorkshire.
Approaching the Glacier Suggested by a visit to Norway in 1971 and written a few years later in Aran; an exercise in ventriloquism. Published with French translation in a book of the photography of Werner Hannappel, Cape Distance, Arp Editions, Brussels, 1998.
Telling the Tale A reconstruction of an evening walk and an improvised story, in Aran in the winter of 1973. ‘Old Dara’ was my Aran mentor, Micilín Mac an Rí, the blacksmith, d. 2002.
Secret Meeting 1971–3.
Two Reminiscences of London 1970 Aran, 1976. Since much of the imagery of ‘The University of the Woods’ is drawn from a specialized field, a few hints may be in order.
George Boole in the last century pioneered what he called ‘the exhibition of logic in the form of a calculus’, that is, a system of symbols in which calculations can be carried out. (The word ‘calculus’ is from the Latin for a stone such as was used in reckoning.) Boolean algebra, as his system is called, can be used for reasoning either in terms of propositions as in the traditional syllogisms, or in terms of classes and their relationships such as inclusion and disjunction. Venn diagrams (named after their inventor) are used to represent classes and their relationships by means of circles and other shapes, which may or may not overlap or lie one within another. Logical and mathematical systems usually start with a set of axioms, from which theorems are deduced, as in Euclid’s geometry. However, if propositions are allowed to refer to themselves, or classes to include themselves as members, paradoxes arise, as Bertrand Russell proved. In such cases the system is self-contradictory, and any statement whatsoever (and the opposite of that statement) can be proved in it, which makes it pointless, unless a way is found of coming to terms with paradox.