by Brian Aldiss
Her first husband was pretty rich. He was a tea-planter, with plantations out in Assam. She told me how many workers they employed. Even in the hills, the climate was too hot for her. Perhaps it was the hot London day that prompted her reminiscences. Anyhow, he died out in Assam, and so she'd had to come home alone. But on the boat back from Bombay, she had met Albert. She lit a cigarette and companionably blew the smoke at me.
My interest in Holman Hunt extends over many years. In some ways, he must have been like me - for instance, all that nonsense about actually transporting a goat to the shores of the Dead Sea to paint it! That is the sort of thing I might get involved in myself. But as a writer I also respond to what I diagnose as his dilemma. That novel of mine, Report on Probability A, the one that didn't cause such a fuss, centred round Hunt's best painting, The Hireling Shepherd.
I have been to Bombay too, but I didn't tell her that. By now, she needed no prompting. This chap Albert was apparently an authority on butterflies. Would anyone ever refer to me as 'an authority on Holman Hunt'? I tried to visualize my first wife chumming up with some fellow in a cafeteria, rattling off her tribulations, among which I imagine I would figure prominently, and saying, 'He was quite an authority on Holman Hunt". No, that would be allowing me too much.
My intention was to write a review of the exhibition. Perhaps this is where the only parallel between Hunt and me comes in, and that is a fairly tenuous one. Hunt was right at the fag-end of one tradition, the Renaissance tradition of lining up acceptable objects in an ideal arrangement and painting them, allowing the spectator an essential role in completing the arrangement. And all the while, photography was creeping up on him; men like Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec were making what went on inside the frame its own reference; later still, the Cubists would explore the actual surface of the canvas.
On the other hand, Hunt was quietly revolutionary in his handling of backgrounds. ('I paint,' he said, 'direct on the canvas itself, with every detail I can see, and with the sunlight brightness of the day itself.) Some of his setting could come from Salvador Dali, and seem almost mescalin-influenced. The tremendous country round the Dead Sea is a case in point; Hunt embraced its surrealist qualities.
'Can I get you an orangeade? I'm going to have another myself.'
'I shouldn't really. I ought to be going. I'm supposed to be meeting my sister at Harrods.'
I bought it for her anyway. I hoped that while I was at the counter she would notice the book I was carrying about with me - Nigel Calder's Technopolis - but she was too involved in her own affairs to dwell on all my marvellous paradoxes. I should have said to her, 'Look, isn't it typical of the versatility of people today that I should be so fascinated in the uses or abuses of science, and so obsessed with the present unrolling into the future, and yet remain preoccupied with - well, frankly, not first-rate painters like Holman Hunt!' At times it is hard to see where such conflicting interests integrate. Hunt had the same sort of battle between religion (he was very High Church) and paintings. Perhaps the painting lost. Born a generation later, he might have been more successful.
Hunt was so misunderstood that he took to printing little pamphlets to accompany each painting, explaining what he was doing. He tried to make everything simple. In that respect, creators and critics are alike: all strive to make things either simpler or more complex. I only wish some of our critics could be humbler; one wants criticism and not autobiography, but surely it would be realistic if a critic occasionally said, 'My entirely derogatory judgements on Holman Hunt must not be considered in any way definitive, as I was distracted just after the viewing by a woman whose third husband is still alive but separated from her and now living, as far as is known, in a village eight miles from the centre of Torquay.'
As for Technopolis, I have been distracted in reviewing that. Calder is writing about ways in which society can control technology. He admits that a scientific policy is difficult to formulate, because the politicians can never look as far ahead in these matters as they need to do. Presumably this explains why nothing coherent is done about the population explosion, like phasing out family allowances, for example. But my mind keeps wandering off the subject; I have to confess I am curious about how the doctors cured her daughter Irene's harelip. She gives me plenty of detail but not the sort of detail I want. Like Hunt, in a way.
We are going to find it difficult to control the course of science and technology, which by now have got a bit set in their ways. We are still faced with problems that were already confronting the Victorians. When Hunt exhibited The Hireling Shepherd in the Royal Academy in 1852, the familiar ambivalent attitude to the machine was already established. Since there is no danger that any of my present readers have heard of Report on Probability A, I might as well say that one of my themes was a paralysis of time, which I pretended to detect and find exemplified in the anecdotalism of this canvas, and similar Victorian paintings. This poor woman sitting opposite me -she's not going to touch that orangeade I brought her - represents a personal paralysis of time. She's reliving her earlier days over and over. This whole package-deal of her life is no doubt trotted out to strangers every day. Her life may have become the fearful mess it is simply because she thinks backwards instead of forwards. Hunt kept thinking back to the Early Church instead of forward to the Impressionists. Isn't his sun breaking through the cypress trees in the Fiesole canvas of 1868 as fresh in its way as Monet's studies of light and shadow on the Seine, painted in the same year? I suppose the answer is, No, it is not. Just as this woman's remembrance of things past is not a patch on Proust's, though she may have suffered as much.
Here we sit, then: Hunt and she and Calder and me. Calder's in the best position; his time escape-route lies in the future, because his book is not even published till next week; nor does he exactly address himself to the denizens of the V & A canteen. But the rest of us are paralysed by time. So's her sister, stuck in Harrods waiting for her. And her third husband, down outside Torquay. As for me ... has any critic before ever tried to arrive at an objective viewpoint in similar circumstances and admitted it? Critics ought to confide more, the way this woman does; we need to know more often what's in it for them.
What's in it for her? She didn't even go to look at the Hunts. She says she doesn't like paintings much. She did when she was a little girl. What the hell's she doing here anyway? I shouldn't have imagined she came to the V & A especially to revel in the delights of the cafeteria. Not with orangeade at one-and-three a carton. Perhaps she comes every morning - captive audience always on tap. 1 must break away. I notice she tells me everybody's name but her own. This hysterectomy she's telling me about now - would she be so liberal with the gruesome detail if we had been properly introduced? No painter has ever painted a hysterectomy, to my knowledge.
Some awful academic social realistic painter in Moscow -he must have done it. Glaring light; thick-set surgeons; anaesthetists in green overalls; devoted proletarian nurses, almost sexless; scalpels gleaming, the op nearly over; bust of Lenin in the background, surrounded by flags; the womb emerging; general moral uplift. Or perhaps the Russians consider it a decadent capitalist operation. The way she tells it, they're right!
Anyway, Hunt, William Holman. My review. Primarily a religious painter. More competent than his colleague Millais. The only one of the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren to stick to his principles. I came away from his canvases primed with the suspicion - no, confirmed in my opinion that, while he may be by no means the greatest of the Victorian painters, Hunt's place is assured - no, it is the colourist rather than the moralist that today - no, no, no
This woman's making more sense than I am. I came away still feeling a strong bond with Hunt. One of the great comic painters: comic-macabre, as The Shadow of Death proves. Born too late. Too early. Nothing but cliche ... I must escape from this cliche of a life unrolling before me ... Majorca to recover, indeed! There she met this rich Spaniard. If only one could suspect her of lying. Tha
t uncomfortable pause between life and art is not for her, any more than it was for Hunt.
She's on about sex all the time, you notice, without actually daring to tackle the subject head-on. Dear God, we all live out such muddled lives, and so many lives at once. Calder should write a book about controlling ms !
Hurriedly, I swig down her untouched orangeade and make off with scarcely a farewell, heading towards Harrods, where my wife awaits me.
Confluence
The inhabitants of the planet Myrin have much to endure from Earthmen, inevitably perhaps, since they represent the only intelligent life we have so far found in the galaxy. The Tenth Research Fleet has already left for Myrin. Meanwhile, some of the fruits of earlier expeditions are ripening.
As has already been established, the superior Myrinian culture, the so-called Confluence of Headwaters, is somewhere in the region of eleven million (Earth) years old, and its language, Confluence, had been established even longer. The etymological team of the Seventh Research Fleet was privileged to sit at the feet of two gentlemen of the Oeldrid Stance Academy. They found that Confluence is a language-cum-posture, and that meanings of words can be radically modified or altered entirely by the stance assumed by the speaker. There is, therefore, no possibility of ever compiling a one-to-one dictionary of English-Confluence, Confluence-English words.
Nevertheless, the list of Confluent words that follows disregards the stances involved, which number almost nine thousand and are all named, and merely offers a few definitions, some of which must be regarded as tentative. The definitions are, at this early stage of our knowledge of the Myrinian culture, valuable in themselves, not only because they reveal something of the inadequacy of our own language, but because they throw some light on to the mysteries of an alien culture. The romanized phonetic system employed is that suggested by Dr. Rohan Harbottle3 one of the members of the etymological team of the Seventh Research Fleet, without whose generous assistance this short list could never have been compiled.
ab WE tel min: The sensation that one neither agrees nor disagrees with what is being said to one, but that one simply wishes to depart from the presence of the speaker
arn tutkhan : Having to rise early before anyone else is about; addressing a machine
bagi rack : Apologizing as a form of attack; a stick resembling a gun
bag rack : Needless and offensive apologies
baman : The span of a man's consciousness
bi : The name of the mythical northern cockerel; a reverie that lasts for more than twenty (Earth) years
bi san: A reverie lasting more than twenty years and of a religious nature
bi SAN: A reverie lasting more than twenty years and of a blasphemous nature
bi tosi : A reverie lasting more than twenty years on cosmological themes
bi tvas : A reverie lasting more than twenty years on geological themes
biui tosi: A reverie lasting more than a hundred and forty-two years on cosmological themes; the sound of air in a cavern; long dark hair
biut tash: A reverie lasting more than twenty years on Har Dar Ka themes
cano lee min : Things sensed out-of-sight that will return
ca pata vatuz : The taste of a maternal grandfather
cham on th ZAM: Being witty when nobody else appreciates it
DAR ayrhoh: The garments of an ancient crone; the age-old supposition that Myrin is a hypothetical place
en io play : The deliberate dissolving of the senses into sleep
gee kutch : Solar empathy ge nu : The sorrow that overtakes a mother knowing her child will be born dead
ge nup dimu : The sorrow that overtakes the child in the womb when it knows it will be born dead
gor a : Ability to live for eight hundred years
ha atuz shak ean : Disgrace attending natural death of maternal grandfather
HAR dar ka: The complete understanding that all the soil of Myrin passes through the bodies of its earth-worms every ten years
har di di kal: A small worm; the hypothetical creator of a hypothetical sister planet of Myrin
HE yup : The first words the computers spoke, meaning, 'The light will not be necessary'
holt cha : The feeling of delight that precedes and precipitates wakening
holt che: The autonomous marshalling of the senses which produces the feeling of delight that precedes and precipitates wakening
hoz stap san : A writer's attitude to fellow writers
jily jip tup : A thinking machine that develops a stammer; the action of pulling on the trousers while running uphill
jil jipy tup : Any machine with something incurable about it; pleasant laughter that is nevertheless unwelcome; the action of pulling up the trousers while running downhill
karnad ees : The enjoyment of a day or a year by doing nothing; fasting
karndal chess : The waste of a day or a year by doing nothing; fasting
karndoli yon tor : Mystical state attained through inaction; feasting; a learned paper on the poetry of metal
karndol ki ree : The waste of a life by doing nothing; a type of fasting
kundulum : To be well and in bed with two pretty sisters
lahah ship : Tasting fresh air after one has worked several hours at one's desk
la yun un : A struggle in which not a word is spoken; the underside of an inaccessible boulder; the part of one's life unavailable to other people
lee ke min : Anything or anyone out-of-sight that one senses will never return; an apology offered for illness
likl ink th KUTI: The small engine that attends to one after the act of excretion
mal : A feeling of being watched from within
man naiz th : Being aware of electricity in wires concealed in the walls
mur on tig won: The disagreeable experience of listening to oneself in the middle of a long speech and neither understanding what one is saying nor enjoying the manner in which it is being said; a foreign accent; a lion breaking wind after the evening repast
nam on A: The remembrance, in bed, of camp fires
no lee le mun : The love of a wife that becomes especially vivid when she is almost out-of-sight
nu crow : Dying before strangers
nu di dimu : Dying in a low place, often of a low fever
NU hin der vlak : The invisible stars; forms of death
nun mum: Dying before either of one's parents; ceasing to fight just because one's enemy is winning
nut lap me : Dying of laughing
nut la pom : Dying laughing
nut vato : Managing to die standing up; statues; thorns
nutvu bag rack : To be born dead
nu valk : Dying deliberately in a lonely (high) place
obi dakt: An obstruction; three or more machines talking together
oran muda: A change of government; an old peasant saying meaning, 'The dirt in the river is different every day'
pan wol le muda: A certainty that tomorrow will much resemble today; a line of manufacturing machines
pat o bane ban : The ten heartbeats preceding the first heartbeat of orgasm
pi ki skab we: The parasite that afflicts man and Tig Gag in its various larval stages and, while burrowing in the brain of the Tig Gag, causes it to speak like a man
pi shak rack chano : The retrogressive dreams of autumn attributed to the presence in the bloodstream of Pi Ki Skab We
pit hor: Pig's cheeks, or the droppings of pigs; the act of name-dropping
play: The heightening of consciousness that arises when one awakens in a strange room that one cannot momentarily identify
shak ale man : The struggle that takes place in the night between the urge to urinate and urge to continue sleeping
shak lo mun gram: When the urge to continue sleeping takes precedence over all things
shean dorl : Gazing at one's reflection for reasons other than vanity
she ban mik : Performing prohibited postures before a mirror
&nb
sp; shem: A slight cold afflicting only one nostril; the thoughts that pass when one shakes hands with a politician
shuk tack: The shortening in life-stature a man incurs from a seemingly benevolent machine
sobi: A reverie lasting less than twenty years on cosmological themes; a nickel
sodi dorl: One machine making way for another; decadence, particularly in the Cold Continents SODI in PIT: Any epithet which does not accurately convey what it intends, such as 'Sober as a judge', 'Silly nit', 'He swims like a fish', 'He's only half-alive', and so on
staini rack NUSVIODON: Experiencing Staini Rack Nuul and then realizing that one must continue in the same outworn fashion because the alternatives are too frightening, or because one is too weak to change; wearing a suit of clothes at which one sees strangers looking askance
staini rack nuul : Introspection (sometimes prompted by birthdays) that one is not living as one determined to live when one was very young; or, on the other hand, realizing that one is living in a mode decided upon when one was very young and which is now no longer applicable or appropriate
stain tok I: The awareness that one is helplessly living a role
sta sodon: The worst feelings which do not even lead to suicide
sta stlap : The worst feelings which do not even lead to laughter
SU SODA VALKUS: A sudden realization that one's spirit is not pure, overcoming one on Mount Rinvlak (in the Southern Continent)
ti : Civilized aggression
tig gag : The creature most like man in the Southern Continent which smiles as it sleeps
tipy lap kin : Laughter that one recognizes though the laugher is unseen; one's own laughter in a crisis
tok an: Suddenly divining the nature and imminence of old age in one's thirty-first year
tuan bolo : A class of people one meets only at weddings; the pleasure of feeling rather pale
tu ki tok: Moments of genuine joy captured in a play or charade about joy; the experience of youthful delight in old age