by Matt Wilven
“So Homo sapiens started daydreaming and inventing things.”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t see what this has got to do with anything.”
“Okay,” he says, inhaling smoke deeply. “First of all there were a select few Homo sapiens who started having visions. They taught the others how to see them by pointing them out with pigments – effectively, drawing things on rocks. Back then, a picture was inconceivable to the majority of people and the seers would have to teach them all how to see it, even after they’d drawn it.”
“The seer was like a shaman or a priest or something?”
“This book just calls them seers. They were the ones who could see the pictures in the first place, before they’d marked them out for the others. And once these artworks started appearing, the seers began telling stories about where these pictures were coming from. They created entire belief systems around them. Painting a picture was like catching a spirit, bringing it into the physical world.”
“I still don’t see where this is going.”
“I’m laying groundwork, man. Chill.”
“Fine.”
“Okay, so the interesting thing, the relevant thing, is that one of the most recurring things we hear about these seers, from deepest Africa to Western Europe, is that – without any contact or communication between tribes – they consistently documented the fact that they had spirit animals, usually birds, protecting them and guiding them to the truth.”
“Birds?”
“A spirit animal was considered a badge of honour, given directly to the seer by the great spirit of nature. In those days it was the equivalent of having a well-funded research laboratory. If you had recurring visions of a spirit animal, or if a certain kind of wild animal was consistently tame in your presence, then your theories and inspirations were believed to be nature’s sacred truths.”
“Basically, you’re saying that forty thousand years ago society would have deemed me an important person but now I’m just a whack job who should have studied science.”
Jamal laughs smoke out through his nose and stubs out the end of his joint.
“People who experienced periods where they couldn’t see reality were revered as sacred and wise.”
“You are. You’re saying my brain has been stuck in some kind of retrogressive caveman state.”
“No. You’re not getting it. The Homo sapiens’ ability to imagine and interpret complex imagery, to make contact with meaning and project it onto the world, that was what marked their heightened intelligence. That was how they evolved beyond the animals.”
“So imagination is a kind of intelligence?”
“The human kind. Basically, when a seer conceived of his totem, that was the sign he was becoming more intelligent, figuring something out. It meant that the two sides of his consciousness had started communicating with each other. His tribe would put up with all sorts of shit from him because when he came back to reality he always brought something with him: knowledge, stories, ideas.”
He starts to build another joint.
“But you’re also saying that all those seers were crazy.”
“No. I’m saying that, in the first instance, insight is subjective.”
“Still, you’re saying that all the spiritualism was imaginary. None of these seers ever truly had a spirit animal.”
“The seers didn’t know how to differentiate between good and bad visions, true and false ones. Psychosis, creativity, it was all just supernatural and mystical and therefore true. But the codes and laws they formed over time, the things we kept hold of – science, law, narrative, art, ritual – these are the things that make us human, what makes society worthwhile.”
“But you said these seers, thousands of miles apart, all claimed to have spirit animals. Maybe that’s what happens when people connect to a deeper facet of nature. We just forgot how to do it.”
“It’s more likely that spirit animals were the first severance from nature, the beginning of culture.”
“When it was happening, I knew it wasn’t real, I knew it could never be measured, but, equally, it was just as convincing as reality. There was something incomprehensible all around me, nothing to do with time or space. The blackbirds, Charlie, they were just the signs it chose to guide me.”
Jamal, about to lick the gum on his new joint, stops and looks up.
“Charlie?”
“I saw Charlie. A few times.”
“Shit, man.”
“I know it wasn’t him. Not really. But I don’t think it was me either.”
He seals his joint, prods it with a match and lights it.
“I can’t help seeing it the way I do,” he says. “Take the engine across the hall, when I get it running it’ll sound like it’s got a life of its own, the power it creates will seem like it’s coming from nowhere but it comes from the fact that it’s part of a system, gathered over the years, slowly getting more and more complex, until lots of knowledge is crammed into a tiny space. It might not look like it’s got anything in common with a rowing boat’s oars but it does. The collective power of all the previous engines is carried forward within it. It’s the same with the unconscious mind. There’s some inherent knowledge passed down from our ancestors, more than just instincts, something that can help us understand what’s true, how to move forward, how to deal with life. We project it onto the world around us because that’s the way our brains work. That’s how we find meaning.”
“But why are you so sure? Why can’t you accept reality as an incomplete idea, something we can never fully grasp? There’s no telling what’s in here with us, what sends us meaning, what lies beyond us, what can’t be measured or understood. We have to accept the uncertainty of it all.”
“I guess that’s why you’re the writer and I’m the mechanic.”
“Maybe,” I say, standing up and walking towards the door.
“Where are you going?” he asks. “I’ve not annoyed you, have I?”
“No. Everything you’ve said makes complete sense.”
“What’s wrong then?”
“It just… it makes too much sense.”
“What does?”
“Sorry, I’ve got to go.”
“Why?”
“I’ve just realised what’s going to happen in my book.”
I leave the room.
“Your book?”
“On the great map of the spirit only a few points are illuminated,” I call back.
“But you haven’t even told me where you got your bruises.”
“Another time,” I shout, from the stairs. “I’ve got to go.”
TWO
There are four fundamental forces in nature. Quantum mechanics’ probabilistic theories led to the comprehension of three: the strong nuclear force, the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force. Gravity was understood slightly earlier, using the classical rules of general relativity. However, since the micro quantum-universe is mathematically incompatible with the macro classical-universe, a singular framework that incorporates all four fundamental forces has not yet been discovered. Physicists know what the forces are and what they do. They know how to measure and predict their behaviours. They just can’t prove that they exist in the same universe.
I’ve spent the last month in a very different kind of isolation, writing and editing as much as ten hours a day; lonely but focused and productive. My novel has been finished and redrafted many times over but I keep reading and reading it, just to make sure. The first read-through took over twelve hours but now I’m so familiar with the material I can get through it in four. I’m at the point where there’s nothing else I can do without somebody else’s opinion.
The end has come at a good time. Today’s going to be the first chance I’ve had to see Lyd since she walked out of the anomaly scan whilst I was heaving over a bin. I go out for a run in the hope of vitalising myself, so I don’t seem like somebody bound to a desk, starved of human contact. I avoid Hampstea
d Heath because I’m not quite ready to re-enter that strange land where I lost myself. My psyche is still slightly raw and my body has only just healed. Instead, I do a couple of slow laps around the much smaller Waterlow Park and then walk over into Highgate Cemetery.
This is the cemetery where Charlie is buried. We were lucky to get him in here, apparently. They only accept thirty new bodies a year. His grave is small and discreet. I have no idea how much it cost but it must have been expensive. I don’t even know who paid for it.
I stop, like always, at George Eliot’s small cenotaph. I take a moment to think about her writing, her insight and empathy, her commitment to realism. She was always one of my greatest inspirations and, at a formative age, gave me the first sensations of psychological transcendence that made me want to become a writer. Her work is like a friend that I’m always glad is inside me and her grave always calms me before I move on to see Charlie’s.
Walking on, I recall my obsession with Charlie’s decomposition. For months, rolling around in bed, I would find myself imagining the state of his dead body in its coffin. Again and again I wished he’d been cremated but I was too scared to share this with Lyd. Not only because I had been too manic and too far gone to attend the funeral (or even conceive of it) but because I didn’t want to bring a new and unimagined kind of torment down on her. There was a chance that she hadn’t even thought of his body rotting and decaying in its coffin.
When I see his grave I’m glad that he’s buried. Cremation tiles, all bundled together, are less personal. The dead become a brick in a wall. There’s no space for memories to breathe. Here I can pull away weeds, tend to old flowers and keep his little garden under control. The bones beneath are proof that he truly existed – an anchor: invisible, but adding weight and stillness to my memories.
The grave also adds a sense of settlement to my life in London. Highgate once seemed like an alienating suburb that I shouldn’t be able to afford to live in, part of a city too big to call home. Now, this tiny plot of land makes me feel like I really belong here, because someone I truly loved is buried in its earth.
I realise that this is the first time I’ve stood at Charlie’s graveside and felt like he’s really dead. I don’t sense his essence lurking or shining in the world around me. The feeling of his being, my collected memory of him, comes from the inside instead of outside. I still long for him but the longing is distant, less brutal.
At home I shower and shave and then pick up fresh fruit and vegetables for a healthy lunch. I feel prepared, ready to face life head on. Rather than pick me up, I’ve arranged to meet Lyd at the NHS antenatal services centre because I don’t want her to feel like she has to drive me around, or that I rely on her to do practical things.
I arrive early and wait outside. The NHS building was once an affluent Georgian home, probably converted in the early fifties. There’s space to park eight cars in what was once a front garden. Being on a residential street, it looks slightly out of place but there’s also a dentist’s office, a solicitor’s office and two nursing homes.
Lyd arrives in a taxi looking tired. I can’t believe how bulbous she is. She’s walking on her heels like an obese person. She hardly says a word to me when I greet her. We walk into the building with our heads bowed; lone agents of parenthood. I have an image of a room bathed in soft white light, with modern furnishings and laminate floors, where a circle of loving couples sit toboggan-style, four hands on every bump, forging lifelong friendships whilst me and Lyd sit side by side struggling with our proximity.
The clinic is all beige and pale greens. There are pin boards, health posters, tables of flyers, acrylic signs, plastic chairs, dozens of health-and-safety notices and laminated notifications from the staff who are trying to make their own jobs easier. The round wooden reception island exhibits a level of carpentry and quality of wood that suggests it predates the cheap eighties’ refit. Old kinds of death and suffering seep through its cracks and scratches.
Lyd speaks to the receptionist and we’re directed to a classroom. The whole building is austere and downtrodden. Parts of the corridor are barely even lit. It’s a long way from the bright twenty-first-century pillar of technology where we went for our ultrasounds but it’s the only place we could find that would take us on such short notice (our communications and arrangements regarding the pregnancy had fallen by the wayside over the last few months).
The set-up of the room and the people populating it are nothing like my projected image. Twenty tired couples sit in uniform rows on cheap plastic chairs barely speaking to each other. The room is what I imagine night school looks like, but with lots more posters of babies and no desks. Me and Lyd approach the second row to take the last two chairs, causing a calamitous recession of pregnant bellies and awkward men as we make our way past.
The room, with over forty people in it, is eerily quiet. Blue light bouncing off the projector screen seems to have drawn everybody into a hypnotic state of submission. We all wait for a stout, depressed-looking midwife to connect wires and fiddle with a laptop.
Eventually, an image is projected. It has a white, baby blue and soft yellow colour scheme and is brimming with bad clip art. The stout midwife closes the blinds, turns off the electric lights and proceeds to spout over an hour of obvious, common sense information whilst clicking a little button and making exactly what she’s saying appear on the screen behind her. It is the epitome of a bad presentation.
At the hour mark I look at Lyd and see that she is loathing the dull woman at the front as much as I am.
“Want to go?” I ask her in a whisper.
She looks at me like I just spat on our unborn baby and did I not know that the important bit was coming up in just a minute?
When the presentation finally comes to an end, after each of the seven subheadings has had its bland ten minutes (1: Health, 2: Exercise, 3: Labour and Birth, 4: Pain and Relaxation, 5: Care, 6: Emotions and 7: Health – again!), the midwife turns the lights back on and, in a monotone, announces:
“Okay, everybody stand up and move your chairs to the sides of the room. We’re going to swap partners and try a little role play.”
Lyd’s shoulders slump and hang low. She looks at me with adolescent reluctance.
“Fine,” she says. “Let’s get out of here.”
I jump to my feet and hold my hand out behind me before she changes her mind. She grabs it and I lead her through a corridor of knees, distended wombs, shoes and thin metal chair legs. As we reach the door the midwife’s dreary voice calls after us:
“Shyer couples can sit this one out if they prefer.”
We both look back at her and shake our heads with feigned amusement and ambiguity, trying to imply that something else is pulling us away from this interesting and essential class.
Once we are out in the corridor we both sigh with relief and smile at each other. Realising we’re holding hands our smiles become awkward so we let go and begin walking towards the exit.
“Why do the extroverts who script these things always assume that introverts are broken versions of themselves who just need a little bit of repression workshopped out of them?” asks Lyd.
“Probably the same reason we think they’re self-indulgent idiots who need a little bit of self-reflection and doubt forced into them.”
“I know it’s just a team-building exercise, making everybody feel like they’re in it together so they can break down barriers and make friends, but I really can’t abide it when things are that psychologically transparent. It’s embarrassing. Anyone with any intelligence feels forced to respond ironically or knowingly and then they find themselves trapped in a rebellion that’s even more pathetic than engaging with the process.”
“And then all the rebels have to try to mockingly justify their appeasement to the process when they inevitably join in.”
“Whilst the more self-pitying of them wonder why they can never find a comfortable role in a group.”
“And the more confident
of them ponder why everybody appropriates a psychological type whenever a group forms and thinks they’re so clever to keep their strong individual self so hidden but so present.”
“And the rest of the group are thinking, we all know that this exercise is stupid. You lot are just the maladjusted idiots who want lots of attention because you didn’t get any love in your childhoods.”
“But really we deserve all the attention because we were well-behaved children and that’s why Mummy and Daddy stayed together and loved us.”
“I hate it,” she says, smiling.
“Me too.”
We’ve just left the building but our conversation feels so natural and amusing that we carry on walking together. At the end of the street we turn left and go into the first coffee shop we see without even acknowledging that we’ve made a decision to stay together. This excites me and there’s a tiny sparkle in Lyd’s eyes that reflects the same.
“Maybe we are a bit too anti-social,” I say, as we stand in the queue.
“Undoubtedly. But that doesn’t affect the world in any negative way. There’s no reason to surround ourselves with people if we don’t enjoy it.”
“We’re just not built for groups.”
“Some people are more useful on the peripheries.”
“Exactly,” I say. “And we do okay. We’re good in smaller, more tight-knit groups.”
“Sometimes,” says Lyd. “Personally, I think we both thrive when we’re alone. I’ve got so much more work done since I’ve been at Mum and Dad’s.”
“Me too actually,” I admit, reluctantly.
At the counter, even though I’m desperately poor and thinking that today might be a good opportunity to bring up the fact that I can’t afford the electricity bill (the only bill in my name), I make a point of buying the drinks: black coffee for me and peppermint tea for Lyd.
We sit at a small table by the window. Now that we’re facing each other the easy mood has become more difficult. There is a long silence. Lyd’s expression is serious and solemn. I fiddle with a sugar packet until I notice her scrutinising my twiddling fingers.