– No, my dearest, I’m telling you about the new project.
– But I’m asking you about the doctor…
– You wouldn’t believe what I’ve managed to do here. I’ve been working at it day and night. It’s a new pool.
– What do you mean, a new pool?
– Well, not ‘pool’ exactly. More like ‘donut’. Ah! They’re doing it again! Incredible! When you said you were asking me about the doctor, when you put the stress on ‘you’, they started choreographing you again. Hilary gave this sort of twitch of grace and went sliding, jetting up the side of the glass, coming to rest virtually on my face here, while Taylor took to shuffling in the substrate. They’re directly responding to you. If you were here you’d understand. When are you going to be here?
– You know this, I told you: I can’t get across for another month. Donut?
– Remember last summer? The marvellous donut-shaped rays’ enclosure at the aquarium in Barcelona? And then when we got to the place in Boulogne – what’s its name?
– Nausicaa.
– The very same. You remember the eagle rays at Nausicaa?
– Don’t tell me. You’re building a donut-shaped pool for eagle rays in the drawing room.
– How did you guess?
– Could it be because last time you deigned to talk to me you were telling me all about how you had got the estate agent in and how you’re putting the house on the market and now you’ve come to the realisation that the property will be much more attractive, especially to families, if most of the ground-floor accommodation is taken up with touchpools for rays?
‘Touchpools’ is a mistake. Creepy, it’s as if I’m losing touch with him.
– Touchpools?
Exasperated and uneasy, I am starting to apologise, but he cuts me off:
– I changed my mind. I realised it couldn’t be done. I’m keeping the house.
I’m inclined to query this (how can he afford it? what about his job?), but he’s irrepressible now:
– You want to know about the doctor? Exactly. Everything’s fine. My brain’s entirely normal: that was their actual phrase. I signed up in town as a temporary resident and saw the doctor and he set up a hospital appointment for me the very next day. It was like being in a very slow washing-machine. And then the letter came through from the consultant just yesterday. I’m all clear. I’m entirely normal! But here’s the thing. And it has to do with the photograph I was telling you about. It’s about ghosts and nakedness and superimposition. When I signed on at the local surgery I’d expected to see the GP who saw my father, but actually it was the old one, the other one, the doctor who used to be our family doctor, twenty years ago. Dr Scrivens is his name. He’s always given me the creeps. My mother couldn’t tolerate the thought of him and when she began to decline, through the disintegration of days and years following the point at which as she told me she was losing her marbles, she connected keeping her health with not seeing this doctor, and then the question came up of her seeing him. It would have been a sort of declaration that she was certifiably off her rocker. The whole prospect terrorised her. It delayed for weeks the very idea of getting her seen by anyone at all. In the end my father managed to get her transferred to another doctor. But then on some later occasion, to do with a graze on her leg that would not heal, my father took her along, sitting with her in the waiting room before guiding her through the door when called, virtually into the arms of Scrivens. Floating face-up in Alzheimer soup was she by then merely oblivious? Or did seeing this object of terror somehow return her to life, in the way that sometimes a tiny incident or chance encounter can trigger a massive recuperation, if only for a moment? All of this only comes back to me now when I find myself in the same trap. I am at the surgery and before I realise what’s happening there I am, just six feet away from him, and of course he has been expecting me, he’s had time to prepare, but our encounter is the strangest phantasmagory, his eyes shifting eerily into focus like binoculars on a death-camp. Naturally he smiles, and I too. It is Scrivens, unmistakably, twenty years later yet miraculously aged, as if from a fairytale. And perhaps he, almost completely gray-haired, fainter-eyed, experiences from head to toe the passage of a similarly wayward vibration: I will look twenty years older to him too. And any second, I know, because now it comes back to me, he’ll do that thing with his eyes, that ocular passover, coming out with the standard portrait, the medical gaze that all doctors are trained to impose. But for that crystalline split-second slice of replay, in which we set eyes upon the other, I’m seeing Scrivens in my mind’s eye seeing me, double strangers both, outstaring ghosts. That’s when I have this eureka thing, and I realise my theory.
What convinces me that he is having a breakdown? It is not when he goes on to outline the beautiful bareness, as he calls it, of his theory. Nor, perhaps more surprisingly, is it a few minutes later, when he drifts off into what, to anyone else, might seem demented singsong.
It is a question of veils, capes, sheets, shrouds, cloaks, blankets, quilts, mantles.
It’s too crazy for a cult. He realises that. And it might indeed remain for centuries illegible, incomprehensible or even imperceptible to the general public.
But a ray doesn’t constitute an analogy or ‘lively metaphor’ for a ghost. Rather, it is the other way round: it is necessary to think spectrality starting from the ray. There is no ghost without a trace of the ray. Everything that might be identifiable with the singularity of a living cape or gliding sheet comes back to this. Put crassly, the pallid underside of a ray is not like the bed-sheet whiteness of a spectre. The ray is at the origin. It’s the originary spook. Plato was already onto that, in the ray haunting Socrates and Meno. What people call the Gothic is a kind of anamorphic manifestation of the effects of the ray. The whole sprawling industry of ghosts and vampires is, in truth, largely a ray-phenomenon. Any moderately reflective reader might notice the importance of cloaks, mantles, shrouds, shawls and so on in the Gothic novel. It is necessary, however, to realise how integrally, how inextricably, this motif is folded into the figure or property of the ray, the living blanket or quilt. The bat is a red herring, in fishy phrase, dried and smoked, tried and tested, a making small and manageable of what is neither. What haunts is of greater scope, more minatory and dangerous, all-enfolding, from another element.
Broadly speaking, the manta and the vampire (or ‘vampyre’, in its earliest orthography) emerge at the same period, in the first half of the eighteenth century. That the latter (a fantasy) seems to owe something to the former (the real) might veritably be classed a no-brainer. We don’t know when exactly the word ‘manta’ (meaning ‘blanket’ or ‘cloak’) was first used to designate the rays now linked with that name, but it appears to have been originally used interchangeably with ‘quilt’. In Socratic spirit it is tempting to construe ‘quilt’ here in its other sense, namely as a reference to that point in the throat at which swallowing becomes involuntary, but Antonio de Ulloa in his Voyage to South America (1758) writes of the ways in which the negro slaves off the coast of Panama are fastened with ropes and forced to fish for pearls, ‘and the mantas, or quilts, either press them to death by wrapping their fins about them, or crush them against the rocks by their prodigious weight’. This is as shocking an evocation of the reality of slavery as it is a fictitious and absurd description of mantas. Despite their often great size, manta rays are of course completely harmless. De Ulloa goes on: ‘The name manta has not been improperly given to this fish, either with regard to its figure or property; for being broad and long like a quilt, it wraps its fins round a man or any other animal that happens to come within its reach, and immediately squeezes it to death. This fish resembles a thornback in shape, but is prodigiously larger.’ It seems unlikely that, for all his luminous childlike gifts as an actuary of the imaginary, Lewis Carroll had the ray in mind when he frabjously unveiled his portmanteau but, once the double meaning of ‘manta’ is registered, it seems equally difficult not to en
visage such a creature in the bag, so to speak, or lurking at any rate under his cloak. It is a question of a new imaginary, not a regression into the vagary of animistic belief, a restituted primitivism, but a thinking of the ray as a force, a trace, whether buried or dancing, in a quite different understanding of the spectre and the wake. Like a dream of excarnation without any possible fossilisation, dream as impossible fossil, there is a naked cape and it is alive. Rays to the ground: starting off in the substrate. It is a matter of a new teratology, an enantiodromic animism that is radically non-theological, nanothinking through the ray.
But next thing he is framing snatches of Clarence, speaking of ten thousand men that fishes gnawed upon, wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl, his internal marination, lengthening after life, in search of the empty, vast, and wand’ring air.
Gently I ask him what he’s talking about, but he’s hopped into blurred song, and I am inclined to think this is his way of acting off the slightly ‘possessed’ sense that he claims his theory has given him:
It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring, I see the doctor, I see the doctor and couldn’t get up in the morning, it’s roaring, marauding, we went to bed and deformed the head, of hearing and hoarding, who’s moaning, who’s speaking, it’s raining, it’s pouring, it’s howling, it’s calling, the moon rings, the moon sings, it’s paining, it’s spawning, wedged your head and went to bed, it’s feigning, it’s shoring, you hear the words are calling, cawing, they’re gnawing, and can’t get up in the can’t get up in the staining, it’s boring, she’s reigning, he’s fawning, I hear your voice, I know you’re dead, and can’t get up in the morning the morning the morning.
Such is the range of his more lyrical and impassioned traits. There’s nothing out of the ordinary here, I think. No, the horrifying conviction comes when he tells me about some writing project he’s begun elaborating and proceeds to read it aloud to me over the phone. It is a work of lexicography devoted to the buried life of anagrams and homophones, each word with its own idiosyncratic definition, a dictionaray, yes, as he is pleased to declare: the world’s first English dictionaray. It would be a verbal laboratory, a dictionary testamentary to the way the ray leaves its mark in everyday language, a vocabulary that might constitute a new species of bestiary, and generate an altogether other estuary English. He remarks that it is practically impossible to complete, particularly on account of the peculiarity of the adverb form in English, interminably stirring up as it does new terrain. And then he begins. With each new letter of the alphabet he pauses momentarily, then proceeds to the next series of words, giving each entry equal measure, enunciating throughout with customary care and scrupulosity (no doubt, it occurs to me, also his father’s). He reads it, in short, precisely in the manner of a poem. It takes me a while to get a grasp of what is going on:
A
Airy
Awry
Anniversary
Anteriority
Arraign
Arrange
Actuary
Afraid
Allegory
Amatory
Arty
Abrasion
Aurally
Absurdity
Already
Astronomy
Astrophysics
Arbitrary
Acrylic
Antiquary
Archetype
Archetypal
Apparatus
Alteration
Alterity
Abruptly
Army
Attractively
Admirably
Articulately
Apparently
Angry
Aleatory
Archaeology
Archery
Astray
Adversary
Ashtray
Aviary
Adoration
Anticipatory
Apothecary
Approvingly
Alary
Adultery
Adulterate
Asseveration
Accordingly
Accurately
Accelerate
Anywhere
B
Brae
Beray
Brain
Bleary
Binary
Betray
Berate
Brassy
Brazen
Braised
Barbarity
Break
Breakdown
Brake
Boundary
Braid
Bray
Brave
Balustrade
Battery
Brutality
Barely
Brace
Barley
Broadly
Beret
Bibliography
Biography
Bastardy
Brandy
Barmy
Bakery
Braille
Bestiary
Bizarrely
Brainy
Birthday
Bystander
C
Crafty
Centenary
Charade
Crystal
Chrysalis
Coronary
Carry
Combinatory
Category
Circularity
Culinary
Chivalry
Courageous
Concentration
Craven
Crayon
Cranny
Crazy
Contrary
Carvery
Centrality
Crane
Cranky
Crape
Crate
Crater
Consecrate
Creatively
Celebrate
Corroborate
Collaborate
Courtyard
Cradle
Crassly
Customary
Carpentry
Cartography
Carefully
Contradictory
Churchyard
Chrysanthemum
Commentary
Cinematography
Crayfish
Chlamydospore
Canary
Charmingly
Comfortably
Creamy
Cannery
Calibrate
Clairvoyant
Clearly
Carbohydrate
Cartilaginously
Certifiably
Constrain
Constraint
Certainty
Conspiracy
D
Derange
Diary
Dairy
Dictionary
Deprave
Dreary
Draughty
Deliberate
Deliberation
Drained
Disgraceful
Driveway
Desecrate
Dray
Drape
Derail
Disparity
Democracy
Dreamy
Dromedary
Debauchery
Dilatory
Decorate
Defloration
Dearly
Disarray
Dysphoria
E
Enrage
Exploration
Exploratory
Exhortatory
Extraordinary
Essayer
Earnestly
Entreaty
Errancy
Extravagancy
Erratically
Exaggerate
Eternally
Embrace
Experimentally
Estrange
Estuary
Early
Erase
Eraser
Entrails
Electrically
Entrain
Elementary
Exasperate
Extraneous
Eccentrically
Everyday
F
Frail
Frailty
Fragrant
Fragrancy
Freight
Fraternity
Freaky
Feathery
Fakery
Foray
Frugally
Fairytale
Fray
Frenetically
Faraway
Fainter-eyed
Fearsomely
Friday
Forsythia
Figuration
Foolhardy
Factory
Ferryboat
Frabjously
Frame
Framework
Filtration
G
Granary
Grange
Gyrate
Generate
Generically
Gray
Gravy
Grassy
Great
Grate
Granny
Grail
Grave
Graveyard
Graveside
Grain
Grammatology
Grammatically
Gravity
Gutturality
Grade
Grace
H
Hairy
Hoary
Hydra
Hydrate
Hilarity
Hysteria
Hysterical
Husbandry
Hairspray
Hearsay
Hardy
Holy-water
Hardly
Hierarchy
Hearty
Harmony
Heraldry
Hydrocephalic
I
Infirmary
Innovatory
Iconography
Irate
Irritably
Irascibly
Iracundity
Idiosyncratic
Infiltrate
Incorporate
Interchangeably
Irenically
Irrecoverably
Irreconcilably
Irreproachably
Ironically
Irradiate
Imagery
Incommensurably
Improbably
Irreciprocally
Irrecognisably
Irrealisably
Irrefutably
Irremediably
Irreparably
Invariably
Irrevocably
Irrecoverably
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