by Tom McCarthy
9.8 Before we left the Oceania room, Claudia showed me a large wooden dish across whose surface hundreds of red and white dots had been painted in a semi-regular pattern. These are from Australia, she said. The Aborigines made them. They’re sacred. More than sacred: they’re hermetic. The dots form a kind of cipher, whose key only a handful of the most senior elders are allowed to know. The younger ones can’t even see these dishes, let alone be let in on the key. The dishes were brought here in the forties, by an anthropologist: a German one, son of a Lutheran missionary who’d taken his family out there in the twenties. When the son brought these back to Frankfurt, Claudia explained, he set about cracking the cipher. Did he succeed? I asked. He did, Claudia answered. Look. She led me over to a nearby shelf, pulled out a book and flipped through its pages till she came to one on which the very dish she was still holding in her hand was drawn. On the page facing the drawing was a breakdown of the pattern of the dots, and, under that, what I presumed (the book was in German) was an explanation or translation of the text the dots embodied. This, said Claudia, is their codex. When the last Aborigine who understood the cipher died without passing the knowledge down, they sent a delegation here, to see this book. It served as a kind of cheat-sheet for them. It was a weird scene: we had all these Aborigines here, wearing their ceremonial garb, walking around Frankfurt. They were grateful to the museum, she continued—although, after they’d looked at the book, they requested that all copies be destroyed. How many copies were there? I asked. Not that many, she said. It was privately printed. Maybe twenty. They tried to buy them all up, on the Internet, but found that almost all of them were held in obscure libraries, or museums like this one. And what about this copy? I asked. How did you respond to their request? The issue’s unresolved, she told me. As for the dishes themselves, they were quite adamant that these must never be shown publicly. I shouldn’t even be showing this one to you. In fact, being female, I shouldn’t even be holding it. But you are, I said. Yes, she answered, I suppose I am.
9.9 While we were back in the main room, looking at a big sculpted figure that the fat, silent porter, on Claudia’s instructions, had lifted from one of the sliding storage-units and laid on the slab for us, Madison called me on my mobile. How on earth does a signal find its way through all this concrete? I asked Claudia. The Faraday cage’s metal acts as an aerial, she said. Who are you talking to? asked Madison. I’m looking at a totem pole, I said. That turns me on, said Madison. I looked down at the figure laid out on the white tissue beneath us. It was some kind of warrior-god, garish, daubed in yellow, black and scarlet, with a phallus stretching from his waist up to his chin; his face was twisted in an obscene leer. It’s like an alien autopsy, isn’t it? Claudia was saying, while Madison elaborated sex scenarios involving poles and savages. Listening to her, I started getting a hard-on, straining at the fabric (denim—selvage) of my trousers. Claudia didn’t notice, but the mute porter did.
9.10 As we drove back to the museum, we traded news about our contemporaries from university. A third of them had gone to the developing world, to work for NGOs; another third were, like me, working in the corporate sector; the remaining third were academics. Claudia was the only one to have involved herself with what she again called material culture. As we crossed a bridge in the city’s centre, I could see, on one side of the river, the new headquarters of the European Central Bank being built; on the other, in a row, the town’s museums—all of them: architectural, cinematic, natural-historical and so on—housed, like the anthropological one, in old villas. Further away, spires of cathedrals that had somehow survived wartime blitzing poked out above modern glass and metal. One of the huge cranes building the Bank’s HQ was turning as we drove; the box from which the cables carrying the crane’s load descended was sliding along the jib-arm, which itself was swinging horizontally across the air. The box was sliding fast, and the arm was swinging fast, and we were driving fast as well; and it appeared, just for a moment, that the box, though hurtling along the moving arm, was staying quite still, rooted to a single spot of air. But only from the speeding car, there on the bridge.
9.11 On the flight back to London, as the stewardess gave me a cup, or I removed a teaspoon from its packet, or folded down and up the tray-table in the seat-back just in front of me, the term material culture played and replayed itself in my mental airspace, like a snatch of a stuck record. I couldn’t help but see these things—this table, teaspoon, cup—as tribal objects. Also adjustable air-conditioning nozzles, slide-down blinds, Velcro-fitted head-rest covers, motion-sickness bags, buttons with human icons on them and the like. Aliens, after all trace of us has disappeared bar the small handful of our corpses they’ll preserve for intermittent laying out on their tissue-coated slabs, will have whole bunkers full of these things, stuffed into naphthalene-laced cabinets, twenty of each spilling out of every drawer, and wonder what the fuck they were all for. Before we’d left the building, Claudia and I had ducked into the other two rooms, those housing the artifacts from the Americas and Africa. These rooms had been similarly crammed with objects—drums and bracelets, loincloths, Día de los Muertos figurines—but in the second room, the Africa one, a particular item had held my attention more than all the others. It wasn’t, properly speaking, an item: just a lump of some black substance, all unformed, whose rugby ball–sized mass consisted of no more than tubers and protuberances knotted and gnarled together every which way. It’s caoutchouc, Claudia had said, seeing me staring at it: rubber, in its raw form. Now, looking through the window at the bulbous clouds that, once again, were slightly smudged, I thought of this caoutchouc; then of Petr’s cancer; then, once more, of spilled oil.
10.
10.1 I spent most of the next week honing in my head the presentation that I should have given back in Frankfurt. Consider, gentlemen, the Oil Spill. Oil spills considered as. Considered as a function of or symbol for. When, gentlemen, we consider. No: Consider, then (yes, then, like the consideration followed naturally from the preceding one—although there wasn’t a preceding one: the proposition just confirmed itself, which made it irrefutable)—consider, then, the Oil Spill. Any oil spill. There’s always one happening … In my mind’s eye, the hi-tech modern conference hall morphed into a nineteenth- or even eighteenth-century auditorium: steep-banked rows of wooden benches, an audience made up exclusively of men with bushy sideburns and high collars, pipe- and cigar-smoke mingling with murmurs of approval in air already thick with erudition and just plain old age—although I still had a projector wi-fi’d to a sensor on my index finger, split-second responsive …
10.2 There’s always an oil spill happening, I’d say. Which is why. That’s the reason, gentlemen. Which, gentlemen, is the reason we can name it in the singular: the Oil Spill—an ongoing event whose discrete parts and moments, whatever their particular shapes and vicissitudes (vicissitudes! I’d susurrate the word time and again), have run together, merged into a continuum in which all plurals drown. Click. Here, gentlemen, you see a tanker trailing its long, black tail. Click. Here are vinyl-coated rocks; and here—click—a PVC-hemmed coastline. Nature got up in her fetish gear, her gimp-outfit. Click. Here’s one showing men with body-suits and gloves pacing a taped-off beach the way forensic detectives do at crime scenes. Click. Here’s a video-file: a close-up sequence, captured by a hand-held underwater camera, of a few feet of seabed. Note the way the semi-hardened oil stretches and folds as the diver’s hand lifts it. Can you see the look on his face? Come, now, come: of course you can. It is the fascinated look your own one had when, as a child, you stood (didn’t you?) rooted to the pavement in front of a candy-store window in which taffy was being pulled, transfixed by the contortions of the unmanageably huge lump—what child, I ask you, gentlemen, could eat all that?—as the machine’s arms plied it, its endless metamorphoses as. Stretched and folded, stretched and slapped. Alchemy. Metamorphosis. Material culture.
10.3 I worked on this imaginary presentation during down-moments: while I wa
s walking around, say, or taking a bath, or staring at Madison’s ceiling after sex, or at my office’s wall during intervals between two bits of proper work—in other words, pretty much all the time. Oil, gentlemen, I’d say, is hydrophobic: it recoils from water. This is not a tendency or quirk of oil: it is an elemental property that defines it at its very core, shaping its micelles, hydrocarbons, atoms. Oil and water, as the old adage goes, do not mix. So what are we observing when we watch these elements con. When we watch them introduced to. When we watch these liquids thrown together? You might say that we’re observing ecological catastrophe, or an indictment of industrial society, or a parable of mankind’s hubris. Or you might say, more dispassionately, that we’re observing a demonstration of chemical propensities. But the truth is that, behind all these episodes. Dramas: beneath these. Beneath all these dramas, I’d say, and before them, we’re observing, simply (gentlemen), differentiation. Differentiation in its purest form: the very principle of differentiation. Ones and zeros, p and not-p: oil, water. Behind all behaviour, issuing instructions, sending in the plays—just as behind life itself, its endless sequencing of polymers—there lies a source-code. This is the base premise of all anthropology.
10.4 At this point in these scripted fantasies, I’d pause to take a sip of Evian, or some such. There’d be a hush as delegates waited for me to carry on. A gesture to the screen as I’d name, once more, the substance filling it: Oil—then, smiling, I’d sweep my hand back towards the bottle, and say: Water. The theatrical manoeuvre sucked them in completely: they were mine. Where one is, I’d tell them, the other cannot be. When we encounter, then, as we do often after spills—click—an oily sea, a sea whose body, while it still performs the functions and ceremonies of a sea—flowing, lapping, breaking into waves and the like—has become dark and ponderous, what we’re in fact encountering is not a sea at all. It’s oil that has ousted the sea, usurped it, packed it off into exile and assumed its position. It’s a putsch, a coup d’état. Another pause to let the metaphor take hold. And yet, I’d say (unpacking it into full-blown conceit now), the usurper has kept all the infrastructure of the ancien régime in place, the rules and regulations governing its rhythms and activities. The judiciary and legislature have decided, for their own tactical reasons—for even minerals, gentlemen, display an instinct for self-preservation—to comply fully with the new executive: the same laws of gravity and motion apply as did before; the same day-to-day, minute-to-minute patterns play out as on any other day and as at any other minute; and for many subjects (low-level constituents whose collective toil produces currents, eddies, tides) there’s no sign that the coup has taken place at all. If they do know, they don’t seem to mind; they even seem to welcome the regime-change. And why shouldn’t they? It’s an improvement. Oil has more consistency than water: it is denser, more substantial—and thus brings the latter into its own more fully, expressing the sea’s splendour in a manner more articulate, more something. In a manner more poetic. No, more lyrical: the sea’s splendour in a manner far more lyrical than that in which the original ever did. When you watch swell and surf rolling through a sea that’s turned to oil, is it not like watching the whole process in slow motion? All the grace of a wave rendered through high-end visual software that manages to hold and frame each moment without interrupting or arresting. Something to do with sport: when you can see the football’s backspin. And the net’s grid, exploding. Perfection.
10.5 A swell would, every time, be building up inside the hall at this point in the lecture, nods and murmurs turning into exclamations of excitement; and I’d ride it into the next sentence, leaning forward on my podium. Thus, gentlemen, I’d say, the ocean’s choreography, which for so long has held such fascination for us, is made sharper, more momentous: it is amplified. With this word, amplified, the swell would break into a foaming, multi-voiced cry of huzzah!, surging down the banked rows towards me. Letting it wash past me, then holding its edge back again by raising my wi-fi-enabled finger, I’d continue: The same goes for all those animals you see—click—on stricken beaches: tar-drenched birds who float bewilderedly in blackened rock-pools, or—click—stare out stoically from atop tarry boulders. Robbed of flight, immobilized, humiliated in an almost ritual manner (and doesn’t the inversion make the custom even crueler? Feathers first, then pitch!), they become instant martyrs—and, in so becoming, are infused with all the pathos and nobility of tragic heroes. Living Pompeiians! Victims of the oil Gorgon! They, too, are improved—yes, gentlemen, improved: augmented, transformed into monumental versions of themselves, superior by the same token as statues are bigger, better versions of historic people. Even the rocks on which they perch are granted status and significance by having their forms so meticulously re-molded by the oil that duplicates them half a centimetre beyond their own mass’s natural boundary. Ask any sculptor: to recast even the dullest object is to celebrate it, to align it with its essence at the very moment this emerges, becomes manifest. Has oil not done this to these rocks? Of course it has, with a panache that’s the more brilliant for its simplicity: it has made them rockier.
10.6 At this point in my speech a lone, indignant figure in the auditorium’s back row would pipe up: Shame, sir! Shame! The atmosphere would tense up: a dissenter! I would peer over my glasses, see the wheel-mounted carry-on bag standing at my critic’s side and immediately recognize him: it was my old neighbour from Turin—suit on, tie off—bemoaning in his best Eurozonese this spectacle of nature’s defilement; denouncing my aestheticizing of it. Me? I’d ask him, glancing exaggeratedly around and behind me for effect; I’m “aestheticizing” it? Gentlemen, I’d reason, opening my arms up to my serried ranks of allies; was it not he who first used the term tragedy? Cheers, rising from hundreds of chests in unison, drowned out his protests: the exchange in the transit lounge was universal knowledge; they all knew that I was right. Who, I’d continue, cast the first aesthetic stone? The truth is, that these people’s (for behind this man there lay a much larger constituency: they’d be there, too, dotted about the streets around the conferencing centre, and in homes throughout the city, and in other cities, purchasing ecologically sourced products, sponsoring zoo animals and so forth)—these people’s entire mindset is a product of aesthetics. Bad aesthetics, at that: misguided and ignorant. They dislike the oil spill for the way it makes the coastline look “not right,” prevents it from illustrating the vision of nature that’s been handed down from theologians to romantic poets to explorers, tourists, television viewers: as sublime, virginal and pure. Kitsch, I tell you (here I’d thump my fist onto the podium, three times in quick succession): kitsch, kitsch, kitsch! And wrong: for what is oil but nature? Rock-filtered organic compounds—animal, vegetable and mineral—broken down and concentrated by the planet’s very crust: what could be purer than that? When oil splatters a coastline, Earth wells back up and reveals itself; nature’s hidden nature gushes forth. The man who brings this gushing-forth about—the drunk ship’s captain, oversightful engineer or negligent safety officer, or, behind these, the oil magnate, or, behind even him, the collective man whose body, faceless and compound as oil itself, is the corporation—he should be considered a true environmentalist: nature’s more honest intermediary, its loyaler servant. The cheers, at this point, grew quite deafening; the argument was won; and my foe would be evicted from the building, whimpering as blows rained down on him.
10.7 The atmosphere inside the auditorium was, by now—each time—ecstatic. With the casting-out of this sad bleater, a new society, bound in brotherhood of truth and love of oil spills, had been founded. In anticipation of this moment, I’d cued up a second video-file that showed dead fish lolling around congealed oil on the sea’s floor. The slowness of this scene (it had been edited by Daniel for maximum effect) was lulling, soothing. Look, I’d say in a quiet voice after we’d all watched the footage, mesmerized, in silence for a while; look at these fishes’ eyes. They’re black and opaque. And rightly so: for aren’t eyes windows to the soul?
If you cut open these fish—ichthyomancy, I believe, is the correct. In former times, the appellation for this would have been. Wolfskin-clad men who. If you cut open these fish, you would find oil inside their liver, kidneys, brain and heart. It’s what’s most intimate to them—what, of them, has survived. Look at the mild underwater current roll them slightly one way, then another. See how their bodies seem to merge with the black mass, then to emerge from it again: belly, gill or tail-edge first, producing strange, outlandish, not-quite-fish shapes. Does it not look as though they were regressing to some previous stage in the evolutionary cycle—not just their own, but that of the whole universe? To some interim state of mutation, one in which all forms are up for grabs? Dice in the air, the roulette ball still zipping round the wheel’s rim: anything is possible! God’s first act, we are told, was to conjoin and divide as he moved through the waters. This, then, is the primal deed replaying itself—but godlessly, driven and orchestrated by the whims of matter alone. It’s all the more sacred for that, gentlemen, because all the more true. Nature is senseless. And nature is dirty.