A remarkable man. A man who, thought Victor, had seen the bloody obvious and had simply stated it. Virtually alone among more than a billion people.
In the Absence of Mirthful Women
Orange. The walls were orange. “Orange,” said Victor to himself to fix the idea in his head. He was fifty years old, and he had only just discovered that if he didn’t convert images into words, if he didn’t articulate them to himself, nothing or very little remained of them.
Two incidents had led him to this discovery: the first of these was when a woman asked him the color of the eyes of his beloved son, who was then twenty-one. To her and his own astonishment, he couldn’t recall. He had no idea, in fact. Until the next time he met his son and looked and said to himself “blue, with tints of green.” Then, quite recently, Helen had remarked to him: “What wonderful flowers there are on the lilac trees in your garden.” Flowers? On a tree? His tree? He had never seen them. Despite the fact that every time he took a piss in his bathroom, he stared at or through this tree standing in front of the window.
Am I autistic or what, Victor laughed to himself? It was true, though. He had been to dozens of cities which he had never seen. He could recall nothing of them at all. It had taken him more than a year to notice the address of the street in which he actually lived, despite the fact that various bureaucracies wrote to him there and that he could have noticed the address on the envelopes in which he found his post. No one ever believed these stories. Well, nothing to do about that!
How did others register and remember what they saw? Was it their unconscious or subconscious minds at work or whatever it was that he was bereft of? Without words, he saw, he remembered nothing at all. How curious, he thought.
Yes, the walls of the pub are orange. How incredible that I never remarked this before, though I have stared at them often.
“Harry, did you notice the color of the walls here?” asked Victor.
“Orange. Bloody hideous,” said Harry without raising his eyes from his beer.
Harry was a philistine and proud of it. When they first met, at the embassy in Paris, Victor thought that Harry was feigning his complete ignorance of all forms of culture; that he was simply trying to avoid intellectual engagement, for his own best reasons. Victor soon realized his error when he saw that colleagues invited Harry to go for a walk when journalists, writers, artists and intellectuals came to the embassy to participate in their occasional briefing meetings about the state of French society and the French mind.
Harry ‘did’ business, trade, economic issues. Unfortunately for the embassy and presumably the nation’s affairs, it soon became clear to everyone that there was virtually no one to whom they could introduce Harry. In France, even a sub-secretary of state for the budget or a supermarket chain owner had most likely written a book or two about nineteenth century poetry and would prefer to talk about Rimbaud and Baudelaire over lunch before finally getting to public deficits at coffee time. Harry had soon been moved back to London, where his cultural deficiencies went unnoticed. In time, Victor too had returned to the ministry before they had both been sent abroad again.
As was their wont at least twice a week, Harry and Victor were spending the evening together drinking in the pub.
“So, how’s Yorick?” asked Harry.
“He’s doing fine, thanks. I’m getting very fond of him. I think he likes me too.”
“I forgot to ask you what he can say. You must have taught him a fair bit by now.”
Victor had, if not dreaded, at least been glad to avoid this moment.
“Yes, indeed! A few words here and there. He’s quite a talkative fellow these days.”
“What kind of things?” asked Harry.
“Well, for example … ‘bollocks.’”
Harry nodded and laughed. He clearly thought that this was the appropriate kind of thing to teach a parrot.
“What else? I know you have a rich vocabulary when it comes to profanity.”
“Well, in truth bollocks wasn’t my idea,” said Victor. “It came along with Yorick from the shop where I bought him. I’ve, well, taken a different tack … other kinds of things.”
“Such as?”
“You know, the odd thought or maxim.”
“Don’t be so bloody coy,” said Harry. “Give us one.”
“All is provisional,” mumbled Victor guiltily.
“Hang on. You taught your parrot to say ‘All is provisional’?”
“Yes, why not?”
“Nothing, apart from the fact that I have no idea what it means. What else?”
“Every man is an island.”
Harry grimaced. “Have you lost the plot, or what? You’re having me on, aren’t you, Vic?”
Victor sighed. “No. Let me explain.”
He did his best, keeping it simple. Harry didn’t after all expect him to teach the parrot to say “Play it again, Sam!” or “Hello, how are you?” or “I’m a Barbie doll,” did he? Victor said that he would like Yorick to express real thoughts, not lines from films or pop songs or whatever other people taught their birds. Personally, he thought he was being original, or at least different.
Harry looked sceptical but didn’t want to know more. Except: “What are you working on now with him?” Victor had explained before how much time it took to teach Yorick anything.
“Good question. I’m struggling with something meaningful to teach him about truth”.
“Bloody hell.”
Victor smiled. “It’s not as easy as one might assume. I’ve been playing around with ‘Truth is beautiful’. I’ve thought about it a lot. I can’t come up with anything better than that for the moment. What do you think Harry?”
“Truth is truth,” said Harry with aplomb, as though there was absolutely nothing else whatsoever that one could say about it. “But frankly, I’m beginning to feel rather very pissed. Do you think we could possibly manage another one?—You’re beginning to sound incoherent too.”
“Let us have wine and women’s mirth and laughter,” replied Victor. “Sermons and soda water the day after”.
“In the absence of mirthful women,” said Harry, casting a mournful look around an almost empty pub, “I guess we have to be satisfied with wine, or rather beer. That’s very good and clever, though. Nicely put.”
“Byron,” said Victor.
“Byron who?”
“Byron, Lord.”
“Byron Lord?” said Harry. “Never heard of him.”
Truth is truth, thought Victor as they downed a last pint. Christ, Harry, I think you’re right, you old bastard. You may not know Byron—I can’t really believe that, but who knows—but you do get to the point, get to the heart of things easily.
Harry looked far away, clearly thinking of other things entirely or, indeed, nothing at all.
Strangling One’s Neighbors
According to that year’s laureate of the Abel Prize, the ‘mathematicians Nobel’ as it was usually termed, science had come up against and was stuck with three major enigmas. Firstly, the mystery of the universe, or more correctly “the universes,” since current estimates put the number of them somewhere between ten and five hundred. In short, we knew little or nothing about our universe and even less about the others. Secondly, the mystery of life: what had created it? The probabilities that it should actually have come into being were extremely low. “The odds,” said the laureate, “were so small that it should not even have happened, and we don’t know why it did.” Today still, we had no idea how a cell functioned. The third enigma? The human mind, read Victor. “It’s fantastically complicated,” said the laureate. “We haven’t got even the beginning of a clue about how it works.”
Just so, thought Victor as he pondered over an interview with this Abel prize winner in his morning newspaper. Despite all the background noise from the psychiatric community emitted day and night about the motivations for every aberrant human act in society, little or nothing was known about the mind, that was clear
. He was pleased to have his opinion about this confirmed by such a worthy source. Together, by chance, with his views on education. For the laureate had also said: “The whole purpose of education is to get into the machinery of the human mind. But the key still hasn’t been found. And yet there is practically no research about education. Everybody thinks he knows how to teach.”
Victor was happy to leave the exploration of the universe—or universes, as he had just now discovered—and the origin of life to those who had time for it and were much better placed than he. And when they came up with credible theories, even if only provisional, backed with good, reasonable arguments, if not concrete evidence, he would readily accept their findings. Magnanimously. But the mind … This field, thought Victor, belongs equally to all of us. We all possess one, for a start. And personally he would accept nothing about it except that which he could verify, ‘in house’, as it were. He felt that he had indeed started, by denying the existence even of the unconscious in his own.
He recalled that Nietzsche had once written something very clever about the evolution of consciousness, though Victor couldn’t remember in which work. He had postulated that when the Greeks, or the Romans, both probably, had thought the gods were talking to them, thought that they heard voices and instructions from the heavens, what was actually happening was that they were hearing only their own thoughts and injunctions and mistakenly assuming that they were coming from somewhere else. Perhaps they were hearing their objective minds, Victor now wondered. Had anyone followed up on that? He didn’t know and would have to check. But what intrigued Victor was that it could just perhaps be true. And that if it were so, it would indicate that in the short space of just two to three thousand years (though preparations had presumably been underway long before that) the very nature and configuration of man’s brain, which we now knew was highly malleable, had likely changed. For man had come to realize, to recognize and to assimilate the fact that these voices were his very own. With the exception of Joan of Arc, of course, and a few dozen other saints, who thought that they came from a celestial location. Was such brain transformation possible in so relatively short a time? Why not? We knew nothing about it, in any case.
Once, when visiting the Château at Versailles, Victor had tagged along with his group into the celebrated Hall of Mirrors. He barely paid attention to the guide, droning on about this or that, mainly useless dimensions and statistics—three hundred and fifty seven mirrors covering seventeen arcades and so on and so on—except when he overheard her explaining that they were not only looking at themselves but at a breathtaking breakthrough in mirror technology and that its social and perhaps psychological consequences had been far-reaching and even today not fully understood.
It had only been in the fifteenth century, she said, that Venetian mirror makers had perfected the secret art of making large, flat mirrors backed with an amalgam of tin and mercury, creating a flourishing market for these expensive luxuries among royalty and nobility. (Victor supposed that the poor, common people were still staring into ponds, as they had been doing for thousands of years). Much later, a jealous Louis XIV had engaged in a little industrial espionage and lured some of these experts away from their island of Murano to come and make this gallery at Versailles, breaking the Venetians’ complete monopoly on large and flat mirror making.
While on previous séjours and visits, and at balls in the Château, the aristocrats and various hangers-on had been called upon to admire vast tapestries, immense mural paintings and sundry other pictures promoting the glory of the royal lineage, great hunting scenes and victorious battles, they now had the infinitely greater pleasure of looking at themselves, standing there together with their friends, whole groups, for the first time. Actors in their own tableaux vivants.
Everything that began with the nobility eventually filtered down to the ordinary man, and it was thus also with these mirrors. They in time became much cheaper and even commonplace. At first, rare, costly, small reflectors which had at one time been symbols of the sacred and divine, they gradually lost their magic luster and began to reflect everyday reality and, of course, common vanity. Both the nobles and everybody else started to examine more closely their appearances and visages and, perhaps, to think a little more about themselves and how others regarded them.
Victor had been so taken by this story that on returning to England he had sought out and bought a little Book of the Mirror, a collection of essays on the “cultural history” of this artifact published by Cambridge Scholars.
One or two of these scholars had set off on the same tracks that he was now himself exploring. On his return from the café that morning, he took the collection from his bookshelf to remind himself of some of the ideas that he had previously marked up and then forgotten. At the time, he hadn’t at all suspected that he would come back to them but in any case had always underlined phrases and whole sections in books that struck him as interesting.
One of the writers had recounted that his younger brother had once worked in a factory where he was the only white laborer. One day, he had caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror down a hallway and thought: “What is that white boy doing here?” He thought he had seen a stranger, then recognized himself.
Victor thought immediately of an old Jewish story that he had heard and loved, for reasons that escaped him—but only, he was sure, because he hadn’t bothered much to think about them. It was perhaps his favorite joke. He told it to himself anew, as he often did with stories that made him laugh:
A rabbi was travelling through the country with his disciple. When it got dark they stopped at an inn for the night. It was their last evening together, since the disciple was obliged to leave very early the next morning to catch a train home, alone. The disciple briefed the innkeeper to wake him before dawn and not to disturb the rabbi, with whom he was sharing a room. The innkeeper did as he was told. He got up in the middle of the night, gently and noiselessly woke the disciple and fumbling around in the dark helped him to dress. The disciple set off to the station on foot, well in time for his train. When he arrived at the station, he went into the waiting room and then saw himself, for the first time that morning, in a large mirror covering one of the walls. The innkeeper had given him the wrong set of clothes, and he was dressed as a rabbi!! “That bloody fool of an innkeeper,” he exclaimed out loud. “I clearly asked him to wake ME, not the rabbi!”
In another essay of the book, he had put crosses and lines around a ‘mirror-recognition’ study on babies. This was interesting. The study had found from observation that children up to the age of twenty-four months were unable to recognize themselves. To establish this, the researcher had put a spot of rouge on one side of their noses and waited to see if they touched it. None of them did, though they recognized their mothers behind them in the mirror. By the age of six months, the infants began smiling and playing with their reflections in the mirror but treated them as though they were other children. At one year, they started to search behind the mirror for these other playmates. It was only as they grew towards their second birthdays that a majority of the children in the experiments began to register that they were observing themselves. And then became coy, embarrassed, clownish or self-admiring as they confronted what they now perceived as their own images.
What can I conclude from that, wondered Victor? He read on. A certain George Gallup believed that self-recognition in mirrors meant self-awareness. He had said: “You become the object of your own attention. You are aware of being aware. And that, in turn, allows you to make inferences about comparable states of awareness in others.” Aware of being aware? That was certainly true, thought Victor. I’m sure that’s the beginning of consciousness and, eventually, objectivity. As for the inferences about others, which should in his mind normally lead to empathy, this struck him as far less prevalent and automatic.
Before closing the book, Victor read in another chapter about the Wild Boy of Aveyron, the naked and speechless child, presumably abando
ned, captured in the French woods at the end of the eighteenth century. Taken in by a physician who endeavored over several years to give him an education, to teach him to speak, this child, who was twelve at the time, was never able, then or later, to recognize himself in a mirror. His mind did not visibly develop either, despite the good doctor’s efforts.
Victor replaced the book on the shelf and wandered into the bathroom to take a look at himself. “Hello,” he said to the mirror. “How are you today?” I do not look amused, Victor thought. It was not a face that he liked. As with everything else about him, it could have been otherwise, but it was thus. He could have been handsome or at least appeared interesting. He was neither. And so what? What else? I have no opinion about my torso, he thought, though my shoulders might have been just a little squarer. I like the hairs on my chest, just the right level of pilosity for my taste, no more no less. I have a very cute arse, like most men, even though my belly is fat, but that’s my fault. He loved his knees, truly. Not for aesthetic reasons, all knees looked stupid, even those of top models, but because they made him terribly nostalgic. He rolled up his trouser legs to take a look at them again. They were covered in scars, and in his memory he saw them bleeding again, without pain but rather colorfully. The heritage of a misspent childhood. With the discussion of ideas absent from his education, he had thrown his heart and soul with passion into playing football, before school, in the breaks, at lunchtime, in the evening. Unfortunately, there was no grass space in the school’s playground or in the streets in which they lived, and they had played on concrete. Those boys who never received the ball, to whom no one ever passed, because they were either stupid and disliked or useless at the game, often compensated for their abandonment by slipping a foot in front of any passing ballplayer and bringing him smack to the concrete ground, often ripping open his knees. This happened to Victor a lot. And he was immensely fond of these scars which brought back all those joys to him. He also liked his feet, not so much for their shape, though this wasn’t disagreeable, but for their loyalty. They had walked a considerable number of miles together and he couldn’t remember a single complaint from them.
Homo Conscius Page 14