A Whistling Woman

by A. S. Byatt

  “It’s hard. It’s hard to describe.” Marcus was ill-at-ease with language. “You can move real numbers around on paper, or by doing experiments in your head. I don’t believe in the infinites in the same way. They may only be flashes in the brain—which we need to think about numbers at all.”

  It was a long time since he had talked to anyone about the nature of things. He became very vaguely aware of Hodgkiss’s physical presence. Hodgkiss watched him draw circles on the white damask with his fingers, and made an instinctive effort to appear even more mild and unthreatening.

  Marcus said hesitantly that it was true that Cantor’s proof—and infinite sets—were in a way like a religion. He approached the word with a fastidious distress. The finite numbers, he said, were the visible universe. They were there even if our human descriptions of them and their nature were wrong—certainly they were incomplete. The infinities were like angels. Forms of forms.

  “Did Wittgenstein hate angels? Did he think they were all really demons? Oddly, I feel the infinities with the whole of my body, not only my mind—they don’t feel cerebral. I feel as though I’m in them, I am them—as opposed to observing them. It’s possible I can’t so to speak get out of them because human beings made them up.”

  He smiled at Hodgkiss, who thought his rare smile, both innocent and beautiful, transfigured him.

  “Do you understand that at all?”

  “By analogy. I have to substitute other things—things I do understand—for the infinities I don’t. But I know about thinking with the whole body, and observing with the mind. The connection between the two, as well as the difference.”

  Marcus gave a little sigh.

  “Angels were fanciful. The burning angel with a sword at the gate of Paradise. I’ll tell you something I don’t tell people. When I was a little boy, I used to be able to do mathematical problems by visualising a garden. Visualising isn’t the right word. Seeing a garden. And the mathematical forms were in the garden, branching things, hills and stones, a fountain. Angelic trees and hills and stones. They were different colours, or no colours, transparent things. I used to release the problem into the garden and—if you can understand—see the answer.”

  “I don’t really understand,” said Hodgkiss, truthfully. He was trained to be truthful. “I imagine a kind of lifesize pinball machine, which can’t be what you mean. Is it like unheard music? The score of a symphony, perfect and unplayed?”

  “Pinballs isn’t bad. Those machines remind me of that. It didn’t keep still. There were spiralling paths round the fountain and spiralling branches round the trees. The branching things were animal and mineral too, I think—things like the dendrites and the bronchi, things like branching forms in shattered crystals or snow.”

  “Can you still—so to speak—visit it?”

  Marcus shivered a very little and hunched his shoulders.

  “I got ill, when I was a teenager. Bad things happened. It was scary. I lost it then.”

  “Closed out of Paradise. A pity.”

  “I did think I was going mad.”

  He was no longer looking at the philosopher. Hodgkiss told him lightly and conversationally that Francis Galton had collected a large number of accounts written by people who visualised landscapes or colour-plans or staircases, in order to do maths. They were mostly surprised to find they were not alone. Galton himself worked that way.

  “He could visualise a slide-rule, and read it,” Marcus contributed.

  “And you are working on thinking machines, on the brain as a computer.”

  “I’m trying to. I’m getting nowhere. It’s all to do with concept-forming and decision-making. I like the idea of machines that recognise patterns—but artificial intelligence is all to do with throwing switches and discrete modules. Number-crunching. A primitive automat that mimics a limited number of operations in the brain. Whereas what I want to do—” he hesitated—“what I want to do—is—”

  He was not accustomed to thinking in terms of what he wanted, and was struck dumb by the novelty of saying what it was.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I want—to look at how numbers—do—inhere in things. I want to understand why certain things grow in the Fibonacci spiral. Twigs round branches, branches round the stem of trees. Daisy flowers and sunflowers. Some snails and pine-cones. You’d need a combination of maths, and physics, and cell biology, and ... I want to solve phyllotaxis.”

  “Alan Turing’s obsession,” said Hodgkiss. “As I understand it, his imaginary thinking-machine is behind Calder-Fluss’s work and your bit of that. Wittgenstein said the whole system of mathematical logic was just what he called a “language-game” with human rules. Turing said that if there was a contradiction in your calculus, the bridge you built using it would fall down.”

  Marcus had a brief vision of an imaginary bridge, stemming piles, curved arches, suspended arcs, and its disintegration into flying particles.

  “It isn’t just a game,” he contributed.

  “Turing went around with his pockets full of pine-cones to demonstrate the mystery of phyllotaxis. He hoped to be able to improve his machines—real and imaginary—to solve things like that. Things like the growth of embryos, and the spread of regular patterns on zebra-skins and in moths and feathers—”

  “I didn’t know that. We need real machines that work faster and better. But I think it can be done ...”

  “Then you should be working on that, shouldn’t you? Life’s short.”

  “I don’t know the physics. I don’t know the cell biology. It’s horribly hard. Horribly hard.”

  There was a light in his eyes.

  “You should talk to Wijnnobel. He worked on Fibonacci at one point. He believes in stepping over demarcation lines. He’d like to think of you doing physics and cell biology and algorithms ...”

  Hodgkiss ordered a chocolate soufflé described in the menu as “wickedly dark.” Marcus, at ease again, even animated, remarked that the maths of the expansion of egg-foam was also interesting. Hodgkiss turned the hot liquid and the brittle crust on his tongue.

  “You are interested in everything except other people.”

  “I’m not much good at people.”

  “Jacqueline likes you?”

  “She makes all the effort. She’s got a lot of energy. She’s had a bad time.”

  “She appeared to be settling for Lysgaard-Peacock?”

  “Something went wrong. She’s unhappy.”

  “Nothing to do with you?”

  Marcus twisted in his seat.

  “No, no, not to do with me.”

  Hodgkiss saw that if he were to continue this delicate almost-intimacy he would have to eschew the pleasures of gossip. He felt carried away, his own blood humming, into some other world of extremes, transparent trees, infinite ranks of angels on sharp shining pinheads, long colourless lashes over troubled, liquid, evasive eyes. He was fishing in a glassy sea with a fine hook. The sensation was as pleasurable as the bitterness of the chocolate, as the white-gold-sap-green colour of the swaying wine in Marcus’s glass. Language and Love, he had told Marcus, were his way to infinite sets. Marcus responded to neither. At that moment that made his delight keener, though in the end he might be pursuing, not an angel, but a demonic wildfire in an infinite swamp.

  Chapter 15

  From Brenda Pincher to Avram Snitkin

  Well, here we all are in Dun Vale Hall. We call ourselves a Therapeutic Community, but there’s an obvious sense (to a sociologist at least) in which we are an embryonic religious cult. I feel I’m in on something very exciting, and at the same time, I have to confess I’m a little scared. This kind of group enthusiasm, not to say passion, is unknown territory. I will try to go on making recordings, and to keep a scientific record. I wish you could ever bring yourself to answer any of my letters. It’s going to be much harder to send them from inside this rather remote place. I think we can’t now be too far from where you are, if you are where I think you are
, or were. For God’s sake Avram, answer this letter. Though come to think of it, how can you, now I’m a full-time inmate? How will the post work; what will be our communications with the outside world? I am hoping to be able to get this letter posted when someone goes shopping. I shall try to worm my way into the shopping detachment, which there will have to be.

  People are already talking about self-sufficiency in food, and tilling our land ourselves. This is complicated by two things. One is that winter is coming. We’re about, indeed, to celebrate the Solstice, and tilling anything is an idealistic dream (which some of us are rather relieved about). The second is that the Manichees didn’t till things. They believed in not torturing the earth or harming its creatures. Joshua Ramsden gives talks—sermons—on the “gentle Manichees” on certain evenings. They were divided into the Elect and the Hearers. The Elect never tortured the earth, or any trees, or creatures, and ate only food provided by the Hearers. The Hearers accrued merit by feeding the Elect. Joshua rather charmingly said that he felt that all of us were Hearers, and none of us were, or should behave as if we were, Elect. He went on to say that the Manichees had believed that eating, like sex, continued the entrapment of Light in Matter, and that eating animals, who were more complicated organisms, “degenerated” more light. He said that the Manichees ate only vegetables. This appealed to the Quakers, many of whom are Vegans anyway. Again, he didn’t prescribe what anyone had to do. He just made it clear what he meant to do.

  Two of the activities that weld groups into communities (cults) are well under way. One is hard work. The other is ceremonies.

  The hard work is simple. Or was, to start with. The house used to belong to Lucy Nighby whom I’ve mentioned. Does belong to her, legally, I suppose, though she speaks of it as a “gift.” It had been shut up, since her fracas with her husband. What is happening now is a ferocious stripping and destruction of everything that was in the building “before the Hearers.” Not exactly (yet) the kitchen range, which is built-in and antique, but all the bedroom furniture, chairs etc. We all carry things out to huge bonfires near the midden (I’m not really sure what a midden is, but a mucky bit of the farmyard). We have burned a lot of chairs and tables and bedding. Including the children’s nursery furniture and cot. One or two of the Quakers made the reasonable point that it would be better to give these perfectly decent bits and chattels to the needy. But Lucy and Joshua (backed up by Gideon, Clemency and Canon Holly) said that these were corrupt household gods, contaminated with lust and rage, and their destruction was a precursor of a new world. We smashed a lot of perfectly good plates and cups and saucers. They are being replaced with white bog-standard earthenware and grey blankets. There is talk in the end of making our own pots and garments. I don’t know how this squares with avoiding the destruction of Light in Matter. I don’t know what the Manichees would have made of synthetic fibres—or what Joshua Ramsden will say they would have made. He treads a fine line between the actual (smashing things, vegetarianism) and explaining that things are symbolic (modern scientific theories of light in matter, the vegetable origins of coal, photosynthesis and so on).

  There is a lot of talk, in the actual world of the Hearers, about sex. (Surprise, surprise.) A lot of our vigorous and exhausting physical activity is the stripping of the servants’ attics of this place (a seventeenth-century manor with additions all over). There will be no wallpaper, no colour, white walls, mirrors, but placed too high for people to see themselves in. Mirrors to reflect the Light and the night sky. A nice touch. Ramsden is determined that the sexes shall sleep separately. He is feeling his way—he needs the support of the married couples here—but I think he wants a landing of female dorms and cells and a landing of male ditto. I don’t think he wants there to be any children. But he is very tactful with those who have them. Lucy Nighby has three, but they have not yet taken up residence again. It will be interesting to see what eventuates. At the moment it has to be said, we are squatting. I have an old hospital bed in a kind of cubby-hole. I keep a torch to write to you by the light of. I wish I ever got an answer, it is lonely, being a fraud and hypocrite in the midst of so much real live enthusiasm and—and what—oh uplift with no sarcasm meant.

  Yesterday there was a kind of ceremony—the Freeing of the Beasts of the Field. Many of the animals attached to this farm are moorland sheep, which hardly need freeing anyway.

  There is a resident sheep called Tobias, who thinks he is a dog, Lucy says. He follows her everywhere. She wept over him when she came back, and said he was scrawny and she had supposed he would have been killed, or forgotten her. He sleeps by the range and smells like a damp rug.

  We went and released all the hens from the battery sheds. There were two kinds of chicken-house. One with several layers of wire cages for egg-laying birds. They sit three in a cage on sloping wire floors—the eggs roll out to be collected. They have pulled all the feathers off each other’s necks and breasts, and look disgusting. The other is a big shed where a great flock of young broilers is kept in a kind of dark red twilight. They get music played to them to calm them down but they have pulled each other’s feathers off, too. They are fed from holes in the outside wall, and they stand on a kind of grid with their droppings underneath. Apparently they get cleaned out once a year when they’re all slaughtered. Lucy got rather twittery when we opened them up, and said she didn’t believe in debeaking chickens, but Gunner did. These do have beaks, so I imagine they may be able to scratch about in the frosty mud.

  The ceremony veered between the ridiculous and the tear-jerking. We walked along the rows of wire cages and opened the gates and lifted the hens out. Clemency Farrar started a kind of ritual pronouncement amongst all the cackling and scolding and screeching. “Go free, bless you.” So we all said that to all the hens, who shat and staggered and backed away from us, but were all firmly carried out to the yard and put on the ground. This took so long that we decided to do the releasing in stages, day by day. The farmworker has left. He didn’t like our “goings-on” so we feed the hens ourselves, those in, and those out. Those out flocked together and then did begin to do hen-like things, clucking and peering about and scratching. Quite a lot went straight back into the hen-house, but it was agreed that they should be allowed to do this—with an open door—as it was all the world they knew. The next day we threw open the big door to the broiler-house and turned out the red light. We scattered a lot of food—corn and such stuff—outside. The poor creatures backed away from the light, cowering.

  Clemency Farrar, again, took a sensible step, walking carefully through the flock and saying firmly from the back of the broiler-house, “Go free, bless you.” And she made shooing motions with her arms, and an apron she was wearing. And they moved forwards in a sort of undifferentiated mass, moaning and clucking and splattering, and Clemency became covered in white flying feathers (these are all leghorns) like a totem or snowman. But some did venture over the threshold, blinking, and then more did, and the first ones couldn’t dash back because of the mass behind them, so they milled round and round. I have to say, there are hens everywhere now. They do prefer freedom, observably. They are learning to scratch. Their poor feet are swollen. I’m not a hen sociologist or psychologist but it’s a pity we don’t have one here, as it would be interesting to know which instinctual behaviours these denatured creatures can retrieve and which they can’t. Hens are a very alien life form, I find. Not sympathetic. Human beings in general don’t like hens. Their eyes don’t have expressions I can relate to. Their noises make me anxious. They are designed to make you anxious, I think. There’s a lot of them now, everywhere. They are slowly spreading.

  Like most farms (so I am told) this one had its “own” hen-house for “real” eggs for family consumption. Those crème de la crème, pampered (i.e. allowed to scavenge and strut) hens are very cross and territorial about the arrival of all the other worried hens, and fly at them aggressively. Battles ensue. Ramsden says it is better not to interfere. There have been deaths. Th
ere have been arguments about whether to eat or bury dead chickens. They are part of our self-subsistence, according to some.

  The ducks weren’t really a problem. They had a duck-house and a pen, by the stream. We opened the pen door. We are one duck short, whether because of a fox or a bid for freedom we don’t know.

  Tomorrow we release the turkeys. There are about 100 in a kind of prison compound, gobbling away, and fattened for Christmas. I don’t know where they will go or what they will do when the gates are opened. It will be interesting to see. They are a mixture of iridescent turkeys and boring white ones.

  There are feathers everywhere.

  I might get this letter into the post when the truck goes down for more hen food. How shall we afford hen food if we don’t sell eggs? (Though we are still collecting quite a lot, both from hen-houses and from patches of nettles, etc.)

  There has been talk of closing out the outside world. Only talk. At the moment a lot of people come and go. Elvet Gander, for one. One or two of the Quakers. Canon Holly. They come up for weekends, or “retreats,” to help with the building and demolishing. What will happen eventually, I don’t want to predict. It is a God-given opportunity to watch the dynamics of a self-constituted group, from the inception. I shouldn’t really say “God-given,” should I?

  I wonder if you could see your way to coming up here in case we do close our gates, before we do? I’ve got things I need to give you, and things I need to tell you, in case. In case. The idea is (in some quarters) that we should encourage visitors, and learners, and gifts. In others, that we are an austere, contemplative, closed community. At the moment, there is a huge feeling of generosity from both sides to each other. Such emotions, it is quite safe to predict, don’t last. I wish (no sarcasm) they did. I only wish they did.