She laughed. At herself. I can’t believe I just said that, she said.
She’d been talking so much she’d hardly touched her gnocchi, while I’d already eaten most of my Cajun chicken. I took the opportunity to order a couple more glasses of wine, asked them to bring us a jug of iced water. We ate and drank seriously for a while … and then, between mouthfuls, she asked:
Do you remember Julian Jaynes?
Well, of course. He had been one of our enthusiasms in the (largely) post-sexual phase of our relationship, when we were both living in Wellington, I in Kelburn and she not far away in a place called the Rigi, a small protected enclave set in lush bush not far along from the viaduct and up above the canyon Glenmore Street makes through the gully there. I remember that she still had the Moroccan bedspread; I must have stayed over once or twice. Those would have been the last times.
Jaynes’ epochal book came out in 1976. We both bought and read it that year or the next, and excitedly discussed its revolutionary implications for the study of the mind. Curiously, while I still have my now disintegrating copy, which I sometimes dip into at random, I’ve never been able to re-read the book as a whole, partly because of my disappointment that the promised sequel, so confidently announced in the preface, never did come out.
Well, she said, not waiting for any acknowledgement, after reading the material Lee sent, of which there’s much more than I’ve told you, naturally—he’s a bureaucrat, there’s reams of it—after reading it I began to wonder if Thursday isn’t a deaf-mute at all; he doesn’t sound like any deaf-mute I’ve ever come across and I’ve known a fair few in my time. You know, my work was as much clinical, or therapeutic rather, as theoretical, especially in the early days in Canada.
So. Jaynes. Unlikely as it sounds, I started to wonder if Thursday might be a bicameral who’s somehow lost the connection to his voices. That he’s mute because he’s listening too hard for them to be able to talk to us. Maybe the blow on the head caused him to revert … I don’t know.
Is this why you’re going? I asked. Incredulous. Is this why you want me along?
She must have been hurt because she was suddenly scathing.
Excuse me, she said, I don’t want you along, I want you involved. They’re not the same thing. There’s no way you can come up to Darwin with me tomorrow. Lee’s had to bend all sorts of rules to get me in. Another person is entirely out of the question. And anyway, I haven’t mentioned the bicameral speculation to him. That’s between you and me. It’s just an idea. Don’t tell a soul. It’s an intuition. I might be completely wrong. I probably am. Anyway, I’m not going to make up my mind properly until I’ve seen Thursday.
Along, I said, involved, same thing.
Back-pedalling. Swallowing the anger and admiring, as I used always to do, the excellence of C’s clarifications, her lack of apologetics, her straight talking.
Count me in, I went on recklessly, anything to do with Jaynes has my vote, even if that second book never did come out.
Oh no, she said, it wasn’t that it never came out, he never wrote it. That first one was it and apparently he’d already put most of what he had for Book II into it; the rest was just notes and chapter headings and so forth. He was kind of disorganised, you know, the way some scholars are? A strange man. Quite odd. He used to live in a heating duct.
There’s another book, quite recent, that explains all that. You should get it, it’s around, you’ll find it on Amazon. Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness or some such. Essays, his own and those of his acolytes. A few case studies. Did you know that non-verbal quadriplegics also hear voices? There’s a bio in it too, it’s fascinating. If you’re going to stay … involved, it’s required reading, I’m afraid. Especially the bio.
She smiled, she had me. Jaynes was the hook and I had taken it. While C speared the last few bits of gnocchi, mopped up the remains of her salad, polished off one glass of wine and started on the next, I entered the title as a memo in my mobile phone. I was already a glass ahead of her. I called for more.
As we left the Retro Café people were coming out of the State Theatre next door. It was interval; they were taking mobile phones or cigarette packets out of their pockets, talking to their friends about the show they were at—I didn’t, as once I would have, make a point of finding out what show, nor did I check up later on the web. C and I, not talking, threaded the mass of tweedy forty-something men with their gowny ladies on our way up to Pitt Street Mall, Martin Place and, ultimately, the Hotel Intercontinental on the corner of Phillip and Bridge streets.
I was remembering another time when, for some forgotten reason, after we had started living together, we embarked on a long night walk that took us all the way from our house in Margaret Street, down College Hill, up Victoria Street and down the other slope into the city, along Queen Street and then back in a great loop through Freemans Bay and St Marys Bay to Ponsonby again. Somewhere near the wharves at the bottom of Queen Street, as we walked among scaffolding erected to demolish or restore some building, I inadvertently collided with one of the galvanised-iron poles holding up the framework: a sudden blow to the cheek that did not cause a wound or flow of blood but left me reeling foolishly while C stood by expressing concern while also trying not to laugh out loud.
I didn’t remind her of this as we walked slowly, companionably, just as we had all those years ago, in silence towards her hotel. Nor did I mention another equally disconcerting memory which nevertheless has, as so much does, a simple explanation. It was mid-term break; C had gone down to her parents’ place to study, to recuperate, probably also to see her psychiatrist; I was staying in the city and, one day while she was away, with another of our flatmates, took my first ever acid trip. Well, we thought, we were told, it was acid; now, looking back, with more experience of such things, I wonder if it wasn’t so adulterated with speed as hardly to qualify as a hallucinogenic at all. No matter. Peter and I swallowed the greeny-blue capsules of white powder which Piers sold to us for five dollars each and set off, just as C and I had done not so very long before, to walk into the city—and spent the rest of the day wandering its streets and parks.
I recall phoenix palms lining a long avenue in the Domain transforming before my eyes into huge hairy orange ape-men like orangutans; I remember, down by the Auckland railway station, Peter suddenly crying out, Everything is white! and then beginning to weep; when I looked closely at him the skin of his face had the pallor of milk with stiff, electric black hairs poking sharply up through the whiteness, sparse precognitions of his next shave.
Later, calmer, towards evening, we sat in the band rotunda in Albert Park and rehearsed the shape of the day on the wooden bench before us. I recall one or other of us, pencil in hand, drawing a circle on the painted wood to represent reality, and then inscribing a great parabolic arrow sailing away into the distance while proclaiming: Acid is like this! I once went back to that rotunda to see if our graffiti survived but found nothing there; it was either a hallucination or with time and wear has faded away.
When we returned at last to Margaret Street there was a telegram from C waiting for me. (Remember telegrams? If they weren’t associated with a celebration or a journey, they usually carried a doom of some kind.) I opened it: WENT ON MY MANTELPIECE it said in capital letters across the yellow form. Her name printed below that. I stared at the message. What could it mean? My coming-down mind ranged wildly in search of an explanation but I couldn’t find one. I recall wondering if ‘went’ had some relationship to ‘come’ and hence encoded in those cryptic words was some kind of sexual message … but if so, what did it say? It was quite a while before I thought of going into C’s room and looking on the mantelpiece above the fireplace: there, folded neatly beneath a small lacquered wooden box where she kept her jewellery, were some banknotes. The telegraph office had made an error, W for R; the first word should have been RENT, our fortnightly payment to the landlords, the Paynton brothers, who jointly owned both our house and the one ne
xt door, was due.
I didn’t mention this to C either. What would have been the point? But when I glanced across at her she was looking wanly back at me. As if she had been privy to my thought stream and was acknowledging the impossibility of returning, except in mind, to those far-off days. Or not. I don’t know. How do we ever really know another’s thoughts, except perhaps sometimes in conversation? Or is it indeed possible to commune silently? Nevertheless, C’s incipient deafness gave a certain formality, a kind of grace even, both to our silence and our talk. We walked on up to the Macquarie Street entrance of the hotel and by mutual unspoken consent stopped there.
I could see the high atrium of the Treasury Lounge within, the golden light, the deep wicker chairs where guests sat for their after-dinner coffee or liqueur or whatever. I’d only been inside the hotel once, coincidentally, or perhaps not, while coming down from yet another acid trip. (I would not have you think I commonly took LSD; I’ve only had about a dozen, maybe a few more, trips in my life. The last one, which tediously reiterated all of the others, was fifteen years ago now.) We, my trip buddy and I, took one of those deep wicker chairs each and drank a single beer before returning to our respective homes in the west. I had written some lines about it: No the rich are not beautiful / and the beautiful are not rich / unless it be in praises …
Well, said C. It was nice to see you. Shall I get in touch when I come back through?
She was going to be away a week, ten days, something like that.
Yes, I said, do that. We could perhaps meet up again?
So that was settled. It was a Wednesday night, about nine or nine-thirty; no one much around. A cab came slowly up Macquarie Street from the Opera House and paused to suggest that we might hail it, but no. I had already bought a return train ticket to Summer Hill.
Tomorrow’s Thursday, I said irrelevantly. Will you be seeing Thursday on a Thursday?
If Lee can get me in I will, she said. But it might have to wait till Friday.
We looked into each other’s eyes then, the way that people who are not lovers very seldom do. I felt the air thicken around us as the ghosts of our former selves, with all their memories of our previous encounters, crowded up against us. I did not think that she would ask me in; nor did I think that, if she had, I would have gone. She felt, I am sure, the same. She had her husband, their children, whatever beauty and accommodation thirty years of marriage brings; I had a lover. Our meeting was not accidental, but without intent in any intimate sense. And yet we both could feel those whispering ghosts pressing closer in around us.
She would have seen the doubt in my eyes; I saw the same doubt in hers. Some resolution was required. Her lips brushed my cheek, she laid her body lightly against mine in another sudden embrace.
Till then, she said, and went.
I didn’t watch her go, just turned and walked slowly along Macquarie Street towards St James station, past the Botanic Garden, both libraries, the parliament, the hospital, the Hyde Park Barracks and the Georgian church which Francis Greenway built, and down into the echoing, cream-and-green-tiled floodlit tunnels under the city.
2
I checked out Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes’ Bicameral Theory of Mind Revisited as soon as I got home. Yes, it was available through Amazon—thirty dollars US for the hardback, twenty for the paperback. It is edited by Marcel Kuijsten and first published in 2006 by the Julian Jaynes Society; the paperback came out in 2008 with an awful cover: an orange– red sunset or sunrise behind the pyramids, making it look like one those wacky aliens-from-Andromeda-founded-human-civilisation or occult-key-to-universal-history-uncovered books, not the scholarly, if speculative, work it actually is. I didn’t order it straight away because of the time delay: Amazon are quick but not so quick that they would certainly dispatch the book in time for me to read it before C’s return from Darwin. Instead I thought I’d try the bookshops, not least because there was another book shown on the Amazon site which was certainly available at Abbey’s, my vendor of choice: Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Hearing Voices and the Borders of Sanity by Daniel B. Smith. A much better cover: it has upon it a single human ear surrounded by op-art graphics which are meant to suggest soundwaves rippling outwards. Or inwards.
I picked up Muses, Madmen, and Prophets next morning and then, on the off-chance, went on down to look in the Adyar Bookshop, which described itself as a metaphysical and alternative bookstore with over 40,000 titles in subject areas from Astrology to Zen. Adyar was established in 1922 by the Blavatsky Lodge of the Theosophical Society, who still own it, and named after the location of the society’s HQ, in Chennai. Its premises have shifted eerily around the CBD as long as I’ve lived here, as if constantly repositioning itself on the astral plane; at that time it was on a mezzanine in Bathurst Street.
When I first visited the shop back in the early 1980s, there was a hushed and awe-full grandeur to its sober shelves of thick esoteric volumes wherein, perhaps, the Akashic Records themselves were held; in Bathurst Street, as if all that weighty majesty should turn to tinsel, it had fallen prey to the commercial imperative implied in the popularity of all things New Age. They stocked, as they never did nor would have in the past, an extensive range of gift items including cards, crystals, essential oils, incense, meditation cushions & stools, statues & more; and the relentless triviality of these accoutrements and gewgaws seemed to have overtaken all other, more solemn, intimations.
Yet, it turned out, remarkably (perhaps it was that cover), they had a single copy of Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness. I bought it on the spot (forty-five dollars Australian) and with it, and my muses, madmen and prophets, made my up to Town Hall station to catch the train home. Smith’s book looked rather more accessible than Kuijsten’s, so that was the one I began to leaf through as the grimy carriages made their familiar rickety way to Central and then out along the Inner West Line, through Redfern, Macdonaldtown, Newtown, Stanmore, Petersham, Lewisham to Summer Hill (and thence, back then, all stations to Bankstown). And it was there, on page 16, not far from the beginning of Chapter 2, ‘The House of Mirrors’, that I found a lucid and fascinating account of how we humans speak and how we hear—so compelling, in fact, that when I was back at my desk I copied it out and, with accompanying illustrations of the human throat and the human ear, posted the result on my weblog.
I wasn’t so much thinking of the human propensity to hear voices when there is no actual physical auditory stimulus involved as I was of C’s disability; and it may not have been purely for narrative convenience that I edited Smith’s description somewhat. He had, in that naff North American way, constructed a little drama to accompany his account of how we speak and hear; in his version, some words are spoken by a wife to her husband and, when finally they arrive in his comprehension, announce that she wants a divorce. Well, I left that out. All you’ll find below is a paraphrase of Smith’s account of the mechanics of hearing itself, shorn of any drama save that which is intrinsic to the process itself.
The first step is the release of breath from the inflated lobes of the lungs into the branched tubing of the respiratory system. The main channel, the trachea, is about eight inches long, rigid and segmented, a conduit for the breath toward the vocal cords, those twin infoldings of mucous membrane stretched horizontally across the larynx. They are thin muscular flaps, reminiscent of labia, that block the top of the trachea; when we breath, these flaps are loose; when we want to speak, they form a barrier by pressing together and sealing off the throat from the breath, which accumulates until the pressure becomes intense enough to release the cords—not all at once but fluidly, periodically, in a rippling motion.
As the breath makes its dash upwards, the pressure below the vocal cords decreases and they seal again. More breath creates more pressure, another release point is reached, the pressure drops, the cords seal and so on in a rapid alternating dance of advance and retreat … in addition to the vocal cords, the respiratory system has a series o
f muscles, the depressor anguli oris, the posterior cricoarytenoid, the sternocleidomastoid, whose purpose is to manipulate the flow of breath as it passes out of the body. And then of course there are the tongue and the teeth and the lips.
After crossing the lips, the breath collides with the air outside and its energy transforms into molecular movement. The air molecules in front of the mouth compress and open in pulses tuned to our words. These pulses travel forwards and outwards … if there is an ear handy, its pinna—those folds of cartilage that jut out from the sides of the head—will capture these pulses, this voice, and direct it into the auditory canal, where it will gain speed until it collides with the taut sheath of flesh called the tympanic membrane, or eardrum. The membrane booms, it vibrates and echoes, mimicking the complex vibrations of the air.
Beyond lie three ossicles, little bones that rest lightly against each other so that the movement of one causes movement in the next. The hammer (malleus) strikes the anvil (incus) that strikes the stirrup (stapes) that strikes the cochlea—as C had said, like a pin striking a bell. Very little energy is lost. The cochlea is snail-shell-shaped, hair-lined, fluid-filled. A spiralled, hollow, conical chamber of bone. Here, as the movement of fluid within the shell causes the hairs along its twisting length to vibrate, molecular movement is converted to electricity. This vibration in turn stimulates the slender cells of the auditory nerve, the pathway to the brain, which transports the electrical signal of speech across the axons of its component neurons into that upper section of the brain known as the primary auditory cortex. This absorbs the incoming electrical impulses, somehow converting them into the comprehension of a voice.
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