A theme emerges from these fragmentary pieces of Jaynes’ projected, never-completed second volume. It is the ambition to become, as William Blake’s friends said he was, a new kind of man. That is, to possess in one mind both that archaic, shamanic form of pre-consciousness called bicameral, and the rational, analytic, lucid habit of thought inherited, at least in the West, from the Greeks. Although other papers in Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness attempt, without much success, to summon proof that Jaynes’ preposterous idea might have some kind of scientific validity as a contribution to psychology, Jaynes himself doesn’t seem nearly so interested in proof as he does in the existential implications of his theory.
In this he reminds me of a couple of his older contemporaries, the poet Charles Olson (1910–70) and the philosopher Marshall McLuhan (1911–80), both of whom proselytised in favour of a new form of consciousness. In Olson’s case that new form was to be found, in part, by reconnecting with the remainders of archaic, pre-Classical Greek peoples, and was holistic in the way that splintered Christian and Enlightenment thought is not. McLuhan, more prospective, nevertheless imagined that the archaic would return once we realise that the centre of our understanding is, has to be and will again become our bodies, our physical senses and our psychic balance.
McLuhan, who grew up in western Canada, said: I think of western skies as one of the most beautiful things about the West, and the western horizons. The westerner doesn’t have a point of view. He has a vast panorama … a total field of vision . Here is a distinct analogy with Olson’s favoured method of composition by field; here too we find again the sense of an untrammelled horizon for the mind, the figure of outward, who exists, as Olson said, in the dreamless present. McLuhan once remarked that the road is our major architectural form. And: Tomorrow is our permanent address. Julian Jaynes (1920–97) takes his place alongside these voyagers into the projective; his theory, however valid or invalid it might be in contemporary scientific terms, is really an attempt to unify consciousness so that the whole history of the race, and not just the vagaries of the last couple of millennia, becomes the material with which we make our improbable future.
All three were rogue academics, and their work was not really aimed at the academy at all but at those individuals, like me and C when we were young (and perhaps even now when we are not any more), who might feel in themselves the trembling of a new mind, one in which the very old would find, at last, a place to become. Because the pre- and post-lapsarian nostalgia of these thinkers, as anti-nostalgic as they might have thought themselves to have been, is in the end undeniable. And I too am of this company. From a very young age I have imagined the archaic folded away within my unfolding consciousness and have always wondered why I do not have better access to it. Why we do not. There is no answer except that which may arise in the quest to find out.
3
The hope of renewal was one of the reasons I waited impatiently for C’s return. What had we arranged? I could remember nothing apart from a vague agreement to see each other again. If she did call, and we were going to meet, where would we go? Had I said something about dining at Watsons Bay or had I just imagined it? That village beyond time, like something you might find at the end of a road in Cornwall or in Devon, where the sound of the sea is always in your ears; where the people lucky enough to live there go about their days with an abstracted air as if listening, not to the clamour and bustle of the times, but the hissing of eternity; where the Gap looms to the east, a fenced abyss into which numerous unhappy souls have hurled themselves; or, unspeakably, have been thrown when their usefulness to the powers that be was over.
Nothing ever turns out the way you think it will. I had been waiting for C to call, never thinking that the deaf don’t use telephones—they can talk but they can’t hear. Instead, as before, she sent an email. It was in the nature of a summons: she had just flown in from Darwin, was in her hotel room at the Intercontinental, with only the afternoon and evening to spare before she flew back to New Zealand early next morning. What was I doing? Could I come into town and meet her? Many things had happened, extraordinary things; there was much for us to talk about. This came in a little after one o’clock; I had completed my daily stint of writing, though not its interminable revision. I wasn’t driving that day … I emailed back and said I could be there in half an hour; waited for the confirmation; then went down to where my cloud-blue Toyota waited faithfully in the car park behind the building, climbed behind the wheel and set off.
The vehicular entrance to the Intercontinental is via a gritty, gloomy concrete tunnel that leads up from Phillip Street like the crooked path into some forgotten suburb of hell. You come out instead into the soft yellow glow of hotel reception, where obsequious be-suited young men hover outside the automatic doors that make a kind of cordon sanitaire between the fuming world of the streets and the discreetly air-conditioned interior where guests are sequestered. The space is narrow and oddly shaped, and there’s never any room to park; tempers fray easily.
I pulled up, hoping to find C waiting in the ochre light on the other side of the glass but she wasn’t there, so left the car and, ignoring the protests of one of the sycophants, went inside. I found her not far away, gazing reflectively up at a large work of woven art hung on the wall, its reds and yellows and oranges recalling the colours of the desert lands in the west; and, bolder this time, touched her lightly on the arm to tell her I was there. I could hear already the irate horn of a taxi cab trying to pick up or drop off behind where I’d left the car.
Where are we going? she asked in a slightly panicky voice as we took the longer, darker, grittier twisting tunnel that leads back down to the street.
The beach! I said above the sound of the engine reverberating in that confined space, but she couldn’t hear me and I didn’t want to risk turning my head away from navigating that constricted passageway so that she could see my lips.
The beach, I said again once we had exited into the shadowy cavern of Phillip Street and, with the blue harbour waters of Circular Quay standing up behind us like a promise, paused at the back of the cab rank there.
I thought we could drive out to Watsons Bay. It’s about half an hour. Very pretty. Or we could go to Nielsen Park, that’s a bit closer. Also by the sea.
She was looking dubious. I just want to talk, she said. Can we talk there?
We can talk here , I said. I’ll drive, you talk. I’m good at that; after all, it’s my job.
She was looking a bit tired, a bit drawn, as if the skin of her face had stretched tighter over the bones, making those blue eyes larger and yet also more diffuse. I thought of the way the Outback does alter perception, how you learn to focus simultaneously upon the distant horizon and the exactitudes of close-up detail, while the middle ground blurs, becoming amorphous or perhaps I mean anonymous. And then I remembered she had not been Outback at all, but in Darwin, that city of war memorials and ugly 1970s buildings, of sweaty gardens and crepuscular bars, of air conditioning and heat and startling aqua waters not so very different in colour from C’s eyes.
How was it? I asked as an opener, pulling around the corner into Bent Street and accelerating through the orange light at Macquarie and so on to the Eastern Distributor. How was Thursday?
She was looking out the window at the green line of the Botanic Garden disappearing above us as we went down again into another tunnel, another concrete monstrosity dedicated to the unappeasable hordes of motor traffic, where you hear sounds like the groans of the damned, the screams of the dying, though they are only diminuendo-ed engines and horns; and where, sometimes, randomly, great wet drops fall and spatter like blood across the windscreen, though that is just water squeezed through cracks in the mighty shield of sandstone above.
Had she not heard me or had she taken the option of appearing not to hear me, so as to consider, unprompted, what she wanted to tell and what she did not wish to share? She said nothing until we were rising again out of that orange darkness,
coming up the off ramp into Moore Park Road, where the white fretted stands of the Sydney Football Stadium float like a perforated bowl above green trees on the right. She shook herself as if casting off ghosts.
It was amazing. Really amazing, she said and then she paused. I knew immediately that he wasn’t a deaf-mute, and probably not even deaf, either. When I was finally allowed in to see him—that took a couple of days—he was sitting on the floor, just like I told you, just like Lee said. They keep them in dongas. Do you know what a donga is? Demountables. Or prefabs. These sort of cabin-type things which can be picked up and taken away somewhere else.
At Berrimah there are these long lines of them, two sets, four by four, and the men live five or six to a room in these horrible hot boxes. So when we were finally admitted, Lee and I, they showed us into one of these things and there he was, sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring at the wall. I knew he wasn’t deaf because of the way he looked up when the guard opened the door. They’re rickety, the dongas, they sag, also it’s really humid so the door was a bit jammed and had to be forced, it squeaked, and he looked up. He has the most wonderful eyes, like dark pools, fathomless, deep as time …
Christ, listen to me, she laughed. I’m starting to sound like you!
Anyway, like I say, he responded so he wasn’t deaf. And he knows Lee by now, and you could see that too. But … I don’t know, there was something odd about him, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. He was alone in there because the other men were out playing soccer or something, exercising, and he had refused to go. And he didn’t get up. He looked up, saw us, saw Lee, saw me, the guard went and left us there with him and he just … went back to staring at the wall. It wasn’t a blank look, he wasn’t wall-eyed or in a brown study or whatever you call it. He was focused. He was looking at that wall as if he could see something there. And it was then, right there and then, in the first couple of minutes, that I had my idea. About what to do. I suddenly knew just what was the right thing to do.
You see, the thing is with these types of people, you have to find some basis for communication. Some shared language which might not be ordinary spoken language but is nevertheless a set of symbols which have agreed meanings that you can each manipulate in such a way so as to be able to talk. Blissymbols, for instance. Do you know what they are? I had a set of Blissymbols with me, the cards. I thought I might try them out on him first …
I shook my head. No, I had never heard of Blissymbols.
You should have, said C, in that admonitory manner used by people who want you to join Amnesty International or Greenpeace or Oxfam or something and will not hesitate to use your perceived failings as a goad to make you do so, both for your own good and the good of the planet. So that you too might, as a friend used to say, bear the weight of the world on your should-ya’s.
Yes, Charles Bliss, she said. I met him once, he was a lovely man. It was the Canadians who picked up on his work, that’s where I first heard of him, but he was actually Australian. Well, insofar as a Jew from Moldova can be Australian …
C had her small vanities. I remember how, when we were young, she sometimes boasted that during her gap year in England she met, at a party in Brighton, the polymath and literary critic George Steiner; he told her that there were only three-hundred-odd people on the planet worth knowing and that he knew them all. The implication was that she might be, or become, one of the three hundred.
And yet that self-conscious elitism did not seem to contradict her humanitarian principles, her dedication to helping the unfortunate or less fortunate among us. Or was that in itself a kind of noblesse oblige? And who, anyway, would want to be reminded of the opinions and enthusiasms they had when they were eighteen years old? On the other hand, C was a member of the Esperanto Society and at one stage learned to speak and to write that hopeful language; and Charles Bliss was, as the story she began to tell makes clear, himself a kind of Esperantist.
He was born Karl Kasiel Blitz in 1897, the eldest of four children of an impoverished optician, mechanic and wood-turner living in a nameless village near the Russian border in what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire; where twenty different nationalities hated each other, mainly because they spoke and thought in different languages. In later life he recalled that the symbols on his father’s circuit diagrams made perfect sense: pictures of an electric cell, a lamp, a switch, a telephone and the lines of wires connecting them. It was a logical language, like chemical or mathematical symbols, which could be read by anybody regardless of their native tongue. At school he was a rebel with a cause, refusing to learn the unruly rules of language, declining to differentiate between relative, indefinite, intensive, reflective or reciprocal pronouns.
When Blitz was eight years old, Russia lost the war with Japan, pogroms against the Jews accelerated and refugees came streaming over the border from nearby Russian Kishinev. A virulent anti-Semitism flourished. Blitz remembered children chanting Hep, hep! as he passed by. Some say that word comes from the initials of the Latin tag Hierosolima est perdita—Jerusalem is lost, a rallying cry of the Crusaders which somehow persisted in twentieth-century Mitteleuropa and was usually accompanied by bloodshed and murder. Others find its etymology in a traditional herding call of German shepherds.
This was not his formative childhood experience. In 1908, Julius von Payer, who with Karl Weyprecht led the 1872–74 Austro-Hungarian Expedition to the North Pole which discovered (and named) Franz Josef Land, visited the town where the Blitz family were living; his father took the thirteen-year-old Charles to hear the old explorer lecture and to see his lantern slides. It was a revelation. Blitz understood then that men had given up house and home to venture into the polar wastes in search of knowledge, and decided to dedicate his life to the cause of the betterment of humanity. He would become an inventor.
I don’t know what he did during the Great War; in 1922, he graduated from the Vienna University of Technology as a chemical engineer and joined an electronics company where he was eventually promoted to head of the patents department. After the Anschluss of March 1938, he was interned and sent with thousands of others west to Dachau, and later to Buchenwald; this was before concentration camps became Death Camps. His wife Claire, a German Catholic, was unremitting in her efforts to free him, and ultimately successful, but only on condition that he leave the country. He went alone to England, where the outbreak of war thwarted all attempts he made to have her join him there. He arranged instead for her to go to live with his family in Czernowitz, Romania (now in the Ukraine). It was a temporary expedient; she soon went south to friends in Greece, but when Mussolini’s Italians invaded in October 1940, she had to move on again.
Blitz had a cousin, Paula, living with her husband Kurt Beck in Shanghai; he thought they could both perhaps go and live with the Becks. He travelled west: the Atlantic, Canada, the Pacific, Japan, China; while Claire made her way east from Greece into Turkey, over the Black Sea, on through Siberia and Manchuria, then crossed the Yellow Sea sitting among Japanese soldiers on the open deck of a tramp steamer. They were reunited in Shanghai on Christmas Eve 1940, but Shanghai was not easy. Claire, fifty-eight and fifteen years older than her husband, contracted typhoid; Blitz refused to put her in a Chinese hospital and nursed her himself until she was well again. Then she broke her arm in a fall.
When the Japanese occupied Shanghai, Blitz was sent to the Hongkou ghetto—the Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees where as many as twenty thousand European Jews were interned. Claire, as a German and a Christian, could have divorced Charles and then asserted her citizenship, as others did, but chose to remain by his side. It was in the ghetto that Blitz began his study of Chinese characters, which he thought of as ideograms. He hired a teacher, we do not know who this was, some Taoist perhaps, some sage. Or it could just have been a local shopkeeper.
One day Blitz realised that a Chinese newspaper could be read by all Chinese no matter what their native language might be, and that when he himself l
ooked at characters in newspapers or on shop hoardings, he understood the symbols, not in Chinese, but in German. Then he came across the books of Basil Hall Chamberlain of Tokyo University, who prophesised: Ideographic writing will surely achieve the final victory over phonetic writing. In his forty-fifth year, in the blacked-out nights of wartime Shanghai, Charles Blitz set himself to invent a system of pictorial symbolic writing: a universal language.
After the war, another cousin, also Karl, sent Charles and Claire Blitz (and the Becks too), entry permits to Australia.
They arrived on 14 July 1946, changed their name from Blitz to Bliss, settled at Coogee Beach, became citizens. But Bliss couldn’t find a place at Sydney University; he couldn’t interest scholars and linguists in his new language. He took a labouring job and, with Claire’s help, worked nights and weekends to complete his system: innumerable, interminable hours spent in Sydney libraries, seeking ‘One Writing for One World and Understanding across All Languages’.
Towards the end of the decade, Bliss published International Semantography: A Non-alphabetical Symbol Writing Readable in All Languages. A Practical Tool for General International Communication, Especially in Science, Industry, Commerce, Traffic, etc. and for Semantical Education; Based on the Principles of Ideographic Writing and Chemical Symbolism (Institute of Semantography, Sydney, 1949) in three large typed and mimeographed volumes. The book elaborated its system upon a base of one hundred symbols.
Over the next four years, Claire sent literally thousands of letters to people all over the world; there were positive reactions from luminaries such as Bertrand Russell, but no real traction. Some were actively hostile. Bliss was told: You ought to be dead first, Mr. Bliss. Only then will we exhume you, extol you and exploit you. The Communist Review in a piece in the early 1950s, described his work as the invention of an obscurantist … the latest charlatanry of philosophical idealism.
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