Murmur. Will Eaves
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life has arisen on this planet might be regarded as a matter for amazement. That it should arise on many others would be, on the face of it, if true, even more amazing. The repeated escape from, as Schrödinger puts it, ‘atomic chaos’ would be not just one sense-defying statistical fluctuation but a whole series of them. It would be like throwing handfuls of sand into the wind and finding, when the grains are settled, tiny replicas of the Taj Mahal, St Paul’s Cathedral and the temple complex of Angkor Wat upon the ground. It would be very lovely, but unlikely. Luckily for us, however, the statistical system of the universe has about it a marvellous impurity, which is that it functions also as a dynamical system or mechanism for the maintenance and reproduction of order over long stretches of time. Or, to be disappointingly precise, the prolonged illusion of order, because the statistics of thermal disorder are all still there in the background and, like suspicious tax officers, they will get to us in the end. The art of living then, on this view, is simply that of defying them for as long as possible, until equilibrium, which isn’t as nice as it sounds, is restored.
*
The alarming truth is that you can’t grasp your own condition, though you suspect that something is wrong. You see yourself on the edge of a black hole, or a bowl, or a cauldron, whereas, in reality, you have disappeared down inside it.
*
You know your social life is in trouble when you spend the evening reading an article on puzzles called ‘Recreational Topology’. I don’t have any kind of social life. It’s topologically invariant under many deformations, you might say, although probably only someone without a social life would bother to say that.
*
The other part of my rehabilitation, or punishment, or both, consists of fortnightly meetings with a psychoanalyst, Dr Anthony Stallbrook. I have approached this with circumspection. I find, however, that it is not as I had been led to expect. He is a most sympathetic, comfortably tiny person with fuzz around the ears and a pate that shines like a lamp in his study and lights the way to two armchairs. No couch. We chat. We go for walks and trips. We are not supposed to go for walks and trips, but then he does not believe in his assignment, that homosexuals require any rehabilitation, or that there is time to be lost where friendship is concerned. Neither does his wife. We are planning a trip to Brighton. Our sessions together founder somewhat on the reef of his presuppositions: I have searched my conscience for repressed feelings and find none. I loved Christopher and had fantasised about a future that involved us living and working together. He took me seriously. I am quite sure that I never fooled myself into believing that he felt intimately about me as I felt about him. His friendship would have been enough. My fantasies were outrageously Platonic, and I have never stopped loving him. At the same time, I am haunted by his presence, molecular, gaseous, call it what you will – and the nearness of his voice and person, on the lip of conscious experience, is a constant anxiety made worse by my own changes. He is as near to me as I am near to the person I used to be, and both persons are irretrievable.
Dr Stallbrook often asks me how I feel. I reply that I do not know. How does one feel? It is one of the imponderables. I am better equipped to say what it is that I feel, and that is mysterious enough. For I feel that I am a man stripped of manhood, a being but not a body. Like the Invisible Man, I put on clothes to give myself a stable form. I’m at some point of disclosure between the real and the abstract – changing and shifting, trying to stay close to the transformation, not to flee it. I have the conviction that I am now something like x – a variable. We discuss dreams, and in the course of these discussions I have come to see dream figures as other sets of variables. How else should one account for the odd conviction we have in dreams that the strangers we encounter are ‘really’ people we know?
What gets us from one expression of the variable to another?
There is a leap from the inorganic to the organic. There is a leap from one valency to another, and there is a leap from one person’s thought to the thought of others. The world is full of discrete motes, probabilistic states, and gaps. Only a wave can take us from one to the other; or a force or flow; or perhaps a field. When I look in the mirror, I think, thrice, ‘Is it me? Is it not me? Is it not me, yet?’
Dr Stallbrook encourages me to write. It is like making a will, he says – eminently sensible. If you’ve signed your papers and made a will, you know there will be an end. You have already witnessed it, so to speak. And people who make this definite accommodation with their end, with the prospect of death – who get it in writing – live longer. He says this with a matter-of-factness I can’t help liking.
*
Julius and others belabour me with questions about thinking machines and the parallels between chains of neurons in the brain and the relationship of the controlling mechanism to output and feedback in digital computers. I want fair play for the computer, of course. I feel, as he does, that ‘understanding’ in a machine is a function of the relationship between its rules. Recursion may turn out to be reflection in both the optical and philosophical sense of the word. Who knows what machines may end up ‘thinking’? But I am privately sceptical of too wide an application of the personifying tendency. One knows oneself to be aware and infers from others – from behaviour, yes, but also from the body or the instrument that produces the behaviour – that they are similarly cognisant. One can’t go on from there to supposing that awareness itself is necessary, however. Hasn’t it struck most of us at one time or another that much of life is a pointless algorithm, an evolutionary process without an interpreter. On a smaller scale, too, a process such as simple addition has human ‘meaning’ only because I am there to observe it and call it ‘addition’. And yet it certainly happens. Perhaps the larger process, too, is unmeaningful. If life works, it works. The character of physical law as it extends to biological material is that it should underpin the way cells and systems operate, and that is all.
That sounds pleasingly final, but it won’t do. I know that. Things don’t always add up. I can tell you that it is asymmetrical motion at the molecular level that picks out an axis for patterned development in a sphere of cells – that turns a sphere into an embryo – but I cannot satisfy the person who goes on asking ‘why?’ That person is the half-wit in a public lecture. That person is a child. And that person is also me. The Church says: ‘People come in search of meaning, and to have their fears and anxieties allayed.’ But to think you can be finally satisfied on these points, or to imagine you can satisfy others, is the source of the misgiving.
*
I have this strange idea. Christopher left school without saying goodbye. His parents came to pick him up and I saw them get in the Daimler. I was in the upper gallery, working on some diagonals. I looked askance, through the window and there they were, thanking the Headmaster, hurrying away. I heard no more from Christopher or his mother, with whom I imagined myself friendly, until the notice of his death. I had not known he was consumptive. He had cold hands.
This is the idea. We, Chris and I, were reprimanded for scrumping apples from the trees that overhung the chaplain’s garden. They belonged to Fowle’s fruiterers. We were punished and interviewed separately. I think he was told to avoid me. I think he was told no good could come of our friendship, because of what I am, or rather, because of what, then, it was suggested I would become. I am not effeminate, but I am mannered. I am a homosexual, and I suppose that much was clear to the masters. In particular, I think it was impressed on Chris that some polluting disaster would befall me, and if only he had asked ‘why’, my future ghost might have told him.
*
Dr Stallbrook makes many notes as we go along, talking and arguing, and it has crossed my mind that patients of different stripes must react differently to this. I confess I find it irritating. I do not like being ‘marked’, or having my papers tampered with editorially, or submitting to a ‘clinical’ opinion I am not in a position to check. (I was displeased when I found out that I had been circumcised.) And if his notes are, as he claims, ‘for his eyes only’, then they are unfalsifiable. They may well proceed from a psychoanalytic theory. But how is the theory being tested or controlled? How can it be said to be scientific? He is unflappable, of course; it is not that kind of theory, he says; it is, rather, the-oria, from the Greek,