The Ballet of Dr Caligari

by Reggie Oliver

  ‘Yes. That’s Alison,’ said Sir Bernard, noticing that my eye had been drawn to it. After that he made no further reference to her, but he talked abundantly. Once he had started the flow was unstoppable and it went on through lunch, at which he ate very little and drank next to nothing, though an excellent Pouilly Fumé was on offer for my benefit. It was not that he monopolised the conversation—he was constantly asking me questions and soliciting my views—but his need to communicate was strong, at times, it seemed to me, almost desperate. He kept to topics outside himself, politics, the arts, the latest developments in science and ideas, and rarely made any reference to his present situation. He was a lonely man refusing to admit to his own loneliness.

  Briefly we discussed the program we were going to make. I outlined some of the questions I would ask him and he raised no objections to them, even nodded his approval occasionally. That was what I had come for, so by the end of the meal, I felt that my task was done and I was ready to take my leave. But as we were finishing our coffee, Sir Bernard suddenly said:

  ‘I thought we might have a walk after lunch. I nearly always do. Keeps me going. Exercise, you know.’

  He looked at me eagerly and I thought it impolitic to refuse.

  ‘They tell me the countryside round here is very—’ He searched for a word and finally lighted on: ‘—picturesque.’ It was typical of his intellectual austerity that he would not commit himself to an aesthetic judgement of his own.

  We were in the hall, while he put on a cap, and chose a walking stick from the umbrella stand when Mrs Jacks emerged from her kitchen domain. Sir Bernard seemed startled by her appearance, even nervous.

  ‘Just going for a walk, Mrs Jacks,’ he said. ‘Showing Jane here a bit of your countryside. Delicious lunch by the way. Delicious.’

  Mrs Jacks frowned. ‘Now Sir Bernard, you won’t be taking her down by—’

  ‘No, no, no! Not to worry. We’ll be fine. Won’t be long. Cup of tea when we get back. Come along, Jane!’ And with that we were out of the door before Mrs Jacks could respond.

  Once out of the sphere of Mrs Jacks’s influence Sir Bernard relaxed a little. We went down the drive then up the winding main street of the village flanked by ancient stone houses with cottage gardens that were beginning to come into bloom. Sir Bernard did not walk fast, but he walked steadily, and seemed undaunted by the slope. It was an impressive performance for a man in his eighties.

  ‘Picturesque, you see,’ he said gesturing, but not looking, at the houses to his left and right. We said little until we had almost reached the top of the village when he indicated a footpath to our left with his stick.

  ‘This is where we turn off,’ he said. ‘We will come back to the Rectory by a different route.’

  The footpath, much overgrown, passed between two dry stone walls that encircled village gardens. Sir Bernard, plodding ahead of me, began to hum. It sounded like one of the dances of the Blessed Spirits from Orfeo, but he stopped abruptly when we came to a narrow sunken lane that crossed the end of the footpath at a right angle. Pointing to his left, Sir Bernard said: ‘We go down this way.’

  The path was of beaten earth and, because of the rain we had had that morning, somewhat slippery and treacherous in parts. Was this what Mrs Jacks had tried to warm him against?

  The lane, gouged out of the surrounding landscape and quite steeply sloping, was fringed on both sides by trees. To our left were the back garden walls of cottages we had passed on our way up; to our right we caught glimpses of fields beyond the oaks and beeches that spread their dappled shade over the path. The air was close and still. A few insects hummed but no birds sang. Despite the sun above I felt a certain oppression in the atmosphere, but Sir Bernard did not appear to be so affected.

  ‘This path is called Churchyard Lane. When the villagers died, they were traditionally brought down this way to enter the graveyard on the South side of the church. I don’t think it still happens.’

  Having delivered this piece of information Sir Bernard proceeded on his way, stopping only when he came to a gap in the fringe of trees. Through it there was a view up a gentle slope of sunlit meadow. The grass was long and uncropped, and wild flowers such as poppies, buttercups, and cornflowers abounded. Sir Bernard pointed at it with his stick without himself looking at it.

  ‘That field there is called Porson’s Piece,’ he said. I wondered why my attention had been drawn to this pleasant but unremarkable stretch of land. ‘Nobody knows who it belongs to. Generally thought to be some sort of common land, but the name implies it was once owned by someone, presumably called Porson; though that could be a corruption of “parson”. In which case it could belong to the Church—or indeed to me, I suppose, since I own the Rectory.’ He gave a short laugh. Still he did not look at the field, but examined my face as I did. ‘Occasionally a local farmer grazes his cattle on it, but rarely in the summer months. Mostly it’s left alone. Hence the wild flowers, as you can see.’ He paused. I nodded. ‘Butterflies later on in the summer. Interesting local feature. Well, onwards, onwards!’ And without turning to look at Porson’s Piece he began to move on down Churchyard Lane. I was beginning to be troubled by his behaviour.

  We had come almost to the bottom of the lane when Sir Bernard started to talk again.

  ‘As you may have gathered I am not usually very susceptible to scenery. It was once said of me that when I thought of New York, I would picture in my head a sign with the words NEW YORK written on it, and that images of the Empire State Building, Central Park, Statue of Liberty, so on, so on, which apparently occur to most people when they think of that city, were entirely absent from my mind. That is of course quite untrue. I have never said any such thing. It is a myth, but like many myths— some myths—there is an element of truth in it. I tend not to think in visual images, more in—’ he paused for a moment in his headlong delivery ‘—concepts, I suppose. The visual arts, painting, sculpture, so on, even architecture, don’t mean very much to me. Music on the other hand . . . That is why it is so strange that . . . Tell me, what is it that you think in mainly? Images? Sounds? Concepts? Algebraic equations? Is that a meaningful question to ask?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose I just think in—thoughts.’

  ‘Aha! Ha! Very good answer. But tautologous of course. What I mean is, how do your thoughts appear to you? Are they—’ We had somehow arrived back in front of the drive of The Old Rectory. Sir Bernard nodded and smiled at me, reassured by the familiarity of his surroundings. ‘Ah! Home again. A cup of tea?’

  Mrs Jacks stared at us searchingly when we entered the Rectory, and, after she had brought us tea in the sitting room, Sir Bernard waited for some moments upon her leaving the room before he began to talk.

  ‘I wonder . . . when I showed you Porson’s Piece, on our walk, did you see anything—unusual there?’

  ‘No. Just a meadow with some rather nice wild flowers.’

  ‘Yes. Yes . . . Nothing—else?’

  ‘Nothing. Why?’

  ‘Well, no reason really, but . . . it is rather odd. I’d been doing that walk down Churchyard Lane for some time—the one we did—and then, a couple of weeks ago, I was passing Porson’s Piece when I saw something. It was still light, but getting towards evening, and there were people in the meadow, and they were dancing. Interesting, I suppose, but only slightly unusual except for two odd things. The first was that they were all in white. I mean everything: clothes, shoes, even their skin and hair. It was all the same white you see. But they were perfectly solid, as far as I could judge: I mean not translucent or transparent. Not like ghosts, you understand. Of course ghosts don’t exist, but what I mean is, not like ghosts are imagined by some to be like.’ He paused, seemingly exhausted by his narrative efforts.

  ‘And the other odd thing?’

  ‘Ah, yes. This was even stranger, I suppose. They made no sound. No sound at all. There were these lines of them all holding hands and they wound round each other, moving quite slowly through
the grass and the flowers. But in the middle of them was this man who looked as if he were playing a fiddle, and he was all in white too and his fiddle was also white—bow and everything—but the instrument made no sound at all. I must have watched it all for about a couple of minutes, possibly longer, but not much. Somehow I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all. I thought it must be some kind of—joke; I don’t know . . . but a nasty joke, if it was. Well, when I got back I naturally asked Mrs Jacks about the dancers in Porson’s Piece and she gave me a strange look and said that nobody went dancing in Porson’s Piece. And then she said I should not go down Churchyard Lane again and when I asked why she wouldn’t answer, but a few days later she gave me this book. Now where is it?’ He scrabbled among the papers on his desk until he found a small leather bound book which he tossed over to me. ‘You’ll find the relevant passage on page one hundred and sixty five.’

  The book, entitled Ramblings in Old Gloucestershire, had been written by a clergyman towards the end of the nineteenth century. The passage on page 165 had been heavily underscored in pencil, presumably by Sir Bernard.

  In the picturesque village of Bourton Monachorum there is reputed to be a piece of land where, on Summer afternoons and evenings, the Dead dance. This pleasant legend states that they are the spirits of those who have not been buried in hallowed ground and who are not good enough to enter heaven, nor yet wicked enough to be cast into the flames of eternal torment. The worthy old beldame who told me this story would not reveal the precise location of the meadow, ‘for,’ said she, ‘them as sees the dancers are not long for this world, but them as both sees and hears them will perish at the coming of the next new moon after they hears them.’ It is a commonly held belief in these parts, but I have encountered it nowhere else in the county.

  ‘All nonsense, of course!’ said Sir Bernard as soon as I had finished reading. ‘I suppose it must have been some sort of hallucination on my part. And somewhere or other in a book or whatever at some time in the past I had picked up that old legend and it had lodged in my subconscious only to emerge later on. That is the only rational explanation.’ After a long hesitation he added: ‘—but the thing is I’ve seen those dancers a couple of time since in Porson’s Piece.’

  ‘But not heard them?’

  ‘No. No! Not heard, thank—thankfully. It is all quite absurd, but what is really—annoying, you might say, is that it should happen in this way. I am perfectly aware that certain people— especially at the beginning and end of their lives—have what are called “religious” or “spiritual” experiences. The great William James, as you know, wrote a book about it, The Varieties of Religious Experience. And I am prepared to concede, with James, that these experiences, though not of course real in any . . . real sense, have a certain value—“cash value” as William James liked to put it. That is, they offer consolation, reassurance, freedom from fear of death, so on, so on. And if I had had such an experience, akin, say, to those described by Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey or The Prelude: oceanic feelings of oneness with an Eternal Being, or whatever, I would have been prepared to accept it as part of some kind of evolutionary process connected with old age. And appropriate to my intellect. But this! I mean, it’s a folk legend of some kind. It’s so ridiculous! So trivial! Dancing dead people? I mean, really!’

  ‘Do you think you should see a psychiatrist about it?’

  ‘No, no, no! Never had any time for shrinks. Psychology is a pseudo-science, posited on a mind-body duality which is totally invalid.’

  ‘Perhaps you should simply take Mrs Jacks’s advice and not go down Churchyard Lane any more.’

  ‘Maybe . . . Maybe . . . But why should I give in to this nonsense? It would be as if I believed it. Well, there we are! I expect you want to be on your way. Perhaps talking it out with you has cured me. Isn’t “the talking cure” all the rage these days in shrink circles? Maybe it’s done the trick.’

  Soon after that, I left, having fixed a date for recording an interview with him at The Old Rectory.

  Three weeks later I came to record my interview. It was now June and high summer. At Sir Bernard’s insistence we sat outside on the front lawn to do our talk. It suited me as it provided the opportunity for one of those classic introductions, so beloved of radio presenters:

  I am sitting here in a beautiful garden somewhere in Gloucestershire. The sun is shining: it is a perfect English summer day and with me is Sir Bernard Wilkes, Grand Old Man of British philosophy, and founder of the influential and controversial Rational Positivist school of thinking. . . .

  As a matter of fact, it was not a particularly beautiful garden, just a well-mown lawn fringed by a few desultory bushes and trees. There were no flowers or exotic plants as Sir Bernard’s interest in horticulture was minimal. However, I was able to obtain a ‘wildtrack’ of a few birds twittering which supplied the requisite aural atmosphere for our discussion.

  Sir Bernard seemed relaxed but perhaps a little subdued. When he talked he was as fluent as ever, but his eloquent paragraphs were interspersed by quite long pauses in which he did not look as if he were engaged in concentrated thought. He stared around the garden, apparently listening for something. Occasionally he would look towards the house where, once, I saw Mrs Jacks staring anxiously out at us from the dining room window.

  When I asked Sir Bernard about his achievements he said: ‘Of course I got a lot of things wrong, as one does. Most things, perhaps. I never really, to my satisfaction, sorted out the Verification Principle, for example. But I think the spirit of Rational Positivism was the right one. Has one been influential? Impossible to tell. Maybe one has moved philosophical thinking a few inches in the appropriate direction, I don’t know . . .’ I don’t believe his modesty was assumed.

  Finally I had the courage to ask him: ‘Sir Bernard, you are now in your eighties, and nearing the end of your life. How do you, as a philosopher, view the prospect of Death?’

  There was a longer pause than usual, during which Sir Bernard gave a slight start when a blackbird suddenly began to sing quite close by. I was to keep most of that pause in when I edited the recording.

  ‘Death?’ he said finally. ‘Death? Well, of course, death doesn’t exist. It is a concept, like God, which is frequently used, but has no real meaning, because it is simply an absence, a non existence. There is dying, a process with which we are all familiar, and one may fear, or be apprehensive about that process. But death itself? There is, quite literally, nothing to fear.’

  ‘No rational being can fear a thing he will not feel.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But doesn’t Larkin in the same poem say that it is precisely this absence of feeling that we do fear, whether it is rational to do so or not?’

  ‘Ah, well! Larkin was a poet, not a philosopher, you see!’ He laughed. ‘A very good one, so I’m told. Didn’t he also say: “what will survive of us is love”? An admirable sentiment, a nice expression of feeling, but hardly—hardly verifiable in the philosophical sense.’

  I had to press him: ‘But have you had no experiences recently that have made you revise the idea that Death is simply a cut-off point?’

  Sir Bernard shot me an angry glance. I thought for a moment he was going to terminate the interview and storm off in disgust at my impertinence, but he stayed seated. He turned his face upwards to the sky and stared long at the cloudless blue.

  Finally he spoke, dreamily at first, then gathering momentum in his old familiar manner. ‘Well . . . one has experiences of course. Strange experiences of all kinds which are not to be discounted. No experience is invalid, only the interpretation placed upon it. For example, an alcoholic in the condition known as delirium tremens may say to you: “I saw a pink rat.” And he would be telling the truth, but you must not infer from that that there are such things as pink rats, only that some alcoholics see pink rats. Thus the validity of all sense experiences is conditional upon the meaning one gives it. Or one does not give it. To put a metaphysical gloss
on some sense experience is to rob it of its true meaning, which may simply be that one has had that experience. If philosophy has any purpose it must be as much to strip experience of any false significance rather than to confer it. To apply, as it were, Ockham’s razor to the cheek of circumstance and scrape away the stubble of superstition.’

  After that Sir Bernard fell silent. He knew better than to try to add to this peroration. A stillness followed, untouched by so much as the trill of a bird or the hum of an insect. The sunlit garden was serene. Then Sir Bernard started violently.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did you hear that just now? I thought I heard music. Solo violin. Bit like a Paganini Caprice or something.’

  ‘I can’t say I did.’

  ‘Must have been Mrs Jacks indoors playing one of my CDs. Yes, that must be it. Well, are you finished with me?’

  I congratulated him on an excellent interview. I stayed a while after that because Sir Bernard seemed reluctant to let me go, but eventually I told him I must leave because I did not want to drive back to London in the dark. As I was going I found myself for a moment alone with Mrs Jacks in the hall.

  ‘Mrs Jacks,’ I said, ‘while we were doing the interview in the garden, did you play any of Sir Bernard’s music on the CD player?’ Mrs Jacks looked shocked.

  ‘Oh, no! I wouldn’t do that! Mind you, I like a good hymn—I’m Strict Baptist, you see—but I don’t go in for all that music.’