–Stop.
Her hand slaps-stops the white face in the round mirror on the cupboard door that fills with rings widening quickly out. People collide, spinning on orbits and made up of other people in slices that spread out like flat discs of vaporised heavy elements in the plane of their present orbits. And as their initial material cools the atoms condense, forming small particles of dust which through constant collisions aggregate into larger and larger bodies, until perhaps they burst with accumulated identities that pass from one to another like elements, emitting particles of pain. You can never know with absolute certainty that consecutive observations of what looks like the same particle do in fact represent the same. Because since you can’t establish the precise location you can’t claim to have established the identity of the thin face on the dial in the square control panel which still bombards the room with particles of anxiety, moving from right to left, how do you feel, she says.
–Has he flounced out?
–Yes, Larry.
–And then what shall I do?
–Just rest. And eat if you can.
–Oh, I can live on the square roots of my time for ever.
–I got some cold food from the shop round the corner. You slept, you know.
–Did I? I never sleep.
–You never dream, either.
–Sometimes, nowadays, I have an omen.
–Try to eat, Larry.
–Thank you. Thanks. For everything.
–Don’t mention it.
–Oh but I must. I always mention it when anyone does me proud.
–I feel proud. You killed the bull. Oh, you’ve forgotten that, too. We used to joke about our imagined enemies, and things to conquer, exams, and your dissertation, remember? Why did you change from physics, Larry? I used to think you’d solve the universe.
–Perhaps my daughter will do that for me.
–Eat, Larry, eat. I can stay an hour or so. I have to see my lawyer this afternoon.
–Oh, that. Why bother, Elizabeth? Does he deserve even that much attention?
–Larry, everyone deserves the attention of definiteness.
–Even if they prefer the uncertainty principle?
–They only pretend to prefer it. While they have to. You used to say that. Someone would come along and find a unified theory that would do away with indeterminate interpretations, you’d say, and revert to causality. I thought perhaps you might.
–I thought so too. In psychic terms at least. But I didn’t. In the meantime we do the best we can, some of us preferring to pretend causality exists, and others, others preferring to prefer its absence. But you can never know with absolute certainty that what looks like the same particle, with the same identity –
–Yes but for practical purposes you have to, Larry, in the chemistry of people. Otherwise how can you live?
–You can’t. Not really. You pretend you do. To save the appearances.
–Larry, you can’t honestly believe that.
–I don’t know. I think I believe that every particle of ourselves, whether combined with those of others in normal electrovalence to make up this or that slice of us, or whether bombarded by those of others until this or that human element mutates into some other, every particle of ourselves returns. So that it has, in that sense, identity. But you can never quite identify it at any given moment.
–Though you pretend to recognise it.
–You recognise it, if you like, by an act of faith. Every scientist makes an act of faith at that point, as does every doctor, parent, priest, he expresses the chance as a probability over a large number of atoms, a near certainty but a probability nevertheless.
–So we all pretend to come and go as fully ourselves. And all the time millions and millions of particles of us have combined with others or escaped into various orbits to return to us ultimately.
–The law of the conservation of energy. Marry me, Elizabeth.
–Thank you, Larry. Thank you.
–Don’t mention it.
–But it wouldn’t help. Those particular electrons or whatever that made up the slice or disc or sphere of you at twenty-four won’t make them up at forty-eight. But I could, if you like … provide … evidence.
–Evidence? Of what?
–Well. Don’t embarrass me, Larry. I know you don’t love me, you said so. I have no illusions on that score. But I wouldn’t mind. I mean, Brenda told me that you refused to –
–Brenda again! What else did she tell you? Do you confide all your spots and pimples to each other at the split of an atom?
–Larry, forgive me. She did, become, quite friendly. She’d come to see Patricia –
–Ah, yes, Patricia. So you want to provide evidence of adultery with me. Why? To balance things out? You can’t hope for an eternal quadrangle from me, my dear. So common, as my daughter would say.
–Larry, please.
–And for when had you planned this convenient little episode? Now? Who will give the evidence? Have you got the Queen’s Proctor hidden there in the cupboard behind the door with a round window in it? All right then, now. You have to see your lawyer in thirty minutes, yes, a nice sense of timing, for your age I mean, come, my remote Bermuda, ride with me, come, don’t dilly-dally, off with your appearances, now I understand, Base Headquarters, all this talk of secret instructions, laws broken, meridians bent, and all the time you meant your base instincts. Right, then –
–Larry, let go, let go, get off me –
–My dear good woman, why should I sit on you? You can ride me, if you prefer it that way. No? Come, let me rouse your base instincts, ha! Hands grab at hands and wrists to pin them down in an angular attitude with parabolic gestures that create situations, contortions in the innumerable particles of her desire bombarded with astonishment, repulsion, fear that spiral at high velocity around the lightning zig-zags of her magnetic field, till in no time at all you have a human body or thereabouts made up of lips and human breath and odour, blood vessels, nerve fibres, muscle spindles, bones, flesh and such. The resistance you could call matter melts and mutates into wild energy by a law of conservation that has a perfectly good scientific explanation, so that you give rebirth which hurts to some lost slice of you, a forgotten area of particles that come whirling back to form filaments of gas in violent motion or extragalactic nebulae colliding perhaps on the outer rim, great clusters moving at thousands of miles per second while the primitive noise occurs, in the wrong square. Some argue nevertheless that parts of a divided nucleus recede from one another at great speed, the shock processes involving ejection of high energy particles that must ultimately form a human element, a star where the taste of love will increase its luminosity until it cools in quiet rage at all that tenderness that went to waste, accumulating only the degenerate matter of decay. Well, what did you expect, a Blue Giant? We love like ancient innocents with a million years of indifference and despair within us that revolve like galaxies on a narrow shaft of light where hangs the terror in her eyes as the life drains away from blood-vessels, nerve cells, muscle spindles, bones, flesh and such, once and for all in a spasm from the attitudes, the created situations and the circular gestures, with the little individual flan already dead in her meridians, out of the story of a death and amazing recovery and into the unfinished unfinishable story of Dippermouth, Gut Bucket Blues, my sweet Potato Head, Tin Roof, Really, Something and me.
To Eva Hesse
with love and gratitude
Between the enormous wings the body of the plane stretches its one hundred and twenty seats or so in threes on either side towards the distant brain way up, behind the dark blue curtain and again beyond no doubt a little door. In some countries the women would segregate still to the left of the aisle, the men less numerous to the right. But all in all and civilisation considered the chromosomes sit quietly mixed among the hundred and twenty seats or so that stretch like ribs as if inside a giant centipede. Or else inside the whale, who knows, three hours, three days of ma
ybe hell. Between doing and not doing the body floats.
To the right of the fuselage the enormous wing spreads back quite motionless on the deep blue of the high sky, the sunlight quiet on the dull-shining metal, the jet-exhausts invisible in their power save for a tremor against the blue or the propellers invisible in their speed save for a hinted halo, no cloud and from this seat no reef of nature no man-made object passing to show that the plane flies immobile at eight hundred and thirty kilometres an hour height twelve thousand metres on a sheet of paper handed over the back of the armchair in front by a black hand above Bordeaux with outside temperature minus forty-two degrees.
Inside they have pressurised the comfort. The people sit hidden in their high armchairs but for a few head-tops bald fluffy blond curly back between the port and starboard engines, looked after cradled in their needs, eat drink smoke talk doze dream and didn’t catch what you said.
— That curtain up there between us and the first class. It reminds me of a tabernacle.
— Oh. Yes.
— Or a Greek Orthodox church. Have you ever—
— Oh yes and travel-talk ensues half drowned in air-conditioning and other circumstantial emptiness with the eyes gazing at the blue temperature of minus forty-two degrees.
At any minute now some bright or elderly sour no young and buxom chambermaid in black and white will come in with a breakfast-tray, put it down on the table in the dark and draw back the curtains unless open the shutters and say buenos días, Morgen or kalimera who knows, it all depends where the sleeping has occurred out of what dream shaken up with non merci nein danke no thank you in a long-lost terror of someone offering etwas anderes, not ordered.
Or a smooth floor-steward in white.
The stewardess in pale grey-blue and high pale orange hair puts down the plastic tray covered with various foods in little plastic troughs.
— Mineralwasser bitte.
— Mineralwasser? Leider haben wir keins. Nur Sodawasser.
— Also dann Sodawasser.
Which bears no label. Leider nicht.
The decorative metal locks on each door of the cupboard shine in the shaft of bright light coming through from the left where the wooden shutters meet. They have Napoleonic hats and look like Civil Guards, the one on the right door carrying the vertical latch that hangs down in relief like a rifle at rest. Next to the cupboard the smaller doors of the dressing-table repeat the motif darkly and unreflecting. On the two drawers of the dressing-table, above the smaller doors, the Civil Guards lie horizontal.
Beyond the wooden shutters and way down below the layered floors of stunned consciousnesses waking dreams nightmares lost senses of locality the cars hoot faintly poop-pip-poop the trams tinkle way down below in the grand canyon and an engine revs up in what, French German Portuguese.
The dark shape of the cupboard unrounds in the half-light. On the bedside-table stands the bottle of mineral water, its label still illegible. No one comes in offering anything.
The florid American priest leans forward, fills the round window as shoulders fill a slipped halo, watching the sea of cloud way down below no doubt, that draws the gaze into an idle fantasy of stepping out and bouncing on it as on a trampoline, unless the cloud has cleared, the window set quite low, the long thin mouth embedded in the cardiac flesh talking of tabernacles which proclaim that the cloud has not cleared, for he turns again and says in some countries the women segregate still to the left of the aisle, the men less numerous alas to the right introducing himself as Father Brendan O’Carawayseed or some such name. The girl lays her rich auburn head on the lap of the handsome man cross-legged above the caption He’ll always remember Piquant. Of course the Church must change, but the world can’t call the tune.
The dawn has quite unrounded the corners of the cupboard made of teak, built in up to the ceiling and therefore without corners. It has pale oak vertical bars for handles. The light roars full of traffic through the yellow cotton curtains on the right.
The label on the bottle says VICHY ETAT—Eau Minérale Naturelle. VICHY. Station du foie et de l’estomac. Toutes maladies de la nutrition. Saison thermale: Mai–Octobre. L’eau de Vichy CELESTINS constitue l’eau de régime des hépatiques, diabétiques, dyspeptiques. Prise aux repas, elle facilite la digestion et régularise l’intestin. Elle doit aussi sa réputation mondiale aux résultats obtenus too small however to read in the half light.
And yet the central heating has the unrelaxed intensity of a cold northern night, the sheeted puffed up eiderdown that causes sweat and falls off causing coolness indicates an outside temperature of minus forty-two degrees perhaps although the body stretches out its many ribs in a pressurised comfort as if inside a giant centipede. Or else inside the whale who knows, three hours three nights of maybe hell. Between sleeping and not sleeping the body floats.
The cloud has cleared. Way down below the window-seat through the oval window the rectangles of agriculture brush-stroke size, the forest blobs metallic lakes the scatterings of smudged dots the thin white lines curving and straight and crossing one another make up an abstract study of some earth-goddess in brown and green. Valmar girls always get a second glance.
The bathroom door faces the entrance to the room so that the bathroom has an outside window next to the balcony window of the room. Soon some dark waiter will enter with a breakfast-tray and something else not ordered. All ideas have equality before God he will say unless some orator with eloquent gestures outside the glass booth, his words flowing into the ear through earphones in French and down at once out of the mouth into the attached mouthpiece in simultaneous German.
But no, the green or perhaps blue washbasin stands on one leg to the left of the window back to back with its neighbour which runs a small niagara at dawn or so and gurgles loud into the green or perhaps blue washbasin to the left of the window, single rooms not often having bathrooms. The decorative metal locks on each door of the cupboard shine brassy gold in the shaft of distant hoots coming through from the left where the wooden shutters meet. They have Napoleonic hats and look like Civil Guards, the one on the right door carrying a rifle at rest, those on the drawers of the dressing-table lying down. A small dot of bright light thrown by the round hole in the shutter further up the cupboard imitates the sun. Or else the telephone rings allo? er, dígame? The bottle on the bedside table says Agua Mineral.
The stewardess in navy blue comes down the aisle, carrying a tray of drinks and a small Schweppes. The menu goes all the way to Santiago. Oslo—Prague, airborne one hour and ten minutes: smørrebrød Scandinave, café. Prague—Geneva, airborne one hour: jus de fruit. Geneva—Lisbon, airborne two hours: oeuf froid italienne, coq-au-vin, pommes parisiennes, charlotte russe, café. Lisbon—Monrovia, airborne four hours and twenty minutes: smørrebrød, délice de tartine à la S.A.S., café. Monrovia—Rio de Janeiro, quartiers de pamplemousse, omelette au bacon, Rio de Janeiro—São Paolo, São Paolo—Montevideo, Montevideo—Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires—Santiago but the menu has no personal significance beyond the oeuf froid italienne the coq-au-vin the charlotte russe café and the small bottle of scuse-plisse as the dark Viennese leans right across from the left to photograph the Alps in the pink glow of bitteschön, travel-talk ensuing half-masked by air and other such conditioning to prevent any true exchange of thoughts when rhetoric flows into the ear through the earphones in French and down at once out of the mouth into the mouthpiece in simultaneous German. Out of the mouths of babes the Frenchman says with eloquent gestures, la vérité, la justice, l’humanité. The words prevent any true EXCHANGE caught in the late afternoon sun that stripes the airport hall between the slats of the Venetian blinds on the vast wall of glass beyond which the planes wait, move slowly off, rise suddenly and vanish or come in out of the blue over the unseen lake somewhere to the right of the distant mountains.
A voice calls out continuous flight and gate numbers and the murmur of the talking delegates as they wait in rows of desks like a giant class fills the great congres
s hall. The chairman knocks his hammer on the dais table. The congress members dutifully don their listening-caps and the murmur still continuing now comes through the earphones in the glass booth, picked up by the microphones the engineer has just switched on. Siegfried sits to attention, wearing his earphones like a helmet as communication begins.
— Meine Damen und Herren. Kindly fasten your seat-belts and observe the non-smoking sign. The animal has filled up again, its body between the enormous wings stretching its one hundred and eighty seats or so like ribs towards the distant brain way up. The large African woman on the right in a long printed dress straps herself with lethargic difficulty as she talks to the man beyond her in a language not understood. Votre poitrine peut se développer et se raffermir facilement. In some countries the women would segregate to the left of the aisle the men less numerous to the right. But all in all the chromosomes sit quietly mixed as the enormous wing spreads back on the port side, catching the last red segment of the sun before it disappears behind the blackened hill.
The shadow of the green pelmet cuts between the light reflected from the pale blue slatted blind, dividing the reflection into two giant staves of five lines each, empty of notes above the cubic-looking cupboard in the pale blue cubic room. The double bed feels huge, empty of music in the silent pale blue room. The bathroom door faces the entrance to the room so that the bathroom has an outside window next to the picture-window of the room with its blue slatted blind between its double panes and the green pelmet above, the two green bars of the undrawn curtains hanging vertical on either side. More often the bathroom flanks the entrance in a small passage, facing the built-in cupboard and has a token window on the hotel corridor or no window at all, merely a ventilation shaft. Sometimes it even flanks the bed.
The Brooke-Rose Omnibus Page 33
