by Stella Duffy
Hermann Minkowski and David Hilbert walk through a garden together. They look at the flowers, a train goes by. A man in the train sees that Minkowski and Hilbert appear to be passing him. The garden (if it could see) would see both the train and Minkowski and Hilbert moving. The train (if it could see) would see the train tracks as moving. The train tracks (if they could see) see the train and the men pass by. And what do the flowers see? The flowers that are the ideas in the garden of science? They see time.
Herman Minkowski is a mathematician. He wants the equation that makes sense of what is. And what is, is that space and time are linked. Have always been linked. It’s just that Minkowski sees this. It’s all about perception.
There is this way to write it: (+, -, -, -)
And there is this way: (-, +, +, +).
Length, breadth, depth – and time. Together. Spacetime. Simple. Revolutionary. Quiet.
Mr Newton’s law believed it could be possible, if we travelled fast enough, to catch up with a beam of light, with a point in that beam. Mr Maxwell’s law of electromagnetism told us we can’t, that point of light is travelling at a constant speed away from us, always away. And then Mr Einstein’s special relativity found a way through the problem – time and space are not immutable concepts, identically experienced by everyone. In special relativity, time and space become mutable ideas, their appearance and form depending on the observer’s state of motion.
A man travels at ten miles an hour is irrelevant unless we know what he is travelling past, from, toward. Simone de Beauvoir quoted Goethe, ‘I love you, is it any of your concern?’ Lennon and McCartney wrote, ‘She loves you’. Yeah yeah. Yeah. ‘I love’ is irrelevant unless we know who or what is loved. You were loved. Are loved. Light travels at six hundred and seventy million miles an hour whether anyone is watching or measuring or not, regardless of where from or where to. I love, regardless of you.
Hermann Minkowski and David Hilbert are walking in a flower garden in Göttingen in 1905. It is a sunny day, probably. It is perhaps 11 am. Maybe they are taking a break from thinking about mathematical physics, maybe they are talking about their wives or their children or their jobs, the business of academia, maybe they are not talking about science at all. Maybe they will soon stop walking and sit for kaffee und kuchen. They have been friends and colleagues since they were undergraduates in Königsberg, they know each other well. Maybe Hermann Minkowski is thinking he might buy some flowers for his wife Auguste, maybe he is pondering the geometry of numbers. Certainly the flowers have their own geometry.
Perhaps the garden is 20 metres from the university office. Maybe the garden is quite small, only 100 metres by 100 metres. Maybe it is spring, there are plants, but they are not yet fully-grown, somewhere between ten and one hundred centimetres above the earth. Some of them will become bigger – higher, wider, deeper – in time.
It is 11.10 am. It is time to leave the garden and go back to work, away from the work that is the discussion of ideas in the garden to the work that is the discussion of ideas inside. Different spaces, same work.
It is time to leave this time and space and go on to another time and space, inside the building. Maybe Hermann Minkowski, walking in a flower garden, in Göttingen, Germany, with his friend and colleague David Hilbert, understands, as he checks his watch, that time has passed as they walked in this garden. Maybe the mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who taught courses attended by the young Albert Einstein, is thinking of Euclidean geometry – the measuring of space, of things in space – and maybe Hermann Minkowski, who has been married to Auguste Adler for eight years, and is the father of two young daughters, Lily who is seven, and Ruth who is three, maybe, this German Jew who was born in Russia a quarter century before Adolf Hitler, who is walking with David Hilbert just four years before he himself will die at only forty-four of a sudden appendicitis, maybe Hermann realises, looking at the time that has passed, in this garden, with his friend with whom he talks about ideas, that young Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity can be easier explained – far more simply, cleanly, beautifully explained – if time and space (11.13 am, the flower garden, outside his office in Göttingen, Germany) are considered together. The three dimensions of space, and the one of time, four dimensions as one. Spacetime.
In 1908, Hermann Minkowski wrote a new paper and gave a speech to the Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians. It was their eightieth such assembly. Minkowski explained that the work of Lorentz and Poincaré, which in turn led to Einstein’s special relativity, could be better understood, more clearly, more elegantly, by bringing time to space and space to time. By taking the three dimensions of space and adding the fourth that is time.
And with spacetime, the (relatively) young Albert Einstein developed the general theory of relativity.
In 1909 Hermann Minkowski died of a ruptured appendix. He was forty-four.
Here’s a thing: before spacetime, before Einstein and Minkowski and Lorentz and Poincaré, and all the others, before them, back when, back then, with Newton, we believed gravity was all. We believed it held us, elliptically, to the sun. We believed that if the sun were to collapse in on itself, to explode, to otherwise die, then we too, our planet, this little earth, that we here would be simultaneously – at the same time – thrown out, thrown off course, away forever. (Or in forever, forever in.) Now we know better, we know that it takes eight minutes for the light of the sun to reach us. Eight minutes for that light, travelling at light speed, to find our earth. The sun could die and we would only find out eight minutes later, when the light failed. It might feel as if we found out at the same time as it happened, because we wouldn’t know it had happened until we saw it, but it would already have happened.
I didn’t know you had gone until long after the fact, I didn’t know you had left me until I saw the evidence – you, the body of you, the cold, waxy body of you. You had, of course, left much earlier. We always do.
We are not held by gravity to the sun, we are held in gravity, in the warp and weft of it, with the sun. Not to or from but with. Not one and the other, but together. And if that sun, our sun, fell, collapsed, exploded, imploded, died, it would be the ripple of that disturbed, rolling, roiling weft we felt as much as the absence of light.
I feel the absence of you. I feel the loss of you as much as I see that you are not here. Like those who first understood spacetime, I know our gravity is much bigger than just the pull of me to you, you to me. It surrounds me and holds me up, over, under, in. It holds me through and through. Without you, I am not held.
Hermann Minkowski said, ‘Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.’
Two meaning far more as one than as their separate two. Two mattering far more together than apart. Two as one to make sense of both two and of one.
I am a shadow and there is no light to make me.
There is a Buddhist concept, esho funi, it translates as ‘two but not two, one but not one’. That’s spacetime my love, that was us. And in time, because of time, because neither space nor time can ever part again – it is us still.
Everything is moving, everything is joined. It’s all about perception.
No
THEY PLAY LOUD Japanese music. It is modern, as they are. Modern and strange to the western ear. Quite possibly strange to the Japanese ear too – this music is avant garde. Whatever the Japanese for the French is. The chants slam and swing blind metallic through their perfect house, across the raked gravel garden and batter at the neighbours’ imperfect doors. Theirs is all ideal home, house and garden minimalist white and they are the black cloaked maximum therein.
The playing is loud in their residential haven. It is foreign and abstract and penetrates past language and known forms and far into that place where even too loud is not loud enough. It is more than welcome. It brings her back to within herself, to what she once was. These
days she sees him and her, sees the we, as he and she too often. Too often for her own comfort, for his own desire. She would not be separate if at all possible. Music plays and they are serious and newly important and self respecting in their intake of too strong black coffee and not enough cocaine and barely sufficient slow aged island whiskey. They have perfumed skin and hair and mouths and wear foolishly expensive designer clothes in many shades of black. They pose on cold bridges in London and dark alleys in other cities and then they catch themselves and laugh at the lunacy of the pose. But strike it anyway.
She is thin and he is thinner, but she has reasons for her greater mass. The perfect creation excuse for the thin band of narrow flesh that encapsulates her once vicious hips, her clawing bones. The fresh flesh will go though, sooner than it came. She will see to that. She has no further need of padding.
He and me a unit, just the two of us inseparable and nothing could come between us. Until now. Now that this small screaming thing has come between our comings. It cries through the night through the day. It is mewling and puking and we did not want it, could not envisage this and we are trying to get at the truth but do not know where it is hidden. We ask the questions but no-one can answer us honestly now. Do you like yours or do you not? The inquiry is direct and basic but the answers will not come. We ask, is this normal? The distance that we feel? But the old ladies nod their parkinsonian heads and goo and gah and lad fathers are now new men who delight in their ability to reveal softness and swim in glee that this fresh self exposure is a medal-worthy activity at the pub and even the mature mothers, not young but new all the same, coo and consort in the terrible room of labour comparisons. And so we are left bereft because no-one will talk to us of the truth. We are obviously wicked. We are obviously bad parents. We are obviously bad.
It’s not that they don’t love the child. It was not accidental, they did decide to admit it into their lives. Conscious choice not taken lightly. They simply love each other rather more. The music is intense. It rockets back from the sitting room through expensively non-reverberating speakers and along finely polished floorboards into the kitchen the bedroom the bathroom where they hide from the wailing infant, the smiling infant, in the stark and cool white room at the end of the hall. The long hours sanding floorboards that were not intended for softest knees, edible baby flesh dancing across the glistening boards. There are gongs and chimes and then dead silence followed by other percussive accents they have no names for. There is extremity of sound and without vision she does not know what he is listening to, he cannot picture her mind’s eye. But they try. There is silence and un-pattern and howling, noises from the ether that at the same moment are also so very earth. There is simply sound and she can kiss him and he can hold her and they are lovers in the bed of resonance.
I love him. I have always loved him. The hour we met knew I had always loved him, my skin flayed itself from my bones, leaping out to touch him, the fine thin lines and man in black drawn sharp across my field of vision, ready to take me in take me up make me up other woman another location to that place where I was only his always his, the palace of bliss.
His yielding was equally whole, his dismissal of the self for the two made one, just as total. They chose in that instant at that dinner party in that fat London suburb to belong. They did not get around to mentioning their truth for another four weeks. It didn’t matter. The promise of always had already been made, vowed in complicity when first their eyes met over a proffered smoked salmon canapé, glistening caviar sprinkled. They refused, politely. They are vegetarian.
I saw her and fell fast into her, fell diving, fell as intentional leap, fell because if I did not fall I would regret forever and not know why not and never be again. And anyway, I had no choice. I gave myself without reservation and without any possibility of redemption. There was only her, is only her and I am slave to that, master of this. She is my definite article.
Your whisky is too good. It deadens the senses I have just woken with cocaine. Now you are offering grass. What is this, Salome? A den of iniquity or a nursery? I am full of you, wish woman, and yet you are so fine already, a thin copy of the mother of our child, you are whittling away at yourself, returning your fecund round to my matching thin. I applaud your willpower, your strength of desire. The world marvels at your fine mother’s breasts and stick thin figure. Your impaler’s hips are coveted specimens. You clever little thing, you.
Certainly this drugs and alcohol diet works well. I am already back to myself. Back to ourselves. We are nearly us again.
And still the child screams. Or perhaps it wakes and smiles. Coos, giggles tries new words and turns its head. It is a glamour child of catalogue proportions and advertising bright features. It is a gold mine and a delight. And when it cries again as inevitably it will, it is held, touched gently, lovingly, reverentially. Is kissed and bathed and adored because it is perfect and they are so clever to have made this between them.
And that my darling is the problem. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this child, except that it is the held grace note, unnecessary between us. You are tired and have no time for me and I am tired and have no eyes to see the pain in yours, because I am sleeping and only in that sleep is there a space to realise what we both know. This cannot go on.
You whisper it to me in dreams and I am so afraid of what you are saying and so equally delighted that you say it. You braille the suggestion on my back, naked and tattooed and yearning, and I am delighted to hear you think so too.
And how can we, how could we, runs on and on. This child is defenceless and adorable and makes the right noises and is beginning to learn mama and papa. We could let this all continue, we could make it possible to be three instead of two in one. We could try couldn’t we?
Well yes, I suppose we could, but fuck it you are mine and I want all of you all that you are. It sucks at your breasts, they that are my breasts for my touch and if that child was someone else some adult else I would break every finger slowly and with deliberate ease for the touch with which it caresses you. Instead I kiss it and soothe it and lay you down to sleep and return to lay you down for real, but you are laid out prostrate with motherhood and I am worn down by fatherhood and we drift holding hands into the fitful sleep that is our promise for the next five, ten, fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five, forty-five years. The half sleep of the parent ever listening for the call from the child.
We play louder music now and still the dream chimes and ecstatic cries do not drown out our child. We have found another composer and another, they are getting harder to listen to, these avant garde men and their fields of furrowed noise. We take in whole albums at a time now, I cannot leave the room for fear of missing the nuance the subtlety the accusation that wipes away your face and turns you from cool perfection into gibbering wreck of tidal sound weave. The walls make tsunami of this music. I am listening hard for the way out. Then you tell me it is found.
She does not believe him. Does not really think that he will take this ultimate step. And yet she has never doubted him before. Has always taken his every word as gospel. But even the gospels are contradictory, Matthew and Mark were not really good friends and only John loved Mary.
The rain falls still but a gravel garden has no need of gratitude.
I am Martha not Mary and prepare supper. We eat together – a narrow bar of thin dark chocolate, more than 70% cocoa solids stretched between four quivering lips. The child talks to itself, sweetly gurgling. We close the door. This moment needs privacy. Our second course is liquid, I take the single malt, he reaches for the sluggish vodka, hot and bitter pepper frozen into the empty liquid. Now we are 110% proof. We play music ever louder and float into a Zen garden of he and me, his fingers rake the white gravel of my skin and he soothes my whiskey burnt mouth with his cool tongue. Then we turn to dessert.
The long lines of coke snake towards us, I am the mongoose reversed and spellbound before the line you lay out for me across your concave chest. I empt
y my lungs for greater depth, wait until the last possible moment when diaphragm is beating syncopated against my ribs, begging for air. I bend to your thin man torso and breathe in coke and you and the drug is unheeded, unnecessary. It is you that rushes straight to my brain, you are the amphetamine lift quickening my heart and you are far inside me.
I leave her, spinning in the euphoria of potential, turn volume up to the last notch before I go, this is no time to worry about what the neighbours think. She is sitting on the floor, bare boards and bare body, light white room and only sound. The chimes turn through intermittent silences into a moan into a wail, soon the wail will rise to screams and then, in the white noise of action, the task will be masked. I bless her shut eyes face and close the door quietly behind me. In the hall is a stillness, a waiting. Now it is done.
I listen only to the music, I hear only the screams from the speakers, I understand only the wailing created through improvised electronic no-pattern and interpreted by my shivering flesh. My senses are confused with the alcohol/amphetamine mix, my body does not know whether to accept the depressant or run with the energiser, it sits in limbo while sound washes across me, wailing and screaming, discordant gongs and perfect chimes breaking free, drowning out every other tone in the house. I flow through the sound for an exact eighty six minutes and then, in the white room through the white halls in the white house, there is silence. It creeps up on me as memory of winter. There is silence and now there will be peace. I rise and on shaking legs go to thank him, anoint his courage.
In the corner of an almost empty white room, a pale cradle sits. It is quiet and the woman walks unsteadily to it. Walks slowly to kiss the stopped child. And then halts. The child lies eyes wide and smiling. The child breathes and smells sweet baby. The woman is first angry and then immediately relieved and grateful and pacified and picks up the child and holds him close to her. Kisses his soft head and listens as his breath falls against her assaulted ear. She turns again for the door, cradling the child, turns for her partner. Then she sees him, half hidden behind the open door, wet red glossy against white walls. Sees him and hears again the cries she ignored beneath the music, the wailing and the moaning, the screams and the long, dying lament.
