The Limits of Vision

by Robert Irwin

  – that Spartan boy who kept a fox stuffed up his tunic, and the fox gnawed at the boy’s vitals, but the boy never flinched until he died;

  – Sir Philip Sidney nobly expiring at Zutphen;

  – Captain Oates trudging away from Scott’s tent so that his companions’ provisions might stretch a few days longer;

  – and of course T. E. Lawrence with his matchsticks.

  I need to think about people like that to get me through my working day. Their examples act as a pick-me-up when I am feeling low – as now with General Patton for aggression. Shirley Conran hasn’t got it: Patton has. And as for treating a pan as a battlefield, isn’t that what generals do in real life? According to what I have been told, they sit drunk as stoats in their officers’ messes in the evenings moving salt cellars about as if they were tank battalions and tracing rivers on the table by dipping their fingers in the wine. My re-enactment of the Battle of the Bulge is at least getting something useful done.

  But enough digressing. I’ll get through this faster if I concentrate my forces. Back to the Ardennes. Success = concentration of forces × mobility. I am fully equipped, as one would expect an American army corps to be – nylon brush (my favourite, the motorized section, I think), dish mop, dish cloth, Brillo pad, detergent and tea towel. There is a poised moment when a balance of terror prevails – my terror of getting down to actually doing the pan, balanced against my terror of putting it off and putting it off. At every moment of challenge there is always the possibility that I may walk away from it. But no, a balance of detergence is unreal. The equipment is there to be used.

  Get rid of the cold water. The skies are clearing. A tentative scrape with a dry brush. The scouts are being sent out. And now a barrage of hot water, terrorizing and disorientating the enemy, but otherwise inflicting few casualties. When the barrage breaks off, one is amazed by the silence in the woods. No bird sings.

  Lost in the forest, my mind begins to wander. What about Patton’s ivory-handled revolvers? Ivory goes brown if it is too long in the shadow. His guns will have been all right under the North African sun, but in the Ardennes forest in winter time? I don’t like to think of those handles with unsightly brown streaks. It’s silly really and it spoils things. I’m not Patton’s batman and this sort of thing is wrecking my concentration.

  Peering through the water, which is once again greasing over, I imagine the debris of warfare everywhere – abandoned trucks, used cartridge-cases, blanco tins and strands of wire going nowhere. Possibly rubbish tips booby-trapped by the enemy. It seems inconceivable that this place can ever be cleaned up, and the reek of charred corpses is all pervasive. Areas of dirt and cleanliness lie cheek by jowl. The front is fluid, confused. Isolated units of germs stagger about the bottom of the pan. They are the victims of combat fatigue and conflicting rumours. Frantic movement alternates with periods of bored immobility. They cannot believe that Patton could have moved so swiftly. (Patton is, like my Philip, the man of surprises. I never quite manage to get out of Philip what he does in his office all day long. His hours at the office seem to get longer and longer, but every now and again he catches me on the hop by returning home unexpectedly early. This time I must be ready for him, have the house spotless and tidy for my returning warrior. I thought Philip was a man of destiny when I married him. He certainly is a man of mystery.)

  Logistics is a matter of attention to detail, making lists and conserving stores. But the preparations and the softening-up operations are over. Now for the attack with all the élan I can give it. The detergent hits the bottom of the pan running. My brush tracks over the same area. Bash! Crump! Thud! Bash! Bash! Bash! Then the storm of steel with the Brillo pad. It is mounted against one of the more weakly defended sectors, forcing the road to Bastogne. And there is fairly concentrated nibbling along a broader front. The germs are rarely seen – only their debris. They are running scared. They are trying to get out of the killing zone, but it is not easy in this waterlogged confusion. Tank tracks churn vainly in muddy lanes. And anyway, which way? The force surrounding Bastogne is itself now beleaguered.

  Burnt risotto is easier to deal with than I expected. The germs are operating on extended supply lines and this time Mucor has pushed his Wehrmacht a little too far. A final push and the enemy crumbles before the Brillo pad. It is easy to visualize Patton’s triumphal cavalcade into the main square of Bastogne. Only mopping-up operations remain. Then I see my face in the bottom of the pan. It is wreathed in a smile of triumph.

  That round to me, I think. I am in a thoroughly good humour now and I go out into the hallway to taunt Mucor. Mucor is sullenly silent. Then I catch the smell of stale dish-water on my hands. I should wash them but I haven’t had a bath today. I should have a bath.

  Slowly, slowly and sinuously, I begin to strip.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Slowly, slowly and sinuously, I begin to strip. As my cast-off garments drop on to the hall carpet, a cloud of dust rises to fondle at my ankles. For a few seconds I pose naked amidst the excitedly flapping tendrils and webs. Then I stride off along the hallway and up the stair. Now there can be no going back, for I did it only to tease and defy Mucor.

  Into the bathroom. It’s wall-to-wall carpeting in the bathroom. It’s one of the great pleasures in my life to wriggle my toes through its thick pile. In a jiffy I have the bath running. Ah now, the water is my friend! We should be allies, for I am, I believe, more than ninety per cent water myself. A nice long soak in the bath and then I must remember to get something out of the freezer for Philip’s dinner. (That should not be difficult, for I store my memories of what is in the freezer in the bathroom.) That my body is mostly water, that’s scientific. By now I am plunged in water and thought. Yes, that is what I meant to think. That is exactly how I think. I have never got around to telling any of my ‘friends’ this, but I believe that not only is my body water, but my thoughts and emotions are made of water too. That’s how it feels to me. My sympathies just seem to flow out to people and things. On my unimaginative days (fortunately these are very rare) I feel peculiarly dry. At other times however there seems to be an awful lot of water in my head or my heart, and the pressure builds up until it has to discharge – as at the Ardennes. Otherwise I should be springing leaks all over the place. There’s no need for me to go on about this, for I can’t believe that I’m the only person in the world with plumbing in my brain. I guess that it is the same for all of us; thoughts just swim into our heads, rising up out of depths that we can never fathom. It might even be science. Doesn’t psychoanalysis teach us something like that – or have I been misunderstanding what Philip was saying to me again?

  Anyway, water in water, I relax in my bath. The bathroom has recently been repainted green. But on the wall above the bath’s taps the rough plaster surface still shows streaks of white. I’m a bit puzzled by this, because I thought that I had been particularly thorough in painting that particular patch; but anyway as I gaze on it, it transforms itself for me into another arctic landscape. The raised bumps of the plaster form cliffs and overhanging crags. Their snow faces fall abruptly to smoother pools of ice below, which have been formed by mysteriously regular streaks of white. Incidentally it’s an odd thing, though it does not trouble me, that I see the green as snow, while the white marks are shadows and black ice. I gaze on the tumbling stones and ice and stalagmites. A little to my left I see that there is a cataract; from a rapid of rough stones, shoots of white water fall a prodigious distance to the ice below, and the meeting of the ice and the water produces a froth of steam. Such grandeur on a small scale!

  Abruptly I become aware that my bath has become cold. I reach for the hot tap and a renewed stream of consciousness jets down into my bath. The steam clouds cover the arctic landscape, and my eyes unfocus. Since the water at the tap end is getting so hot I draw up my knees. No sooner have I done so than I see that there is space now for a man to join me in my bath. I think it is Leonardo da Vinci. It looks like him anyway – kindly and
white bearded with shaggy white eyebrows and a balding head. A bit underfed I think. I reach round him to turn the tap off – I don’t know how he can stand it so hot – and then I pass him the soap. He shakes his head. He hasn’t got in the bath to wash, but to further the interests of science. On second thoughts he takes the soap from me and watches the soap clouds disperse and dissolve in the water. Then he splashes with his hands to make some ripples and his eyes look intently up at me from under those lovely shaggy eyebrows. What do I make of that?

  He wants me particularly to observe the bars of light and shade that the ripples make on the sides of the bath under water. The pattern of the ripples is more accurately registered there. First he makes a pattern – a wave puckered by a central vortex from which a mesh-work of diminishing ripples extends outwards. Then he challenges me to repeat it, that exact pattern, and I find that I cannot. He tries to repeat it and fails also. This is quite exciting, finding myself at the pit-face of scientific research so to speak.

  Leonardo believes that there are islands of determinism, of predictability in moving water – call these islands chreods – but they are only islands in its random turbulence. What is this force of randomness that blows through our world, invisible, uncontrolled and leaving only indecipherable patterns to mark its passage? It does not only move through the water. Leonardo points to my thick-pile carpet. There is, perhaps, a faint draught, so that it ripples and billows; and we gaze on it, like two hunters on the edge of a cornfield trying to track the passage of a fleeing animal from the movements of the heads of the corn stalks. We are already breathless from having tracked the creature’s passage across the sky, where it left its mark in the shapes of the clouds and the bending of the branches, and down the stream in which the eddies marked its trail. Standing on the edge of the cornfield with Leonardo, I have to take a grip on myself to realize the weirdness of it all. For this is no ordinary hunt, and Force no ordinary animal. He is a spiritual beast and very dangerous. Let me explain. Force is a creature born in the violence of the medieval laboratory. An invisible Frankenstein, Force has been formed by the impact of the animate on the inanimate. The curious thing about him is that the more he is confined and caged the stronger he becomes, until the pent-up strength of Force must inevitably burst from the bars of his cage. So our hunt is curious too, since our purpose is not to catch him, which would only give him more strength, but simply to pursue. This is because the slower Force runs and the more Force senses himself to be coralled in, the stronger he becomes. The faster he goes, the weaker he becomes.

  ‘He will die only in perfect liberty,’ says Leonardo sadly. At length we lose the trail. We have lost our quarry and so our hunt is successfully concluded. We must return to the bath, as there will be sweat and ears of corn and burrs to wash off. As I have already noted, Leonardo isn’t very bothered about getting clean. However he is as happy as a sandboy at his end of the bath, demonstrating to himself how surface tension creates what is almost a skin on the top of the water. A lovely old man – but quite unaware of the need for bodily hygiene.

  Such a handsome old man. Here in the bath I could imagine us making love together with the ripples crashing round us – like in that film From Here to Eternity. The roaring waters, our intertwined bodies and the discharge of his desire into me. But then I think isn’t that rather dirty, making love in the water one lies in? Like peeing in the sea one is swimming in? This brings me down to reality with a thump (splash?), for I look down and see that the bathwater I am lying in is filthy anyway. I can hardly see my own legs. They look as though they have been pickled in some horrible green fluid. Millions of particles of dirt float like dark stars in the water. It’s always the same problem, I find. I clean the house and I get dirty. The bath cleans me and it gets dirty. Then I clean the bath again. Who shall clean the cleanser? And who shall clean the cleanser of the cleanser? It is like using one hand to get sellotape off the other. I could go on for ever about this, but more serious things are afoot. I am for getting out now, but Leonardo restrains me; he wants us to stay in and watch the water going out.

  Now we lie squashed together with our heads at the tap end of the bath, but our intimacy is passionless, for all Leonardo’s interest is focused on the plughole. First the water swirls in a horizontal plane over the hole. Then a faint declivity appears and this becomes a whirlpool which rapidly extends itself down to the hole. Now Leonardo wants to know why it is that the water is spiralling out. Why does it not simply go straight down the plughole? And why is its spiral anti-clockwise? Impatiently I explain how it is anti-clockwise here and clockwise down in New Zealand. I don’t want to stay in the dirty bath a moment longer. However Leonardo shakes his head and twiddles his finger violently round clockwise over the plughole, and now when he removes his finger I see that the spiral has started going round clockwise. This is certainly proving to be a day for surprises!

  There is no time for further experiments. The slurping of the plughole is at its last gasp and sitting back I am uncomfortably aware that my bottom is resting on a residue of bath grit. The last trickle of water runs out under Leonardo’s baffled gaze. Leonardo is like me; the most ordinary things are a source of absolute wonder to him. Not taking things for granted, that is the source of his genius and mine. Becoming confidential, Leonardo starts to describe how he finds inspiration for his famous paintings. He likes to look at a wall splashed with stains or made of stones of many colours, and then if he has to invent some new scene, he finds in the stains resemblances to a great number of landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, great plains, valleys and hills in various ways. Also battles, and lively postures of strange figures, expressions on faces, costumes and an infinite number of things, which the artist’s imagination can reproduce in a more complete form.

  By indistinct things, he says, the mind is stimulated to new inventions. He is getting quite worked up about it. I must not take offence, says he, if he now ventures to urge me to stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud, or similar things, for in such things I may find really new ideas. He urges me now to look at the wall behind his head. It is useless for me to protest that I am already very familiar with this practice. He is smiling, but insistent. I must do it now.

  I stare then at the wall and as I stare the panic comes upon me, for I am staring at the wall through Leonardo. That smile of his is a crack on the wall (where formerly the arctic landscape had been). Those venerable white hairs are really only streaks of white in the green paint. But the source of my panic is deeper; for, alone now in the bath, as I continue gazing I see that the streaks of white are really colonies of white mildew, and higher up under the window-ledge I see black mildew and finally there in their midst I see Mucor. The silky sheen ripples and it speaks:

  MUCOR: Well, here I am again. Your fault; I can’t help myself. You got me quite roused out there in the hallway. Go on, put some more water in the bath and I’ll come in and join you.

  I shake my head in horrified fascination. It is clear that Mucor has his own monstrous version of the From Here to Eternity vision. As the surf crashes round us the monster will spore inside me. The exspore of his seed rupturing in my womb, my body will become hostess to his parasitic offspring dividing and multiplying cell into cells and multiplying again and again – until in the end my beautiful white body will look like a mushroom farm.

  I scream.

  Mucor shakes his fibres at me and continues:

  MUCOR: That’s what comes of having dirty thoughts.

  ME (shakily): You can’t get it up. You’re sexless.

  MUCOR (silkily): On the contrary, I’m bisexual. Mycology – which is the science of mushrooms – is really a branch of demonology. Every diabolic little mushroom is bisexual, an incubus when he wants to – er – incubate and a succubus when he wants to succubate.

  The thought of incubation makes his exospore go rigid with excitement.

  ME: You can’t get me. You are st
uck on the wall.

  MUCOR: Perhaps not, but you can come to me. And you will, now or the next time. Your fear of boredom means that you will always be vulnerable to us. You don’t fancy me now, but you cannot get away from me. Willy-nilly you will come to know me, and in time the idea of being the bearer of my spores will come to seem quite attractive to you. We’ll get you through your understains.

  At the word ‘understains’ I scream again and run still dripping from the bath out on to the landing, down the stairs and into the living room. Ah, my Christ. Where can I turn to for help?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Dripping and naked, I run into the living room and kneel, gazing up in supplication at the painting that hangs over the mantelpiece. How calm! How cleanly! Like all great art, it is a balm to the soul. My eye is drawn in, in pleasurable contemplation, by the diminishing perspective of black-and-white tiles. I don’t know about art critics, but I reckon that most people look at paintings the way I do. I like to imagine myself walking into the picture. It doesn’t matter what it is – a painting of an English harvest scene, a feast in a Venetian palace or a mass of pink dots and purple oblongs. I like to imagine myself inside the painting and then, if I like being there, I reckon it is a good painting. It is also nice to imagine how the painting goes on beyond the frame where one can’t see. What’s more, despite all the stuff that was being talked this morning about ‘the formal and ideological bases of feminist art’, I reckon all my friends look at paintings the same way too, only they daren’t say so. The society I live in is very hypocritical in that way. So many topics are taboo, aren’t they? I saw that this morning. One never gets the intimacy from talk that one gets from certain smells. It makes me sick sometimes.

  Another thing that is hypocritical is the way my friends go bananas about something in a painting which they wouldn’t give a second glance to if it was in real life. I noticed this last night when Philip and I had finished dinner. The dinner things were still on the table – I remember the scooped-out eggshell, almost translucent in the guttering candle-light, and the wax coiling round the base of the candle’s stand and the spiral of lemon peel reeling out over the edge of the piled-up dishes and my glass overturned and the lees of its spilt wine mingling with the rose petals from my fading table-piece. I thought it was marvellous. If it had been a painting by Claes van der Heda or Pieter de Hooch we would have been obliged to stand in front of it for at least ten minutes. As it was, Philip just looked irritated that the stuff was still on the table. Dead-eyed. So I just had to clear it away, feeling melancholy for the transience of all things. Why did he marry me? Surely we all see the same world? Why can’t we talk about it in the same way? Leonardo was not hypocritical like that.