The Limits of Vision

by Robert Irwin

  It is just this sort of movement of random turbulence that Jasper was to recall and compare in his mind with the sensation he created a week later when he burst in upon the circle of ‘geniuses’ that had gathered to read tragedies with the solicitor’s assistant, Bazzard – for comparisons are always possible when there is a movement of a considerable quantity of something, whether it be of water or of genius. In that same swirling instant when Jasper identified Bazzard with Datchery, the mysterious spy at Cloisterham, Bazzard rose to his feet, pointed to Jasper and turning to his circle of ‘geniuses’ cried, ‘There, gentlemen, is the murderer of Edwin Drood!’ The hunt is on, first in London, then in Cloisterham. The flashing circle, the gleaming lens of Mr Tartar’s telescope, falls on the fugitive Jasper in Cloisterham Cathedral Close, like the avenging eye of God, and this glittering circle does indeed signal the apprehension of the homicidal choirmaster of Cloisterham.

  A circle, a lens, a noose, a passage out of this world. He would escape these sickly fancies, but everywhere his vision is circumscribed. It is as if Jasper’s hypnotic gaze has been turned inwards to gaze at the abyss of his soul. Round and round. Up come images of poverty, crime and insanity, like bubbles rising to form a scum. There can be no end to these meditations. What ring of power can have provoked them? But see! It is only a ring of mould on a crust of bread being chewed by a condemned man on the last of that man’s false dawns.

  Dickens has been talking at full gallop. He has held us all enthralled. Abruptly now he collapses on to the sofa mopping his brow.

  ‘Jolly good, Charlie!’

  ‘Such shadows – and such light!’

  After a few more such appreciative murmurs nobody knows what to say, and there is a busy reaching for cups and cakes. Finally Darwin turns to regard Leonardo’s noble profile. Conscious of being watched, Leonardo is impelled to return his gaze and wait for him to speak. At last Darwin does so:

  ‘Do you like scones?’

  ‘Very much,’ and Leonardo, his mind at ease again, resumes his munching of one.

  More silence. I can see that I will have to get the party going.

  ‘This reminds me of this morning. I was hostess to a coffee morning in this room. Actually, although it’s afternoon –’

  ‘Late afternoon,’ interrupts Blake. (I can see that he is worrying about me, worrying what will happen when Philip comes home.)

  ‘– although it’s afternoon, this could be a sort of coffee morning. We could have one.’

  ‘What is a coffee morning?’ asks De Hooch.

  ‘Oh well … you have a few friends round and you just sit around and talk about things. I am your hostess.’

  ‘A causerie then,’ says Dickens.

  ‘A symposium,’ offers Leonardo.

  ‘What sort of things are we supposed to talk about?’ Teilhard wants to know. I can see that he is worried whether he is going to be able to keep his end up.

  ‘Well, sometimes we talk about our houses and cars and our children …’

  ‘We have no children,’ several of the geniuses mutter.

  I rush on: ‘But more often, my friends and I, we like to talk about art and literature and religion, plays we have seen and issues like the politics of sexism. It takes us out of ourselves. I thought that with all you lot here we might talk about something like “The Responsibility of the Artist in Society”, or perhaps “The Two Cultures” – you know, whether art and science are compatible.’ I look brightly round.

  ‘Excuse me. That is very dull,’ opines De Hooch. There is general agreement.

  ‘Dear lady, I confess that hitherto I have never found the leisure to consider such topics, worthy of consideration though they certainly are.’ Having said this, Darwin carefully cuts a slice off the cake, selecting the bit which has the mould on it, and he starts talking to himself – or is it to the mould?

  I look imploringly at Dickens. He sits a little more erectly and then once more he is in full flight:

  ‘Gentlemen, dear friends and mine hostess – and particularly my hostess, who has challenged us to address ourselves to the topic of the Artist in Society – in responding to her call – and I am honoured to find myself among those to whom that call was addressed – I find that I stand in some awe of the immense largeness of the topic. A resonant topic, yes! The Artist! His Society! His Responsibilities! Vast and chilly phrases. Cold abstractions. The Artist does not need to eat nor scratch his itch. He does not lie awake in his restless bed troubled by the fear that he may have forgotten to put the cat out and that that cat in the darkest fall of night, in the extremity of its need, may be defiling the kitchen floor. But an artist does. One such as our friend here!’ (Pointing at De Hooch.) ‘A man of flesh and blood, no cold abstraction, he has known the laughing joys of infant perceptions and the sorrows of a maturer age – child and man, as are we all.’

  Dickens pauses and looks round before resuming:

  ‘Yet what is an artist – or, more generally, a genius – without some woman to care for him? Some woman, it may be his wife, or his housekeeper or perhaps his motherless daughter (pity her plight!), she laughs and weeps with the genius. Yes! But she does not only stand aside in life’s fray, laughing and weeping away. No! She washes his shirts and she sweeps away the rejected products of his genius that lie discarded around his feet, the ill conceived drafts, the hasty sketches, broken pencil-stubs. She is the handmaid of genius – but this is too general. I will be precise. Such a one is Marcia! God bless you, Marcia!’

  There is a ragged toast of teacups.

  ‘Your husband must be a remarkable man.’

  Galton’s question (it is really a question) catches me by surprise.

  ‘Philip? Oh no, he’s just ordinary.’

  ‘A very remarkable man, as I am sure we shall find.’

  ‘Oh no, you will all be gone by the time he gets back.’

  Dickens shakes his head smiling:

  ‘Well, we shall see.’ Then, abruptly, ‘And if I again hesitate in trepidation when I am asked to broach the theme of the Two Cultures –’

  ‘Excuse me, please,’ interrupts De Hooch. ‘There are not two cultures but three. There is art culture, science culture and germ culture. The first two should be allies against the third.’

  ‘Just so. And, besides, the vastness of the topic confounds our apprehensions –’

  ‘Fuels our apprehensions, you mean.’ This is Blake.

  ‘I meant that it confuses our understanding, though certainly it increases my fear also. I shall now give shape and colour to my fear.’ Dickens looks wildly round at his audience. He seems uncertain how to proceed, yet proceed he does:

  ‘Gentlemen, I want you to picture a carpet. Let it be a carpet of mystery, for its thick pile is the repository of secrets which are not the less curious for being little ones and they and it are darkened over in enigmatic half-shades. Picture a carpet that is neglected, save by one person who cares for it as best she knows how. If a man were then to be seen crawling over that carpet, a curious observer – one whom chance has brought to this scene – might muse to himself as he looked down at the man on hands and knees on the carpet, and his musings, very likely, would be as follows, “Hulloa! I do believe this man is drunk – but no! Confound it! There is too much system in the fellow’s progress over the carpet! Here is a puzzle indeed!” But there is no such observer and no man crawls over that carpet, which still retains its mysteries. Yet if a man were to crawl over that carpet, he might make conjecture to himself. Aye! What might he not conjecture –’

  ‘What not indeed! This is not up to your usual standard, Charlie. Where is this all leading to?’ This is Galton.

  ‘How may I picture this carpet, when you have revealed none of its lineaments?’ Blake is equally peevish.

  Dickens is almost feverish in his agitation. He pushes back a lock of hair and mops his brow again.

  ‘Who was it who said, “Genius is nine tenths perspiration and one tenth inspiration”?’ That was Te
ilhard. No, it was not Teilhard who said it, but it was Teilhard who said, ‘Who was it who said …’ and so on, if you see what I mean. He is always saying things like that. A great quoter.

  Suddenly Dickens is on his feet. His eyes seem to be on the verge of bursting from his skull. One arm sweeps out. The other points down to his feet.

  ‘Gentlemen! Blind fools! I only know that the carpet – this carpet of mystery – is in this house and that I am standing on it at this very moment, and, if I have refrained from the description of its precise lineaments, I tell you that it is only because she who cares for it is in this same room and she is certainly a wiser guide to its mysteries than I could ever hope to be. Behold the woman! Marcia, please –?’

  Now I am in my element. This is very much my territory. The living-room carpet is not at all the same sort of carpet as that frayed thing in the hallway where Mucor has his headquarters. This is fawn-coloured Axminster in quite good nick. Since I share Dickens’s aversion to generalities, I am not going to lecture on the whole carpet, just a selected patch. I have devoted quite a lot of thought to this strangely neglected patch. I am down on the carpet encircling the patch in my arms.

  If the hall carpet was all jungle and lagoons, this one is more savannah or pampas. There are no bare patches to remind us of the furrowed dead sea in the hallway. I am dealing with an area of, I suppose, some one hundred and twenty knots, plus a few outlying colonies of two or three knots that are congealed in darkness. We won’t be looking at the knots themselves in any detail. I simply ask them to observe that the individual knot exists as a twisting column of fine-spun threads. I have remarked that the carpet’s colour is fawn, but here at the level of local colour, the threads can be seen to give off a, perhaps illusory, golden shimmer. There are about one hundred and eighty such threads to each knot – that is an average. These threads go upwards twisting round upon themselves, like a multiple helix, or like barley-sugar, to take a more homely analogy. Each thread is tipped with blackness at the top. It is these little black tips which multiplied many thousands of times over and taken en masse give a general effect of grubbiness to the carpet.

  By now I have really got them. Their tea things are forgotten, and all the geniuses are down on their knees beside me on the carpet. Addressing Leonardo particularly, I point out how the close packed knots incline in ripple patterns, like a still shot of a wind-tossed cornfield or eddying water. If we could just seize the meaning of these patterns … But this greater mystery is (alas!) only the background to my own more restricted area of investigation, the dirt which mingles in with or lies over these carpet knots, the dirt which, in my eyes, forms the figure in the carpet and furnishes me with the point of my narration. The darkened tips of the knots I have already alluded to. They are trivial. But see here! The leaves and a few other smaller organic fragments which have drifted in through the window. And see there, picking its way along the narrow crevice between two rows of knots, that is a carpet-grub in its larval stage. It is commonly known as the woolly bear. Despite its rather cuddly name, the woolly bear is a destroyer. There is only one here, thank goodness. Let us follow its path and see where it is going. Yes, at the end of the crevice a dense cluster of knots has been fused together by a thick black substance which I take to be machine oil with some ground-in grit. It rises like a temple of evil in the faintly darkening plain.

  The geniuses are only too fascinated by this structure. Such fascination can be dangerous. Let us pull back a little.

  ‘So, sirs, we see that the general effect of dirtiness has been built up in layers, as if it were the creation of an artist’s palette.’ (What follows is for De Hooch’s benefit.) ‘The natural colour of the fabric threads has as it were been primed with artificial dyestuff, then lightly pounced with a dusting of grubbiness, but here and here we have the thick impasto of machine oil, and then a final glittering sheen of close ground grit to give surface texture, and all this ingenuity, these fine gradations of shadow, simply to create a dark figure on the carpet – and this figure is itself one of the least spectacular of the effects of the Empire of Mucor. I think that is as far as I can take you by way of a general introduction, though I am of course ready to answer questions on particular points of detail.’

  There are murmurs of demurral. A few of the geniuses reach back for their cups of tea, which have grown cold in the meantime. Galton speaks:

  ‘That was masterly, Marcia. The presentation of your vision was remarkable for its control. I was particularly intrigued by your identification of the temple of evil. I wonder if you would like to say a few words about that?’

  ‘Yes. I see the temple as a forward colony of Mucor’s, engaged in the propagation of evil in my living room. As to its actual identification – well, I think that reading patterns in the dirt is a skill that many people have. It is a skill which demands first and foremost humility. The skilled critic of dirt will indeed come to realize that she or he may be not so much reading it as writing it. I mean that to a certain extent she may be imposing her perceptions on the mess. The example I like to give is Hamlet with his cloud which was “very like a whale”, where the uncertainty of his reading is, I believe, a product of his characteristic introspective humility.’

  Now Blake raises his hand. ‘The Dark Temple is closed to my senses five and where the woolly bear treads I dare not follow. Enchanted Atoms mock us from the Temple’s columns. What is to be done? Angel, I see you weeping. How may we help?’

  ‘I don’t want to enter the temple. I want to destroy it. It gives off a negative emotional tonality –’

  The writers in the group all wince.

  ‘I’m sorry. You’ll have to forgive this housewife, but you know what I mean. It gives off vibrations’ (more wincing, but I press on) ‘which are poisoning my relation with Philip. He hasn’t commented on this particular patch of dirt or any other, but they are bound to have a sort of subliminal effect.’ (Wincing again. Hell!) ‘Anyway, machine oil with grit is very hard to get off from fabric like this. A Hoover is useless. I’ve tried shampoo. I have even tried bleach.’

  I have been doing far too much talking. I think I have said enough to get them going. I ought to stop.

  Teilhard is first with a suggestion:

  ‘Can Philip not help you with this problem?’

  ‘I thought you knew. My husband has no idea at all that all this is going on. It is your help I want.’

  Darwin is the one I have pinned my hopes on. He is now subjecting the dirt to minute examination, while talking to Leonardo. De Hooch unhelpfully pours a little tea on the patch of carpet and silently contemplates the difference that this makes, but Galton and Teilhard soon join in the discussion. In a matter of minutes a brainstorming session is going on. I try to follow it, but the geniuses are talking very fast. The gist of what I have understood, mostly from Darwin, is as follows:

  Classification is the key to the problem. Dirt has been misclassified. To understand what is involved in classification a homely analogy might help. Classification is like tidying up. It is putting the right things in the right boxes. It is what I do when I scurry about the house putting the cushions back on the sofa and plumping them up, putting newspapers in the newspaper rack and so on. So every object in the house gets classified. There are classes of living-room objects, kitchen objects and so on. The order of things is just as important in housekeeping as it is in semantics, and a very untidy house may look like gibberish to another person. A thing is the sign of itself, but it is also a unit in the larger unit of communication, the room. There is also likely to be dirt in the room (philosophers’ rooms are no exception here).

  Dirt is a shorthand term for an anomalous class of objects which are perceived as interfering with the room’s communication, and, in fact, the dirt is not communicating with us in the same way as the orderly array of objects on the mantelpiece, say. That its failure to communicate has come to be seen by thinkers like Leonardo and Darwin as a major problem in Western thought is due par
tly to a too anthropocentric classification of the types of dirt, and to the use of an unjustifiably affective vocabulary. For example ‘thought-provoking dirt’ or ‘fear-provoking dirt’ and simply and most commonly ‘depressing dirt’. More profoundly however our problem is due to an insufficiently dynamic definition of dirt, for, yes, dirt has its own concealed dynamic. A breakthrough here will be achieved by totally transforming the frame of reference. It is not really so much by observation and experiment, but more by a shift in paradigms that the epistemological leap will take –

  I cannot control my impatience any longer:

  ‘Look, I will go nuts if by the time Philip gets home this oil stain is still on the floor. How is all this shifting of paradigms going to help?’

  Darwin levelly returns my gaze, but he does not respond to its urgency.

  ‘Directly … not at all. But we have made great strides already. A transformation of thought is not achieved overnight or even necessarily within a century. I now regret not having even hinted at the problems in The Origin of Species. We here feel that dirt’s concealed direction of movement is towards structures that are progressively (or as I prefer, regressively) more complex but less functional.’