Gut Symmetries (2 page)

According to Darwin the evolutionist, man stood upright when he shed his saurian tail. What happened to it? Here it is, in my hand, like a motley joke of the
commedia dell'arte.
My fool's wand, my visible weakness, dropped off the back only to run round the front. I am civilised but my needs are not. What it is that lashes in the darkness?

What or who? I cannot name myself. The alchemists worked with a magic mirror, using reflection to guide them. The hall of mirrors set around me has been angled to distort. Is that me in the shop-glass? Is that me in the family photo? Is that me in the office window? Is that me in the silvered pages of a magazine? Is that me in the broken bottles on the street? Everywhere I go, reflection. Everywhere a caught image of who I am. In all of that who am I?

My suspicions were aroused when I was quite young. I could not find myself in the looking glasses offered. I could not define myself in relation to the shifting poles of certainty that seemed so reliable. What was the true nature of the world? What was the true nature of myself in it?

I could not immunise myself against the germ warfare of object and dream. There seemed to be no bridge between mind and matter, between myself and the world, no point of reference that was not a handy deception.

I tried to copy my parents, as monkeys do, but they were trying to copy me, looking to the child for the energy and hope they had long since lost.

I tried to copy other children but lacked their tough skin. I was a glove turned inside-out, softness showing. I was the visceral place between mouth and bowel, the region of digestion and rumination. No doubt it is my spleen that refuses to locate the seat of reason in the head. No doubt it is my natural acidity that fears the milkiness of the heart.

This story is a journey through the thinking gut.

It began on a boat.

The
QE2.
Southampton to New York and on to Los Angeles via the Panama Canal. A spring cruise of fun and fantasy where each day had been labelled with a mortician's care. There was an undertaker on board but his services are not usually required. For a few days, at least, the expensive antibodies of illusion and excess are sufficient to stall the effects of ageing and apathy, jolting even the most coffin-like into pink cheeked pleasure.

Pleasure = consumption.

After only six hours at sea my dauntless fellow travellers had begun to jowl their way through 2,455 lb of butter, 595 lb of frozen prawns, 865 gallons of ice cream, 26,500 tea bags, 995 lb of frozen fish, 135 jars of baby food, 170 bottles of vodka, 1,959 lb of lobster . . . the list is not endless but it is long. In a few days, these gut-defying deck chair adventurers will have vanished the lot in an orgy of Now You See It Now You Don't. I doubt whether our resident magician will perform such prodigious feats of disappearance. I said in my lecture this morning that the dining rooms of the QE2 were proof positive of a fourth spatial dimension; there can be no ordinary human explanation for the daily loss of so much matter.

It is remarkable, at sea, how delicate appetites, special diets, macrobiotic tendencies, and Yin-Yang energy alignments fall victim one and all to the Dionysiac phrensy of champagne (1,160 bottles) and caviare (55 lb). The unworldly should remember that caviare is normally eaten by the ounce.

Inevitably it is not only the gastric juices that are stimulated by luxury and fresh air. What could be nicer than pre-prandial fellatio in a foreign tongue?

The Exotic, the Other, the orient of interest that floats at sea. Where else could anyone have access to a Thai chambermaid, a bored Countess, a fading rock star and a briny boy, all for the effort of a stroll on deck?

Here is a Faustian world of self-gratification. Set outside of time, it looks real, it tastes real, inevitably it vanishes. If that brings bitterness it also removes responsibility. Outside of time there is no responsibility.

HE: Are you married?

ME: No.

ME: Are you married?

HE: Yes.

There was a long pause.

HE: My wife and I live on different planets.

ME: Are you separated?

HE: We have our own bathrooms.

After my opening lecture on Paracelsus and the new physics, a balding man, bristling with energy, had bounded up to me and grasped my hand, hands, no matter how many I might have had, he would have grasped them all. He introduced himself as my companion lecturer for Cunard's spring cruise, theme, 'The World and Other Places'.

The world of physics has few places more prestigious than the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, New Jersey. This man, Jove, was based there, working on a new model of the cosmos, dimensionality of hyperspace, ghost universes symmetrical with ours. He was the future.

I said 'You are the future.'

He said 'Does time wear a watch?'

Jove was lecturing on Time Travel. Every morning he had to explain to elderly gentlemen why they would not be able to regain their hairline by stepping into a time machine. No one was interested in Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and its impact on what we call time. Everyone wanted to know when they would be able to extend their lives indefinitely by living them backwards. Theoretically it is possible to slow down the effects of ageing by altering the rate of time. Travelling at speeds close to those of light (186,000 miles per second), time's flow trickles. If we break the light barrier, time seems to go backwards, that is, we need no longer move forwards.

'They want me to tell them how to find Reverse,' said Jove, 'when most of them have spent sixty years wondering how to shift out of Automatic into First.'

I did not believe in fate but it can be a useful excuse.

How strange that I should be working my passage to New York, bags in the hold, my body harbouring a new start.

How strange that I should have won two years of research funding at Princeton.

How strange that I would be seeing this man every day.

As the rest of the audience shuffled away to their favourite binary opposition, gin/tonic, a woman came forward and asked Jove, 'If we were to travel back in time would it be advisable to don the costume of that period before we set off or to buy it when we get there?'

What a fashion opportunity. While the physics fraternity are just beginning to wrestle with the implications of time travel, the travellers are worrying about what to wear. The world is ready for Ralph Lauren Mediaeval.

'I'll leave you ladies to discuss it,' said Jove.

'Wait,' I said. 'You are the one in the Armani,' and I walked away.

He caught up with me later, part furious, part beaten.

'You should meet my wife.'

'How will I know which bathroom to use?'

I said there was a love affair. In fact there are two. Male and female God created them and I fell in love with them both.

If you want to know how a mistress marriage works, ask a triangle. In Euclidean geometry the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees and parallel Unes never meet. Everyone knows the score, and the women are held in tension, away from one another. The shape is beguiling and it could be understood as a new geometry of family life.

Unfortunately, Euclidean theorems work only if space is flat.

In curved space, the angles over-add themselves and parallel lines always meet.

His wife, his mistress, met.

Perhaps if this story had happened before 1856 I should not be telling it to you at all.

In the nineteenth century, most people knew their place, even if they did not know the mathematics that predicated it. In a strictly three-dimensional world, where the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, the comings and goings of sexual intrigue could be measured with a reassuring accuracy. On a flat sea the boat hardly rocks. What happens when the sea itself plunges away?

1856. A poor obscure tubercular German called Reimann delivered a lecture calculating that Euclid is valid only in terms of flat surfaces. If the surface were to turn out not to be flat then two thousand years of mathematical smugness might not be smiling.

Sixty years later, a poor obscure German called Einstein realised that light beams bend under gravity. Therefore, the shortest distance between two points is a curve.

If light travelled in a curved line it would mean that space itself is curved.

(Pitch of her body under me.)

'Alice?'

I could see him standing behind me. He wrapped himself rug-like round my shoulders. We made an elegant pair: dark/fair, older/younger, assured/uncertain. The mirror offered us a snapshot of our own desirability. He was gazing past me with some satisfaction.

I looked too, but what disturbed me was another face in the mirror and another room behind.

It began. Of course it did. Simple, solid, knowable, confined. A love affair. A commonality of life as dependable as life itself. We are what we know. We know what we are. We reflect our reality. Our reality reflects us. What would happen if the image smashed the glass?

'Ice?' Jove handed me my drink.

'How many more of them will ask me whether or not they should be refrigerated at death until science can defrost them into the warmth of perpetual youth?'

'What do you say?'

'What I should say is that if you go in like a turkey you will come out like a turkey.'

ME: What will you do with your old age?

HE: What I have done with my youth and middle age.

ME: Your work?

HE:
Purché porti la gonnella, Voi sapete quel che fa.
(He sang.)

ME: If she wears . . .?
La gonnella?

HE: A petticoat.

ME: You know what he does.

HE:
Don Giovanni.
I'll take you to the Met. I'll take you everywhere.

That's how it was/is. The story falters. The firm surface gives way. Nine months ago I was on this boat sailing towards my future. Nine months later and I am balanced on it as precariously as if it were a raft. On this raft I am trying to untangle my past. My past/our past. Jove had a wife. I was in love with them both.

That's how it is/was. Jove and his wife have disappeared. He crying in salt waterfalls, she scattering her tears like gunshot. I should have been with them.

Why was I not?

Here I am, all aboard the eternal triangle reduced to a not quite straight line.

Here I am, man overboard, woman too. They are gone but there are no bodies.

I am still here but there is no feeling. I cry lead.

If there was a body perhaps I could feel. He would say if I could feel there would be a body. Energy precedes matter.

She would say 'Until you are ready to love there is no one to love.' Would say/did say, caught in the curve of her own light.

Is that her breast under me? Sphere of the thinking universe, wilful plunge of the sea?

Stabs of time torment me. What use is it to go back over those high rocks that resist erosion? My life seems to be made up of dark matter that pushes out of easy unconsciousness so that I stop and stumble, unable to pass smoothly as other people do. I should like to ramble over the past as though it were a favourite walk. Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view.

Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as I start to run?

Past. Present. Future. The rational divisions of the rational life. And always underneath, in dreams, in recollections, in the moment of hesitation on a busy street, the hunch that life is not rational, not divided. That the mirrored compartments could break.

I chose to study time in order to outwit it.

When I was ten I heard my headmaster tell my father,'She'll never be top drawer.'

I looked at the pockets of their tweed coats, their knitted pullovers and knitted ties. I looked at their tawny jaws, their bottled eyes. I felt myself caught between two metal plates, crushing me. The pressure on my head was intense. I wanted to say 'Wait' but I was so low down that they could not possibly hear me. I lived in a world below their belts, not an adult not a child, smaller than small at the indeterminate age. The plates ground together and my father started to talk about the cricket.

We got home, my father and I, self-made man, poor boy made good, and while he poured himself a sherry, I went into my parents' room where they kept their chest of drawers.

There were two top drawers. My mother's held her jewellery and scent. My father's stored his handkerchiefs. His hobby was magic tricks.

When children learn to count they naturally add and multiply. Subtraction and division are harder to teach them, perhaps because reducing the world is an adult skill. I had long believed, and still did, that my father had at least two hundred handkerchiefs and that he had handkerchiefs as kings have treasure. Silk, spotted, plain, embroidered, cotton, paisley, patterned, striped, linen, raw, spun, dyed, lace like a periwig for his evening clothes. When he put one in his top pocket he sometimes gave it rabbit ears.

'Alice?'

And I followed him through corridors of make-believe and love.

Right at the back of the drawer was his gold watch; a full hunter that chimed every fifteen minutes. Essential for a man whose time was measured in quarter hours.

Is this what I would not be? Solid, reliable, valuable, conspicuous, extravagant, rare?

I scattered the handkerchiefs like soft jewels. Is this what I would not be? Fancy, impudent, useful, beautiful, multiple, various, witty, gay?

In what was left of the afternoon light I opened the lower drawers.

Underwear, talcum powder, balled up socks.

'Do you have to work so hard?' said my father, when I was anorexic and hollow eyed.

I got a scholarship to Cambridge to read physics and I started eating again. Of sleep I remained suspicious.

When I sleep I dream and when I dream I fall back into my fears. The gold watch is there, ticking time away, and I have often tried to climb inside it and jam the mechanism with my body. If I succeed, I go to sleep within my sleep, only to wake up violently because the watch is no longer ticking but I am.