A Whistling Woman (9 page)

Another “ludic” exercise was a primitive experiment in deliberate thought transmission. We picked “transmitters” who wrote down, or drew, what they were transmitting and then we meditated and tried to receive the image. I pointed out that this was fairly standard in scientific ESP trials. I was mildly told off. Mixed results. Holly managed to “transmit” a burning bush to two of the Quakers, Zag, Ruth and (this is a bit doubtful) Richmond Bly.

Another ludic exercise was the drawing of “spiritual images” of oneself. John was quite unable to conceal the fact that he and Zag had drawn identical geometric patterns—a highly complex series of polyhedrons inside other polyhedrons. John said, this was a game they often played as children. He also said, rather surprisingly, that God was “to be seen” in mathematics. “God is mathematics, the form that's in everything.”

Zag said the polyhedrons represented “everything being
in
touch,
all these points of contact, infinite touch.” John didn't like that. He said it wasn't surprising, both of them drawing the same pattern. “We've both drawn this one often enough before.” Zag said “We've both drawn
all sorts
of forms and figures before. This is the Complicated One, admit it.” John said “So. If I do admit it. We would both naturally choose the Complicated One. Don't make a supernatural happening out of a statistically probable coincidence.” Zag said “There are hundreds of figures you could have chosen. I
felt
it would be the Complicated One.” John said “So you were second-guessing me. Nothing surprising in that.”

Daniel Orton drew a leafless tree, with deep roots. Gideon drew an angel with a flaming sword. Holly drew the Cross, with a black, man-shaped hole in it. Ellie drew a minute circle. Like so, o. O, and Miss Pincher produced a nice studentish sketch of three apples, nicely shaded-in and hinting at three dimensions.

I can see you thinking—And Elvet Gander. I drew my pipe, of course. I put it next to my own version of Van Gogh's drawing of his pipe. (The dead-ash one, next to the sprouting onion.) I wrote under it Ceci n'est pas une pipe. Ceci n'est pas Elvet Gander. Farrar said, writing was cheating. I said, it was a pity if there were rules to preclude wit. Richmond Bly (who had drawn a
sad sheep,
I think he meant it for Blake's Lamb) said that if William Blake cd combine image and word in one icon, so cd Magritte, and
ipso facto
so cd Elvet Gander.

This group has a remarkable variety of natural leaders, who change roles. The Fishers have a quiet authority—it's their house, and their idea—which they're at great pains to disclaim. Farrar is a born Leader—his need to lead is pitifully blatant—his own people love him, and bask in his warmth (and he in theirs). Holly doesn't mind. He's a loner, and comfortable with it. He so to speak gets his pleasure from
theorising
the others' behaviour. My Ellie, and Farrar's Ruth,
hurtle
to renounce their Selves for others. Ruth is distinctly the handmaid type, Richmond Bly wd like to be a leader, and knows he won't make it, so follows. He needs to be part, either way. To sing the same song as the others.

Zag has more
charisma
than everyone else put together, but it don't shine out like splendour from shook foil unless he's asked to sing, and then he's the snake-charmer. He cries “Share my passion.” Gideon Farrar says “I'll give you what you want.” (Implying, what you want is
me
.) The Tigers holds the two together, to its credit.

These are the leaders, and then there are the Watchers. Elvet Gander, psychoanalyst. Always one step out of the arena, looking to see what other people's utterances mean, cover,
can
be translated into
. Trained, God help him (!), in suspicion and scepticism from the dark days of his studenthood, and wryly watching his own tentative hand-claspings and drawings-back. Daniel Orton's a watcher. He doesn't appear to be watching according to any rules, or for any power-intrigue that I can see. Does he have a deep, quiet faith, or is he a Priest of No God, like his colleague? You don't learn much about him. I asked him if he was married and he replied, “My wife died in 1959.” End of conversation, end of topic. End of him, he implied. He was stalwart at washing-up, clearing up, closing shouting-matches. He sees Ellie's invisible fence, and keeps to his side. She notices this. Miss B. Pincher is a watcher,
I suppose
. She looks so damned ordinary, it's as though she's an emissary from another planet, pretending to be human.

The final Meeting was “inspirational.” When these things work, they work like poems, or orchestras. First one takes up a note, then another, and they build on it. The Quakers began—they are usually “called” to speak first—with biblical quotations about those who are born of the Spirit. “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.” We must give up our wills and go with the wind, was the message. Zag suddenly made up a beautiful little song, a lilting wind-song, in a minor key. Even Ellie said something. She didn't stand to speak, indeed she sank her head with its coverings a little lower, and held it with her bandaged hands, and said “There should be a safe place where we wouldn't be afraid to hear.” Did I speak? I did not. I don't. But I did hear a vague rushing in the silence. Afterwards, everyone was all solemn and so to speak
rainwashed,
after a storm. They agreed that they (we) must do more to make Ellie's safe place. The Fishers want to found a therapeutic community—like Laing's Philadelphia Association, with differences. They said they admired Laing but weren't quite sure about his
praxis
. (The word “hairy” came up again, tho' they can't have uttered it? Who did?) They said their community wd have open doors, but a core of residents who would both care and be cared for. No “patients.” No “doctors.”

Farrar asked why the Joyful Companions were not already the desired community, and the others found it hard to answer, for the reason was, that they do not trust
him
. This caused them to turn to me, and say that my insights, my wisdom, were as necessary as the wisdom of the churches. I was suddenly the centre of attention because I wasn't Gideon Farrar. I said I would think about it. God knows, Kieran (God!!!). (We write, God, exactly when we least believe in It. Natural theologians, of course, use this involuntary cultural reflex as evidence of G's persistence.) OK,
God knows
I want no part of Farrar's huggy-bunnies and happy-clappy-chappies. I wonder, cd one use his undoubted energy differently, like earthing electricity? What do we want people
to be
? Holly's Jung wanted healthy Aryan spirits in Aryan bodies, mandalas and sun-worship. But our deliciously earthy Freud was earthed in pre-war Bourgeois Vienna, bleak and musty with antimacassars and three-piece suites, quite like our front parlour in Stockport. (Did you know I grew up in Stockport?) I don't want to perpetuate the Normal bourgeoisie. So what, where? If we did start such a thing—with an imaginative psychiatrist (or two) and a few sensible visionary Quakers, we cd make a real safe house for people like Ellie, and your Lamb.

Young Ludd went round the Tigers asking who would be prepared to put time in, to take the idea further. John Ottokar said he wouldn't. He said he wouldn't have the spare time. Then he added “And I might be moving away. That is, I
am
moving away.” First I'd heard of it, and, as it turns out, first Zag had.

The other non-starter was the man I'd picked for the possible king-pin, the solid Daniel Orton. He's got experience in plenty, and good sense, I intuit. He just said “No, I don't think so.” Holly said “That is strange, Daniel. This would seem, on the face of it, to be your work, your calling, precisely.” Orton repeated, no, I don't think so.

I asked him, as he was leaving, catching him privily in the entrance hall, why. He looked at me with a look I interpreted as
crossness
—I don't know what else it was. He said “I'm not a community animal, Mr. Gander. I know myself so far.” I said “But you belong to a community—” He said “That's how I know.” At this point there was shouting behind us, and John Ottokar
rushed past
and flung himself on to a motor bike, on wch he must have come. I asked Zag what had happened. Zag said “He's a turd, he's turning himself into a pure turd.” I am too tired to analyse his choice of metaphor (unless it's literal). This is a dreadfully long missive to inflict on you. Take it at yr own speed—foolish advice for what I
must make
the last sentence.

Yours ever

Elvet     

The snail-searchers were scattered in a triangle. Marcus lifted his head and noticed it was briefly equilateral, before Jacqueline moved away, attenuating the connections, pulling both invisible lines after her to a fine point.

All three, spread at silent, companionable distances, were preoccupied with mathematics. All three were thinking about order (and disorder) in mathematical terms.

Marcus, the only natural mathematician, picked up an empty shell of
Cepea nemoralis,
a fine-lined coil of chocolate brown on shimmering horny-gold, and puzzled again about the way natural patterns of growth constructed themselves along the Fibonacci spiral. Snail-shells, ramshorns, spider-webs, branches of trees and twigs on branches, sunflower heads. Take a number, add it to its predecessor, add the number obtained to its predecessor. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13. It grew in starts, not smoothly. Kepler had noticed that the ratio of these numbers to each other became closer and closer to the ratio of the Golden Section as the series progressed. As though 0.618034 was a mystical constant in the geometry of life. Marcus had discussed with Luk, a merely journeyman mathematician, but an imaginative naturalist, the possibility of working out the maths of the dynamics of phyllotaxis, or the increments of the snail-shell. The one in his hand—and all the others around—seemed constructed on a Platonic skeleton of the ordering of things, a glassy web informing matter.

Jacqueline's mathematical problems were only just beginning. She was trying to master the differential equations needed to map and measure the action potential of the symmetrical giant cells on the ventral surface of the snail-brain. The idea was to insert micro-pipettes into the prepared cells, to inject potassium chloride, and to pass pulses of electricity through them. She was having trouble with the dense layers of connective tissue around the cells, which were hard to soften with enzymes, and hard to dissect by hand. The electrodes were hard to insert, and hard to keep in place. She had to readjust both the chemistry and the mechanics, and then to readjust them again. Her work disintegrated into mess and failure; the beauty and order of the creature's nervous system became mash and inert stuff. Beyond the preparation were the problems of the oscilloscope and the problems of constructing a voltage clamp to make the delicate measurements possible. Somewhere in all this cutting and stripping and splaying lay the thread of a clue—perhaps—to the biochemistry of learning and memory. The snail knew how to move, to choose and avoid foods, to mate, to hibernate. In these neurones were a map of part of that process of knowledge and learning. A ghost-dissection hung in her imagination on the moor. The snails on the wall before her slid forward on contracting and expanding feet, opened their delicate, miraculous mouths, extended their shining horns.

Luk Lysgaard-Peacock's maths was simpler. It was arithmetic—six pink, twelve wide-striped, two chalk-white, a yellow—becoming statistics meaningful or maybe meaningless, as his numbers were added to the numbers recorded by his Edwardian predecessor and the original Victorian clergyman. The beautiful idea that snails carried their genetic code on the coils and colourings of their shells, which had acquired a happenstance metaphorical elegance with the discovery of the helical nature of the DNA, was about to become redundant as a useful tool. The discovery of electrophoresis—the grinding and mashing of snail-flesh (or any flesh) to be stretched and measured and mapped on a gel in an electric current—had provided a quick way in the lab to replace all the local observation, recording and guesswork. Luk knew this. He was using electrophoresis to analyse both snails, slugs, and other creatures. But this was not a substitute for the precise observation of what creatures did, how creatures related to each other, in the world of living things.

He measured the world from inside the balance of his own body—he was a creature among creatures, out here amongst heather and tough grass and thorn-trees. He noticed the sharp, peaty smell of the air; fresh earth at the opening of a burrow; exposed roots, scraped by what? Things moving—sheep on the horizon, a long, slender, dark coral worm, a spring bubbling in a reedy patch, moss, snails, snail-trails, a majestic golden slug.

He noticed the variable human triangle, too. He could feel Jacqueline's purposeful progress without looking at her. He asked himself how, and registered the faint electrical crawl of his own sexual interest, mingled with the naturalist's scanning for anything moving. It was his nature to be shadowy. He wondered if Jacqueline's body registered Marcus as his registered her. Would he pick up those currents? He could not feel that they were there. Marcus was not charged.
A sheepdog trotted towards them, making small whining sounds, from the direction of Gunner Nighby's new hen-battery in the water-meadow. It was Lucy Nighby's Shirley. She ran up and wreathed herself round Jacqueline's ankles, snorting and nipping at her calves. Jacqueline looked for Tobias, the sheep who thought he was a dog. He was trotting towards them along a sheep-track. Jacqueline whistled to him; she was fond of him, and approved of his resolutely confused ambitions. He came up, a little wearily. Jacqueline put out a hand to pat him, and found her palm smeared with blood. Blood was seeping up from his skull between his stubs of horns. Blood was wet, Jacqueline also saw, all over his fleece, red-brown and tacky. A lot of blood. Jacqueline knelt down and ran her fingers through the wool. The wound on his head was nasty but superficial. The blood on his flanks and rump did not appear to be his own.