A Clue to the Exit Page 11

  ‘Oh, I think they would have attended a rudimentary cocktail party,’ said Derek. ‘You only have to watch a group of chimpanzees to know that. Language evolved from the pressures of social cooperation. Anyway, nobody could say that Proust was indifferent to the pecking order in his society, and it might be argued that he gave birth to so many books because he was unwilling to disseminate copies of his genes by the traditional method.’

  ‘You are right,’ said Jean-Paul, emphatically reopening his book. ‘The more I think about it, the less I can tell the difference between Proust and a chimpanzee.’

  ‘Oh, I think there’s a very marked difference. For a start, I’m sure that Proust wasn’t partial to PG Tips.’ Derek chuckled. ‘But the size of the difference is the very thing that makes one marvel at the power of natural selection.’

  ‘And what about the experience of pure consciousness?’ asked Jean-Paul, deciding to change his line of attack. ‘Awareness of awareness – what would be the evolutionary utility of that?’

  ‘If there is such a thing as pure consciousness – and I’m not much of a navel-gazer myself, so I won’t enter into the semantics of it – ’ said Derek with dismissive modesty, ‘it doesn’t require an evolutionary explanation. Consciousness had to exist before it could be moulded by natural selection, so, from that point of view, there is no task of explaining the existence of consciousness.’

  ‘But if the various types, of consciousness – visual, cognitive, et cetera – evolved for their survival value, they are essentially unlike awareness of awareness, which has no survival content whatever.’

  ‘Relaxation,’ said Derek, ‘there’s tremendous survival value in that. But, you know, in general, I like Chomsky’s distinction between problems and mysteries, between scientific questions which are amenable to a solution and those which no imaginable set of experiments could resolve. It seems to me that certain aspects of the attempt to create a science of consciousness fall into the mystery category – free will, what happens to consciousness after we die, that sort of thing. What’s nice from my perspective is that that makes complete evolutionary sense. Our minds didn’t evolve to solve those problems, any more than our eyes evolved to see ultraviolet light.’

  Weary of being misunderstood, Jean-Paul was determined to bring the dialogue to an end. ‘So, if I’ve understood you correctly, evolutionary psychology has no need to explain the existence of consciousness and no possibility of explaining what is interesting about it. Really, we were completely lost before the invention of this discipline, huh?’

  ‘Oh dear, you really aren’t a fan,’ said Derek. ‘So, what’s your line of country?’

  ‘Reading,’ said Jean-Paul.

  Crystal’s eyes were closed. She definitely wasn’t going to have another conversation. Tiredness was good. There was nothing to feed her curiosity, nothing to distract her from her anguish. She realized, with the thud of self-reproach reserved for the most blatant oversights and already accompanied by a shimmer of relief, that her whole journey to the conference was born of a desperate need for consolation. Her craving for answers to the questions posed so brutally by Peter’s coma had partially disguised itself as a passion for science. Now she was left with the naked longing to be reassured.

  But could she afford to seek consolation from a future where death was the only certainty? When he was asked about the origins of the universe, the existence of God, the mind–body problem, and his survival after death, the Buddha had remained silent. What had drawn her to the dharma in the first place was the fact that it was a practice and not a faith: something to do, not something to believe. She recalled the allegory of the wounded man who refuses to have a poisoned arrow removed until he knows the name of the man who wounded him, whether the arrow was curved or barbed, shot by a crossbow or a longbow: his inquisitive pedantry is the equivalent of refusing to seek liberation without knowing whether the soul is dependent on the body.

  As she remembered these things, her relationship with the unknown seemed to reverse: instead of being paralysed by ignorance, she was liberated by agnosticism. Released from a sales conference of systems and models, she returned to the vivid and discreet life of her own mind. She realized that she doubted everything except the sense of freedom that came from acknowledging a world in which things were neither unreal nor endowed with an independent reality, but flowing into one another like the air flowing in and out of her lungs. With this return to simplicity came relief, as if she had thrown open the windows of a hospital room. She was no longer tired, and when she opened her eyes she saw that the coach was already passing through west London.

  By the time they arrived at Victoria coach station, Patrick could hardly wait to tell Crystal the happy news that the problem of consciousness was insoluble. A man called McGinn, sitting next to him on the coach, had explained the whole thing with exemplary clarity. Instead of using the mystery of consciousness to unlock a world far stranger than the one we thought we were inhabiting, McGinn used it to lock us into our constitutional limitations: not only was the problem unsolved, it never could be solved. Something we did not know and could not know provided an entirely naturalistic explanation for the arising of consciousness from insensate matter. Patrick, who had been toying with a materialism in which our ignorance was not intrinsic to our faculties but confined to our understanding of matter, immediately saw the advantages of the more radically pessimistic ‘cognitive closure’, namely that it allowed him to stop thinking about the problem. Instead of wondering whether he would live long enough to see science crack the code, he could now legitimately turn his back on the entire question. His life had been spent trying to stop thinking about one thing or another – sex, drugs, cruelty, snobbery, money. Consciousness just happened to be today’s relatively abstruse nightmare, the thing he couldn’t get off his mind, and McGinn’s analysis was the Betty Ford clinic he had been crying out for, a refuge for those who had been engaged in the compulsive futility of trying to find a common language with which to negotiate between the dictatorship of science and the anarchist guerrillas of introspection.

  Why was the copula between the brain and the mind plunged in an obligatory darkness? He had to hang on to the argument while he shuffled down the crowded aisle of the coach, hang on for a few more minutes until he could explain it to Crystal. Then he would ask her to dinner and back to Ennismore Gardens for an in-depth seminar.

  It would all be over soon. Whether he was a property dualist or a classical dualist, a mystic materialist or a silly old physicalist, whether he acknowledged that the mind was extended or he opted to be an out-and-out panpsychist: none of it mattered any more. No need to try to airlift causality to the seemingly calmer plane of functions or algorithms; no need to pretend that the mind which had produced computers suddenly turned out to be no more than the artefact it had wrought; no need to point out that the intelligence which appeared to belong to the computer was put there by the programmer not by the circuits; no need ever to mention Searle’s Chinese Room Argument again. He felt like a debutante who, grimacing sceptically in the mirror, has tried on every dress in her wardrobe, and then, with a sudden all-over rush of authenticity, decided to stay at home with a plate of baked beans. His own plate of baked beans was the thought of how ‘deplorably anthropocentric’ it would be to imagine that our cognitive closure could be translated into any kind of objective eeriness. Why should reality be constrained by our conceptual powers? All was well with the world, it operated according to the laws of nature; it just so happened that the law which described the cause of our most intimate and inevitable experience was utterly and for ever incomprehensible. He could live with that. No problem.

  Still, the point was not how it made him feel but what the argument was. That’s what would provide the agenda for a midnight seminar. He was getting dangerously near the door. He could see Crystal going down the steps, followed hotly by the superfluous Jean-Paul. He must get the whole thing clear, like a diagram hanging in the translucen
t space of his imagination, the blueprint of a missile that would lay waste to the Great Consciousness Debate. On the one hand, the property of consciousness was not a perceptible property of the brain … Then there was the stuff about spatially defined properties … we’re doomed to vacillate between the contingency and the necessity of the connection. On the other hand … Oh dear, he was already at the steps. Well, he could only hope the whole thing would come back to him once he started talking.

  ‘It’s very clear,’ said Jean-Paul, pulling his suitcase out of the side of the coach, ‘our primate minds were not designed to solve the problem of consciousness.’

  ‘Well, quite,’ said Patrick. ‘On the one hand—’

  ‘I’ve decided to limit myself to being tormented by what I know,’ Crystal interrupted, ‘and not take on the further torment of what I don’t and probably can’t know.’

  ‘Forget the “probably”,’ said Patrick. ‘The whole thing was explained to me…’

  ‘We agree,’ said Crystal. ‘We agree in advance.’

  ‘So we’re all agreed that it’s insoluble,’ said Patrick doggedly. ‘Perhaps we should celebrate over dinner.’

  ‘I need some rest,’ said Crystal, with a shivering smile. Seeing her weariness, Patrick was almost grateful to hear her refuse.

  After an unconvincing exchange of phone numbers, the three characters dispersed into the damp London night, each locked in their partially private and, even to themselves, partially hidden minds, but all standing firmly on the common ground of having no explanation for the real nature of this tireless and fugitive mental display.

  At this point, Jean-Baptiste fetched me to say that the call had come through. I hurried to the phone and said hello.

  ‘Charlie! It’s Arnie Cornfield. How are ya?’

  ‘Arnie? I was told a woman was going to call,’ I said stupidly.

  ‘You only take calls from women now, you old rascal?’ said Arnie. ‘Taking it easy in the South of France, surrounded by beautiful women on some paradise island – not a bad lifestyle.’

  ‘What’s all this about, Arnie? Why are you calling me? Don’t tell me you’ve found a package for Smell the Flowers?’

  ‘I’m working on it.’ Arnie giggled. ‘Seriously, though, the reason I’m calling, apart from the pleasure of talking to you, which it always is, is that the Movie Channel wanna do an interview with you about Aliens. The bad news is that they need to know your medical status.’

  ‘Well, when we met in New York four months ago, I had six months to live. You’re good at figures, Arnie; work it out.’

  ‘The decision is up to you…’

  ‘Or, rather, it isn’t up to me.’

  ‘We’re talking different “its”. I’m talking television; you’re talking terminal. I don’t know any tactful way to put this, so I’m just going to put it out there. Either they can do an obituary piece, which would tie in very nicely with a retrospective: this was the man who gave you The Frog Prince, Aliens with a Human Heart, and so forth; or they could do a profile, and if your health should decline totally before it gets aired, a little note at the end, “Charlie Fairburn died whenever” – you know the type of thing; always a heartbreaker for the audience; makes it very real. They think, “My God, I loved that movie. I can’t believe the guy who wrote that has actually passed away.”’

  ‘Tough decision,’ I said, ‘but I’m going to make it easy for you. They can do the obituary piece without the interview. And, Arnie, don’t ever bother me with this bullshit again.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like I’m going to have that many opportunities,’ said Arnie. And then, feeling he might have bared his teeth a little too nakedly, ‘I’m only trying to protect your interests,’ he pleaded.

  ‘Interest doesn’t come in the plural any more. It’s singular all the way to the end.’

  ‘Never give up hope,’ said Arnie, a million fatuously happy endings cluttering up his mind. ‘Never,’ he repeated, his voice cracking with emotion, ‘give up hope.’

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  ‘They might discover a cure. Scientific breakthroughs are happening all the time; and, don’t forget, when it comes to medicine, money talks.’

  ‘That really would be a scientific breakthrough,’ I said. ‘I wonder what money would say if it could talk.’ I launched into a dialogue. ‘“I was in Joan Collins’s wallet the other day.” “Oh, were you? How is Joan? I don’t know her personally but her lawyer once used me to leave a tip at the Ivy…”’

  Arnie roared with laughter at my silly fantasy. ‘Are you putting a patent on that concept?’ he asked. ‘Only, I have a writer – British guy called Ian – always looking for a concept, and I think Money Talks could be perfect for him. A couple of bills fall in love, get torn apart, reunited, solve a crime maybe, or find the autistic nine-year-old who’s hacked into a secret government installation for brainwashing air-force pilots who think they’ve seen a UFO. Only the nine-year-old, and of course the audience, know that the head of the programme is actually himself an Alien, and that the entire human race is a crop for these Alien farmers – real sinister guys; they wear dungarees but they glow in the dark. That’s what death is: the Alien harvest. And if the kid can crack the code, he can save the world and make us immortal … I’m just making this stuff up as I go along.’

  ‘I can tell,’ I said. ‘Anyhow, the money talks concept is all yours, or Ian’s.’

  ‘Can I have that in writing?’

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said, hanging up the phone.

  After the torpedo of Arnie’s conversation, I sat dazed at my table. I watched the histrionic complaints being acted out at the bar, the islanders’ inevitable insularity, railing against ‘le continent’, the mock fights between men with drooping moustaches and smoker’s coughs, a fisherman pretending to storm out and then winding his way back with an aria of insults, his hand chucking spadefuls of indignation over his shoulder, and I felt the violent alienation of those moments when everyone seems so trapped in their roles that they might as well not have an imagination, a dream life, a capacity for geometry – how long shall I make this list? I couldn’t help wondering what roles I was caught up in myself. I might no longer be the alpha scriptwriter puttering around LA in his classic car, secretly delighted by the bad taste of his shirts, but wasn’t I still dying in the shadow of some giant cliché? The artiste maudit, for instance, who says, if not out loud, ‘My neglected children are scattered over the face of the earth, my body is in ruins, and my alimony payments are twenty times larger than my income, but just get a load of this paragraph about the umbrella pines.’ Or the deathbed apologist who is persuaded by the creaking of vulture-laden branches to put away childish things and have a cassock sent round from the wardrobe department. The thought of being remembered for Aliens with a Human Heart, upsetting enough in itself, was especially bitter since I’d become a human with an alien heart. I couldn’t have missed my true subject more completely.

  I left the cafe and hurried out of the village like a hunted animal. Arnie had stolen my solitude and I had to shed the self he had conjured up before I could think again. The island was becoming too crowded and vulnerable. Calls could burst in from New York and flood me with strange preoccupations. ‘Never give up hope.’ That was Arnie’s vision of my situation: an argument between hope and despair, probably resting on a still sillier struggle between optimism and pessimism. At least hope and despair were feelings; optimism and pessimism were emotional ideologies, or deals with fate. In the universal chiaroscuro, the Manichaean crevasses of daily life, it made no sense to latch on to one thing rather than another. There was no point in striving for anything but intimacy with mental reality.

  I started to reinvoke the power of intimacy, but the feeling of insight which had accompanied the whispering of its name on the previous night was gone. What pressed in on me instead, as I walked along the dusty track to the Plage du Langoustier, was the impossibility of saying anything that was true, anything that didn’
t require qualification, anything that wasn’t local and uncertain. I was obsessed by the trap that if knowledge is uncertain and causation inexorable, our sense of freedom rests on our ignorance. This thought is always available (I think Patrick had it at some point, or was it me?), but sometimes it insists on itself with a kind of leaden authority. The world again resolved itself into rippling lines of dominoes, falling through me, over me, past me, crashing down with every action I took and every thought I had.

  I came to the top of the hill and looked down on the tapering south-western tip of the island, its bevel of beach, its wind-stooped bushes, and further out to sea, in a final rush of seclusion, a ruined tower crumbling on a rock of its own. I was suddenly gripped by the desire to swim out to the tower, to a place where Arnie couldn’t telephone me, an ultra-island to which this island would be ‘le continent’. I walked down to the spit of land I had seen from the hill, intending to set out from the long, pale Plage du Langoustier, but seeing the sickle bay of Port Fay on the other side, and remembering that I had imagined taking Ton Len there and watching the clear ripples sift the black and gold sand at our feet, I decided instead to set out from there and swim to the tower round the end of the island. It was a much longer swim, but I’d stopped reflecting and was acting from impulses which were so rapid and imperious that they seemed to belong to a single trance.

  The water was cold. By the time I reached the mouth of the bay I was shivering uncontrollably, but my mind was in a state of despairing calm, my gaze fixed on the grey crease of the horizon where the sea and sky seemed to meet, without in fact doing so. They just went rolling on in their parallel curvature, only brought together by storms, like the mind and the body forever separated by the ‘explanatory gap’ but brought together by the storm of life. The horizon was the home of delusion, pretending to reconcile the parallel curvature of the world. I must swim out there and denounce its lies. I was beyond the narcissistic impertinence of the lonely tower – ‘Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie’, the winding stair to the crumbling battlements – beyond all that. I was cold and tired, but I was furious as well, furious with all illusions of reconciliation. And what of intimacy? Was I going to let the vague potency of that word save my life? Was intimacy going to make me turn back and get dressed and stop this silliness and have a hot meal and get a good night’s sleep? No. Intimacy was another blurred horizon, pretending to dissolve the observer and the observed, only to resurrect them the moment that the dissolution was recognized. I swam on with savage weariness.