A Clue to the Exit Read online

  I am not the person who was playing dead on a hotel bed yesterday, I am transfigured by beauty. I don’t love these hills because they remind me of a woman’s breasts, or love the sea because it recalls my piscean ancestry, or love this landscape because I’ve been taught to by Cézanne. The beauty is given, it is the order of things on which my suffering is imposed. Today I can see that clearly.

  How do I know? Because if you jump out of a window, you can always tell when you’ve reached the ground.

  19

  Why do I bother with On the Train? If I have anything to say about the all-and-nothing subject of consciousness, why don’t I just spit it out? Most things that can’t be explained have the tact to remain unknown, whereas consciousness remains inexplicable despite being the only thing we know directly. One way of reformulating this mocking state of affairs is to say that the first-person perspective, which is the only witness to the quality of consciousness, cannot translate into the third-person perspective, the source of the scientific observations on which explanations are built. I had hoped to embody this frustration by writing a third-person narrative which is a flagrantly displaced first-person narrative. I also imagined that the tensions of these fictional conventions would create intriguing parallels with the tensions of the scientific method: the way the ‘observer effect’ and the participatory reality it entails conflict with the attempt to organize nature into laws; the way that the immutability of those laws conflicts with the claims of evolutionary theory. Ultimately, the way that science forms laws, by assuming that what has happened in the past will happen again in the future, means that science must by its own logic judge itself to be an inadequate description of reality, since it always has been in the past. There could have been a beautiful interplay between all of that and the notorious unreliabilities of narration.

  Yes, if I had the time (and the intelligence), imagine the Fabergé bauble I might have wrought, nesting miniatures of itself, wrapped in a golden web of connections, at once floating and fundamental, compact and complete. It hovers before me, not unlike Macbeth’s dagger, a reproach, a temptation, an illusion.

  Still, there are things I can think about better by arranging them in a third-person narrative and so I’ll plug on with my novella. Besides, I’m in a state of relative calm ideal for resuming On the Train. I’ve got hold of Heidi and she says that Ton Len will be coming down here next Friday with her nanny and a camera. For the last year I’ve had to try to set aside my frustrated paternal love so as not to go mad, but now it’s fountaining irresistibly.

  And yet as I sit here in front of this faded raspberry farmhouse, on a broken wicker chair, under the dusty eucalyptus tree, I feel the tingling of destiny, as if electrified sand has been poured through the crown of my head and is fizzing down through my body. I am grateful that my own mind is being ripped open again and again by dying and gambling and Angelique and my adorable daughter and the beauty of this island. The mess that’s emerging, a confessional diary overwhelming the fragments of a speculative narrative, at least reflects the truth of my experience, the fact that every contemplation is interrupted, and that every interruption becomes a further object of contemplation, and that this rhythm of delusion and revelation feels as if it’s essential to the nature of consciousness considering itself.

  I keep thinking of my daughter’s birth. The green accessories of the operating theatre, the friendly foreign nurses, the hard white light. Supine Heidi screened from her lower half by a tactful little curtain. The doctor performing the operation as crisply as a man tying his shoelaces. A Caesarean section could not distract him from planning a game of golf with his assistant. And then, with the flourish and the tenderness of a wine waiter, he eased the baby from her mother’s womb and held her towards us, bloody, slimy, purple and open-eyed. I looked at her and saw that her eyes were full of knowledge and feeling. I had the intuitive certainty that she was already a person, without a vocabulary, a birth certificate or a wardrobe, but still a psychological unit whose development would take place in relation to something that was already present. What I loved so effortlessly was not something that was mine or something that was cute, but a person who was radiantly herself. It was not just her emotional intensity – she was furious to have the roof of her home cut open and to be dragged into the glare and pressure of a dry new world – but the person having the emotions who was present.

  I realize that if I look into the implications of this intuition, it conflicts with my equally strong conviction that the self is a ludicrously contingent nonentity. Am I then locked into a debate between self and soul? These are not abstract questions, they are at the heart of finding out what the hell is going on. There isn’t a human being on the planet who doesn’t have a vocation for making sense; some people are just better at convincing themselves that they can.

  Enough! This is just what I mean: these kinds of speculations are much better off in a third-person narrative where the self-contradictions can be reorganized as varying points of view within a lively debate.

  20

  There was nothing left to say about being stuck in Didcot and the rest of the conversation had come to a sympathetic halt. Crystal was swallowed by her preoccupations. Jean-Paul resumed his sense of the outer world as a conversation he couldn’t help overhearing but had no desire to listen to. Patrick, driven by an old unease in the presence of social silence, scanned his memory of the conference for other points of entry into the subject that tormented them all.

  The conference had taken him back to Oxford for the first time since he had been a student there. In those happily bygone days, he had found a city living under the spell of the high suicide rate for which it was celebrated throughout the world. Apart from the tramps who lined the crooked lanes and hideous shopping precincts with an air of belonging, everyone looked as if they were hurrying home to an overdose. After rare and reluctant tutorials he would sprint back to the station feeling that a missed connection might turn into a life-threatening incident. It was generally as he passed Didcot that the possibility of enjoyment, excitement and lightness of spirit slowly returned to his terrorized mind. Perhaps he was still in the shadow of that habit; perhaps his mind would clear once the train broke free of that foggy junction.

  Something about the set design of Oxford seemed to encourage posturing, to organize what were supposed to be unusually intelligent people into tribes of actors, as if no individuality could survive a fall into the deep trenches of tradition dug by all the oarsmen and dons and divinity students who had gone before. Eccentricity was the natural and in itself clichéd protest of slaughtered individuals.

  On Patrick’s first evening as a student, the warden of his college welcomed the new undergraduates with a speech. He praised the geographical position of Oxford. ‘We’re very well placed to go to London,’ he said. And Heathrow, thought Patrick, dreaming as usual of New York. ‘And Cambridge,’ said the warden, ‘which, of the newer universities, is, in my opinion, quite the best.’ That’s donnish humour, thought Patrick, deciding to take immediate advantage of London’s proximity. The warden’s sly, pedantic chuckle seemed to reverberate among the bookshops and gargoyles that guarded the taxi rank; his gurgling complacencies soaked the golden buildings until they split open like soggy trifle. Perhaps they had once been intended for something serious, but there had been too many puns, too many Latin tags, too many acrostics, too many fiendish crossword puzzles, too many witty misquotations and too many sly chuckles for them to do anything but rot, however noble and solid they might look to the winking eye of a tourist’s camera.

  Returning to Oxford after ten years, he found that his ear no longer picked up this paranoid frequency. He was a sufficiently different person to return with some neutrality; and, besides, he was no longer cultivating that narrative sense of self which collects the resonances of earlier experiences. The buildings seemed to have achieved that ‘ordinary unhappiness’ which Freud promised his star patients.

  Patrick’s attenti
on drifted among the various incompatible approaches to consciousness he had been exposed to over the last three days. He hadn’t yet organized his memories of the conference into anecdote and he knew that unless he gave them that structure they would slip down the nearest drain. Once he had described what had happened, on the other hand, the story would gradually colonize the experience, the alternative details would disappear and only those that served the story would be allowed to survive. The experience was already shaped by another story about who he was, but only the feedback loop of description could give the experience enough solidity to survive in active memory.

  It was tempting to picture an ascending hierarchy of complexity, with consciousness arising at the point where the feedback loop occurred, but this just pushed the problem back, leaving the loop unexplained.

  The habit of asking ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ again and again was like living with a four-year-old child. Patrick was exasperated by it and sometimes wanted to say, as he might at the end of a long gauntlet of monotonous interrogation, ‘Well, that’s just how it is.’ At other times, or sometimes at the same time, he felt that the measure of his strength was his ability to inhabit this vertigo of enquiry, to meet the eyeless gaze of the incomprehensible. Perhaps these two positions were not so different.

  Patrick sighed and looked out of the unrevealing window. It was impossible for him to concentrate on the question of consciousness for long, impossible to turn away from it for any longer. At the conference, Galen Strawson had shown him Michael Frayn’s parody of Wittgenstein about the man who doesn’t know that there is fog on the road unless there is a sign saying ‘fog’. ‘This is the man who philosophers are always telling us about, the man who goes on asking for explanations when everything has been explained.’ After going through some moves typical of a certain kind of analytic philosophy, this enquiring character asks, ‘But how do I know that the expression “fog”, where “fog” means “fog”, means “fog”, where “fog” means “fog”?’ Someone suggests he is in a mental fog. ‘Now one asks: “But how do you know it’s a mental fog you’re in?”’ He, in turn, needs an illuminated sign saying ‘mental fog’. The author concludes: ‘If a lion could speak, it would not understand itself.’

  If British Rail had been thoughtful enough to put a sign on the station platform, would it have said ‘mental fog’ or ‘physical fog’, and who would have been able to read it anyway? Perhaps in one of those fits of self-improvement which usually gave birth to a ticket with a name too complicated to request, they might have put ‘metaphorical fog’ or even, throwing caution to the winds, ‘metaphysical fog’. What difference did it make?

  Patrick could see Crystal reflected in the window. She seemed to have become inaccessible, and he felt his desire for her checked by the opaque surface which covered her disappearance. As to Jean-Paul, was it wise to interrupt him while he was reading a big shiny French book called Le Mythe du sens? Patrick was thrown wearily back onto his own thoughts. What kept him looking for clues in a sometimes infuriatingly abstract, technical and circular debate was the allergic relationship he had with so many of his own mental habits. He had to know whether there was anything free in the wretched drama of consciousness. What else was there in the end? A man’s biography was the history of what he had given his attention to, and so it seemed worth knowing what attention was, and how it related to other types of knowledge.

  ‘Oh, God,’ muttered Patrick. He felt the constant longing to escape his own habits of expression, and then watched the tyranny of his taste, like a bullet in the heart of a skylark, reintroduce him to the inevitability of certain rhythms, certain symmetries, certain tricks of argument. Faced with this curvature of his imagination, he experienced a fresh outbreak of self-allergy. Maybe things hadn’t changed that much since his student days.

  All the agony about how consciousness related to the simultaneous firing of neurons seemed to Crystal relatively trivial. The correlations would become more compelling, there would be ever more bizarre brain lesions for the angel of empathy, Oliver Sacks, to describe. But even if the map came to match the territory in the spookiest possible way, there would still be a few hippies, philosophers and romantics who would insist that there was a real city under all that paper, a city of experience, lost in translation. The mapmakers would reply that there was indeed a city, the city described by Francis Crick where, ‘You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.’ Everybody would be back where they started but with more suggestive details. What was neuroscience worth in the consciousness debate when consciousness had its life in experience and she could never experience her neurons firing?

  She was sometimes tempted to think that consciousness was the fundamental constant which physics had forgotten. The notion that the ‘singularity’ was a form of consciousness seemed rather less mystical, on balance, than the idea that the universe was born fifteen billion years ago out of nothing. Followed a few billions of years later by life, with consciousness arriving only just before the end of the party, struggling up the stairs against the downpour of entropy and species extinction, an afterthought resulting from activities in the central nervous system. ‘A likely story,’ as Peter was, or had been, fond of saying.

  What appeared to be the tough existential decision to face up to our famous insignificance and isolation, a refusal to grab at the flimsy consolations of a purposeful cosmology, turned out to be a human monopoly of creative power. The universe, life and consciousness were allowed to lurch stupidly into existence, but for true creativity we must look to the Sistine Chapel, or the combustion engine. The Hubble telescope was a miracle for admiring an accident. No flies on the brave boys and girls, in white coats and black overcoats, who had banished superstition from their laboratories and cafes.

  She was arguing, but who was she arguing with? Who were these people in white coats and black overcoats? As she recognized what she was doing, the argument began to fade. The thoughts were all hers. They settled back at their source. Her shoulders sank. She breathed out more slowly. She had retracted her attention from the contents of her thoughts – in this case a make-believe argument with a make-believe audience – and returned it to the subject, the thinker. But she was still observing herself, and thereby observing herself observe herself, in the infinite regress of the witness box. When the fixation on the object of thought had gone, there was still the witness observing its absence. Then there was no observer, just an experiencer. Then there was no experiencer, just experience. At last.

  I have to stop writing my novel. I rang Heidi today and she told me that Ton Len will not be coming to see me after all. Someone called Dunan Rimpoche is doing a special healing ceremony, and Heidi has been told by her therapist that she ought to take Ton Len ‘to heal the wound of her absent father’. She’ll be in touch with me soon.

  ‘When will that be?’ I asked, trying to stay calm.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t like to set my plans in concrete.’

  ‘I’m up to my mouth in concrete,’ I said, ‘and it’s pouring in through every vent.’

  ‘Oh, God, you’re such a drama queen,’ said Heidi. ‘Anyhow, I’m not going to argue with you. I know how to set my boundaries these days and you can’t make me feel guilty.’

  ‘Why don’t I come over and see you both tomorrow?’

  ‘I don’t think that would be very appropriate,’ said Heidi.

  Since then I’ve been lying on my bed. Through the warped windowpanes, the torn mosquito net and the half-closed shutters, I can see the corner of a plane tree, the seagulls drifting through a slit of sky, and some shivering bushes on the hillside, shining in the north wind, as if they had been splashed with cold water.

  I could say that it is death that frightens me, but that would be too reassuring. It would give the impression that I know what is going on. Every day, it’s true, I
wake to the winning image of a revolver fired into my temple. It’s true that my brains splash onto white tiles and my body slides down and slumps at the foot of a wall. I can’t deny that it’s upsetting, but why would my imagination go to so much trouble if suicide wasn’t less upsetting than this limitless white terror, bleaching every object in its universe? I marvel at the optimism of suicide, expecting to bring torment to an end. Not to mention the executive elan, the rush of impatience that comes at the end of a long history of failed delegation – everybody employed to console you has let you down, and so you sigh and load the gun and say, ‘It’s always the same story: if you want something done properly, you have to do it yourself.’

  The allure of suicide is to avoid the white terror and the allure of everything else is to avoid suicide. Reactions react to reactions like worms impaling themselves more deeply on the hooks they try to escape. If I refuse to elaborate this feeling, maybe it will fold in on itself. An infinity of unease, given no trade, might shut up shop and turn out to be as small and fleeting as happiness and love and vitality. Why should fear have any more substance than the rest of them, unless I sustain its life with evasion and credulity? Yes, I accept it all, the shame, the cirrhosis, the stupid and unkind things I’ve said, the boredom of this fucking personality which has stopped me doing anything I don’t regret. The unacceptable has finally found its natural dumping ground. Truckloads of hospital waste rain down on me and I wait imperturbably for more. The white terror folds up like a sheet, corner to corner, crease to crease. It can’t stand being recognized for what it is: just another feeling. But what a feeling. I think I’d better go for a walk.

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