Fremder

19

Lowell Sixe’s troubles in this world were over; mine weren’t and I didn’t even know what all of them were. The terminators in the peeper could just as easily have closed my account when they hit Sixe; that they hadn’t seemed to indicate that for the moment nobody important wanted me dead; perhaps, even, somebody important wanted me alive. But it clearly wasn’t safe for anybody to stand too close to me.

‘Well,’ I said to the crumpled figure. ‘At least once in your life you had the feeling of running ahead of the chariot.’ Probably I seem insensitive in not making more of his death but I’d sensed that he himself had felt that his life was behind him; and as ends go his was a quick and painless one. I emptied his pockets and took the contents with me. The disposal of his body I left to the sweeper that would follow the peeper. The card Sixe had given me was quietly elegant in its typography:

PICCADILLY RELIEF

‘You’ll come again and again.’

37 The Maze, King’s Cross

All tastes catered for.

On the back of the card was written the name Marie Demska. It was a name that meant nothing to me but since earliest childhood I had lived in constant expectation of messages and revelations from the unknown; much of the time I felt lost in a labyrinth, and now here was a name from The Maze. A clew?

By the time I came down from the roof it was after four in the morning. There was a sweaty dampness in the air but no freshness, only the stench of too many years of Fungames and Maxiburgers. Katya was sleeping soundly — no talking or singing — lying on her back with her mouth slightly open, like a child completely empty after the action of the day. I wondered what she was dreaming; if there was any trouble in her mind it didn’t show in her face.

I went into the kitchen and looked at the photocopies I’d taken from Sixe’s pocket. Most of them were of Helen Gorn’s notebook pages:

14.8.16

Waiting for the rain. Parched earth waiting for rain. Elijah the Tishbite: ‘As the Lord, the God of Israel, liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.’ Elijah with his face between his knees, waiting. Sometimes full of certainty, sometimes full of doubt.

15.8.16

Elijah. Eliyahu. ‘A man who is called a hairy man in his signs, a man whose loins were girded with leather,’ says the song. ‘A man who rose on horses of fire in the wind. A man who did not taste the taste of death and burial.’ The only prophet who was a runner. Seventeen miles from Mount Carmel to Jezreel. Where did the ravens get the bread and the meat they fed him? Midrash says from the table of Jehoshaphat but that answer doesn’t satisfy me. Darkness in the shape of a bird. Noah ‘sent forth a raven and it went forth to and fro until the waters were dried up from off the earth.’ Darkness as the finder. This was the ancestor of the ravens who were commanded by the Lord to feed Elijah. Bread and flesh of darkness. Darkness is what kept Elijah alive: the black. To be Elijah he had to be able to live on blackness; that was how the Lord tested him.

21.8.16 Seventh anniversary of E and S’s death.

Dream: Fragment of 16th-Cent. Ushak carpet, Father’s study. Father naked, sitting cross-legged on it. Try to look away but can’t. His body & limbs become vine & leaf patterns — he slowly sinks into carpet — mouth shapes word I can’t read. Carpet not flat but infinitely deep space — blue-green primordial sea of consciousness — proto-red of world-mind — gold of its thought — black womb of silence. Vine of world-mind-thought growing, twisting — new shoots, new leaves out of womb of silence. Pattern whispers word I can’t hear. Word becomes stone, becomes ziggurats, pyramids, circles of standing beckons, places of broken columns. Stone becomes thought — thought becomes self — self becomes proto-red.

22.8.16

Big storm — Izzy afraid of thunder and lightning, asked if he could get into bed with me. I said yes. Izzy afraid of what’s behind the lightning, ‘the bright emptiness’. After a while he quieted down. This/not this.

23.8.16

Elijah in the cave on the mountain of God. Not the wind, not the earthquake, not the fire. A still small voice, a soft murmuring. The cave is the place of becoming, the female darkness waiting to be seeded, womb of transition. From the air around the mountain comes an invisible shape that fills the cave where Elijah is hiding.

Not male or female, the Elijah condition. A conjunction of both. A merging and an emergence. The rain at last.

Elijah is more than a specific individual; Elijah is a state of things, a condition, a convergence of probabilities, a coming together of scattered possibilities that manifest themselves as sudden and unpredicted action. Oh yes, here is Elijah, here is the rain. Now, now, now. At last.

24.8.16

Dream: a rushing in the air behind the visible world.

Isaiah 17, 12

Ah, the uproar of many peoples,

That roar like the roaring of the seas,

And the rushing of nations, that rush

Like the rushing of mighty waters!

Thinking again of Elijah with his face between his knees, waiting for the world in which there will be rain. Waiting for the world in which under a black sky he will run before Ahab’s chariot. Thinking how it was when at last the rain.

A chariot of fire and a whirlwind took him up into heaven. Or another world.

From ‘The Anthropic Principle’, George Gale, Scientific American, December 1981:

It is necessary to suppose there are infinitely many worlds,

in each one of which the particle has a definite position.

What happens during a measurement is that one world is

selected from among the infinite range of possibilities.

Can electrical impulses from the brain precipitate possibility? Leibniz says the world is as it is because God is as He is. But what if God is as He is because we are as we are? Then the world is as it is because we are as we are.

Listening to Étude No. 9 in F minor, Opus 10. You can hear the world of it trying, trying, trying to become.

Ilse Bak in Arts International, September 2016:

You have to become Chopin, become the world of him. In the Opus 10 F minor study the effect is quite uncanny. That left hand! The repetition is strange: once you’re in it you don’t want to stop; you feel yourself trying to get to a place that you never arrive at. The end is the abandonment of something — hope maybe.

28.8.16

Chopin and Caspar David Friedrich — Friedrich 1774–1840 — Chopin 1810–1849 — white bones of cliffs at Stubbenkammer — oval aperture of grass and trees through which appears sharp-toothed abyss like dentate vagina with the sea beyond — 3 figures: on left Friedrich’s wife in red dress pointing down into abyss — on right his brother at very edge leaning back against dead stump — in centre Friedrich on hands and knees, almost falling over edge.

Friedrich’s drawings more pianistic than his paintings, more etudinous, more mazurkian, more nocturnal — good drawing — boats and ships with real rigging and working tackle — great owls, etudinous and nocturnal Uhus.

Sonia D says how can I be modern thinker and like Friedrich better than Lamia Quick — thinks anything distorted or abstract better than anything straight — the strangeness in the straight too quick for her & Lamia.

12.09.16 Dr Burke’s lab

The Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction — on the light box is a Petri dish in which 10 ml each of potassium bromate, sulphuric acid, and malonic acid, plus ferroin to give colour, have been added to 10 ml of a solution of sulphuric acid, water, and cerous nitrate. In the pink liquid there are bluish-white wavelines forming concentric circles that expand and collide and disappear. Those that hit the edge of the dish don’t stop or rebound, they vanish as if they’ve gone through the glass to (one can’t help thinking) another world where they keep expanding.

Extract from letter, E. Gorn to B. P. Belousov, 12 November 1969

… It seems to me that oscillation might well be the universal communication pattern of which your chemical reaction is one of an infinite number of manifestations. Communication of what and to whom or what? An interesting question.

13.09.16

Alternative worlds: A world in which Richard Soames doesn’t take me to the May Ball and a world in which he does.

14.09.16

What if God decided to actualise a possible world which is on the whole less perfect than other possible worlds?

Substituting the name of Richard and the not-taking of Helen to the ball in Leibniz’s Arnauld-starting-for-Paris proposition (Leibniz — An Introduction, C. D. Broad). Words in square brackets mine:

There is no general property [except plainness] possessed by [Helen] (comparable to the definition of a circle) from which it necessarily follows that [Richard] will [not take her to the ball]. But, since it has always been certain that he will [not] do so (for otherwise God could not have known it beforehand) [and God has known it from before the first day of Creation] there must be some timeless connection between [Helen] (the subject) and [not being taken to the ball by Richard] (the predicate). If [Helen] were not to [be not-taken to the ball by Richard] this would destroy the notion which God had of [Helen] when he decided to create [her]. For that notion, considered as the notion of an as yet merely possible individual, includes all the future facts about [Helen] and all the decrees of God on which these facts would depend, considered also as merely possible. On the other hand, says Leibniz, the supposition that [Richard] did not [not take Helen to the May Ball] would not conflict with any necessary truth.

Thanks a lot, Leibniz.

Seventeen miles through the rain running in front of Ahab’s chariot from Mount Carmel and the killing of the priests of Baal to the gates of Jezreel. The image of Elijah wide across the desert and the sky, the long muscles of thighs and calves sharp and shadowed as the hard feet strike the stony ground. Running with the power of his god in him under the black sky and the rain. To have that just once.

*

There were two photocopies of a different handwriting. The first was of a notebook entry that I guessed had been written by Izzy Gorn:

23.8.16

In the storm a safe place, a calm and wild place. Oh the great secret. The forever-moment that has always been and will always be, the centre to which the universe configures itself. The magic place, the good blackness. The dancing of the heat on the infinite sands, the pyramids, the ziggurats, the lightning and the sphinxes of it, the pleasant palaces and rainbows. Now the satyrs are quiet and full-fed, now they sleep while the wild dogs howl. Broken is the great vessel of the alone, the aloneness is all spilt out. Broken the forty jars of silence wherein I crouched like forty dead thieves. Broken, broken, broken the solitary madness where the lizard-men ran silent on the ceiling of my mind. How they screamed and wept, how they dropped and one by one burst on the stone of Yes. The Yes of the death of the lizard-men.

The remaining photocopy was of a printout:

PYTHIA 04.11.52 04:00:01 NO EDIT ATT THNKSC SPEED I

BY NIGHT ON MY BED I SOUGHT HIM WHOM MY SOUL LOVETH I SOUGHT HIM BUT I FOUND HIM NOT I WILL RISE NOW AND GO ABOUT THE CITY IN THE STREETS AND IN THE BROAD WAYS I WILL SEEK HIM WHOM MY SOUL LOVETH RAVENS RAVENS RAVENS WHAT FEEDING ELIJAH THE BLACK YES THE BLACK ALIVE STILL BUT WHERE IS MY LOVE BY NIGHT ON MY BED I SOUGHT HIM BUT GONE GONE GONE. I WILL SEEK HIM IN THE BLACK I WILL FIND HIM WHOM MY SOUL LOVETH WHEN THE TIME CAME HE DID NOT TASTE THE TASTE OF DEATH.

In the margin an unknown hand had written on the photocopy:

L-

Maybe you’re right.

M

I don’t know how long I stood there reading that. I felt like an island of stone with time flowing around me. Speak to me, I said to my mind.

No answer.