Mark de Silva - Square Wave

Where events appeared in both accounts, how could Rutland’s not be given more weight? His words, after all, were temporally closer to the objects and events described, and conceptually closer as well, perhaps, in that Rutland gives us scenes, sequences of his experience, inner and outer, unfolding in ordinary time. Knox condenses and generalizes from his. Supposing their powers of observation were commensurate, and that neither had more reason than the other to distort matters, it seemed natural to give priority to Rutland’s words.

But the first assumption: How to measure their perceptual acuity without being, yourself, in a position to check it against your own, observing the same things, beyond the correspondences with other documentary evidence? And did aesthetics insinuate itself here, as it did in mathematics? Perhaps it had a place, and the great maligned classicist Richard Bentley and his heterodox approach to interpretation — really his gifts as an exegete were beyond question — was right, to a point at least. A great aesthetic intuition could recover the true and fullest form of a gap-ridden text, even when it was Paradise Lost , and the world snorted with laughter at the emendations.

There would also be immanent clues to consider. Too many inconsistencies in an account might suggest a weak eye. But too few might suggest the same, the missing of distinctions, of tensions, of the minute irreconcilability of events along their edge that every glassy text and tale polished away.

Even if the matter of priority couldn’t be settled, an equilibrium might be sought. Rutland’s words could light Knox’s, and Knox’s Rutland’s. Similarly for the rest — the Chronicles, the trader balance sheets, Haas’s and Darasa’s words — until everything was bright, light dawning “gradually over the whole,” as he’d read once in the carrels of the Wren library, in Cambridge (Bentley’s library, too). The pages of that original manuscript, Wittgenstein’s, were tinged blue, he recalled, by the light falling through the library’s tall lead panes.

In Berkeley, the preferred term was semantic holism: the fixing of the position of one term by the fixing of the position of others. Perhaps, then, Stagg’s work was just historiography as an extension of radical interpretation, recovering the past as one recovers the meaning of sounds leaving mouths, a world, an idiolect, on every tongue.

Then the second assumption: Beyond reconstructing the life of a nation, to what extent could Knox’s private view of the Sinhalese be discovered? There were far fewer letters to go on. Apparently he didn’t think there was much hope of their reaching home.

Rutland’s records, the journals and the letters, were private documents, which meant he would have had little reason to mold them for public effect. Historical Relation , on the other hand, was written to be widely read, and was.

As one of the first Britons to be so deeply acquainted with South Asia, Knox offered one of the first detailed reports on the land; there is an early mention of cinnamon, for instance, and other endemic spices. So he might well have been tempted to sculpt his account, in an effort to shape the dawning imperial consciousness of a nation. The irony being, though, that through the influence of his family through the generations, Rutland’s account almost certainly had a deeper effect on that consciousness than Knox’s in the long run.

Knox more than Rutland took an impersonal, quasi-anthropological approach, and this suppression of subjectivity created a further hurdle for Stagg. Knox was steeped for twenty years in the country’s atmosphere before writing the book, though. Whatever his aspirations toward being a dispassionate witness, time would have molded his sensibilities, structured his account.

But teasing out the normativity, uncovering the moral architecture of the book, and of the British Empire — all the things that interested Kames — how was that to be done with Historical Relation? The book rarely engaged with matters in a straightforwardly moral way, so Stagg would have to detect their subtextual operation. And then, as before, how far could the moral framework be prized apart from the reality it framed? A kind of notional separation of scheme and content, to whatever degree it could be effected, was required, a double interpretation, of Knox’s consciousness and of the world it embraced.

All this made him grateful for the private jottings of his ancestors.

Stagg mounted the subway steps near carrell Square, his ears still throbbing from the train. Only some lines had it, the crushing squeal that came on far from any platform, deep in the tunnels. Every conversation halted, and the sound, like a jet engine overlain with trebly polyphonic squawks, made itself the lone object of the car’s attention. It might have sprung from the tracks, he thought, something warped or worn in the black spaces between stops.

A wall of wind met him at the top of the steps. His stomach, rekindled half an hour ago by a swig of vodka as he walked out of his apartment, burned pleasantly. Still, he was feeling prickles and running with sweat, so he welcomed the frigid wind, which numbed and dried him. It was hard to outrun a chronic hangover. Whatever you did, however much you drank, it was right behind you, waiting for you to fall off the pace.

The grinding noise grew rather than faded as he walked away from the station. A tower of scaffolding stood in the distance, in the square. Though it was partly lighted along its edges, it was still too dark, and there were too many crossbeams blocking his view, to see exactly what it scaffolded. He wondered whether work somehow might be going on, even so late. The sound only got louder as he walked, before suddenly falling away.

The fountain in the square was dry, and under the dim construction lights circling it, the concrete was pitted and scaly. Plaster stained the bottom in swirls, especially near the base of the statue. It had been annihilated in a blast that came right on the heels of the one in Brandt Square, just weeks before. He’d assumed the statue at its center would be replaced, as the Brandt fountain was going to be, not restored. Circumstances must be different.

He jumped the massive lip of the fountain and approached the statue. Plaster, or some sort of binder, was spattered along the fissure beneath the ribcage, where a curving chunk of the torso had been reset. The same had been done to one of the arms, though the hand, which was meant to rest on its waist, was still an absence. The wrist simply hung in the air, falling short of the body. He studied the legs, veined in hairlines as if a severe compound fracture had been set. A few slivers had been replaced by closely matched marble, perhaps quarried from the same mountain in Carrara, though it was a touch lighter, more translucent. It would have to age.

The closer he came, the more fissures appeared. Touching the arm, he could see that the entire statue had been remade from hundreds of distinct chunks of marble, some original, some new, put together like a puzzle.

The plaque, which he’d never thought to inspect before, read thus: “A Gift of Benjamin Henkel Jr. (1835–1870).” The Henkels must still be rich, Stagg thought, to have the wherewithal to put this back together or the clout to have the city council do it at its own expense.

How many pieces was the head in? And when the restoration was finished, would it carry a new aesthetic valence? Restored works, after all, always bore the trace of that labor, even if only an expert could say in exactly which details it resided.

The long bulbs attached to the beams around the statue streaked the blue-white marble with light and gave it an uncertain presence. Standing back from it, looking only upon its lower half, which was almost complete now except in its finest details, the fractures seemed to bring a kind of weight to the sculpture he’d not noticed before.