Christine Brooke-Rose - The Brooke-Rose Omnibus

— Don’t be impertinent. You’re nothing to me and you may as well go.

— Oh now look here, boss –

— I said go. Wait downstairs in my office for your wages up till now.

The pieces of marble are strewn all over the floor. It is essential to pick them up and pile them in the corner which has already been demarbled. Some are triangular, some are trapeze-shaped, some are just small chips. One is a whole rectangular slab, which came away entire.

— Now then. Can you cope by yourself for the time being?

— Yes, I think so.

— Bad lot, that one. He not only won’t work himself but prevents others from doing so. It was the same in the pavilion. Delinquent of course.

— He told me –

— Yes, I expect he did. Well it all comes to the same thing in the end. What did you say you were registered as?

— Well, er, if you’ll excuse my saying so, I’m all things to all men too.

— It’s all a matter of tone, isn’t it. You’re all right. You’re a serious chap, you seem to grasp the nature of reality. You know, it’s not so easy for us as you may think. All privilege brings its inhibitions and the privilege of health is no exception. There’s an irrational fear that lingers on, it’s understandable, and in some cases justifiable. I just thought I’d mention it.

The conversation is real, repeat real. Sometimes it is sufficient merely to desire intensely. The law is known as the attraction of opposites.

— The law is known as the second law of thermodynamics, namely, that warmth cannot flow from a cold to a hot body, from a weak body to a strong, from a sick spirit to a healthy spirit, without the application of external circumstances.

It is sometimes sufficient to say nothing, or in this instance to stop the gentle throwing of marble pieces on to the pile of variously shaped slabs in the corner, for the sequence to continue.

— It is thus very difficult for the strong to love the weak, and for the healthy to love the sick, since no warmth is received from them or for that matter needed. The energy radiated from the strong can only flow into the weak in the form of temporary pyrexia, or even hyperpyrexia, which makes them weaker and sicker until dead cold, because it cannot flow back. You understand, don’t you?

— Mr. Swaminathan, you don’t have to explain.

— Sometimes it is kinder to explain at the beginning. It may prevent a tumorous growth.

— You mean in the imagination?

— Imagination is not an organ, it is a function. And when you recall this conversation, remember also that memory is not a place in the brain but a function of neural energy. So much energy is wasted through friction, dissipated, disorganised, it is important to preserve what there is, otherwise all molecular motions of love would be random ones, unable to impart uniform motions to other atoms. Then the universe would die, of maximum entropy.

— The diagnosis, however, would be a post-mortem.

— There you go again with your sick talk. Some people think that cold Colourless bodies should be done away with, to protect the universe, you know. But I am not such an absolutist. For one thing, it’s unscientific. What did you say you were before the — er displacement?

— I was a humanist.

— I didn’t mean your politics. They didn’t see you very far, anyway, did they? I meant your identity. Oh well, it doesn’t matter, identity is only an instrument after all.

— Mr. Swaminathan, I want to ask you one small thing. And that is, well, if you could, once a day, when I pass you on my way up here, just once a day, nod to me. It would help me so much, it would help to confirm my existence. This swaying of yours, you see, it’s such a negative sort of gesture.

— Well I will give the matter my consideration. It may not be very wise. Obsessions feed on so little. You are evidently still seeking that external circumstance. But then after all it might be a matter of common courtesy, you being here in this house, working. Perhaps really it would be kinder to sack you.

The feeling is one of euphoria. The veins in the pink marble leap out like a white network made to catch falling eyes. Existence takes the form of the hammering, which has the high-pitched ring of metal hammer on metal chisel. Identity is only an instrument, a hammer for example, hammering a metal chisel. Two instruments, to be precise, or one instrument and its objective. The gesture of work is its exactitude. It is important to hang on to that. The white veins in the pink marble tremble and nod, they sway and stretch out to catch the excited atoms. An oscillograph might perhaps reveal whether the hammering which now drives its high-pitched ring of metal on metal into the neural cells also drives into the memory of the conversation, memory being a function, not a place. An electroencelograph might perhaps separate the components of the conversation into the elements of silence, reality and unreality. A recording engineer might then dub the unreality with the hammering, if of course the hammering is not already part of the mixture. The piece of marble has broken into a shape exactly like the Matterhorn pink on a picture postcard. That the physical presence has occurred is not in doubt, for the visual image, though rapidly fading, is more distinct than in other circumstances, whereas the psychic presence is less strong than it is when there has been no physical presence, less engulfing, not engulfing at all. It is difficult, however, to be equally certain about the conversation, despite the ringing echo of certain phrases, such as the swaying, you see, protects me from levitation, which is unscientific. Did Mr. Swaminathan say, or did he not, the swaying, you see, protects me from levitation, which is unscientific?

— Mr. Swaminathan, you said in the street that memory is a primitive organ in the left hemisphere of the brain, reflected by the right hemisphere as the moon reflects the sun?

— You don’t want to believe everything you hear from the man in the street.

— But Mr. Swaminathan, you did say, didn’t you, that denial is the only true human power, rather than free will, and that negation is the shadow self which permits man to find unity?

— Well that’s another story.

— But is there a story behind the story?

— That’s a very good question. I congratulate you on having avoided the trap.

During the hammering, the conversation is one-sided. Highly intelligent questions pertinent to the conversation are posed with a rush of ease, but remain essentially unanswered, for the imagination has not sufficiently identified to compose exactly the same answers as those composed by an alien set of neural cells. This proves that the unhammered conversation has been real since unimaginable replies occurred, though difficult to reconstruct, and fading fast.

The slab breaks into three pieces, one of which is an isosceles triangle. The other two are right-angled triangles with one angle cut off. The lines of breakage are not, however, quite straight, but follow the course of nature. The edges, also, of the breakage lines, are not always vertical, like a canyon side, but more often oblique.

The sun pours into the room, inducing a state of pyrexia. The room must be very high, under the flat roof perhaps, for the long narrow window is full of sky, intensely blue if not as blue as on a picture postcard. It is necessary to close the shutters.

The plane-trees along the straight drive make a thick long crocodile up to the house, the jaw disappearing into a long wide coast of foliage below, the tail into a haze of distant trees and shrubs in green and red and yellow. On either side of the crocodile are smooth green lawns, like water, islanded with flower-beds in great clusters of colour, mostly mixed but one oblong a mass of red. Flower-beds give way to clumps of laurels, pink and crimson azaleas, pink and blue hibiscus, fuchsia, palm fronds, pomegranates and green bay. Beyond the flowering shrubs and trees the mimosas are still in bloom. The white wall is only guessable behind the yellow fringe, which curves imperceptibly to the left until the white wall becomes visible again, and becomes two white walls, the first much further forward, separating the expanses of lawns, flower-beds and bush-clumps from the olive-grove and the vegetable gardens, the other beyond the vegetable gardens along the edge of the property, where the head gardener’s cottage is. The path bordered with cypress-hedge is a small dark snake to the large crocodile. Both walls are edged with red and blue and yellow here and there, the bougainvillaea perhaps, and the red poinsettia which are leaves not flowers.