Yannick Grannec - The Goddess of Small Victories

“Quantum-physical space is a wave field where the duality between what is I and what is not-I ceases to obtain.”

“I’m relieved to learn that Pauli didn’t inflict those diabolical matrices on us for no reason.”

Oppie’s comment floated to us from his deck chair. Even with his eyes closed, he didn’t miss a shred of the conversation. I couldn’t tell whether Jessup was a fraud or simply clueless. His cosmic hodgepodge might go over with some Hollywood starlets, but here in Princeton? Even I could see his effrontery. I was sorry Albert and Pauli were not around; they would have roared with pleasure at tearing this specimen to pieces. Kurt, speechless, picked nonexistent specks of dirt from his white suit. He had taken off his necktie; his open collar gave a view of his scrawny neck. This little patch of light-colored skin triggered in me a spasm of tenderness. I smiled at him; he nodded complicitly. Oskar Morgenstern shifted the conversation; he wanted to discourage our crackpot from embarking on any more dubious disquisitions. By spiriting Charles’s quarry from under his nose, he had snatched his toy away.

“Kurt, have you finished your paper on Carnap?”

“I withdrew it from publication.”

“Why? What a waste of energy!”

“I wasn’t happy with the result. It was polemical. My old friend Carnap wouldn’t have had time to reply. It wasn’t right. From now on, I’m devoting myself solely to philosophy. I’ve become deeply interested in Husserl’s phenomenology and his work on perception.” 55

“Are you bored with mathematics?”

“Where you see a tangle, I am drawing out a single thread, Lili. My ambition, my hope, is to discover an axiomatic foundation for metaphysics.”

“By studying the work of others?”

“Study is never in vain.”

Theolonius came back to the charge, reinvigorated. “I, too, endorse a marriage of traditional approaches and modern scientific theories. Truth is undivided.”

Charles was savoring these words like so many grains of caviar. He was preparing a scathing reply. My husband foiled his plans by subjecting his guests — already saturated with words and alcohol — to a lecture on phenomenology. The philosopher Husserl, his current obsession, was, he claimed, engaged in an identical quest for analytic purity in thought. I’d quietly examined Husserl’s works to try and understand Kurt’s new monomania. I’d never read anything so hermetic, not even my husband’s dratted mathematics, which, transposed into my language, sometimes became imaginable. This Mr. Husserl had a talent for coming up with a terminology that was even more obscure than the subject it was meant to explain. Even Kurt admitted it was dry. Which is saying something!

“On the subject of perception, are you familiar with Aldous Huxley, Mr. Gödel? He has just written an essay called The Doors of Perception . I’ll send you a copy.”

“He stole the title from William Blake!”

My husband waved his hand as though driving away a pesky wasp.

“Let him speak, Hulbeck! The subject interests me.”

Delighted, Theolonius launched on a panegyric of Huxley and his experimentation with mescaline, a derivative of peyote. He believed the substance of great import in the study of perception. According to him, it opened doors onto other dimensions, doors that would normally be hidden from us by reason. He preferred LSD, which was a legal drug, over peyote. He was kind enough to tell us that mescaline gave you diarrhea. He and his circle used it in making extrasensory experiments. It allowed him to see music and listen to colors. I wondered if this potion could also make a wife’s voice audible to her husband, but I forbore to ask. Charles was muttering and mangling toothpicks one after another: Jessup was now trespassing onto his flower bed. This miraculous LSD was no recent discovery, and Charles had treated a number of his patients with these psychoactive substances. While LSD could alter one’s sense of time and space recreationally, it had numerous side effects, including the loss of appetite and the onset of dangerous hallucinations, unsettling the mind in a way that some people never recovered from. Charles argued too zealously against its use, and Kurt only became more interested. His curiosity did not worry me unduly; he was too afraid of being poisoned to experiment with such substances. And I recognized symptoms that my husband had already brought on himself just by abusing his faculty for thought.

“It sounds quite tempting.”

“Altering one’s thought processes is not the same thing as purifying them! Kurt, this will lead you to drug addiction!”

“That’s not what I meant by tempting, Oskar. Yes, I would be afraid to lose myself in it. I’m searching for, let us say, less chemical means. The human body has resources of its own for achieving this end. While I seek to open a new door of perception, it’s not by distorting my senses but by detaching myself from them.”

“In the first place, you would have to believe that there is a reality separate from the one captured by our senses!”

“We have talked about this a hundred times, Oskar. Mathematical objects are one aspect of this other reality. They form a universe apart, to which we barely have access.”

“It is a world you have the good fortune to frequent, Mr. Gödel.”

“Only as a temporary visitor, I’m sorry to say. Sometimes I hear voices when I work. These voices belong to mathematical beings. I would almost say … to angels. But my friends seem to get coughing fits when I mention the subject.”

Kurt was being unfair, particularly to Morgenstern, who had always greeted his fanciful ideas with unlimited indulgence. Finding him deaf to his flights of fancy, Kurt likened Oskar to a blind man who would deny the existence of colors on the grounds that he had never seen any.

Theolonius stripped off his jacket, giving us a good look at the shirt stretched over his pectoral muscles. The ladies smiled, half mocking and half stirred by this objective reality that their own men had long since given up maintaining. The hunk from California couldn’t get over his good fortune: he had assumed the role — not without courage — of the lunch party’s exotic black sheep and found an ally in the logician, a paragon of rationality. I wasn’t entirely surprised. Kurt felt that nothing should be discarded because of the dogma of reason. What seemed absurd today might become tomorrow’s truth.

“I, too, believe in angels. Every human being has an invisible and benevolent companion.”

“Gödel is not talking about harps and golden curls, Theolonius. For him it’s more a philosophical principle.”

“You are blunting my ideas, Charles, because they terrify you! I sense the existence of a suprasensory world and a specific ‘eye’ of the mind fitted to distinguish it. We possess a sense capable of apprehending abstraction. A sense similar to hearing or smell. Otherwise, how can we explain mathematical intuition?”

“Are you imagining an actual physical organ?”

“Why not? Certain mystical philosophers believed the pineal gland to be the seat of knowledge.”

“Among the Hindus the third eye, the instrument of clairvoyance, belongs to Shiva. No doubt it is the third eye of the man of the future. The pineal gland could be its internal appendage, still in dormancy.”

Hulbeck pointed out testily that the pineal gland was a hormonal regulator, not a cherub-detecting radar. By way of proof he advanced the dissections he had performed as a medical student. I didn’t see how it supported his assertion, but I enjoyed our unpredictable Dadaist’s fulminations against “that crap about a third eye.” Charles, who was overly fond of taking a polemical stance, sided against what might have been his own conviction. It was delicious to see him forced into the conservative role by his need to be in opposition. Theolonius sipped his whey, while my husband kneaded his stomach ostentatiously.