they made jokes; sometimes they talked with great seriousness: usually they left spaces through which a listener or observer had to make his or her own way. What they seemed to be saying about marriage was that if there was disjunction there was no liveliness and if there was fusion there was no liveliness: liveliness depended on openness; on an energy going between.
Over the years, in fact, they each of them became increasingly involved with their own threads through the maze: they had sadness, difficulties in maintaining the vision and hopes they had had for themselves; but friends did not easily see signs of such uncertainty, which seemed peripheral to so much energy. Max, after an unproductive period in England just after the war, was offered a research fellowship in Canada: he was to be allowed to enquire into an area which had increasingly come to engross him — the borderline between physics and biology. When Eleanor returned from Palestine she stayed with Max in England for a time: then she went back to West Africa to complete the anthropological study she had planned when she had been there before going to Spain — on the possibility of an anthropology in which the anthropologist recognised his part in what he observed. To those who knew Max and Eleanor during these years it was true that there often seemed to be few conventional signs of their being married: Max from time to time had relationships with other women; Eleanor in her travels was likely to join up with someone she liked. But there was always the impression that in some crucial sense they trusted they were together; that it was this surety that gave them the freedom to go their own ways. Those who became fond of them sometimes protested about this. The girl called Lilia once said to Max 'You treat Eleanor as if she were God!' Max replied (with irony of course) 'Yes, it has been said that successful relationships depend on a third person, God.'
When Eleanor came back from West Africa she spent some time writing a long essay on marriage: she took as her anthropological field of study, as it were, European literature. In literature, she suggested, marriage was seen first as an end to be aimed at but then as something boring and even deathly when achieved: what seemed to be almost impossible to write about (or indeed to experience) was marriage as a successfully going concern. Of course, Eleanor argued, humans do get taken over by an exciting drive for surety and when this is achieved it is apt to seem second-rate: but what might happen if people just recognised this? Could there not be a
going concern on some quite different level — one from which it could be seen that a drive for security, when achieved, might then have to be turned to a drive for freedom, for the spark of liveliness to be maintained; and vice versa; and so on: this level being to do with a recognition of pattern. It is a contrasting to and fro, like that of a heart-beat, that is life-giving: one strand on its own, pursued to an end, of course is deathly. This was the first anthropological-type essay that Eleanor published. Max wrote to her — But who, except you and I, will understand this business of to-and-fro; of levels?
Max himself tried to make more of the matter of levels: he wrote papers which introduced the concept into most of the lines of research he was engaged in at the time. In physics, for instance, there had for long been the conundrums posed by quantum theory — light could be said to consist of either particles or waves according to the condition of the experiment — but this was a conundrum only when one was talking on the level of what was light. On the level of the viewer — the setter-up of the conditions of the experiment — there was no conundrum, Max argued, but simply a matter of choice: shall I set up this condition or that? And so the question on this level was what were conditions of mind. And indeed quantum theory allowed that it was mind, consciousness, working as it were on a higher level, that produced on a lower level the effects of choice — it was through the intrusion of consciousness that Schrodin-ger's cat, for instance, became actually rather than potentially dead or alive. And so should it not be one of the tasks of physicists not only to be trying to understand the nature of the outside world, but to be trying to understand the nature of understanding — the understanding by which the outside world in some sense seems to be organised.
In biology, Max continued to be interested in the recurring problems of how order had evolved and continued to evolve out of 'chance'; how chaos was organised into shape and then how shape and pattern were maintained. Once the whole process was under way evolution could perhaps be explained by the mechanisms of natural selection: but how did the whole process exist? What was the provenance of shape and pattern? If in physics there was a sense in which this or that occurrence was brought about by observation, by an activity of mind, then why should this not be the case in biological evolution — with regard to both the creation and perpetuation of forms, and to the possible emergence at least of new forms of understanding. At the heart of the disciplines of both
biology and physics, Max argued, there was an area about which not much could scientifically be said: scientific language was a tool of consciousness when it looked at the outside world; it was not one much fitted to the process of consciousness looking at itself Perhaps what was needed here was some language that was only too ready to recognise its own limitation; some self-mocking style — ah, look at consciousness looking at itself!
Max got as far as he could with these ideas: he wrote his papers in which he tried to keep to a scientific style: this became increasingly difficult. It seemed to him that the area into which he was moving was now not so much one of science as of philosophy. He gave up his job in Canada and returned to England; although by now somewhat middle-aged, he embarked on a study of philosophy in London. He pursued especially a line of enquiry into the concept of levels of language that had been introduced by Russell and Whitehead before the First World War in order to rescue logical systems from self-contradiction. There were various paradoxes that had threatened to invalidate the consistency of logical systems (These terrible vandals, paradoxes,' Max used to say, 'ploughing up the fallow ground of moribund systems!') — the paradox of the Cretan who said that all Cretans were liars, the paradox of the barber who said he shaved everyone in the village who did not shave himself, the paradox of whether the class of classes that are not members of themselves is or is not a member of itself (Max used to say 'Oh of course they are farcical, these paradoxes, these routines of clowns, breaking up logical systems!') Russell had argued that sense could only be made of such paradoxes if it was seen that language was being used on two different levels — one to talk about things or events and the other to talk about one's talking about these. If one did not recognise this difference then there was contradiction: if one did, then there was the recognition of movement between the two — an oscillation in time, a pattern. But then there might be the question: From what level did one recognise the operation of such patterning? There might be an endless regression of levels: it was this prospect that seemed to be objected to by philosophers. But — Max concluded — what was important here was not the number of possible levels but the use of language to describe the fact that the mind moved between them: it was by means of a style that would embrace such movement that there could be intimated what otherwise could not be said.
Max's first book was a collection of his papers in physics and
biology and philosophy: at the centre of each there were the questions: 'Is it consciousness that forms structures?' 'What is pattern?', 'Is not life that which is held, moves, across levels, between poles?' He suggested that scientific and philosophical language may not indeed be fitted to deal with these questions but might not a suitable language be what is called 'aesthetic'? It was at this place in his book that Max seemed to lose many of his readers. People had become accustomed to physicists hinting at the existence of what could not be described logically, but Max seemed to be claiming some special verity for aesthetics.