I recall hearing on BBC a witty speech Prince Philip gave to some science body and wondering who’d written it and being smartly put in my place by Tessa who said all his speeches were written by Philip himself.
Prince Philip with his engineering and nautical interests may remember enough cartography to know the law of deformation: which is that there will always be at least two pairs of directions perpendicular to each other at a given point on the globe that will reappear when that curved surface is turned into a flat map.
Monty Graf when he and I caught up with each other Thursday found this law less urgent than the right angles that gave rise to my memory of it. But persisting, I said that Tuesday opposite King Street I suddenly had not known whether I’d moved from sphere to plane or plane to sphere, which was a discomfiting application of my Druid’s thought—
But Andsworth’s not in this, said Monty on Thursday; not deep anyway. Or is he?
Less than I, more than you, more than he knows, less than he fears.
Yes, but what was his thought you mentioned? He helped set up Stonehenge for you. He wasn’t on the film was he? And who was Marie’s boyfriend?
My knowledge of operations seemed to go unquestioned; it was my knowledge of policy that seemed dubious to me and others. There comes a point at which one wants to compute no more of these facts. Still, as my Druid says, in each age arise unlikely tongues which nonetheless may help us: the gods of the body’s warm organs may show themselves now not through a burning bush or a martyr’s funny bone on fire or in the mysteries of appetite, but along intangible electronic canals where slippery loops joining pancreas and lung, bowel and eye, become, for the sake of a diagram’s current, straight lines and right-angle transits, and clarity’s pulse waits for the gate which if open may flip whole futures of gates drawing that pulse like a spasm of the greater body through gods who blink and gods who do not blink (for Andsworth ever was a closet polytheist) until at some crux near the analogic cog or digital core a twinge of harmony is heard like someone else’s pain. But at that moment Tuesday I was not clear if those right angles had survived from true sphere to projected plane or from plane to sphere.
But when you saw Andsworth before you took the train to Glasgow, said Monty Graf, was he disturbed that you tried to pass as Jack Flint to get by the housekeeper?
If the merchant deforms himself seeking the direct route, credit him at least with not knowing till he gets there what the project is he is merchandising. It might be a film, might be words, or from Red Whitehead’s science-supply firm a gross of liquid crystal newly marketable in a cartridge that approaches the condition of music; or it might be the Montrose heart discovered like Mercator’s 1538 map of the world — famous, lost, then rediscovered in New York thirty-six years after Catherwood’s panorama burnt. If the deformation from sphere to flat yields you straight-line bearings from here to there, the fact that your trip is expedited by an illusion costs you no more than the way taken by Raleigh to vast and undefined Virginia or than the routes abstracted to a straight line in the partial Underground map Dudley Allott stares at traveling with dear Jane (for like the Druid, Dudley seldom takes a cab, though unlike Dudley the Druid drives everywhere — an ancient English Ford).
He wasn’t on the film? asks Monty Graf again, not knowing that at least since Tuesday night (diary or no diary, film or no film) there has been a hunt on for my life.
Oh Andsworth calls film evanescent.
But he wasn’t on your film?
He isn’t on it, no.
You say isn’t! How much is there, then? More than you said?
There’s so much a film can’t find. It catches the dull gleam and choppy chill of the sea when the dilettante geologist was bringing Jim Nielsen into a Hebridean cove; but not the sea’s curve over the horizon, for you have to reflect upon that, formulate it, imagine it. The film catches the look of Paul’s shoulders so narrow they seem to have been framed in a vise which simultaneously heightens him. Film claims his shaggy moustache, frames the lanky hint of ungainliness when Paul stumbled and braced himself as Tessa tried to tug him through a portal toward the light. You could catch that on film, but not the posthumous alignment on the one hand of Paul’s widely suspect conversion from violence which he’d come to believe was not authenticity but the mere figment of change, and on the other hand (his hand that’s being tugged!) Tessa’s long fling with Maya blood, and the heart-excision atop the priestly pyramid, and some half-chewed creed of cruelty whose roots plot their length through the other violence of a tame marriage which was in turn one yield of a wifeless father (seeking angrily, fearfully his wide-eyed daughter hiding in a bombed house) and of a mother crystallized into ash or bone-meal or, at best, thought. Catch even on a sound track as if from under a stone in response to the bank clerk’s account of how far some of Stonehenge had to come, these words: It comes to that, and that alone — Paul Flint’s words, as you who have me may have guessed.
But take the film in daylight or night light or from the air even if — action! — we restage the wheelless haul from Wales by neolithic land and water with bare brawn and animal hides and at the end on Salisbury Plain log stages for raising the lintels — and instead of a star in the lead a blond or swarthy tall unknown — think of all an emulsion, a lens, a drive motor, and a mind running the contraption can’t convey. There’s so much more.
I suppose you’ve seen your swashbuckling friend Dagger since he arrived, said Monty. If there’s more, did he bring it with him? Claire said all he sneaked in was a carton of audio gear he’s going to sell.
So much more: not only the idea of the sun cutting across the eyeball as if its vitreous arc were a gate giving a million alignments to that other energy the brain — oh not only the hot god or mere star or grid-fixed force passing from parallel to parallel across that useful fiction the celestial sphere (not parallel—declination, blinks Ned Noble from someplace in my system which is not only my system, for I have grown into the impingement of other fields on mine and this sense should in theory mean I’m in less danger than, say, Incremona, Jerry, or Claire) each day each year each 26,000-year cycle of the whole solar system. (Whole? Who says it’s whole? blinks a light which may be Ned at an outpost of my lung or may be just my thought of what he’d say.)
What is this danger Claire is in? asks Monty Graf fresh from England, continuing to smoke to keep his weight in hand, and now less clear what it is that he and his young beloved are trying to salvage for themselves.
But Monty old friend, having like you and Claire set too high and narrow a hope upon the film, I then let the contrary occur, let its scenes come between me and it, so what I valued was not the film at all but the fog at the edge of the bonfire ring, the fog becoming something else gassy to jump and bend (I told Claire) through the forms of a boy in overalls, a big woman in red and yellow swinging across the circle, her glad tantrum of head-wagging, two burning branches bearing a gray label — all that was left of a carton — not the label even but letters once on it like some instance of Hindu Māyā that lets us believe in the rest that may not really be there.
Then was it you who destroyed parts of the film or let people think parts were destroyed?
Instead of the film as all or nothing (which is dangerous) let us conceive something else: beyond the Druid’s circuitries with Yes or No gods at the gates of our bodily systems which in the idiom of computers become newly strange and finely limited and whole and, hence, beyond Jenny at Stonehenge stepping back inside the circle but facing out with her back to me taking a picture through a linteled arch then turning radiant to me as if she were my transit outward or my charged gate and calling to me (where I stood by the altar stone with the bank clerk behind me), It’s a message! — while he, rustling in his clear plastic mac coughed and the cough turned into hard facts about two circles (not one), sixteen Sarsen stones left out of thirty, exact measures of consistent distances from midstone to midstone—