As to what that means, well, I don’t know and neither do you. That’s why we were talking and laughing about it.
And he said, “I think you do know what it means, Mrs. Wilson, or will do, and when you do, we’d like to hear from you.” It sent shivers down my spine, I must say. Then he asked me about the lady sitting all alone, and I’m afraid once again I was at a loss. In fact, I was upset, because it needs no great feat of interpretation to sense the powerful emotion in your hallucinations, and in that respect I feel for us both. We have both lost someone, haven’t we?
Bill later filled in the blanks of the lone lady. You were remembering an old English riddle, the sort of thing Dilly went in for. “I saw a lady sitting all alone.” That’s all there is of it and it remains unsolved. Except that Bill has suggested a solution. He says it is quite obvious once you see it. The answer is “Mirror”—the one who watches and reflects.
Really the most unthinkable part of what you told me was the business of imagining me hatless at your mother’s. As if I’d have dared. I seem to remember she and I were both very civil. Her pride in you was a bit of a force field, of course. The most striking thing was that she couldn’t find anything to ask me. When we were in the garden, she pointed at the flowers in turn and gave me their Latin names. And when she’d done that, she blurted out in a sort of panic: “As a little boy, Alec made his own pens.” Anyway, I think your somewhat distrait image of me must be an homage to self—I am partly you in dreams and so more likely to forget a hat.
But we must meet: this keeping up of merely affable appearances is hard, when there is so much at stake for you. Max and Lyn bring news, of course, but it isn’t the same. I miss you.
We could meet in King’s—in Gibbs’?
What has your Dr. Stallbrook made of the cartoons? I expect he will say they point to some inability to countenance reality, etc., but I think there is more to it than that. Snow White is a detailed work of art, and the thing about that kind of creation must be that it is only ever painstakingly achieved, and yet always a surprise, which is the essence of cryptanalysis, after all, and of the work we did. I think it is also clearly the lesson of caring about anyone.
Better not call again: I do not like the idea of being “cut off.” And be of good cheer: the anxiety of your pursuers will abate. They will find others of more concern to them. For now, though, honi soit and let your virtue continue to shine.
PS So good to hear your voice. You sounded physically whole—revived? Resigned? Phones very good for scrying. I can picture you, however far away!
As soon as one can see the cause and effect working themselves out in the brain, one regards it as not being thinking, but a sort of unimaginative donkey-work. From this point of view one might be tempted to define thinking as consisting of ‘those mental processes that we don’t understand’. If this is right then to make a thinking machine is to make one which does interesting things without our really understanding quite how it is done.
The People in the Lake
Dear June,
Well, we shall avoid the telephone and trust to the post, although I am not convinced that it makes much difference. My letters are certainly being read: the postbox is just over the way and I can see the man rummaging about in the bag that he takes away with him. You were kind to tax the intelligence officers with the illogic of their suspicions, in defense of my honor, but you were being too subtle. I am now a nuisance. Having been identified as one kind of sexual menace, I am as liable to be another political sort, I suppose.
This prompts a response to your interesting remarks about mirrors. The lady who isn’t there in the glass, who’s all alone, is possibly a feverish example of one’s thoughts about being original in some crucial respect. One has one’s moments, after all.
It strikes me that a mirror reflects, but that, geometrically speaking, it transforms rather than translates. One is turned back on oneself and in the process one sees a second person, a new person whom one does not fully recognize. Always uncanny, this about-facing, and not unrelated to the common fear of automation, which people assume to be a sort of coming doom. The fear of robots, I take it, is like the fear of prophecy, the essence of which is repetition: if you can be repeated, you can be replaced.
But the funny thing about a reflection is that it isn’t actually a repetition at all. I remember goggling at myself in the Haunted Mirror Maze two years ago, in Battersea, and wondering about this. The person I saw was clearly capable of being another person—inaccessible to me. And isn’t that why the Queen in Snow White is so angry? Her slave in the mirror is really someone else. An apparently obedient but deceptive likeness. And, for that matter, isn’t Snow White herself another betrayer of the Queen’s beauty, another likeness come to life, with her own puffy-sleeved and faintly irritating style? (You made this point rather less mechanically when you talked about cartoons being a surprise.)
Now, I’m no beauty—please, don’t insist—but I present our anxious government with a similar dilemma. I am a piece of sensitive information. I am, in fact, the personification of such information. I hold secrets. I know how impulses passing through mercury tubes can store memory. I have the key. I am the gatekeeper at a technological frontier. The difficulty is that there are only two things you can do with a piece of sensitive information, as we discovered at Bletchley, June. You can disguise it, or you can delete it.
The problem with disguising or encrypting it is that the original still exists. One has doubled the information, not made it less sensitive. Something has happened to it, but the semantic load persists behind a mask, a veil, a foreign accent, new papers, breasts, etc., and really the only thing to do about that, if you’re still anxious, is to remove both bits of information—the original and the encryption—altogether.
Why are the intelligence services paranoid? Because they know you can’t force someone to conform, or learn the error of their ways. You can’t reach the inner life. I can’t be a model citizen—though, heaven knows, I’ve tried—because the menace lingers inside. You can’t simply change people, in other words, or double them, because you can’t know they’ve changed. Only they can know that. Only they know what it’s like to be copied.
I bathe slowly because it hurts. My skin is sore, but I’m consoled by the stinging of the water and the sheer awkwardness of feeling my shape so altered, the eczema under the flaps, the bruised diminution of my maleness, my fatty hips. I look at what has happened in the mirror and do not in any way recognize what I see, while at the same time feeling, deep down, that I am more myself than ever. A person who feels pain. When I go to the Infirmary, I am being given instructions. When I eat, I am instructing my stomach acids to get to work. Everything acts on me to gain a programmed response, and sometimes I cannot imagine a way to retrieve what self-determination I once had except, perhaps, by the admittedly extreme measure of introducing a halting mechanism.