Dr. Stallbrook often asks me how I feel. I reply that I do not know. How does one feel? It is one of the imponderables. I am better equipped to say what it is that I feel, and that is mysterious enough. For I feel that I am a man stripped of manhood, a being but not a body. Like the Invisible Man, I put on clothes to give myself a stable form. I’m at some point of disclosure between the real and the abstract—changing and shifting, trying to stay close to the transformation, not to flee it. I have the conviction that I am now something like x—a variable. We discuss dreams, and in the course of these discussions I have come to see dream figures as other sets of variables. How else should one account for the odd conviction we have in dreams that the strangers we encounter are “really” people we know?
What gets us from one expression of the variable to another?
There is a leap from the inorganic to the organic. There is a leap from one valency to another, and there is a leap from one person’s thought to the thought of others. The world is full of discrete motes, probabilistic states, and gaps. Only a wave can take us from one to the other; or a force or flow; or perhaps a field. When I look in the mirror, I think, thrice, “Is it me? Is it not me? Is it not me, yet?”
Dr. Stallbrook encourages me to write. It is like making a will, he says—eminently sensible. If you’ve signed your papers and made a will, you know there will be an end. You have already witnessed it, so to speak. And people who make this definite accommodation with their end, with the prospect of death—who get it in writing—live longer. He says this with a matter-of-factness I can’t help liking.
Julius and others belabor me with questions about thinking machines and the parallels between chains of neurons in the brain and the relationship of the controlling mechanism to output and feedback in digital computers. I want fair play for the computer, of course. I feel, as he does, that “understanding” in a machine is a function of the relationship between its rules. Recursion may turn out to be reflection in both the optical and the philosophical senses of the word. Who knows what machines may end up “thinking”? But I am privately skeptical of too wide an application of the personifying tendency. One knows oneself to be aware and infers from others—from behavior, yes, but also from the body or the instrument that produces the behavior—that they are similarly cognizant. One can’t go on from there to supposing that awareness itself is necessary, however. Hasn’t it struck most of us at one time or another that much of life is a pointless algorithm, an evolutionary process without an interpreter? On a smaller scale, too, a process such as simple addition has human “meaning” only because I am there to observe it and call it “addition.” And yet it certainly happens. Perhaps the larger process, too, is unmeaningful. If life works, it works. The character of physical law as it extends to biological material is that it should underpin the way cells and systems operate, and that is all.
That sounds pleasingly final, but it won’t do. I know that. Things don’t always add up. I can tell you that it is asymmetrical motion at the molecular level that picks out an axis for patterned development in a sphere of cells—that turns a sphere into an embryo—but I cannot satisfy the person who goes on asking “why?” That person is the halfwit in a public lecture. That person is a child. And that person is also me. The Church says: “People come in search of meaning, and to have their fears and anxieties allayed.” But to think you can be finally satisfied on these points, or to imagine you can satisfy others, is the source of the misgiving.
I have this strange idea. Christopher left school without saying goodbye. His parents came to pick him up and I saw them get in the Daimler. I was in the upper gallery, working on some diagonals. I looked askance, through the window, and there they were, thanking the headmaster, hurrying away. I heard no more from Christopher or his mother, with whom I imagined myself friendly, until the notice of his death. I had not known he was consumptive. He had cold hands.
This is the idea. We, Chris and I, were reprimanded for scrumping apples from the trees that overhung the chaplain’s garden. They belonged to Fowle’s fruiterers. We were punished and interviewed separately. I think he was told to avoid me. I think he was told no good could come of our friendship, because of what I am, or rather, because of what, then, it was suggested I would become. I am not effeminate, but I am mannered. I am a homosexual, and I suppose that much was clear to the masters. In particular, I think it was impressed on Chris that some polluting disaster would befall me, and if only he had asked “why?,” my future ghost might have told him.
Dr. Stallbrook makes many notes as we go along, talking and arguing, and it has crossed my mind that patients of different stripes must react differently to this. I confess I find it irritating. I do not like being “marked,” or having my papers tampered with editorially, or submitting to a “clinical” opinion I am not in a position to check. (I was displeased when I found out that I had been circumcised.) And if his notes are, as he claims, “for his eyes only,” then they are unfalsifiable. They may well proceed from a psychoanalytic theory. But how is the theory being tested or controlled? How can it be said to be scientific? He is unflappable, of course. It is not that kind of theory, he says; it is, rather, theoria, from the Greek, meaning “contemplation.” The look of point-missingly clever satisfaction on his face! Anyway, he is not telling the truth. I am a criminal. He is writing reports and sending them off.
The whole premise is childish, like the schoolboy who covers his work with his elbow to prevent his neighbor cheating. I told him this.
“I’m really not trying to hide anything, Alec,” he laughed. “I just don’t think you’d benefit from reading my notes. My job is to help you encounter yourself.”
I replied, in a bit of a torrent: “Balls. This is passing the buck. This is what my father saw in India all the time—Europeans waving their hands and saying, ‘But the unrest is native and has nothing to do with us.’ You are not an impartial observer, Dr. Stallbrook. The observer is a participant, as the great revolution in quantum physics has taught us. Consider now that I am the set of notes that you wish to read. I might as well ask: how are you to benefit from reading me? Shall we condemn ourselves to solipsism? The two sides of an equation must meet if they are to balance. You are dodging the issue. What you want is for me not to press too deeply, not to ask for things you cannot give, not to question your authority. And that is unfair.”
“What do you mean?”
At this point, I lost my temper. “The assumption of science is that things are discoverable. Things that belong in problems of logic that are not in principle resolvable belong in a separate category. Things that do not admit of rational argument in another—God, for instance. But things that are just hidden, or powers that are reserved for no good reason because someone ‘says so,’ are the work of the bloody devil! They are a cryptic burden to us all—”