Hopeful Monsters (48 page)

endowed at the same time with a gift for creating circumstances in which it could flourish - and this too was a characteristic of evolution, that a coincidence of chances, gifts, is required for successful adaptation to be achieved. The Jews, that is, with their faculty for seeing a pattern for themselves and through this for the things around them, yet had little ability to prevail over nor indeed to live at peace with their neighbours. And their neighbours, of course, without the ability to see any pattern (if it could be so called) except that of one organism flourishing at the expense of another, were apt to set out to disprove the claims of 'chosenness' by the Jews by turning on them every now and then and killing them or carrying them into captivity. This was indeed the Jews' own view of their history and mythology. This had at one time been particularised into the expectation of a Messiah - the coming of the Messiah would be the circumstances in which their facility which had been potential could become actual; what had hitherto been a predicament could become a triumph.

But then when either the Messiah did not come (the Jewish version) or did come and was not recognised by Jews (the Christian version) there occurred what might have been expected to occur according to either interpretation - the Jews were scattered throughout the world. Either they were being punished for apparently not being sufficiently worthy of a Messiah, or they were being punished for not recognising a Messiah when he came. But also might they not have been scattered (this was Eleanor's interpretation) in a way that had nothing to do with punishment but be part of a required pattern whether or not a Messiah had come: might they not have been scattered, that is, as seeds, so that their special trait - their view of the working-out of a pattern - might have had a chance to take root around the world. But as things were, everyone seemed stuck within a cycle of hopelessness or vengeance: Jews with their faculty for seeing that there was some design for the world but still without the ability to find much of a part in it for themselves except through suffering; Christians with their taking over of the triumphal Messianic idea but still without a faculty for trusting any pattern except that of so-called Victory' by the elimination of one thing by another. Neither Jews nor Christians in their formal protestations seemed to have the attitude of mind to see their responsibilities as agents of self-creation within a larger pattern - a trust that, by attending with care to means, ends would look after themselves. Christians had glimpsed something of this with their doctrine of the

Holy Spirit: but having noted the potential power of such a trust, they had not been able to say much about it.

In the first draft of her book it seems that Eleanor wrote that the Jewish people might have to undergo some extreme form of suffering before they could see that there had been enough of this and they could once more feel themselves as active agents in their destiny - as agents even in the destiny of others - in the way of imparting knowledge of the frightening interplay, beauty even, between triumph and suffering in events' patterning. But Eleanor wrote the first draft in the early days of the war before the extemities of actual Jewish suffering were known: later, when stories of horror began to filter through from occupied Europe, Eleanor put aside the first version of her book, with its view of the efficacy of suffering, and concentrated on what might be a direct and practical connection between this and the chance of the creation of a state of Israel: she became, that is, an increasingly ardent and optimistic Zionist. She did not mind the shelving of her book: she knew, as Max had done, that even in what might be true about the working-out of patterns, there are some things best recognised in silence.

Eleanor had been with Max when he had first gone to America: they had had their home, for a time, on the edge of a painted desert. She had been writing: he had been working on the Bomb: they had, as always, been happy together. But how was it possible in such circumstances to settle down without anxiety? So when Max still had work of importance to do but Eleanor had put her book aside, she went off on her own for a time to be an active worker in the cause of Zionism; she managed to get to Palestine, where she became part of an organisation that helped Jews to get out of occupied Europe. Max encouraged her in this: he said 'In marriage, why should it not be life-giving to be sometimes apart: what else is pattern?' Eleanor stayed in Palestine long enough to see success in her work but also the dangers inherent in Zionism - that the very reaction to suffering might go into chauvinistic runaway, out of control; that only by stepping back from memories of suffering might there be a coming to terms with the necessity to live at peace with neighbours. She would say 'Indeed, what else is pattern.'

During the years that followed, Eleanor and Max were sometimes together, sometimes apart: but always, they said, they felt themselves together - as partners, that is, in the working-out of some design, under the guidance of what turned up. They evolved an ironic style of talking about their love and their marriage: sometimes

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.

When Max returned to England at the end of the 1950s he became involved almost immediately again in controversies concerning the Bomb. At the end of the war he had achieved some notoriety for first having helped to construct the Bomb and then having disassociated himself from the dropping of it - and now there was not only the Atomic but the Hydrogen Bomb. In England, Max was approached by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; he went to their first large-scale rally in Trafalgar Square; he found himself joining their protest march to Aldermaston which was where components for the British Bomb were said to be being made. On the road near Maidenhead he was spotted by a journalist who knew him: he was carrying a pole which supported one end of a banner which proclaimed 'Let's Go Back to Bows and Arrows': carrying the pole at the other end was a pretty girl. The journalist wrote the story in his paper the next day with a headline - 'British Physicist Renews Anti-Nuclear Attack with Arrows'. By the time the march reached Aldermaston Max was marching with the banner folded and his arm round the girl; there was a posse of reporters waiting for him by the side of the road. Max explained - He had a great respect, yes, for the aims and especially the sprit of people in CND but he did not agree with them, no: he was still glad that the Bomb existed on account of the depravity of human nature; it was only through something like the existence of the Bomb that human nature might be kept within bounds or even change. Then why, he was asked, had he been carrying a banner which advocated a return to bows and arrows? Because, Max said, he had wished to be of assistance to people to whom he felt friendly. He was asked by reporters - Was this a responsible attitude for a physicist in a matter of such importance? Indeed, Max said, just as it had seemed to him sensible years ago to have helped in the construction of the Bomb and then to have protested against its use in war, so now it seemed

sensible to show sympathy with the good people of CND even though he was doubtful about their aims: what mattered in such a business was to distinguish between means and ends: if each person practised what he or she thought was right and recognised the obligations of others to do this, then ends could be left to themselves. In fact this was just the sort of attitude that might be required for, and indeed exemplify, a proper change in human nature, Max went on - but by this time most of his audience had drifted away. One or two papers the next day printed a photograph of Max leaning so heavily on the pretty girl that it was as if he were having to be propped up. A month or two later Eleanor came across a copy of one of these papers in Borneo: she sent Max a postcard saying -Indeed who but you and I would understand this business of levels! Eleanor had gone to Borneo after West Africa. In her profession as anthropologist she was still pursuing the idea that had come to her during her first period in Africa - the question of how there could be a form of anthropology that was not just to do with the recording of events and processes but which would include a consideration of the function of the recorder in organising them into systems. An anthropologist was the filter through which events and systems came to mind; yet anthropologists wrote as if they themselves did not exist. Eleanor's first published book was a collection of essays mainly about her time as an anthropologist. On one level the book was a straightforward tabulation of ethnographic facts; on another there was the arrangement of these facts to give the picture of a culture; both these levels were in the area of traditional anthropology. But then on a third level (Max wrote to her - 'This is our level!') Eleanor tried to speculate on her own activity as picker of facts and recogniser of patterns: what as an operator was she doing: was it not a characteristic of life, this forming and recognising of patterns? To understand living systems, perhaps one had to understand what one was doing in trying to understand living systems: they themselves were of the same nature as the activity of mind. It was by this that from what otherwise seemed to be at random there was produced orderliness: and to have a vision of one's own role in this would one not have to have an experience like the appreciation of what is called 'aesthetic'? At this point, to many of Eleanor's readers, she seemed to be dabbling in the occult. Her book was published at much the same time as Max had published his. Max wrote to her - 'And you hadn't even read