SYLVIE'S RIDDLE (21 page)

The odd thing was, when the evening finally came to a close, she wanted to go back with them both to John's flat. She didn't want to sleep with either of them, only to lie on a separate bed and talk into the small hours. Without being touched. \\as that such an unreasonable request? Didn't seem to be one that could be fulfilled, anyway, so she didn't bother making it.

Marks of Light

Henry had taken out the photographs of all his wives now, and laid them across the table in the Picasso Room.

He picked up one of his first wife Isabella, lying on the beach, her eyes shut. It made him think of her when she was sleeping: she was such a tidy, regulated sort of a person. Only at night did curious sighs and coded signals start to escape from her mouth. So many complaints. A murmurous little riot between the sheets. The hermetic protest her soul permitted itself while Isabella's daytime mind was on the blink. When the god of money finally closed his eyes. She had creatures locked inside her who never saw the light of day. So when her mind had been switched off when these hidden creatures could wander at last through the deserted playground of her spirit, so many dead streets left vacant in the hours of darkness, they all spoke at once in urgent whispers. Henry used to lie there and listen, fascinated, beguiled. He'd wanted to meet them; wanted to run a phrenological hand across their little skulls to locate the bumps, so that he might map the miniature topographies of their souls. But come the morning they would all be safely locked away once more inside the businesswoman's brain. Isabella of course simply denied their existence.

In the photographs of Laura, she was always provocative, but then in this particular instance, the photographs were merely recording reality. In one
she had started to pull the T-
shirt up over her breasts, and as Henry recalled, he hadn't spent much longer with his eye to the viewfinder.

And then Eleanor. Eleanor simply smiled. Whatever happened to her, she smiled. You didn't have to ask Eleanor to smile, because she was already doing it. So much pain in her life; so many smiles.

He seemed to spend more and more hours alone in the Picasso Room. What separate worlds Picasso's men and women inhabit. They even look at each other in different languages. Light a candle in your heart, Henry, and trim its wick in solitude. Let the wounded minotaur retire into his labyrinth.

Go out for a walk, man. And so he did. He stopped when he reached the pub by the river. Sh
ould it be a pint by the water-
front, watching the Severn go by? That seemed like a good idea. Hadn't had a glass of wine all day; he'd wanted one, but he'd run out, and couldn't be bothered going out to buy any more. He sat down nex
t to two young men, with close-
cropped skulls. Neither of you can carry off the skinhead style like Miriam French, he thought, but he kept his thought to himself. One of the young men was talking in low, urgent tones.

'I'm going to kill that fucking dog of his, if it does it again in my garden.' The other's voice became quieter. 'They're tooled-up.'

'Tooled-up?'

'Armed.'

'Ah.'

'They don't bring their work home with them, like. Not so as I've heard. But I think it might be better if you don't mention about killing his dog. He might get a bit touchy about that.'

'Just go down the pet shop and get myself a pooper-scooper, you mean?'

'Might be the best idea, to be honest.'

'You're probably right.'

And the Severn rolled on. It had seen off the Romans. It'll see us off as well, Henry thought. With our dogs beside us. All our dead drowned dogs beside us, as we make for the exit.

When Henry arrived home that night he went and looked in the mirror. What he saw was very much not Pablo Picasso. For one thing he had more hair than Picasso, and he was taller. But there was no
mirada fuerte,
no facility for bewitching the beloved object.

'Can you not resign yourself to sharing the sheets with no one?' Henry asked himself. He didn't hear any answer so he went and sat in the Picasso Room until he fell asleep.

Genius

Sylvie had prepared her lecture. She had to make a real effort now to set off to the Institute. She was counting the days until the end of term. She was doing everything in her power to avoid Hamish. There had been no call from Tom Helsey. Down she went through the tunnel, with a million tons of water overhead. Even the radio cut out.

She sat cross-legged on the table before them. She had her jeans on so Lionel had nothing to really focus on and was looking out of the window.

'Geniuses. They have become an indispensable requirement of modernity, and often the main protagonists in our hunt for the significance of life. Part psychopomp, those figures who walk ahead and lead us to the Underworld, and part shaman to climb up the
axis mundi
and re-locate us in the centre of reality, they do some of our living, much of our thinking, and a great deal of our creating for us. In the world of show-business they are sometimes expected to suffer and die on our behalf too, like briefly glamorized redeemers. I've shown you that image of the minotaur; bewildered and defeated as the spectators look on. Well imagine John Lennon in the street in New York, with all the bullets in his body, stumbling backwards as the spectators stare.

'Let's look at two images for our purposes this morning. One is a picture of scientific genius and one of artistic genius. We might find they have more
in common as part of our world-
view than we would imagine.'

She switched on the overhead projector and slid the first image into place.

'This image of Einstein with electrodes attached to his head has come to symbolise the mysterious fact of genius, the unquantifiable sprite that's locked away inside the cerebellum. In an essay in his book
Mythologies
Roland Barthes pondered the meaning of this photograph. While all the wires linked Einstein up to his monitoring machinery, he'd been asked to think of relativity. This was presumably to send the maximum pulse waves coursing down the lines. The implication was clearly that, for the rest of us, thinking might emit a relatively meagre electro-magnetic signal, but when Einstein really got down to it, the intellect re-arranged every single force-field around it. The iconographic implication of the image seems to me more significant: we are being presented with the idea of genius as
magical interiority.
The shadowed world we inhabit is about to be illuminated by the gleaming singularity of Albert Einstein's mind. Time, place and circumstance are irrelevant, as this reproduction of the scene of thought in a laboratory many years later and elsewhere clearly indicates. The freakishly charged individual, intellectually potent beyond expectation, engages with the world and re-creates it for our understanding. But the facts of the matter are quite different.' Come on Lionel, stop looking out of the bloody window; I'm trying to tell you something important here. Should have worn my skirt, shouldn't I: then at least his head would be pointing in the right direction.

'The truth is that Einstein's intellectual development is inseparable from his time and circle: inseparable from his mathematics teacher Josef Zametzer, for example, and his Uncle
Jacob
, who was involved professionally with the latest
electro technology
, and was much in evidence as the partner of Einstein's father in a joint business they both ran in Munich. There was also the poor

Jewish student Max Talmey, who lent the youthful Einstein popular guides to science. What becomes even more striking in retrospect, as Galison shows so clearly, is that his work at the Berne Patent Office, apart from offering the young physicist the intellectual leisure he was later to joke about, also provided him with material for his work on relativity. He was dealing with lots of applications for patents relating to the co-ordination of time-signals. His genius came out of his implication in the world; not his dissociation from it. Relativity was a conceptual response to a set of contemporary problems. What Einstein proved was that all local times were valid, since neither space nor time could be assigned an absolute value. It was a question of fully understanding the rules of conversion from one context to another.

'We work in the context where we find ourselves. None of this is to deny that Einstein had genius; it is only to try to understand what genius is and how it works, and how we form images of it. Our first caveman could constellate, remember; but he couldn't constellate a plough, because he hadn't made one yet. But take one last look at the image. What it is telling us is that the light shines from within. It will illuminate the dark outside.

'Now if the
dishevelled
, beslippered, pipe-smoking distraction of Einstein's baggy features meant scientific genius for the last century, the face of Picasso undoubtedly came to mean its artistic counterpart. A vulgar detestation of Cubism and Surrealism undoubtedly helped promote him as the manic Spanish dwarf of what is known to so many as modem art. Picasso became the emblematic figure of artistic genius for our time, as Einstein became the image of the scientific variety. A single vignette of their faces is enough to signify their meaning: their physiognomies are so potent, words are not required. Their appearances have become signs.

'Picasso, with that special stare of his, is about to transform reality. In one film he even paints with light. The same magical interiority is at work, since Picasso had neither a visible subject nor, it appeared, even a visible medium. Not even canvas or a lump of clay. Because we become one with the medium of the film in the process of watching it, the film itself as a medium gives the impression of being nothing at all, or at least being merely the medium of our thoughts; it is the materialisation of insubstantiality. Like the ether which Poincare retained and Einstein discarded, its substance is hypothetical. Picasso creates out of nothing then,
ex nihilo,
precisely as God was said to do by orthodox theology. Einstein had already established that nothing in the universe could move faster than the speed of light, so the fact that Picasso could make images, and most compelling images too, out of light itself moving freely through the air from a torch in his hand, with nothing to prompt him but his own bright interiority, meant that his artistic spirit travelled as speedily as anything in creation ever could. He was spirit then, that
ruah
or
pneuma
of the first page of Genesis:

And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
In the relative world of mundanity, he had reached the actual speed of creation. The photons of genius were being emitted from him, and we were left behind to study their traces, since we are unable to travel with the same velocity.

'There was a long tradition before modem optics really began with Newton, which interpreted vision as coming from inside; we projected a light upon the objects we saw. The light then was referred to as
lux,
not the
lumen
of modem physics. Now I would suggest that we have retained this discredited concept hermetically, in our notion of genius. Over the next week I want you to look at the photographic iconography of genius. That includes the world of popular culture. I think you might be surprised at the recurrent patterns of expectation and portrayal.'

Lenses and Constellations

All
a lens knows, Owen, is focal length and framing. It can't know anything else. So if I'm to convey that the lens is moving towards knowledge, then it will have to be by one of those means.'

'What about filters?'

'They're just a way of telling the lens that it knows less than it really does.'

John was setting up his camera and tripod so that they pointed to the window of his flat. He had placed a chair immediately before the window. That's where Owen was going to sit.

The
confusion in framing means that the lens doesn't know where to settle, and a confusion of focus means that the lens can't relate to the material it's been presented with. Now if you sit on that chair and speak and I can hear your words clearly, but you are out of focus, then the words are in a definable relation to reality, but not the image. Or a part of the image might be. For example, the roofs over the canal there, they can be in focus, while you're not. What would that tell us?'