The Virgin in the Garden (25 page)

“No, no. We must either give up, or –”

“Or –” said Alexander.

“Or get married. Then we could –”

“Married.” He contemplated the moving curtains. He realised he supposed Jennifer was not good at marriage. He drew her closer. He was very nervous of being seen. He pulled her rather roughly behind the bed-curtain. He kissed her.

Footsteps clattered. They sprang apart. Alexander pointed up at the ceiling and said the first line which came into his head.

“And thee returning on thy silver wheels.”

“Oh yes, Tennyson,” said Frederica with a chuckle of irrelevant complicity. “I always used to suppose that was about a statue on castors, not a chariot, silly fool I was. I’ve been sent to get you both, Mr Crowe wants to lock this wing and take us into his own turret he’s going to have when the students come. To see his Marsyas, he says. Personally, not being in the habit of sightseeing, I don’t know if I can take any more. Anyway, I’m here.”

Crowe’s little wing, if not as hugely grand as the staterooms, was still palatial. He gave the cast tea in his study, a panelled dark room, in which only the little Marsyas was directly lit, and that Frederica took at first for a murky and obscure crucifixion. Crowe explained, with glee, that it was Jacopo’s subtlest and nastiest work, not, like Raphael’s Marsyas, an image of the animal strung up to await the divine flaying that would produce high art, but like Ovid’s Marsyas an image of pain on the point of disintegration, the body after flaying but still, for a brief moment, holding its terrible shape. The furry pelt was extended on the ground, the flesh and laced muscles were exposed, and gouts of blood were bursting out under the muscles, so that what had appeared at first glance to have the firmness of marble was running and slippery, bulging, about to burst into formlessness. Carved horn pipes lay cast aside: in the middle distance Apollo smiled his terrible empty smile and struck his lyre.

Crowe put his arm round Frederica’s shoulder.

“What do you make of that?”

“I don’t like it.”

“It is very painful. It is lovely. It is the moment of the birth of the new consciousness. Marsyas cried out to Apollo:
quid me mihi detrahis
. Why do you tear me from myself. And Dante prayed to be so torn. Apollo should deal with him ‘si come quando Marsia traesti: Della vagina delle membre sue.’ As when thou didst tear Marsyas from the sheath of his members. A metamorphosis, yet again. The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Lava, pupa, imago. An image of art.”

“It’s repulsive,” said Frederica. “I don’t want art if it has to be so nasty. Thank you.”

“You still feel oppressed by my beautiful house?”

“Oh, more so. But more interested.”

“In what way?”

She considered, casting a now cold eye on the hanging satyr.

“Well – before I looked at it, it seemed amazing but unreal. And now I have looked, it seems amazing and too real. But I do want a good long walk in the open air.”

Crowe laughed and released her. He said, “You must come and look again. You must familiarise yourself with all this.”

At Blesford Ride, what most schools would have called the Sanatorium was called the Nursery. It was presided over by a stout Sister in not quite clean starched white, who wore a cap like a winged helmet, a row of scissors and pens across the swell of her breast, and a vigorous greying moustache. Her prescription for most upsets was darkness and starvation, which she called giving the brain and stomach a little rest. Most boys, after an hour or two of privation, more or less miraculously recovered and asked for release. Marcus was often in, with asthma and headaches. He did not ask to be let out.

After the light and the Bilge Lab Marcus tried weakly to erase God and Lucas Simmonds from his consciousness. He did not read Simmonds’s pamphlet. He went the other way if he saw Simmonds in school corridors. He sought company before crossing the playing fields, or walked round. He had headaches with lights flashing just behind his head, neither in nor out. He did not throw the pamphlet away, but he kept it in his desk.

One day, in a maths lesson, Marcus looked out and saw light moving on the tops of a row of lime trees on the horizon. He looked again, and saw it gathering and dancing. A bird went up in sunlight and flung sparklings and sprinklings of brilliance in the air. Marcus, greening, thrust a blind hand in his desk, seized the papers, put up his hand, and asked to be excused on account of migraine.

In the Nursery, Sister tissocked her teeth, opened cold sheets on a high iron bed, watched him climb in and pulled down the green blind. The wooden acorn rattled on the sill. The room was in submarine gloom. Marcus drew up his knees to his chin, and did not look at the splinters
of white light round the edges of the blind. Sister rustled out, closing him in.

He was visited by brief visions. Light, the glassy hyaline rising like a sea and drowning him. Himself clasping Simmonds’s grey flannel knees and howling like an animal. Nothing else he called up seemed substantial or possible.

Sister had put the papers in his bedside locker. He rolled over, let up the blind a cautious half-inch, and began to peruse them.

Marcus had not, as Eliot said of James, a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. In a sense, however, all ideas appeared to him to be of the same weight as each other: he made no judgments about their possible truth or untruth: his response to them was not so much an intellectual as a near-perceptual planning of their coherence or incoherence, as he mapped the squares and possible moves on a chess board. His sense of coherence with verbal structures was also less acute than his response to visual, or mathematical forms. He assumed, without formulating the assumption, that words were crude indicators anyway and their messages only approximations at best. So he skimmed Simmonds’s pamphlet as he might, in his youthful eidetic days, have skimmed a picture he was offered of fields or streets or shoals in waterways, simply as a kind of neural reconnaissance to aid memory. If his reading, even in this neutrally cognitive form, was also at fault because he had no knowledge of other texts from which Simmonds had patch-worked his theory of the universe, this was counterbalanced by the fact that he was reading Simmonds. He was indeed, in that sense, Simmonds’s only reader, though he had no desire, unlike every other person in this story, to prove his skill at reading people.

The Plan and the Pattern
was concerned to describe the interrelated wholes, indifferently named organisms or organisations, of which infinity was made up. There were three infinities: the Infinitely Great, the Infinitely Small, the Infinitely Complex. Some sort of weighting of value of things seemed to be attached to degrees of the last Infinity. E.g., “The further we proceed up the Scale of Matter, from minerals to vegetables, from vegetables to animals, from animals to Man and creatures more complex than Man, so it becomes truly manifest that the corpuscles that compose matter, atoms, electrons, protons, neutrons, tend to group themselves in ever more complex ways to form ever more complex compound Bodies.

“In respect of Complexity a living Body is superior to an inanimate Body since an arrangement of cells is more complex than an arrangement of molecules. An ant is therefore superior to the physical Being of the sun.

“On this Planet there is no more complex organism than the human brain.

“The whole Organisation of the Life of the Earth can be regarded as a sensitive film called the Biosphere stretched over the earth’s solid surfaces. This with the Lithosphere (the solid earth) the Hydrosphere (the liquid globe) and the Atmosphere (the gaseous envelope) make up the four aspects of this physical globe. I say nothing yet of the Mental Globe.

“The view that the Biosphere should be regarded as a living entity with its own Inner-Togetherness has been advanced by many biologists and geologists since Süss first formulated the theory that was later developed by Vernadsky.

“Such a view is a challenge to our simply stratified view of existence, for it entails no less than a total reversal of our Megalanthropic, Anthropocentic belief that Man is the highest order of Being given to us in sense-perception. If the Biosphere is a living Creature, then we men are parts of its physical organism or organisation, and indeed parts so small as to stand in much the same ratio of size and number as does the single cell and the living body of man.

“If we hypothetically regard Mankind as the brain-cells of the Biosphere the numerical coincidence is indeed striking. It is estimated that in the human brain there are 3,000,000,000 cells which is equal to the expected human population of the earth in 2000 AD. Moreover there are some 10,000,000,000,000 ordinary cells in the body, which figure agrees with a reasonable estimate of the number of metazoan animals on the surface of the Earth …”

Marcus felt some vague doubt about Simmonds’s hypothetical Scale of Matter, but felt attracted to the idea that his consciousness was only one cell in a vast interconnected system of apprehension. That made both the graph paper vision and the intrusive and excessive light more tolerable. He skipped some more dubiously related figures and analogies between human cells and created birds and beasts and arrived at Lucas Simmonds’s theory of Mental Evolution as the successor to the Darwinian kind.

“The physical surface, the outside of matter, evolved to a certain point and produced Man. Scientific observers since Darwin looking for observable mutations that could be said to be evidence of continuing evolutionary processes have been unable to produce anything convincing. This is because the species has now achieved its ultimate physical form and identity. The struggle for existence and the process of development have transferred themselves to the Mental Sphere. Thus the developed Biosphere is in its turn contained inside an even denser
layer of Thought. This layer is the Noussphere, the Earth-Mind. It would seem reasonable to suppose that the present Goal of Existence is the transference of Material Energy into Mental Energy. Thus Man, and drawn steadily after him, the whole of the lower creation, will be transfigured into pure Mind. Thus the phenomenon of entropy, the loss of tangential material energy in the terrestrial globe through the giving-off of heat in every new operation of matter, can be seen, not as a threat to our survival, but as a working-out of a higher purpose, a necessary operation in the realisation of a Plan.

“It is reasonable also to suppose that other celestial bodies and organisations available and unavailable to us in sense-perception have nousspheres or entelechies, dimly figured in the Living Creatures of the Apocalypse perhaps, or in the crude representations of angels, archangels and so on, or as C. S. Lewis has intelligently propounded through Science Fiction in the giving of names of pagan Deities however clouded by anthropomorphism to the Souls or Nouspheres of the other planets of our solar system.”

When the work came to God Marcus discovered that Simmonds’s habit of referring to this by a cipher was not, as he had supposed, facetiousness, but an attempt to de-anthropomorphise the Space-Filling Universal Mind which was represented in the text by G. G was the organiser of all organisations, the Planner of a Pattern which was “actualised” according to certain Laws. Marcus found the descriptions of the operations of G considerably harder to follow than the hypotheses of biospherology.

“All our minds can be seen as aspects or particles of G. G is streaked with all minds’ world-lines like the Tulip, or the dawn-sky, but does not depend upon these flickerings for its existence: without G they would not be. It is the goal of Mental Activity, human, subhuman and superhuman, to reach fuller awareness of G.

“The Plan springs directly from G. The Plan is the Idea, the perfect and total Idea of the Maker, towards which the whole creation strives. Pattern is the actualisation in Time and Space of parts of the Plan. The Plan and the Pattern stand to one another as Male and Female principles, the former affirming and potent, the latter denying and actual. The sun must be looked on, not as the mother of the planets, producing these out of her own substance, but as the Father impregnating the unformed planetary material with the Plan, the shining Light, of his own genetic constitution.”

There followed several very specific pages of scientific “facts” which Marcus had trouble with. They concerned an analysis of proteins as pattern-carriers; there were many millions of distinct protein-structures
present in living organisms but these were only “an almost vanishingly small proportion of the total number of proteins chemically
possible
”.

Even a simple protein made up of 20 amino-acids, Simmonds exclaimed, each occurring once, would give about 2,400,000,000,000,000,000 different compounds, each containing the same amino-acids in identical proportions and differing only in their space relations. He went on to the genetic coding transmitted by sperm (a hundred-millionth of body-weight) and ovum: the development of the complex eye from the small number of undifferentiated protein compounds present in the sperm. Marcus, faced with figures, was troubled by weak links of coherence: his attention was focused again by a peroration on Life as a Cosmic Reconciling Force.

“But how few Men are aware of their true nature or function! Most men are hardly raised above the level of self-awareness of the Species seen in other mammals. A cow is like a machine. She can be only what she is, the actualisation of the pattern, Cow, which irrefragably includes only a rudimentary self-awareness. The grass and the lettuce she converts to her body-matter have of course no self-awareness at all. A Man should struggle to fulfil his potentiality. An ordinary Man may act from deliberate choice perhaps 10,000 times in the course of his life. If we compare this with the 100,000,000,000 involuntary or reflex actions that his organism will have performed during the same period we must be bound to conclude that self-direction is a power that is scarcely ever exercised in Man.

“The highest grade of self-awareness transcends of course any individual or species and is present in any entity able to be aware of the Pattern of life itself: i.e. entities such as biospheres.