Her arrival seemed to act as a signal for Bowman and Jacqueline to move away. This left Luk, who looked, and was, cross. He had had a difficult time, and was suffering from unexpected but intense stage-fright about his controversial paper. Shortly after Frederica’s spring visit, John Ottokar had disappeared. He had not turned up to work one morning, had not turned up the next morning, and never turned up again. His room was found to be cleared of anything personal, such as clothes, razor and toothbrush—his books and slide-rule were still in their shelves. Luk prompted Abraham Calder-Fluss to ask Elvet Gander if the missing computer-scientist was in Dun Vale Hall. He had to do this, because Dun Vale Hall had ceremoniously closed its gates, when the Pale was completed, and had cut off the telephone. Gander appeared to be still coming in and out, as indeed was Canon Holly; they were both still scheduled to give papers at the Conference. But a resolutely dejected small group of members—mostly Quakers, crestfallen founders of the Spirit’s Tigers, had shaken hands, it was told, and walked away from the locked gate towards the moorland. One or two more appeared, not saying much, during the next few weeks, and took trains back to the south. On the other hand, walkers were seen making their way with satchels and staves over the moorland, long-hairs and seekers, from Calverley and further afield. They were welcomed in. Some came out again. Elvet Gander told Abraham Calder-Fluss that there was no need to worry about John Ottokar. He was indeed inside, he was safely inside. Calder-Fluss asked whether he should consider he had resigned, or was on sick leave, or what? Gander said, he is certainly in need of help, that is my professional opinion. He will find himself in there, that is my personal opinion. You must do as you think fit about the salary.
Luk at the time was more concerned at the hiatus in his figures than at the possible spiritual fate of either or both Ottokars. He tried—with some success, but not enough—to persuade Marcus Potter to sort out some of the distributions and equations. Marcus was also helping Jacqueline, whose giant neurones were producing new bursts of action potential, and Christopher Cobb, who was giving a paper on learning in songbirds, especially chaffinches. Cobb, who ran the Centre for Field Studies in the moors, and was a world authority on ants, had branched out into birdsong, and had been working with some research students in the University’s new animal behaviour centre. He was even less mathematical than Luk, and even more beleaguered by the approach of the Conference. He knew Eichenbaum slightly, and revered his work—with qualifications, and caveats, of a scientific nature. He was not a political animal. He did need computer help.
On top of that, the Hearers had enclosed what Luk was accustomed to think of as “his” snail populations, although he knew very well that the land they were on belonged to Lucy Nighby, and the snails belonged, if to anyone, to themselves.
Luk marched up to the front gate of the drive leading to Dun Vale Hall. Two very thin young men, with very long lank hair, in white overshirts, were, so to speak, languidly guarding it. Luk explained about the snails. He explained about the length of his study. Geese gathered behind the guardians, spread their white wings experimentally, serpentined their sharp heads on their necks, and spoke like abrupt trumpets. The young men said he could not come in, and ceased to listen.
A letter to Gander, and a letter to Lucy Nighby, produced no reply. Luk reasoned that the perimeter could not all be always guarded. He made his snail observations at dawn. He did some prowling—his snail-infested wall was unfortunately near the place where Gunner had kept his motor bike, and the hen-battery had been. Luk reasoned that the buildings might still be in use, and tried to peer through knot-holes in the fence. He heard hens running and bustling, and peewits, but no human movement. It was not a concentration camp. It would not have an armed guard and a watchtower. He came back before dawn with a saw and a shovel, and managed to remove a slightly split plank, making a hole he could slip through, replacing the plank behind him. He prospected. Farm-birds ran wildly out of his way. The buildings were dusty-windowed and their doors swung. Next day, he returned before dawn, with a back pack. He had to park some distance away, and had to carry his things over a hilltop, on rough ground. But no one had touched his entry point, and after a time, he felt it was safe to make regular dawn raids, to record snail movements, to put dabs of fresh blue, to count. All this filled him with a kind of irritated energy.
In some dark part of his soul, he put the absence of John Ottokar down to Frederica Potter, ignoring any part he himself, let alone Paul-Zag, might have played.
He had also seen the astrology episode of Through the Looking-Glass . His mood had veered back from cautious benignity to a semiautomatic hostility.
Frederica did not know whether to mention John Ottokar, whose absence was heavily present. She smiled her television smile at Luk, and said she was greatly looking forward to hearing his paper on sex. Luk glowered. Frederica said even more brightly that she hoped he would consider recording a personal interview. Sex was a topic that would be certain to interest the viewers. Luk said that he regretted the presence of the television, which trivialised things. And worse. Worse? said Frederica, behind her bright mask.
“Look what you did to the Vice-Chancellor. You should be ashamed. Letting that woman make a fool of herself—and him—in front of millions. Disseminating a package of dangerous lies.”
Frederica received an image of floating fungal spores over a pristine landscape. From one of those puffballs that exploded. She became combative, the more because she was, of course, disturbed about the Vice-Chancellor, who had been kind to her, in his way.
“Come on. There’s nothing wrong with astrology. It’s a sort of popular poetry. It lets people think in metaphors. Make lists and categories. People enjoy that. It’s beautiful in its way.”
“No it isn’t. It’s fabrications, and untruths, and it does harm, because it prevents people from thinking. That woman’s dangerous.”
“She’s absurd. But I thought she—she stood up for herself.”
“It’s like looking through a window covered with disgusting cobwebs and saying, that’s what the sky’s like,” said Luk.
“Well, you’re the scientist. If the cobwebs’re there, you have to be interested in them. You can’t say they’re not there. Been there for centuries.”
Luk was briefly baffled. He rallied.
“No, no, they’re obscene, unreal forms of thought.”
“Our brains made them.”
“But they’re dead forms. They’re so much less interesting than—real things.”
“Reality’s what you think it is.”
“No it isn’t. It’s what is. You’re too clever to give me that one.”
“It wasn’t my idea to put her on the programme. It was Wilkie’s, he’s got a streak of anarchic naughtiness. And he was right, we’ve had hundreds of letters, people are hungry for all these things, astrology and alchemy and spiritualism ...”
“That’s why—”
“Don’t go on. I do know. I hate Elvet Gander, too. He’s much more dangerous than she is, because he isn’t obviously mad.”
The shadowy forms of John Ottokar and Paul-Zag shimmered between them.
Luk said “I’ve had sleepless nights getting my paper together. It’s too long. It’s not wholly coherent.”
Frederica felt it would be presumptuous to try to console him, or to say anything anodyne, it’ll be all right, or anything like that. She said well, she would be there to hear it. Unless the students disrupted everything.
“So far, there’s only been placards, and a suspiciously docile little demo.”
Nick Tewfel, who had organised the demo, was visiting Deborah Ritter, Greg Tod, Waltraut Ross and Jonty Surtees. He knew that the demo was only the beginning, and he suspected uneasily that there were things about which he had not been told. The room in the cottage had changed: it was not that it had been swept for action, it was simply more cluttered. Four very large objects, like bedrolls, or stooks, stood against one wall, covered with old blankets. Greg Tod’
s working-table was covered with copies of a cyclostyled, stapled document. He and Waltraut Ross were bundling them together.
“We got them,” said Surtees. “I was afraid they wouldn’t be on time.”
They were translations of extracts from Theobald Eichenbaum’s “brown” paper of 1941, Helder und Herde, which was based on Francis Galton’s chapter, in Inquiries into Human Faculty entitled “Gregarious and Slavish Instincts.” Eichenbaum’s paper was an exploration of the herding, flocking, and shoaling behaviour of creatures who found safety in masses. It observed the effects on predators of the massing and wheeling of the bodies of potential prey. It also, following Galton, took up both the comparison of the intelligence of wild and domesticated cattle and a comparison with civilised, or domesticated, human beings. Galton had argued that humans had inherited what he perhaps unfortunately called a “slavish” attitude—a shrinking from responsibility, an incapacity to think independently—from some gregarious primeval ancestor. He believed that democracy, and careful breeding of intelligent men (eugenics), would increase responsibility. Galton believed that modern domesticated cattle were more independent than wild ones because the more aggressive and wilful had not been “pruned” from the edge of the herd by lions and leopards, but had propagated themselves. Eichenbaum had subtly switched the emphasis—or anyway the language—and had used phrases derived from the vocabulary of National Socialism, to suggest that there were superior and inferior races of cattle (and men), some of whom were heroes, and some of whom were born to be the slavish herd, or to be eliminated.
Greg Tod had written an eloquent preface to the selective document, which was printed on what he called “shit-brown” paper. The preface which began “Has a man like this any ‘right’ to be heard in a free society?,” explained with rhetorical hammering every suspect term, and its political overtones. Sideswipes were taken at Galton and the evil of eugenics and selective breeding. Connections were drawn between Eichenbaum’s admiration for the rituals of aggressive combat in wolf-packs, Prussian sabre-fights, and SS initiation rituals. The whole was illustrated with a cartoon image done by Ross of Eichenbaum with a slavering wolf-head on a puny poodle-rump (an allusion to the famous breeding experiment) surrounded by swastikas.
Nick Tewfell whistled. He asked if they were going to barricade the Theatre, or sit-in, or ...
“We are going to make them sweat,” said Jonty Surtees, who was incandescent with enthusiasm. “We are going to release these one by one, so they don’t know where they’re coming from, and go from a trickle to a flood ...”
“They’ll know they’re coming from here.”
“No they won’t, because they won’t be. Don’t ask. What you don’t know, you can’t tell anyone. We are going to begin with little things—minor irritations—so they keep thinking, is this it, is this all, and of course, it won’t be. A good organiser makes his own troops feel they aren’t going far enough fast enough ... But it mustn’t get out of hand. Yet.”
“And what are these?”
“These are for the Finale. You’ll know in plenty of time.”
He swagged his mane, and smiled with huge cheerfulness. Nick Tewfell felt vaguely humiliated, and vaguely excited. He said
“We aren’t going to let him speak?”
“Of course not. But we want to scare the shit out of him, first. And all the others. This is it. This is when we strike. This is when we were always going to strike. A blow towards the Revolution.”
He grinned again.
“We’ll have some pretty fireworks and alarums and excursions before then—”
Hodder Pinsky gave the opening address. He stood in the theatre, in the centre of the circling blue velvet seats, his eyes invisible behind his flashing blue glasses, his white suit faintly gleaming over the sky-blue expanse of his shirt. His subject was “Metaphors for the Matter of the Mind.”
He began with a compliment to Wijnnobel, who, he said, had tried to map the growth of the branching forms of language whose seeds, or germs, were, he was himself convinced, already in the developing human brain in possibility, before birth. And the branching diagrams of the hypothetical grammar resembled the Golgi-stains of dendrites and synapses for reasons both—so to speak—matter of fact, matter of physics and chemistry—and matter of metaphor. The word “dendrite” derived from the Greek word for a tree, the name was an analogy. Human beings could not think without such metaphors and analogies, the action potential for an electrical jump of comparison must be born with the branchings of the grammatical forms in the embryonic brain to which he had just alluded. But what he intended to do, today, was to make opaque and visible and problematic, these facile and often beautiful metaphors with which human beings tried to think about thinking.
He himself was convinced that brain, nervous system, and mind were the same thing. There is, said Hodder Pinsky, no ghost in the machine, no external and invisible soul, no spirit, come from heaven, hell, or the pit of the stomach, that is not in and of that convoluted layered slab of white and grey matter and its branches and pulses. There was a time when psychoanalysts—Sigmund Freud himself—had been neurologists, had looked for things like the repeating compulsion in the closed-circuit firing of neurons. But now the human sciences had backed away from neurology. This was at least partly because they disliked the metaphors. It was very hard to make a philosophy of mind that was not simply a criticism of particular language.
He himself was interested in a science of mind that dealt with things that were only approximately objects of language, at all. We name them, but their names neither contain, nor confine them. We do not know what the largest part of them do, or are. In physics, it has been helpful to understand the nature of the atom by making an analogon, a metaphor, from the solar system, the planets moving around the sun. It had also been obstructive, and unhelpful, because electrons and positrons and neutrons are not, and do not really resemble, planets moving round the sun.
He talked for a time about mechanical images for the mind. He said that the founders of cybernetics had named their new science—that new metaphor—from the Greek, χμβερνητηs meaning a steersman, which gave rise in the mind to the idea of the brain as the intelligence guiding the beautifully designed vessel through the waves of chaos, or just possibly of the inventor of a system, a computing machine, as the political governor of another kind of system.
He spoke of the profound human resistance to the idea of mind as mechanism, or mechanisms in the mind. It came from many sources, often paradoxical. There was the old idea of God the watch-maker, and the human need to posit a designer for anything that was found to be working in a coherent and orderly way. There was the later, and quite different, fear of automatons, of man-made, non-vital, creatures or beings who could sing, or dance, or calculate, and might learn to replicate themselves. This fear of the machine had informed much of the anxiety caused by Galvani’s discovery of bodily electricity, the mechanical jerking and twitching of dead frogs’ legs attached to magnets.
There were also uses, and objections to uses, of metaphors from systems of human communication. Words like programme, code, information, transcription, encryption, message, translation, were not invented to describe either the operation of the neurones of the brain, or the physical mechanisms of computing-machines. They were derived from factual descriptions of writing and speaking, from human language, talking about itself.
He spoke of psychological metaphors—the idea of the “entry” of a sense-impression into the brain, of the “reproduction” of the outside world as a “representation” inside the head. He spoke of the beautiful Renaissance idea, derived from all this, that the physical world, the vegetable world, the geological world, which had succeeded the creatures named by Adam in the Garden of Eden, was so to speak written by God in signatures, the names of things being inherent in the things, being, so to speak, their nature.
He spoke of mechanical metaphors drawn from the world of computing itself. To call certain pattern
s of behaviour, or reactions to stimuli, desires or aversions hard-wired, was to obscure as much as it illuminated about the physiology of mental processes, for there is no wiring, and the relation of permanent functions and memories to random or “free” movements does not precisely resemble the decision-pattern of computing machines.
He spoke of the dangers of analogy in the comparison of the possibility, in the neurobiological world, of describing what went on in terms of simple electromagnetism and chemical reactions, to the simplifying descriptions of economics, the equating of all human activity to pounds, shillings and pence, stamped-out coinage, repeated, minted currency. The difference was endlessly more instructive than the analogy, said Hodder Pinsky. The analogy is made by the slipperiness of thought with words. We need linguistic philosophy to sort out the beautiful and fatal snarls we are fated—not designed, but fated as we are shaped into embryos—to entwine ourselves in, with words. But thought is not words, life is not words.
He ended with a simple, clear summary of what he said was the present knowledge of the activity of the brain. It was now known that the nervous system was activated by a chemical set of signals, as well as the other two forms of coding already known—a complex geometry of molecular connections and symmetries, and the temporal succession of electrical nerve impulses, what used to be known as negative energy, and became known as action potential.
He spoke about new work on chemical signals and codes, and their diffusion along long distances, in, for instance, the bloodstream. He became technical—and lost Frederica—about how chemical signals brought diversity to synaptic connections with a similar geometry.
She realised that though she had understood what he had said, which was lucid, and interesting, she was profoundly ignorant, blackly, thickly ignorant, of what he was talking about. She knew the words, neurone, synapse, dendrite, and she liked them because she could do their etymology. But the human world—including maybe some of her own forebears—had invented microscopes, and telescopes, and dissected tissues and identified cells, and if it all vanished tomorrow she would not know where to start, though she might be able to write down quite a lot of Paradise Lost by heart (whatever her heart was, and however it worked).