A Whistling Woman

  Electricity, chemical messengers, geometry.

  The matter of the mind.

  Someone pushed a brown packet under her feet. It said “Bog-paper. Open it at your peril.” It had been shuffled along, from end to end of the row. She picked it up. It was found to contain the Eichenbaum pamphlet. The first batch was finding its way out.

  On the evening of the first night, there was a dinner in the University. On the campus, there was a student rally, not very big, which dispersed peacefully. Hodgkiss acquired a copy of the Bog-paper pamphlet, and asked Wijnnobel if they should speak to Eichenbaum. They agreed to wait until the next day. The college staff did not know where the papers were coming from.

  In the morning, the Henry Moore statues of the King and Queen were found to have been damaged. Someone in the night had been very thorough with crimson paint. Both figures had wide bloody bands around their necks, like the red ribbons worn defiantly by French aristocrats in the time of the guillotine, but dripping. The King’s cloven crest or helmet had also been painted like a bloody cockscomb. The Queen’s bronze lap was full of red paint, as though she had haemorrhaged—much of it was in wet puddles, tacky on top. And a hand had been painted on the stone seat, a white hand, the Isengard hand, with red fingernails. “You have been warned,” someone had written, in Elvish letters.

  Luk spent much of the night revising his paper. He always told his students not to do this. He deleted several of the equations which had so painfully gone to its making, without which it would not exist. He added, on the spur of the coming moment, some generalisations about human society he was usually far too cautious to make. He looked at himself in the mirror, and took a pair of scissors to his beard, making it sharper-pointed, more aggressive. In the morning, he put on a suit, and took it off again. He put on a ribbed black sweater, and black cords. He thought he looked trim, but like a danseur. Finally he rolled up a scarf in Liberty lawn, with their peacock feather design. The feathers were emerald and a rather good Prussian blue; the peacock eyes were white, with a tiny purple splash in the centre. The floating feather-fronds were on a background colour of deep crimson. Luk knotted all this brilliance about his neck, and set off for the Theatre. He knew it was all going to go wrong. He had put so much into it, and it was about to fail.

  There was a full house, including Wijnnobel, Pinsky, Eichenbaum and the television team. Luk strode on to the stage, and said his subject was one that was puzzling honest population geneticists. How and why had sexual reproduction evolved, given that other methods of self-propagation, of passing on the genes which strict Darwinian theory supposed was the function of organisms, appeared to be less costly, biologically speaking. We are so used, he said, to the idea that sex produces more—that parents beget children—that we don’t think about the fact that at the cellular level sex diminishes the number of cells; it is a process whereby one is made of two—one zygote. Why should a female not prefer to reproduce parthenogenetically—which would pass on more of her genes?

  He argued his case, with elegant diagrams and slides of the extraordinary fecundity of aphids. He spoke of diffusion and territories, of flying seeds and creeping worms, of elm-trees and oysters, of aphids and rotifers, of sessile organisms like strawberries and coral. He was brisk, he was lucid. He was witty—he made jokes he had not intended to make. He spoke of the expense of being male and quoted Charles Darwin’s letter to his son, in which he said “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me feel sick.” They laughed. He felt them held to him by threads of attention and laughter, like an electric spider-web which he was spinning. He described his slug research, on the ruddy Arion rufus, the black Arion ater, the ruddy ones in the south of the hills, the black ones in the north, the sexual ruddy ones intensely aggressive, the meek black ones a clone.

  He was sharp, he was fierce, he made just enough reference to the unknowns, the not understood, that might dilute, or shift his argument. He said he didn’t deny sex was there, it must be in some ways adaptive—but the case must be made.

  He was witty at the expense of ideas of altruism which claimed that selection worked amongst groups, or that creatures could act “for the benefit of the species.” He explained, patiently, reasonably, happily, that competition between organisms worked within small groups, and by mechanisms of immediate survival, which made nonsense of selfsacrifice for an idea. If you give up your life for another, he said, all your altruistic genes are annihilated with you, unless that other has as many of your genes as you do. We do not like these thoughts, for we have grown up with, we have inherited, beliefs in self-denial, in turning the other cheek, which some of us, in history, ascribed to imaginary Fathers beyond the grove or in the heavens.

  You might say, said Luk Lysgaard-Peacock, thinking of Frederica and her inconvenient assertion that mental cobwebs were real things—you might say, that if an idea has survived for a very long time, it has its own adaptive fitness. You could argue that religions and moral instructions survive in the world because they are like larger organisms, struggling for existence. You could argue that Christianity spread to be a world religion because it had better survival characteristics than Manichaeism. There is a simple sense in which this might be true, in that strict Manichaeism forbids both eating and sexual reproduction, so it is in its essence designed to implode and self-destruct. But a faith is not an organism, and survival works at the level of the fitness of cells, through the adaptation of cells. I would like you to recall the admonitions made yesterday by Professor Pinsky, against thinking loosely with analogies and metaphors.

  In a recent book on The Life of Insects, Professor Sir Vincent Wigglesworth wrote that insects do not live for themselves alone but devote their lives to their species, of which they are representatives. They do no such thing. There is no question of “devotion” or “representatives.” Please understand that this is quite a different idea from the one that in a nest of ants all the workers are sisters, daughters of the same mother, with the same genes. They have no noble idea of the species. The German philosopher, Feuerbach, tried to prove that the idea of God was simply a personification of “the species,” the big Man, as the Nest is the big queen-ant. These ideas, whether right or wrong, do not help with thinking about survival and fitness at the level of the dividing cell, and the inherited DNA. An idea is not a cell. Although we need cells to form ideas.

  So where does it all come from. Our final speaker, Professor Eichenbaum, has argued that domesticated species are degenerate, in that they are less capable of communicating with each other than their congeners in the wild. Except for man, in whom communication has burgeoned to an astonishing degree. We gabble, we babble, we sing, we chant, we paint, we draw, we carve, we use wires, and lights, and amplifiers from taut skins to knobs on radios. Professor Eichenbaum describes displacement activities in captive creatures. J.B.S. Haldane suggested that an ethologist could describe religion as a vacuum activity of communication—a displacement ritual—in which human beings communicate with non-existent Hearers.

  In human society, Luk said, as in other niches where competition takes place, there are winners and losers. Females are the losers. They have to bear the nutritional cost of reproduction—the growth of the zygote—for both themselves and their mate. Human societies in general have made ethical and religious traditions out of the patterns of human sexual reproduction. Humans have so arranged matters that women are oppressed by men, and children by both. However, if you look at the working-out of lives, I would suggest the ultimate losers are the redundant males. You need only to begin by considering the sex differences in the statistics of illness in general, and of death at all ages.

  Frederica watched Luk, amazed and delighted. He seemed like some sort of small golden fire-demon, with sparks coming out of the ends of his fingers (which he used a lot, as he paced the platform, very effectively). She had been infected by his stage-fright, and was now infected by his joyous contact with his audience, which had become one at
tentive creature. She thought, he’s sweeping around like a great peacock, showing off, and laughed to herself that he was doing this to demonstrate the wastefulness and pointlessness of just such male display. She remembered her dream. It was odd to make love to someone in a dream. It was not his body, it was something she had called up, but it made her feel differently. Once, she would have asked herself, was she “in love” with this person to whose shadow she had in her sleeping brain made love. He was very busy explaining that this was an unaskable question. He was taking everything apart—ethics, romantic love—with great good humour and controlled aggression. She wondered what Jacqueline had done to him.

  Everyone gathered round, afterwards, to congratulate him. Eichenbaum himself stumped up, and held out a hand. “Du bist der Geist der stets verneint,” he said. “It’s not so simple. But it was resplendently argued.”

  Luk glowed. As he was leaving the Theatre, someone pushed the bog-roll pamphlet into his hand.

  The next two papers were about the biology of memory. The first was Christopher Cobb’s paper on birdsong. He accompanied himself with both recorded birdsong and his own very musical renderings. He described the difference between chaffinches and canaries which need to hear singing to learn, but can learn in isolation to produce a well-structured song, whereas the chaffinch needs to hear both its own song, and those of other birds. A chaffinch deafened within the first three months of life will produce little more than a continuous screech. It cannot learn from a song-tutor which has pure notes and not a chaffinch-voice, but it can learn from recordings of chaffinches even if played backwards. A bird can be muted by destroying the left side of its nervous system, but—since birds are more plastic than humans—an aphasic canary will recover its song. Cobb looked like a woolly Pan, his hands cupped to his mouth, with the bubbling, inhuman music pouring out.

  Someone in the audience—it was Waltraut Ross—cried out “And it is worth imprisoning and mutilating these free creatures to find out this kind of thing?”

  Christopher Cobb said mildly enough, “Well, of course, you do always wonder.”

  “Shame!” cried Waltraut Ross.

  There was a moment of shouting and counter-shouting in the audience. Cobb mildly turned up his sound-system, and produced a choir of variegated nightingales. He went on to explain how they invented new songs, varying those they heard, learning the new sequences in groups. The audience subsided, and he was warmly applauded.

  The final paper of that day was Lyon Bowman, and was about the debate between those who argued that particular neurones had very specific, precise functions, and the holists, or Gestalt thinkers, who believed in the plastic functioning of the complicated networks. He explained that in the cerebral cortex there are perhaps 600 million synapses in each cubic millimetre. In a human cerebral cortex there were somewhere between 1014–10 15 synapses. Imagining large numbers is something the human mind is generally bad at. If you counted 1,000 per second, he said, it would take you somewhere between 3,000 and 30,000 years to count them all. Let alone to disentangle the branches and stems of the axons and dendrites. Nevertheless work was being done on individual groups of neurones and in some cases—such as Alving’s work on Aplysia pacemaker neurones, and work in his own laboratory on the giant neurones of Helix aspersa—on individual neurones. He spoke of the location in the anaesthetised brains of cats and macaque monkeys of particular sets of cells which appeared to react very precisely to fine angles and movements of light sources. He described the chemistry of the snail neurones. Deborah Ritter rose in the audience to denounce him. What he called a preparation, she said, was an impaled living creature. He had no right to indulge his reductive speculations at the expense of the helpless cat or monkey. Jacqueline Winwar sat there and heard her results described, and so to speak, claimed, without acknowledgement. It was her work—her months of trial and error, failure and triumph, smoothly taken over, as part of the Lab’s generally excellent performance. Of Bowman’s performance. She was a see-through implement, that was all.

  Various other contentious voices were raised. Bowman smiled and finished his paper, speaking more loudly.

  There was a cocktail party afterwards. Jacqueline stood at the edge of it, possessed by fury, and also by the knowledge that her academic future—the snails, the oscilloscope, the lab space—were in Bowman’s plumply delicate fingers. Luk Lysgaard-Peacock appeared behind her.

  “Pretty cool,” he said. “Those were your figures. Very smooth.”

  “As though I don’t exist.”

  “Good work, though. And the bit about the effects of injected calcium sounded surprising—”

  “It doesn’t do what you might think. You’d think it would increase membrane resistance—but it appears to increase permeability—I’m not sure yet—”

  “You should be speaking yourself.”

  “Your paper was very good.”

  Luk grinned. “The rage of the rejected. Good for the mind.”

  Jacqueline smiled doubtfully. “Then I’d better learn to use the rage of those whose work is appropriated—”

  Bowman came up to them, leading Hodder Pinsky.

  “This is the young researcher I was telling you about, Hodder. Jacqueline Winwar. Very promising. Professor Pinsky is founding a new—very broad-based—discussion group. I suggested he might ask you along.”

  “Filaments,” said Pinsky. “Cybernetics suggests hierarchies and central power. Filaments is a good—well, a goodish—pun. Neural networks, spider-threads, all that. But it’s got files in it, to suggest memory, and mens, or almost. Karl Lashley uses double-entendres as an argument for some sort of residual mental representation in the cells of the brain. You have to connect the one to the other, arbitrarily, so to speak, to ‘get’ the idea. Tell me about your research, Dr. Winwar.”

  Bowman smiled, like the Cheshire cat, and moved away, leaving the smile in the air. Jacqueline saw in her mind’s eye her preparations of neurones, the wonderful steady bursts of action potential, the perturbations, the gaps.

  “What I’ve been trying is—” she began. Pinsky listened.

  Wijnnobel, Hodgkiss, Calder-Fluss and Wilkie met to discuss the opposition to Theobald Eichenbaum. Calder-Fluss was of the opinion that it might be a good plan to call in the police. With the vandalism, and the pamphlets, and now libellous posters about animal experiments, eugenics, and proto-Fascism. Wijnnobel said that if you called in the police, the matter became a criminal investigation, in their hands, not the University’s. Hodgkiss said he was sure that what the core of the opposition wanted, was that the police should be called in. It didn’t follow, unfortunately, that anyone could guarantee that Professor Eichenbaum could give his paper without some major disruptive act. Wilkie said why not ask Eichenbaum himself, and Hodgkiss said he would prefer not to perturb him. He had a right to speak freely, and was an invited guest. Wilkie said he must have been the object of a lot of this sort of thing already. Wijnnobel said no, he had not been. The offending 1941 paper had not been translated—or returned to life, so to speak—until Pinsky had sent it to him. He did not know how—or when—the Anti-University had got hold of it. Hodgkiss remembered its arrival. He remembered Pinsky’s letter. He remembered, suddenly, the excited comportment of Nick Tewfell.

  He saw no point in confronting Tewfell. That would be what Tewfell wanted. He saw no point in mentioning Tewfell to the Vice-Chancellor. He rather hoped the whole problem would go away. He must have known it would not, he thought much later, without being able to think of any very good course of action he might have taken. All they could do was to be vigilant, he said.

  Wijnnobel said that he would take it upon himself to discuss the matter with Eichenbaum.

  The penultimate day of the Conference was devoted to what are known as the Humanities—as though, Luk said crossly to Jacqueline—genetics or neurology or biochemistry were somehow inhuman. Jacqueline, a little rattled by the rash of posters and leaflets depicting Lyon Bowman and Christopher Cobb as tor
turers, said that it was a general perception that they were, precisely, inhuman.

  Hodgkiss, looking nervously at the audience, for he did not think of himself as a brave man, gave his paper on Wittgenstein’s ideas of colour—which did not include any discussion of the physics of wavelength, or the physiology of the retina, but did somehow describe the mind describing its own operations.

  There were various literary and historical papers, including one on George Eliot’s metaphors from anatomy, perception, tissue study and webs in Middlemarch. There were papers on Lawrence on blood and semen, and blood and brain in Shakespeare; Raphael Faber spoke on Proust’s visual metaphors, and Canon Holly spoke excitedly about the idea of the Incarnation, that God was made flesh, and had blood and brain and bone—was confined in them, he said, quoting Marvell on the prison of the rib-cage and the nerves, on the walking corpse impaled on the spirit, which reached upwards. Frederica had expected to find these literary papers the most interesting. She had grown up in the narrow British educational system which divides like a branching tree, and predestines all thirteen-year-olds to be either illiterate or innumerate (if not both). She had grown up with the assumption that to be literary is to be quick, perceptive and subtle. Whereas scientists were dull, and also—in the nuclear age—quite possibly dangerous and destructive. She thought of F. R. Leavis’s Education and the University, which she had studied, and which had said that the English Department was at the centre of any educational endeavour. This suddenly seemed, as she listened to Lawrence’s dangerous nonsense abstracted from Lawrence’s lively drama and held up for approval, to be nothing more than a Darwinian jockeying for advantage, a territorial snarl and dash.