A Clue to the Exit: A Novel (14 page)

In the delirium of my longing to reassure Ton Len, I started to think of the insects which were now eating my neck and hands and face as the appetites of all the furious generations before us, the troupe of hungry ghosts who had prepared the way for this meticulous tangle of suffering. With every bite I imagined I was offering them my blood, like a coin in a cup. Finally, when my whole body was contorted with the desire to crush them, I saw that my need for Ton Len to know that I loved her was itself a hungry ghost. At that moment the ravenous troupe subsided, appeased by blood and recognition. The emotions which had seemed to be inextricably entangled with my love for Ton Len – frustration, despair, longing, resentment, the desire to be a good person – took on their own separate natures, leaving an unalloyed love radiating from my body through the rest of space.

I was jolted into a new clarity by this strange fantasy. I started to flick away the flies and scratch my bitten skin. I’m not interested in martyrdom, just in having as many lucid episodes as possible before the curtain drops.

The wind had died down and the glassy atmosphere it left behind was turning a lighter grey behind the high hill to the east of the creek. I sat very still for a moment as if I was made of glass as well. The icy moon had sunk out of view. I felt drained and light. I couldn’t think any more, any more than I could have stopped thinking at the beginning of the night. My legs were half dead as I clambered to my feet. I tottered home like a dizzy pensioner.

22

I was welcomed back to the house by a pair of air-force fighters cracking the sky above my head, the sharp lines of their vapour trails turning to smears of lipstick against the lurid dawn. I can never sleep in daylight or, for that matter, in darkness, but at least at night I’m in with a chance. I knew I would have to bully my way through another day on the volatile fuel of coffee and desperation. After a bath, I dragged myself to the village and had breakfast at L’Escale. I’ve given Heidi the number of the cafe, in case she changes her mind. I can’t help entertaining the superstition that my little breakthrough of the previous night, however buried it now is by exhaustion, will be rewarded by some transformation in her attitude. Just as I was mocking myself for this magical thinking, Jean-Baptiste, the barman, came over to tell me that a woman had telephoned last night and would call again in the afternoon. It must be Heidi. She is the only person who knows I’m here. I settled down for the day and, after my sixth double espresso, started to write as if there were no tomorrow.

After his period of silence and withdrawal, Jean-Paul felt lucid and calm and, if he was going to be impeccably honest, rather superior, among all these Anglo-Saxons who brought the atmosphere of Sherlock Holmes to intellectual life, observant only in its case-by-case myopia, and lacking that power of impertinent generalization to which it was so invigorating to return in a text such as
Le Mythe du sens
.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, may we have your attention, please—’

The announcement broke off immediately.

Ah, no, thought Jean-Paul, not my attention, that is asking too much. Won’t it be more than enough to leave part of my mind, as I inevitably do, receptive to the information of my senses, to let your dead words drift down and land on the ground of my awareness? You really can’t expect me to leap up and catch those withered trophies.

Crystal didn’t speculate: a man had been talking; now he wasn’t.

What has secured our attention, thought Patrick, is the interruption of the message. More is said in the pauses, blah, blah, blah.

The announcement resumed. ‘Due to circumstances beyond our control this train will be terminating at Didcot Junction. Coaches have been provided for passengers to continue their journey to London’s Victoria coach station. The coaches are located outside the main entrance to the station. We apologize for any inconvenience.’

A collective, stoically English groan passed through the compartment.

‘Circumstances beyond our control’ is an excellent phrase, thought Patrick. There’s hardly a statement that wouldn’t be improved by mentioning them. ‘Due to circumstances beyond my control it’s my birthday today … Due to circumstances beyond our control we still don’t know how consciousness works.’

By the time they arrived at the coach, there were too few seats for Jean-Paul, Crystal and Patrick to sit together. Crystal smiled forlornly at the others and sat down in the first free seat. Patrick walked down the aisle, hoping to find someone who would not awaken the monster of his intolerance. When he got to the back of the coach he settled there anyway.

Jean-Paul installed himself as near to Crystal as possible, a knight’s move away as he saw it, two rows back, on the other side of the aisle. He knew that the man next to him was Derek Wood, the evolutionary psychologist, and he had no intention of talking to him. Jean-Paul took an aloof view of ‘Evo-babble’, as Crystal liked to call it. For him, what characterized the twentieth century, if one could put aside its dazzling achievements in the competing spheres of overpopulation and mass murder, was the way in which thoughts, behaviour and communication had been set adrift from the intentions of the person making them, first by psychoanalysis, leaving us helpless in the hidden face of the unconscious, and then by all the disciplines that could loosely be called structural. Evo-babble was the latest attempt to demonstrate the vast weight of prejudicial habit. It was, in Jean-Paul’s estimation, a natural consequence of the famous death of God that his depressing omniscience should be redistributed among genetic, linguistic and cultural structures. Evo-babble trumpeted the maturity of facing up to the blindness of natural selection, without that blindness leading to any more freedom than the most rigid predestination.

‘My wife’s waiting for me at Paddington,’ sighed Derek, ignoring Jean-Paul’s hasty immersion in his book.

‘You have been hunting in Oxford, and your wife is gathering you in Paddington,’ said Jean-Paul drily.

‘Oh dear,’ said Derek, laughing too hard, ‘I hope you’re not making fun of evolutionary psychology. It’s very easy to mock, very easy indeed.’

‘There is no need to mock it,’ said Jean-Paul. ‘It is too banal to require mockery. If someone tells me that we spend more time standing on our feet than on our heads, mockery is an exaggerated response. We are clearly embedded in our bodies, in our ecologies, and in the history of our species. There is no doubt that the mind is modular and that its various modalities have evolved.’

‘We see eye to eye, then,’ said Derek.

‘But if I am reading a page of Proust, let us say a scene from the final reception given by the Princesse de Guermantes in
Le Temps Retrouvé
, how will my appreciation of the complexity of this experience be enhanced by the knowledge that fifty thousand generations earlier the Prousts were wandering the plains of Africa, peeping greedily and apprehensively over the tall grass, without yet having attended even the most rudimentary cocktail party?’

‘Oh, I think they would have attended a rudimentary cocktail party,’ said Derek. ‘You only have to watch a group of chimpanzees to know that. Language evolved from the pressures of social cooperation. Anyway, nobody could say that Proust was indifferent to the pecking order in his society,
and
it might be argued that he gave birth to so many books because he was unwilling to disseminate copies of his genes by the traditional method.’

‘You are right,’ said Jean-Paul, emphatically reopening his book. ‘The more I think about it, the less I can tell the difference between Proust and a chimpanzee.’

‘Oh, I think there’s a very marked difference. For a start, I’m sure that Proust wasn’t partial to PG Tips.’ Derek chuckled. ‘But the size of the difference is the very thing that makes one marvel at the power of natural selection.’

‘And what about the experience of pure consciousness?’ asked Jean-Paul, deciding to change his line of attack. ‘Awareness of awareness – what would be the evolutionary utility of that?’

‘If there
is
such a thing as pure consciousness – and I’m not much of a navel-gazer myself, so I won’t enter into the semantics of it – ’ said Derek with dismissive modesty, ‘it doesn’t require an evolutionary explanation. Consciousness had to exist before it could be moulded by natural selection, so, from that point of view, there is no task of explaining the
existence
of consciousness.’

‘But if the various types, of consciousness – visual, cognitive, et cetera – evolved for their survival value, they are essentially unlike awareness of awareness, which has no survival content whatever.’

‘Relaxation,’ said Derek, ‘there’s tremendous survival value in that. But, you know, in general, I like Chomsky’s distinction between problems and mysteries, between scientific questions which are amenable to a solution and those which no imaginable set of experiments could resolve. It seems to me that certain aspects of the attempt to create a science of consciousness fall into the mystery category – free will, what happens to consciousness after we die, that sort of thing. What’s nice from my perspective is that that makes complete evolutionary sense. Our minds didn’t evolve to solve those problems, any more than our eyes evolved to see ultraviolet light.’

Weary of being misunderstood, Jean-Paul was determined to bring the dialogue to an end. ‘So, if I’ve understood you correctly, evolutionary psychology has no need to explain the existence of consciousness and no possibility of explaining what is interesting about it. Really, we were completely lost before the invention of this discipline, huh?’

‘Oh dear, you really aren’t a fan,’ said Derek. ‘So, what’s your line of country?’

‘Reading,’ said Jean-Paul.

Crystal’s eyes were closed. She definitely wasn’t going to have another conversation. Tiredness was good. There was nothing to feed her curiosity, nothing to distract her from her anguish. She realized, with the thud of self-reproach reserved for the most blatant oversights and already accompanied by a shimmer of relief, that her whole journey to the conference was born of a desperate need for consolation. Her craving for answers to the questions posed so brutally by Peter’s coma had partially disguised itself as a passion for science. Now she was left with the naked longing to be reassured.

But could she afford to seek consolation from a future where death was the only certainty? When he was asked about the origins of the universe, the existence of God, the mind–body problem, and his survival after death, the Buddha had remained silent. What had drawn her to the dharma in the first place was the fact that it was a practice and not a faith: something to do, not something to believe. She recalled the allegory of the wounded man who refuses to have a poisoned arrow removed until he knows the name of the man who wounded him, whether the arrow was curved or barbed, shot by a crossbow or a longbow: his inquisitive pedantry is the equivalent of refusing to seek liberation without knowing whether the soul is dependent on the body.

As she remembered these things, her relationship with the unknown seemed to reverse: instead of being paralysed by ignorance, she was liberated by agnosticism. Released from a sales conference of systems and models, she returned to the vivid and discreet life of her own mind. She realized that she doubted everything except the sense of freedom that came from acknowledging a world in which things were neither unreal nor endowed with an independent reality, but flowing into one another like the air flowing in and out of her lungs. With this return to simplicity came relief, as if she had thrown open the windows of a hospital room. She was no longer tired, and when she opened her eyes she saw that the coach was already passing through west London.

By the time they arrived at Victoria coach station, Patrick could hardly wait to tell Crystal the happy news that the problem of consciousness was insoluble. A man called McGinn, sitting next to him on the coach, had explained the whole thing with exemplary clarity. Instead of using the mystery of consciousness to unlock a world far stranger than the one we thought we were inhabiting, McGinn used it to lock us into our constitutional limitations: not only was the problem unsolved, it never could be solved. Something we did not know and could not know provided an entirely naturalistic explanation for the arising of consciousness from insensate matter. Patrick, who had been toying with a materialism in which our ignorance was not intrinsic to our faculties but confined to our understanding of matter, immediately saw the advantages of the more radically pessimistic ‘cognitive closure’, namely that it allowed him to stop thinking about the problem. Instead of wondering whether he would live long enough to see science crack the code, he could now legitimately turn his back on the entire question. His life had been spent trying to stop thinking about one thing or another – sex, drugs, cruelty, snobbery, money. Consciousness just happened to be today’s relatively abstruse nightmare, the thing he couldn’t get off his mind, and McGinn’s analysis was the Betty Ford clinic he had been crying out for, a refuge for those who had been engaged in the compulsive futility of trying to find a common language with which to negotiate between the dictatorship of science and the anarchist guerrillas of introspection.