Authors: Scarlett Thomas
The End Of Mr. Y (4 page)
and Edward Morley set out to prove that the ether existed, but in the end they had to conclude that it didn’t. While talking to Burlem I couldn’t, of course, remember the date of this experiment, or the names of the scientists, but I did remember the way Michelson referred to the lost object of his experiment as the ‘beloved old ether, which is now abandoned, though I personally still cling a little to it’. I got a bit excited about how much poetry there was in theoretical physics, and then I went on for a bit about how much I like institutions: especially ones with big libraries.
And then Burlem interrupted and said: ‘Don’t do that. Fuck theoretical physics. Come and do a PhD with me. I’m assuming you don’t already have one?’
It was the way he said it. Fuck theoretical physics.
‘What would I do it on?’ I said.
‘What are you interested in?’
I laughed. ‘Everything?’ I shrugged. ‘I think that’s my problem. I want to know everything.’ I must have been drunk to admit that. At least I didn’t go further and say that I want to know everything because of the high probability that if you know everything, there’ll be something to actually believe in.
‘Come on,’ Burlem said. ‘What’s your thing?’ ‘My thing?’
He took a gulp of wine. ‘Yeah.’
‘I don’t think I know what my thing is yet. That’s the whole point of the magazine column. It’s about free association. I’m good at that.’
‘So you start at the Big Bang and work your way through science until you end up at Lumas. There must be a connection between all the things you’ve written about.’
I sipped some more wine. ‘Lumas’s ideas about the fourth dimension are particularly interesting. I mean, he didn’t exactly pre-empt string theory, but …’
‘What’s string theory?’
I shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me. That’s why I want to do theoretical physics. At least, I think I do.’ Burlem laughed. ‘For fuck’s sake. Come on. Find the connection.’
I thought for a moment. ‘I suppose almost everything I’ve written about has had some connection with thought experiments, or “experiments of the mind”, as Lumas called them.’
‘Good. And?’
‘Um. I don’t know. But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics, but using metaphors instead. That’s how I’ve been approaching all my columns. For each of these ideas and theories, you find there’s a little story that goes with it.’
‘Interesting. Give me an example.’
‘Well, there’s Schrödinger’s cat, of course. Everyone can understand that a cat in a box can’t be alive and dead at the same time – but hardly anyone can understand the same principle expressed mathematically. Then there are Einstein’s trains. All of his thoughts about special relativity seem to have been expressed in terms of trains. I love that. And whenever people want to understand the fourth dimension nowadays, they still go back to
Flatland
, which was written in 1880-whatever. I suppose you can look at Butler that way, too.
Erewhon
is basically a thought experiment intended to work out ideas about society and machines.’
‘So write a proposal. Do a PhD on these experiments of the mind: I’d be very interested in supervising that. Work in some more novels and poetry. I’d recommend looking at Thomas Hardy and Tennyson, as well. Make sure you don’t get too carried away. Set a time frame, or some other sort of limit. Don’t do a history of thought experiments from the beginning of time. Do, say, 1859 to 1939 or something. Start with Darwin and end with, I don’t know, the atom bomb.’
‘Or Schrödinger’s cat. I think that was in the thirties. The bomb is too real; I mean, it’s where the
thought experiment becomes reality, really.’
‘Maybe.’ Burlem ran his hand over the stubble on his face. ‘So, anyway, what do you think? I reckon we could sign you up pretty easily. You have an MA?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Superb. So let’s do it. I can get you some teaching as well, if you want.’ ‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously.’ Burlem gave me his card. At the top it had his name in bold and then: Professor of English Literature.
So I wrote the proposal and fell in love with my idea. But then … I don’t know. When I went to start working with Burlem, he seemed to have gone cold on the idea of Lumas. My proposal had been accepted, of course – I was planning to look at the language and form of thought experiments, from
Zoonomia
to Schrödinger’s cat – and everything was fine with Burlem until I mentioned Lumas.
When I did, he stopped making eye contact with me. He looked out of the window, now my window, and said nothing. I made some joke relating to our conversation at the conference, something like ‘So, has the curse claimed any more victims, then?’, and he looked at me and said, ‘Forget that paper, OK? Leave Lumas until later.’ He recommended that I start by focusing on the actual thought experiments: Schrödinger’s cat, Einstein’s
Relativity
and Edwin A. Abbot’s book
Flatland
. He also persuaded me to leave out
Zoonomia
, Charles Darwin’s grandfather’s book about evolution, and begin later, in 1859, when
The Origin of Species
was published. He also reminded me to look at some more poetry. I had no idea what was wrong with him, but I went along with it all. And then, a week later, he was gone.
So now here I am, unsupervised, like an experiment with no observer – Fleming’s plate of mould, perhaps, or an uncollapsed wavefunction – and what am I doing? I’m reading Lumas. I’m reading
The End of Mr. Y
, for God’s sake. Fuck you, Burlem.
B
Y
T
HOMAS
E. L
UMAS
PREFACE
T
HE DISCOURSE WHICH FOLLOWS
may appear to the reader as mere fancy or as a dream, penned on waking, in those fevered moments when one is still mesmerised by those conjuring tricks that are produced in the mind once the eyes are closed. Those readers should not abandon their scepticism, for it is their will to seek to peer behind the Conjuror’s curtain, as it is the will of man to ask those peculiar whats, and wheres and hows of life. Of life, as of dreams. Of image, as of word. As thought, as of speech.
When one looks at the illusions of the world, one sees only the world. For where does illusion end? Indeed, what is there in life that is not a conjuring trick? From the petrifactions that men find on the seashore to the Geissler tube recently seen at the Royal Society, all about us seems filled with fancies and wonders. As Robert-Houdin has built automata with which to produce his illusions, I shall here propose to create an automaton of mind, through which one may see illusions and realities beyond; from which one, if he knows how, may spring into the automata of all minds and their electricity. We may ask what illusion is, and what form may it take, when it is so easy to dive into its depths, like a fish into a pool, and when the ripples that emerge are not ripples of illusion nor ripples of reality but indeed the ripples made by the collision of both worlds; the world of the Conjuror and the world of His audience.
Perhaps I mislead the reader by talking of the Conjuror in this manner. Let the creator become curator! And we creatures who live on in the dreams of a world made of our own thought; as we name the beasts and barnacles who creep on and cling to this most precious and mysterious earth; as we collect them in our museums, we believe ourselves curators. What folly takes light through ether to each eye from every horizon. And beyond this is not truth but what we have made truth; yet this is a truth we cannot see.
Can this place – this place where dreams and automata are one, where the very fibres of being are conjured from memories no more real or unreal than the dream in which we may observe them, and fish with noses and jaws and skin made only of thought play on the surface of the pooled fancies of our maker – can this place be real, created as it is in Aristotle’s metaphora?
Indeed, for it is only in the
logos
of
metaphora
that we are to find the
protasis
of the past, that glorious illusion which we call memory, that curtain of destiny, drawn tightly over the conscious
mind but present in every fibre of being, from sea-creature to man, from pebble to ocean, as Lamarck and E. Darwin have maintained. Can this place be real? Perhaps not. For this reason, it is only as fiction that I wish this work to be considered.
T. E. Lumas, July 1892
PROLOGUE
I see ahead a time-wrought shore; A fishing boat lifts on a wave;
No footprints on the sandy floor, Beyond – an unfamiliar cave.
Or – forest tree’d with oak and yew A dark mare waits to carry me, Where nothing stirs yet all is true,
A cabin door and here – the key!
Perhaps I’ll wander in a field, With poppy-flush on carpet green:
However thought has been concealed No sleeper’s eye can now undream.
In any place that I take flight The dark will mutate into light.
I finish reading the preface at about nine o’clock. ‘It is only as fiction that I wish this work to be considered.’ That’s how the preface ends. What does that mean? Surely anyone would read a novel as fiction, anyway?