The Weaver Fish (9 page)

13

When Tøssentern had completed his address on Thortelmann equivalence and taken questions, he was formally thanked by the Society president, who invited members and guests to refreshments in the library cloister adjoining the Master's private garden.

Tøssentern himself was delayed in the hall by a few who came to the lectern with more technical questions, or requesting a citation list. When at last he was able to join the main party, the Master came forward to offer his appreciation, at the same time introducing a Signora Scintillini, before hastily moving away to welcome other guests. Tøssentern found himself defending an altogether minor comment he had earlier made about preservation of metre in a translation of Petrarch, realizing quickly that the suave introductions from the Master of Nazarene had been entirely tactical. When he elided the subject from metre to music to melodrama to murder, the Signora excused herself to seek out, Tøssentern was pleased to note, the company of the Master once more.

In the distance, he caught a glimpse of Anna in conversation with Penelope Loom, the new Fellow in Homeric studies, and was setting out in their direction when his mathematician friend, Rodney Thwistle, approached.

‘Good lecture, Edvard. Very clear, very clear,' he said, shaking hands. ‘I liked particularly the link to Shannon's Law and the two conjectures of 1980. Extraordinary that they should remain unproven. Actually, it set me thinking. One of my students is
modelling semantic shift in rumour diffusion within multilingual, theocratically oppressed populations enjoying indefinite migratory flux, identity fraud, endemic mendacity, inculturated insularity, constrictive paternalism, pre-Enlightenment censoriousness, congenital absence of humour, sporadic headless mutism and conductive hearing impairment; it occurred to me that Thortelmann's ideas might be useful. Would you be happy to meet up with her and offer some advice?'

‘Of course, delighted to, Rodney. I shan't ask where you would find such a study group, though,' added Tøssentern.

‘Oh, all over, old chap. All over. You've been too long absent from high table, Edvard.'

Tøssentern was sincere in wanting to be helpful. He suggested that the student email him, and asked for her name. Thwistle told him as a drinks waiter appeared. They each took a glass of mineral water, and Thwistle continued.

‘I've been meaning to ask you, how is our adventurer friend doing—is he still on that godforsaken plateau of yours?'

Tøssentern smiled. ‘The LDI station. It's not that bad. And yes, Nicholas is still with us, except he's taken leave to advise a bank in Australia over some financial products development. It will be a relaxing few months for him in Perth, I hope.'

Thwistle looked thoughtful. ‘I know some people in Perth. You may remember Hiro Wasabi from my department; he's there on sabbatical. Also a chap called Worse, a curious fellow. I've no idea what he does, but we've had correspondence on cryptography algorithms, mostly to do with the defective pixelation problem.'

Thwistle's final words were delivered with some vagueness as his attention moved briefly to the mathematics. ‘Anyway, perhaps I should put them in touch, what do you think?'

‘That might be nice for Nicholas,' agreed Tøssentern. As he spoke he became aware of a sudden earnestness in Thwistle's face.

‘Look, Edvard, I'm so pleased you're back. Back and ... so well. It was terrible thinking you had perished. Let's make sure we see each other more, more conversations.'

For the second time he reached out to shake hands with great seriousness, causing Tøssentern some awkwardness in disposing of his water glass. Then immediately, he left.

Tøssentern felt weakened by this display of emotion in a man with whom relations had always been quite reserved. Realizing that he had no enthusiasm for the social formalities around him, he made his way to an exit, astutely avoiding further interactions on the way. In the garden he found a cushioned cedar bench some way from the main party, and sat down.

Thwistle's words, ‘you're back', concealed a complexity and pain that Tøssentern was only beginning to apprehend. Yes, perhaps he was back, but not in a sense he could possibly share. His disappearance, and whatever meaning attached to it, belonged in the experience of others—his presumed death was their belief, and his improbable return was their shock. That disappearance had created a void in his name, a hiatal self rough-edged by the forces and failure of memory, metonymy, and the weakening spectral vision of those who missed him. Yes, he was back, but not to reinhabit that imperfect silhouette in a seamless return to his past. He was back, and he was a newcomer.

He had taken to reading his obituaries, especially a most generous one in the
Tribune.
At first a source of amusement, they acquired insidiously a proprietary life beyond his editorial reach. More disturbingly, he came to see them as a posthumous accounting of his total worth, destined for as many flawed interpretations as there were people who remembered him. He returned to them compulsively, even as he sensed the morbidness of this and concealed the fact from Anna. Yet at each reading, their subject became less familiar, not more. And the alienation this engendered, far from being distancing, drew him inexorably back; back to the silhouette and into those portraits of the void.

All this time he had been sitting forward, vigilant within his thoughts and straining for the mental language to form them. Now he placed his hands in his jacket pockets, reclined more comfortably and closed his eyes. But inevitably, behind this inattention came exploration of a vivid and unrestful privacy. And there, inside his inner picture world of adversities, he
wanted to be discovered as much as he wanted to be alone. He didn't hear Anna approach.

‘Hello Edvard, I was missing you in there.'

She seemed to judge quickly his state of mind, and without invitation sat beside him. They remained silent for several minutes, when Tøssentern sighed deeply. It was an opportunity for Anna to speak.

‘What's happening, Edvard?'

‘I'm tired. You know, a lecture like that, a year ago, would have been no effort. I like the material, I know the subject. I support the Society. I enjoy the people. But this has been really difficult. I think I'm just exhausted.'

‘Edvard, it was a wonderfully relaxed and entertaining lecture, as yours always are. It was hugely appreciated. There was nothing but positive comment in there.' She hesitated. ‘Besides the exhaustion, what else is happening?'

‘I can't relax. I have these terrible images. Like nightmares. Intense and visceral and overpowering, affecting me physically, with sweating and palpitations. It always starts on
Abel,
with the fish trap dragging me down. I am saying something, over and over, but I don't understand it, I can't remember it...'

He fell silent for a minute, and again sighed deeply. ‘I can't concentrate any more, Anna. And there's so much to be done. I'm behind with MacAkerman. I need to get back to the Ferendes. I want to find the crash site. There's the Chinese problem to follow up. Even this odd business with Thornton keeps coming to mind. I'm feeling close to overwhelmed.'

‘All those things can wait, Edvard. You know you can have complete confidence in Paulo to run the LDI station. It would also make sense for you not to go back until Nicholas is there as well. He's the one most acquainted with logging developments in the northern plain. And don't worry about Thornton; I'm looking after him. Actually, I told him your view that the invariable and perfectly mundane destiny of everything metaphysical is to become explained. It seemed to give him a renewed purchase on reality. He's much better.'

‘I'm no longer sure whether I believe that myself.'

‘Edvard, I think it would be useful for you to talk to someone about everything that's happened. You've never spoken to me about the storm or the crash or the condor attack, what it was really like for you.'

Tøssentern was quiet for a few seconds. ‘I don't know how to start. I can't be sure if what I remember is real or hallucinatory. And I'm starting to think it's not about that, not even about nearly dying. It's something to do with being thought dead and coming back to reclaim my self, almost having to prove my ownership and wrest it back. And sometimes I feel I might truly have died and returned to discover I'm not sure of the man I was, or even if I like him.'

Anna placed a hand on his knee. ‘You don't have to judge between the real and the imagined; you're not assigning truths. It can all be talked about equally, it's all important. And those feelings about appropriation and restoration, very few people have been through that experience, so it is uncharted. It is difficult, for you and for the people who know you.'

Tøssentern remained quiet, and she continued. ‘Would you like me to make you an appointment? I have someone in mind, in London.'

‘A psychiatrist? What's her name?' Neither drew attention to Tøssentern's assumption that it should be a woman.

‘Yes. Barbara Bokardo. I have complete trust in her.'

Tøssentern repeated the name and asked for its spelling, as if appraising the person through the word. Then, unexpectedly, he said, ‘Barnabas Bending. You know, that wasn't amusing, that wasn't entertainment. What we saw was identity construction. Or identity assertion. And, as it turned out, annihilation. It was frightening, in the end, wasn't it?'

‘Identity is constantly nearly frightening, Edvard.'

‘Yes.' For the first time, he looked directly at Anna. ‘I mean, yes, I would appreciate your setting up an appointment with Barbara Bokardo.'

The reader may find useful this brief introduction to
Thortelmann equivalence,
the subject of Tøssentern's lecture. (The following is adapted from an example discussed in Thortelmann, A A,
J. Theor. Transl.
(1980)
11:
1–33.) We are told that the scholar and
mystic
al-Fakr'mustiq,
after many years of contemplation, concluded that the unity of all existence, the perfect oneness of all that is, amounts to ineffable absence, pure emptiness, the cipher of nothingness. So profound and surprising was this realization that he exclaimed:

before entering an impenetrable trance. His disciple, the ascetic
al-Jabr,
who favoured the brevity of arithmetic over literary terms and was naturally disposed to replace ‘is' with the equal sign, transcribed this pronouncement as 1 = 0! Later, by a strict application of the symmetry property of equality, this was rewritten as

Now a modern mathematician reads this as ‘zero factorial equals one', an identity widely encountered in elementary combinatorics and easily proven by recourse to the gamma function. The metaphysical statement (1) and the mathematical statement (2) seem divergent in meaning but are definitely connected, since one is manifestly derived from the other. In this respect, they are said to be Thortelmann equivalent. (More formally, they comprise a cognate pair in a certain Thortelmann space.) Thortelmann equivalence provides a basis for analysing properties that are conserved in literary or semiotic transformations, thereby de-emphasizing conventional (and rather laboured) notions such as what is ‘lost' or ‘added' in translation. The theory encompasses all linguistic restatements including poetry to prose, abbreviation, paraphrasing, abstracting and, of course, foreign language translation. A little thought will convince the reader that Thortelmann equivalence is a symmetric and transitive relation. It should also be apparent that while semantic equivalence implies Thortelmann equivalence, the converse is not true.

[The following discussion may be omitted at a first reading.]
We begin with the (reflexivity) proposition that an entity
S(k)
is Thortelmann equivalent to itself. Let
S
(1) and
S(n)
be two (non-identical) statements that are Thortelmann equivalent. Then there exists a minimum (not necessarily unique) Thortelmann path
S(k), k
= 1, 2, ...,
n,
connecting the two. The
S(k)
generate a Thortelmann set (actually, a Jubius group), the properties of which are the focus of much modern research, not only in linguistics but, for example, in progressing our understanding of creativity and the psychiatry of formal thought disorder. If qualities (say, trope content) attaching to the
S(k)
are assigned numerical identifiers, we can define certain measures on the set which vastly simplify the path analysis. One, the HCF (so called by analogy with highest common factor), can be shown to be the minimal possible complete description of a given Thortelmann equivalence. Further treatment of the topic is beyond the scope of this book, but for more advanced students, the proof of Thortelmann-set Jubius-reducibility is left as an exercise. [HINT Assume a certain condition for arbitrary
S(k),
hence prove that condition for
S(k
+ 1), then apply the reflexivity property on
S
(1). What is the group operation?]

Interestingly, the assertion (2) above, and various corruptions, found brief popularity as tessellation motifs, a fact that has assisted historians in locating and dating the influence of al-Fakr'mustiq (see L Enright,
Architecture of the Sufi-Qurq
).

It is noteworthy that al-Fakr'mustiq's esteemed disciple is the same al-Jabr who figures in a work of
Satroit.
The poet responds (to a woman traveller seeking direction),

She replies,