A Whistling Woman (44 page)

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 patterns 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).

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.