At Last (10 page)

Of course consciousness can be transformed, thought Erasmus, but what is it? If I pass an electric current through my body, or bury my nose in the soft petals of a rose, or impersonate Greta Garbo, I transform my consciousness; in fact it is impossible to stop transforming consciousness. What I can’t do is describe what it is
in itself
: it’s too close to see, too ubiquitous to grasp, and too transparent to point to.

‘Eleanor was one of the most generous people it has been my privilege to know. You only had to hint that you needed something and if it was in her power to provide it, she would leap at the opportunity with an enthusiasm that made it look as if it was a relief to her rather than to the person who was asking.’

Patrick imagined the simple charm of the dialogue.

‘Nothing,’ said Annette, ‘was too much trouble for her. Service to others was her life’s purpose, and it was awe-inspiring to see the lengths she would go to in her quest to help people achieve their dreams. A torrent of grateful letters and postcards used to arrive at the Foundation from all over the world. A young Croatian scientist who was working on a “zero-energy fuel cell” – don’t ask me what that is, but it’s going to save the planet – is one example. A Peruvian archaeologist who had uncovered amazing evidence that the Incas were originally from Egypt and continued to communicate with the mother civilization through what he called “solar language”. An old lady who had been working for forty years on a universal dictionary of sacred symbols and just needed a little extra help to bring this incredibly valuable book to completion. All of them had received a helping hand from Eleanor. But you mustn’t think that Eleanor was only concerned with the higher echelons of science and spirituality, she was also a marvellously practical person who knew the value of a kitchen extension for a growing family, or a new car for a friend living in the depths of the country.’

What about a sister who was running out of cash? thought Nancy grumpily. First they had taken away her credit cards, and then they had taken away her chequebook, and now she had to go in person to the Morgan Guaranty in Fifth Avenue to collect her monthly pocket money. They said it was the only way to stop her running up debts, but the best way to stop her running up debts was to give her more money.

‘There was a wonderful Jesuit gentleman,’ Annette continued, ‘well, he was an ex-Jesuit actually, although we still called him Father Tim. He had come to believe that Catholic dogma was too narrow and that we should embrace all the religious traditions of the world. He eventually became the first Englishman to be accepted as an
ayahuascera
– a Brazilian shaman – among one of the most authentic tribes in Amazonia. Anyhow, Father Tim wrote to Eleanor, who had known him in his old Farm Street days, saying that his village needed a motor-boat to go down to the local trading post, and of course she responded with her usual impulsive generosity, and sent a cheque by return. I shall never forget the expression on her face when she received Father Tim’s reply. Inside the envelope were three brightly coloured toucan feathers and an equally colourful note explaining that in recognition of her gift to the Ayoreo people, a ritual had been performed in Father Tim’s far-away village inducting her into the tribe as a “Rainbow Warrior”. He said that he had refrained from mentioning that she was a woman, since the Ayoreo took a “somewhat unreconstructed view of the gentler sex, not unreminiscent of that taken by old Mother Church”, and that he would have “suffered the fate of St Sebastian” if he “admitted to his ruse”. He said that he intended to confess on his deathbed, so as to help move the tribe forward into a new era of harmony between the male and female principles, so necessary to the salvation of the world. Anyhow,’ sighed Annette, recognizing that she had drifted from her written text, but taking this to be a sign of inspiration, ‘the effect on Eleanor was quite literally magical. She wore the toucan feathers around her neck until they sadly disintegrated, and for a few weeks she told all and sundry that she was an Ayoreo Rainbow Warrior. She was for all the world like the little girl who goes to a new school and comes home one day transformed because she has made a new best friend.’

Although arrested development was his stock in trade and he made a habit of shutting down his psychoanalytic ear when he was not working, Johnny could not help being struck by the ferocious tenacity of Eleanor’s resistance to growing up. He was as guilty as anyone of over-quoting good old Eliot’s ‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality’, but he felt that in this case the evasiveness had been uninterrupted. He could remember first meeting Eleanor when Patrick invited him to Saint-Nazaire for the school holidays. Even then she had a habit of lapsing into baby talk, very disconcerting for adolescents distancing themselves from childhood. The tragedy was that five or perhaps ten years of decent five-day-a-week analysis could have mitigated the problem significantly.

‘That was the sort of breadth that Eleanor showed in her kindness to others,’ said Annette, sensing that it would soon be time to draw her remarks to a conclusion. She put aside a couple of pages she had failed to read during her Amazonian improvisation, and looked down at the last page to remind herself what she had written. It struck her as a little formal now that she had entered into a more exploratory style, but there were one or two things embedded in the last paragraph that she must remember to say.

Oh, please get on with it, thought Patrick. Charles Bronson was having a panic attack in a collapsing tunnel, Alsatians were barking behind the barbed wire, searchlights were weaving over the breached ground, but soon he would be running through the woods, dressed as a German bank clerk and heading for the railway station with some identity papers forged at the expense of Donald Pleasance’s eyesight. It would all be over soon, he just had to keep staring at his knees for a few minutes longer.

‘I would like to read you a short passage from the
Rig Veda
,’ said Annette. ‘It quite literally leapt at me from the shelf when I was in the library at the Foundation, looking for a book that would evoke something of Eleanor’s amazing spiritual depths.’ She resumed her sing-song reading voice.

‘Eleanor was a firm believer in reincarnation, and not only did she regard suffering as the refining fire that would burn away the impediments to a still higher spiritual evolution, but she was also privileged to have something very rare indeed: a specific vision of how and where she would be reincarnated. At the Foundation we have what we call an “Ah-ha Box” for those little epiphanies and moments of insight when we think, “Ah-ha!” We all have them, don’t we? But the trouble is that they slip away during the course of a busy day and so Seamus, the Chief Facilitator of the Foundation, invented the “Ah-ha Box” so that we could write down our thoughts, pop them in the box and share them in the evening.’

Annette felt the lure of anecdote and digression, resisted for a few seconds, and then caved in. ‘We used to have a trainee shaman with a shall I say “challenging” personality, and he was in the habit of having about a dozen Ah-ha moments a day. Many of them turned out to be covert, or not so covert, attacks on other people in the Foundation. Well, one evening when we had all waded through at least ten of his so-called epiphanies, Seamus said, in his incomparably humorous way, “You know, Dennis, one man’s Ah-ha moment is another man’s Ho-ho moment.” And I remember Eleanor simply cracking up. I can still see her now. She covered her mouth because she thought it would be unkind to laugh too much, but she couldn’t help herself. I don’t think any portrait of Eleanor would be complete without that naughty giggle and that quick, trusting smile.

‘Anyhow,’ said Annette, recovering her sense of direction for a final assault, ‘as I was saying: one day, after her first stroke but before she moved into the French nursing home, we found this amazing note from Eleanor in the Ah-ha Box. The note said that she had been on a vision quest and she had seen that she would be returning to Saint-Nazaire in her next lifetime. She would come back as a young shaman and Seamus and I would be very old by then, and we would hand the Foundation back to her as she had handed it to us in what she called a “seamless continuity”. And I would like to end by asking you to hold that phrase, “seamless continuity”, in your minds, while we sit here for a few moments in silence and pray for Eleanor’s swift return.’

Standing behind the lectern, Annette lowered her head, exhaled solemnly and shut her eyes.

Mary thought that ‘swift return’ was going a bit far. She glanced nervously at the coffin, as if Eleanor might fling off the lid and hop out at any moment, throwing open her arms to embrace the world, with the awkward theatricality of the photograph on the order of service. Sensing Patrick’s radiant embarrassment, she regretted asking Annette to make an address, but it was hard to think of anyone who could have spoken instead. Eleanor’s slash and burn social life had destroyed continuity and deep friendship, especially after the lonely years of dementia and the fractured relationship with Seamus.

Mary had asked Johnny to read a poem and she had even been desperate enough to get Erasmus to read a passage. Nancy, the only alternative, had been hysterical with self-pity and unclear about when she was getting in from New York. The rather strained choice of readers was balanced (or made worse) by the familiarity of the passages she had chosen. Two great biblical staples were coming up next, and she now felt that it was intolerably boring of her to have picked them. On the other hand, nobody knew anything about death, except that it was unavoidable, and since everyone was terrified by that uncertain certainty, perhaps the opaque magnificence of the Bible, or even the vague Asiatic immensities that Annette obviously preferred, were better than a wilful show of novelty. Besides, Eleanor had been a Christian, amongst so many other things.

As soon as Annette sat down it would be Mary’s turn to replace her at the front of the room. The truth was, she was feeling slightly mad. She got up with a reluctance that cunningly disguised itself as a feeling of unbearable urgency, squeezed past Patrick without looking him in the eye and made her way to the lectern. When she told people how nervous she was about any kind of public appearance, they said incredibly annoying things like, ‘Don’t forget to breathe.’ Now she knew why. First she felt that she was going to faint and then, as she started to read the passage she had rehearsed a hundred times, she felt that she was choking as well.

Mary felt a scratching sensation in her throat, but she tried to persevere without coughing.

Mary cleared her throat and turned her head aside to cough. Now she had ruined everything. She couldn’t help feeling that there was a psychological connection between this part of the passage and her coughing fit. When she had read it yet again this morning, it had struck her as the zenith of false modesty: love boasting about not boasting, love unbelievably pleased with itself for not being puffed up. Until then, it had seemed to be an expression of the highest ideals, but now she was so tired and nervous she couldn’t quite shake off the feeling that it was one of the most pompous things ever written. Where was she? She looked at the page with a kind of swimming panic. Then she spotted where she had left off, and pressed forward, feeling that her voice did not quite belong to her.

Erasmus had not listened to Mary’s reading of St Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians. Ever since Annette’s address, he had been lost in speculation about the doctrine of reincarnation and whether it deserved to be called ‘literally nonsensical’. It was a phrase that reminded him of Victor Eisen, the Melrose family’s philosopher friend of the sixties and seventies. In philosophical discussions, after a series of vigorous proofs, ‘literally nonsensical’ used to rush out of him like salt from a cellar that suddenly loses its top. Although he was now a rather faded figure without any enduring work to his name, Eisen had been a fluent and conceited public intellectual during Erasmus’s youth. In his eagerness to dismiss, which in the end may have secured his own dismissal, he would certainly have found reincarnation ‘literally nonsensical’: its evidence-free, memory-free, discarnate narrative failed to satisfy the Parfittian criteria of personal identity. Who is being reincarnated? That was the devastating question, unless the person who was asked happened to be a Buddhist. For him the answer was ‘Nobody’. Nobody was reincarnated because nobody had been incarnated in the first place. Something much looser, like a stream of thought, had taken human form. Neither a soul nor a personal identity was needed to precipitate a human life, just a cluster of habits clinging to the hollow concept of independent existence, like a crowd of grasping passengers sinking the lifeboat they imagined would save them. In the background was the ever-present opportunity to slip away into the glittering ocean of a true nature that was not personal either. From this point of view, it was Parfitt and Eisen who were literally nonsensical. Still, Erasmus had no problem with a rejection of reincarnation on the grounds that there was no good reason to believe that it was true – as long as the implicit physicalism of such a rejection was also rejected! The correlation between brain activity and consciousness could be evidence, after all, that the brain was a receiver of consciousness, like a transistor, or a transceiver, and not the skull-bound generator of a private display. The…

Erasmus’s thoughts were interrupted by the sensation of a hand resting on his shoulder and shaking him gently. His neighbour, after securing his attention, pointed to Mary, who stood in the aisle looking at him significantly. She gave him what he felt was a somewhat curt nod, reminding him that it was his turn to read. He rose with an apologetic smile and, crushing the toes of the woman who had shaken him on the shoulder, made his way towards the front of the room. The passage he had to read was from Revelations – or Obfuscations as he preferred to call them. Reading it over on the train from Cambridge, he had felt a strange desire to build a time machine so that he could take the author a copy of Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason.

Erasmus put on his reading glasses, flattened the page against the slope of the lectern, and tried to master his longing to point out the unexamined assumptions that riddled the famous passage he was about to read. He might not be able to infuse his voice with the required feeling of awe and exaltation, but he could at least eliminate any signs of scepticism and indignation. With the inner sigh of a man who doesn’t want to be blamed for what’s coming next, Erasmus set about his task.

Nancy was still furious with the clumsy oaf who had stepped on her toes and now, on top of that, he was proposing to take the sea away. No more sea meant no more seaside, no more Cap d’Antibes (although it had been completely ruined), no more Portofino (unbearable in the summer), no more Palm Beach (which was not what it used to be).

Oh, no, not another Jerusalem, thought Nancy. Isn’t one enough?

All these readings from the Bible were getting on Nancy’s nerves. She didn’t want to think about death – it was depressing. At a proper funeral there were amazing choirs that didn’t usually sing at private events, and tenors who were practically impossible to get hold of, and readings by famous actors or distinguished public figures. It made the whole thing fun and meant that one hardly ever thought about death, even when the readings were exactly the same, because one was struggling to remember when some tired-looking person had been chancellor of the exchequer, or what the name of their last movie was. That was the miracle of glamour. The more she thought about it, the more furious she felt about Eleanor’s dreary funeral. Why, for instance, had she decided to be cremated? Fire was something one dreaded. Fire was something one insured against. The Egyptians had got it right with the pyramids. What could be cosier than something huge and permanent with all one’s things tucked away inside (and other people’s things as well! Lots and lots of things!) built by thousands of slaves who took the secret of the construction with them to unmarked graves. Nowadays one would have to make prohibitive social-security payments to teams of unionized construction workers. That was modern life for you. Nevertheless, some sort of big monument was infinitely preferable to an urn and a handful of dust.

Johnny couldn’t help being reminded by all these readings of a paper he had written in his opinionated youth, called ‘Omnipotence and Denial: The Lure of Religious Belief
.
’ He had made the simple point that religion inverted everything that we dread about human existence: we’re all going to die (we’re all going to live for ever); life is terribly unfair (there will be absolute and perfect justice); it’s horrible being downtrodden and powerless (the meek shall inherit the earth); and so on. The inversion had to be complete; it was no use saying that life was pretty unfair but not quite as unfair as it sometimes seemed. The pallor of Hades may have been its doom: after making the leap of believing that consciousness did not end with death, a realm of restless shadows pining for blood, muscle, battle and wine must have seemed a thin prize. Achilles said that it was preferable to be a slave on earth than king in the underworld. With that sort of endorsement an afterlife was headed for extinction. Only something perfectly counterfactual could secure global devotion. In his paper Johnny had drawn parallels between this spectacular denial of the depressing and frightening aspects of reality and the operation of the unconscious in the individual patient. He had gone on to make more detailed comparisons between various forms of mental illness and what he imagined to be their corresponding religious discourse, with the disadvantage of knowing nothing about the religious half of the comparison. Feeling that he might as well solve all the world’s problems in twelve thousand words, he had tied in political repression with personal repression, and made all the usual points about social control. The underlying assumption of the paper was that authenticity was the only project that mattered and that religious belief necessarily stood in its way. He was now faintly embarrassed by the lack of subtlety and self-doubt in his twenty-nine-year-old self. Still in training, he hadn’t yet had a patient, and was therefore much more certain about the operation of the human psyche than he was today.

Mary had asked him to read a long poem by Henry Vaughan that he had never come across before. She told him that it fitted perfectly with Eleanor’s view that life was an exile from God, and death a homecoming. Other, more enjoyable poems had seemed conventional or irrelevant by contrast, and Mary had decided to stay loyal to Eleanor’s metaphysical nostalgia. As far as Johnny was concerned, giving a religious status to these moods of longing was just another form of resistance. Wherever we came from and wherever we were going (and whether those ideas meant anything at all) it was the bit in between that counted. As Wittgenstein had said, ‘Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death’.

Johnny smiled vaguely at Erasmus as they crossed paths in the aisle. He balanced his copy of
The Metaphysical Poets
on the ledge of the lectern and opened it on the page he had marked with a taxi receipt. His voice was strong and confident as he read.