The insoluble pancake

I’m interested in deep holes. Passages underground. Attentive readers will have realised as much from the last few months of entries. When I was in a certain north English town almost a decade ago now, there was a deep well in our back garden. It went, so they said, down to the level of the river. We were on a hill, the river was many metres below. One of my friends, an avid climber, descended into the hole, going down instead of up, towards the core. But at the bottom there was nothing, not even water. The hole was not deep enough. We carefully covered the well. Sitting outside on one of the few evening where one could sit outside, chairs above the void, nervous thoughts would pass through my mind about the mysterious dry not-so-deep well under my feet when I should have been enjoying my coffee and toast.

Here where I live all manner of strange things can be seen even at ‘God’s own noon’ as a friend would have said, if one looks at things in the right way. A few metres from where I am writing this, chalky footsteps cover the pavement, leading away from a small one-story building. What happens in there? This building is just a portal, a door. These people who crowd the pavements come from underground. It is the exit to Paris’ Catacombs, that fragment of the city’s immense subterranean network transformed into a charnel house sometime in the nineteenth century. It took one and half years of funerals to move the bones from the city’s most insalubrious locations, such as the Cimitere des Innocents at Les Halles. Ack! Today all this is a tourist attraction.

Last weekend I was in Heidelberg, visiting a friend, and we climbed the hills surrounding the town. At the top, a well. A very very deep well. Or was it really a well? The hole descended 80 metres, and there was no water at the bottom. The druids perhaps had dug this hole. A direct entrance to somewhere else, or more likely an exit, if you were unfortunate enough to be shoved in there on the night of a full moon. I thought of that other deep hole discovered in the foundations of Chartres, at the zero-point of the cathedral, the reason why the building is where it is. Was it that in both cases some weird “psycho-geographic” (as Iain Sinclair would say) confluence of forces had led people to believe that digging this deep hole was just exactly the thing they should do? But I suspect their constant hunger and abject fear of nature and natural events had probably more to do with it, I say from the viewpoint of the rational 21st century astronomer.

The point of all this? There is a parallel Universe, perhaps metres from our own. Of which we are normally completely unaware. There’s a world going on … underground! As Mr. Waits sung many years ago. But is that Universe really just a bunch of abandoned tunnels left behind by mediaeval Parisian stone masons ? Just deep dry wells dug by murderous undernourished druids? For reflection.

I’ve been thinking a lot about neutrinos. Those strange ghostly particles that might be there and might not be there. Millions of them, popular science writers never hesitate to tell us, pass through our bodies every second. Or do they? When confronted with the existence of such a strange and mysterious entity what should we think? Sir Arthur Eddington, when asked if he believed that neutrinos really existed, replied that he had no doubt that scientists would produce observations to support their existence. Do you follow? He explained: (I am paraphrasing here) “Imagine a sculptor before a block of marble who says, there is a head of man hidden in this block of marble and with this chisel I will reveal it”. Cowan and Reines had to put their ears, figuratively speaking, to the walls of a nuclear reactor to hear one for the first time.

I remember too Bob Shaw’s science fiction novel A Wreath of Stars, which I read sometime in the last century, back in Ireland. Shaw imagines a parallel universe composed of neutrinos existing somehow contemporaneously with our own. (I know, scientific accuracy was not a strong point of this novel). Special glasses worn by mine workers revealed this mysterious demi-monde. A black neutrino star burning in the mid-day sky. Ghostly shapes passing through walls which were really lost souls from this neutrino universe. Weakly interacting. How can something which is so unreal be real? But half a dozen or so neutrinos were detected in the depths of the Earth after supernovae 1987a exploded, the first time neutrinos were ever detected from a star other than or own.

I thought about all of this as I was swimming my habitual midday 1.5 kilometres at the local swimming pool. Even I was energetically doging old-age pensioners swimming half as fast as me or being overtaken by Aryan super-beings swimming ten times as fast I realised that I was, in fact, a neutrino! A weakly interacting particle. One kilometer of lead, even, would not stop me. Sailing through buildings and trees and houses and people and kilometers and kilometers of rock and earth, out towards interstellar space, the cold empty reaches between the stars. Interacting weakly. I understood, at last, my place in the world. I guess Glenn Gould was a neutrino, too…

I’m falling behind! Life moves relentlessly forward, and nothing has been written here for several weeks. Should I attempt to record everything, or should I follow my friend over at The Cataphonic Explorer into the deepest bowels of the Earth? I haven’t decided yet. And that pancake is still insoluble, so here goes:

I could perhaps instead produce a stream of consciousness about just what happened in the City of Lights this last week but-is that interesting? I will start on Monday, June 16th and finish there. On Monday night i went with a few friends to Ircam to see the quator arditti — i had seen them last year, you know, also at the festival Agora, and it was a revelation. Wonderful stuff. But at the start of last week’s concert– what’s this? A man mounts the stage. Very, very rarely in these kinds of concerts does someone ever climb onto the stage to do anything other than play a musical instrument or sing. And this man does not look a like a singer. And then – the announcement: György Ligeti is dead! A hushed silence falls on the already silent concert hall deep underground Paris. Or maybe it didn’t. Ligeti was still alive? whispered a few, or maybe they didn’t. Then Irivine Arditti and friends are there, and they play a piece from Ligeti, strings plucked in the now almost total silence of the salle de projection. It was so quiet in there I was sure I could here the woman three rows over digesting her magret de canard. And total, absolute attention was demanded! And given. Each note was something important, each note mattered. They all had to be heard and captured and understood, otherwise they would be lost forever. Mr. Ligeti may be dead but-

Then the programmed program, once piece followed another, each in its own incredible complexity, layer upon layer, an intermission, another piece perhaps slightly easier at first then dense and layered again, always this immense energy and force required to understand all that was heard, perhaps you could, if you could just listen, if you could just listen in the right way? And then the concert was finished.

Outside, a warm summer’s night in Paris, about five degrees warmer than the subterranean salle of the Ircam. Many people were in the streets. I thought for a fleeting instant of Thomas Clayton Wolfe, you know him? Writing about the month of March in Brooklyn, it was so hard to remember that it was ever the month of march in Brooklyn, he wrote, and we couldn’t find a door. I may not be a famous Hungarian avant-garde composer, I might have thought, too, but at least I am still alive.

I’m afraid that once again my eyes are on the intricate web of cracks and fissure lines up there on ceiling– read my first post if you don’t understand. Looking close I see one fissure has a name — it is the name of a song I first heard as a boy in Ireland almost twenty years ago. I think of this time almost as a negative, pre-time; this happened even before my life began. You see, I always considered the instant I left Ireland and traveled east as the actual moment I began to live, the point after which things could happen to me, when life unfroze. But stuff actually happened back then, on the other side of zero?

Of course it did. I see long slices of sunlight on my bedroom wall. It is very early in the morning, perhaps five or six am, and the light comes to my room slowly at first, deep red lines of light, sunlight sliding obliquely through the Venetian blinds, fading in now, becoming brighter, light at the end of another shallow northern night which was never really night. It is summer.

I am listening to a cassette tape. I’m listening to a song from the Blue Nile. It is a recording I plucked from the air, from the radio. Blasts of FM static obscure the song’s opening melody. We are far from the transmitter. The song fades in, a few bars of a repeated melody, the sound of sticks on sticks. The first line I miss, I never hear until ten years have passed and I am living in Durham. You are pretending, Buchanan sings, in his hoarse voice, love is worth waiting for. I wasn’t pretending anything! This was, remember, before pretense and knowledge. Heatwave, heatwave he sings, and I imagine there in my northern room that this day to come would be one of those impossibly warm days where one can neither move nor think, frozen into immobility. Heatwave, heatwave, why is it rolling down on the young and foolish? What did I know of heat? In a decade and half I would live in Bologna where for one summer the mercury never went below thirty, even at night, for two long months. But here in pre-history it is different, everything is implied or imagined, the rising sun becomes the sun, the day begins with its promise of great heat, the song finishes.

Before I can rewind the tape, I am at the other end of the fissure. I am standing in my apartment in Paris about to press the skip button on my mp3 player, to skip back instantaneously, and I skip back, forward– and once again I am in this twenty-first century present, and Mr. Buchanan’s voice fills my living room again, I hear the first line of the song that I’d never heard back then, you live beneath another star,
And too much has happened, or not enough. Do I feel the same, here, listening to this song? I do here, in this instant. I skip back and forward over two decades of event and happening, drawing a line from France to Ireland passing through everywhere else I have lived. Distance and time shrink down to zero, I see the long-gone rays of lost sunlight on the walls of my apartment in Paris, I open my window and feel the warm evening air, a summer’s evening in Paris, and I return again, evening becomes morning, and yes, this is the memory, I realise, this is the memory which has yet to happen.