The insoluble pancake

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.

It’s already a few weeks since I’ve written here, and I realise I never wrote anything about my return to the Champo to see the next film Antonioni made, Il deserto rosso. His first film in colour. It was shot in the Po valley, around Ravenna, not so far from Bologna, not too distant from Ferrara, Antonioni’s home town.

Antonioni films in colour but there are no natural colours in the film — except for a segment near the end which perhaps serves the same function as the blast of colour in Wenders’ Der himmel uber berlin or the suddenly moving figure in Chris Maker’s La Jetee: we immediately realise how impoverished our screen existence has been up to then. Antonioni’s vision of the countryside of Emilia Romagna is of a terrifying blasted landscape where the rivers have been turned to sludge and the skies are filled with flame and steam. The cities that we see consist of monochromatic back streets where no-one lives and no-one could possibly live. And through all of that comes the famous fog of Emilian Romana, a fog which can linger for days thanks to the long low level plains where there is no wind, no air to move or stir things. Every so often, immense ships drift along the canals and waterways, materializing by magic, and they seem, perhaps, to offer in equal proportions the possibility of escape or plague.

Once again, the very beautiful Monica Vitti wanders in the midst of this awful desolation, but this time even less cognisant than before. The ostensible reason is that she was in an ‘accident’ but we know that it was really because of all those microparticles in the air, the heavy metals in the water, the constant noise and smoke. An abortive affair with Mr. Richard Harris provides no respite because of course Mr. Harris is there just to take advantage of her weakened state of mind and subsequent intermittent failures of judgement. And of course she can’t escape on any of the ships that slide terrifyingly close to her bedroom window because, alas, she can’t speak the sailor’s language to ask them for a passage to — wherever.

Watching the film, I could see echoes of two films yet to come — Lynch’s Eraserhead and Tarkovsky’s Stalker, both of which rather cruelly subjected their principal characters to the same overwhelming epic industrial alienation. Like Stalker, Il Deserto Rosso is an ‘inaction movie’ where the most important thing always seems to be what might happen — which does not, of course. But I appreciate very much the certain peculiar atmosphere these films have. Each shot in Antonioni’s film is beautifully framed and after fifty or so minutes of “beautiful” smoke stacks and power plants or close pans of the hypnotic regularity of antennaes of the Medicina radio telescope, one might even believe that this kind of beauty is the only kind of beauty which exists. It’s only when we travel to the distant island (recounted in a story by mme. Vitti) and we see the distant seas, the open sky and the blue waters below do we realise, actually, that this thing we thought beautiful is, in fact, very, very ugly.