The insoluble pancake

I’ve just returned to Paris after spending the last three weeks, almost, in Hawaii. The world’s most remote island archipelago, you know. Under the light of the Pacific sun. One of the most bizzare aspects of being so close to the equator is that there is no long, extended Irish twilight. The sun disappears beneath the horizon, and it is dark only a few minutes later, it seems. Instantaneous darkness. The light switches off.

There is the journey there, and the journey back. Getting there, one takes a flight from Paris to San Francisco, an eleven hour journey which passes over the snowy wastes of Greenland and the far north of Canada. Traveling west, following the rotation of the Earth, essentially static with respect to the sun. After almost a twenty four hours of traveling, it is still only nightfall. Twelve hours of time have disappeared. At the end of all of this, Honolulu airport, which is a tasteful composition in fake wood-veneer and browns and concrete greys. Palm trees can be seen swaying in the distance through the plate glass windows, and every ten meters in the ceiling there is a loudspeaker through which oozes, without pause, an unremitting stream of Ukulele plinks and plonks. Audible everywhere in the airport, no respite. Leaving the terminal building, and the air-conditioning, somewhere after eleven in the evening, one notices first of all the warm, heavy heat, the humid ocean air. From here, there is at least five thousand kilometers of ocean in all directions.

Honolulu itself is an extended sprawl of tower blocks and freeways like most other American cities. The buildings are set far apart from each other, and no useful distances can be covered on foot, for the most part. The downtown area of Honolulu is mostly silent at night, though there are a few cafes and bars to visit. No, the real place where everything happens and where all the people are is Waikiki. Archive photographs show a long sandy beach with the irregular mound of Diamond Head volcano crater in the distance. In the foreground, of course, a man smiles for the camera. He is holding a wooden surfboard. In the near distance, perhaps, a wooden hut can be seen. Is this where he lives? Then bam! A hundred years pass and the horizon is filled with tower blocks.

I lived for two weeks in a hotel in Waikiki, about ten minutes from the beach. Waikiki is a strange place. Imagine living and working in a place where most of the population are on vacation! Or are working for people who are on vacation. My own motives for visiting Hawaii had nothing to do with surf, but rather distant galaxies. The usual no-good reasons that I have for visiting most places. From my room on the 39th floor I had a fine view over Waikiki, Honolulu, and could see even a thin square of the blue waters of the Pacific ocean. Despite all the work I was supposed to do over there, I did manage at least to immerse myself in the waters of the Pacific each morning at around 7AM: I swam for around twenty minutes at Waikiki beach. Much further out from the shore, under the long rays of the morning sun, beyond the shadows of the tower-blocks each morning I could see a long line of surfers lying in wait for the waves. It was fine, for a few moments at least, to be separated from thought, to be in these warm waters, to be in this city free from implication and meaning. But I will write more about that, hopefully, in the next few days.

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.