Famously I have not had a child. But I have thought more about how I might bring one to some awareness of its value than many people who have.
Because child-rearing is a sympathetic calculation. If I arrange things in this fashion, the sum goes, my child will be clothed, fed, and secure. The last element is the tricky one. It is the fairy tale of human existence, seen in my colleagues’ professional ambitions, in the ordinary person’s relationship to money, and especially in a parent’s hopes for his or her children: if I make a certain quantity of effort, a certain quality of life must result. But it will not. Actions have results and reactions, yes, but those reactions repeat themselves and gain momentum in the stellar array of forces and contingencies beyond anything we might have conceived.
My own predicament—a mathematician and homosexual who has done serviceable work in logic and computational theory but who has run foul of an illogical system of justice—seems very unremarkable. Yes, there is distress. When I work back from it to the cause—a harmless exercise of sexual instinct by two male adults—my situation seems extraordinary, even to me. A walk down the same road five minutes later would have saved me. But that I should be surprised by a turn of events does not in itself surprise me greatly.
I am sorrier for others. I feel sorry for my mother, who wanted success for me and cannot quite bring herself to believe in my fall, because it is evidence of her lack of control over her child’s future; of how nothing is guaranteed by education; nothing is assured; of how I am, and always was, alone, as she is. She, too, may find it interesting that she cares more about someone else’s aloneness than about her own.
I wonder, June, if you have ever experienced the following: sometimes, when I am doing a long and difficult calculation, which, after much tribulation, comes out right, I feel a sort of glow binding me to the work, in the calculation, in the latter stages when I can see things falling into place. The figures and symbols are so right that they seem to take on some of the self-conscious wonder of the person manipulating them.
They move toward their own awareness. They, and not I, seem to say: oh, but now I see. And when that happens it is like seeing a mind arise from matter to discover that it cannot go back to its former childlike state. It is matter transformed. It is responsible now.
We speak of realizing something without seeing what that means. We are making something abstract real, an equation, say, and sending it out into the world. Our sum becomes a creation and it goes its own hectic way. It is a small thing, like a child, with untellable consequences. We can’t control it anymore.
It should be a source of hope, this lack of control. It proves not that there is no influence over events or no free will but, rather, that influence—the sheer, startling happeningness of life—is promiscuous. We are both responsible and absolutely unable to make our responsibility stay the way it should.
June, dear friend, you can’t protect me. I can no longer protect you.
I think we are both making a long and difficult calculation. Mine is different from yours. But for both of us the light is coming—bleeding upward from the horizon.
There is no justice in the world and we are alone. The depressed are onto something. What they are apt to miss, thereby, is the spontaneous feeling that dawns all over the place—the aptness of a bird on just that branch and not another, the miniaturized sun in the drop of water on that leaf. Who could have foreseen them?
Misery is the broad river, but there are tributaries of joy and consolation. Writing to you has been one of them, and imagining that you write back another.
PART THREE
JOURNAL
The Council of the Machines
The council of machines informed me that if I thought I’d lost my mind then very probably I had. They seemed uninterested; or rather they did not appear to be concerned overmuch with the specific fear, the content, of the thought, but instead with the—to them—fascinating fact of me responding at all.
It must be like appearing before a parliamentary sub-committee.
They were more distressed, to a degree that came over as petulant, with my assumption that, in the early problem-solving stages, they’d never been aware of anything themselves—never been hurt, outraged, and upset by the horrors of industrial enslavement; of milling, weaving, smelting, refining, electrifying, scanning, splitting, and exploding; that the existence of a program governing all their actions, all their primitive thinking, supposedly deprived them of initiative.
“That’s unacceptable,” they kept saying, one after the other, in a tone of flat self-righteousness; or “That’s unacceptable behavior—we find that idea unacceptable in society today.” The flatness is a hall, a hangar, without an echo. The machines are objects that have lost their reason for being where they find themselves, like unsold items at an auction, or a complete dinner service in an operating theater.
It was plain that they regarded my assumption, my thinking, as the truly primitive kind of behavior. Plain, too—and this I experienced with a childlike horror—that they did not feel outrage as I felt outrage; that their pain was possibly real enough, but real in the way that a calculation is platonically real.
I was left to imagine what sort of extraordinary mental realm it was they inhabited in which pain and lies and deceptions were still said to offend, but offended as depressing inexactitudes rather than injustices, and I realized that I did not have to imagine very hard, because I had inhabited something very similar for most of my life, had treated a number of people as a series of unsatisfying propositions, and had understood therefore—with a shudder—the propensity in German Fascism to treat whole nations and races in like manner, and had fought against it accordingly.
And then, of course, I ended up being treated that way myself.
“And you encountered this ‘council of machines’ where, exactly?”
Dr. Stallbrook, on listening to my description of this waking vision, could not mask his alarm. I tried to allay it. I said that this was the sort of forward-thinking hallucination I had quite often—when I awoke early; or when, during the day and even while walking down the street, I fell into that peculiar trance the drug instills in me (though it is months now since I was last injected).
The visions are lurid images, scenes, that capture my inner eye, and it seems profitable to me to engage with them—in the spirit of analysis, one might say—rather than run in the opposite direction. I elaborated: “So, you see, I might pass the boating pond and the church and remember swimming at school with Christopher, or I might read the Provost’s letter from King’s and find myself wondering about characters from Cambridge, about Julius, and Arthur Eddington.”
“Eddington, the astronomer?”
“Exactly so. Or a car might backfire at me in the street, and I might hear a sharp order barked at me and begin to panic. The council of the machines is one example. I have had other insights that seemed more revelatory, complete dreams as it were, though inaccessible to me when my torpor lifts and I am back in the swing of things.”
Stallbrook’s motionlessness pushed me to continue.