The Centre of Gravity:
two incidents joined by a note7

Something was wrong; I knew it as soon as I woke. I was where I was supposed to be – in one of the beds of a six-bed dormitory on an RAF station in Malaya – but of the clothing I had worn the previous evening, and which normally would be strewn on the foot of the bed or hung over the back of a chair beside it, not an item was to be seen. For a few minutes I could not make sense of this situation. Then a blissful memory gradually condensed, purely tactile at first, in my skin rather than in my mind: the touch of cool air on my naked body as I strolled by moonlight among soaring palm trees. But where had I shed my status in the world of the dressed, my externalized social centre of gravity? I wrapped a towel around me and, as if following the spoor of a dream, retraced the hundred yards or so from the cluster of dormitories to the washroom block. There I found my clothes, neatly piled in the corner of a shower cubicle.

My room-mates had long been trying to persuade me to join them on one of their forays to Pleasure Island, a short ferry ride from a little jetty a mile or two from the station. What mattered to me of this island were the butterfly-haunted walks on the flanks of its central, jungle-clad hill, and the meditative calm of the Million Buddhas Precious Pagoda in the garden of its chief temple. I knew its port town only as a few streets of little open-fronted shops exhibiting gorgeous drifts of shapes and colours. Behind these shops I knew was another realm, a seething complexity of dwellings, bars, sweatshops churning out that avalanche of forms, temples of at least four faiths, and brothels of none. Along the shoreline and encroaching on tidal flats were the poorest houses, ragged birds’ nests tottering on stilts over black mud. The Military Police made occasional sweeps through this agglomeration of humanity, parts of which were out of bounds to us because of the activities of Chinese Triad gangs and of communist terrorists. Nevertheless one of our number was reputed to know this labyrinth intimately and was well enough received there to be let dodge from house to house and so evade the MPs. He was in thrall to one of the lovely girls with whom this human coral reef was bejewelled; she was an immigrant from Siam, and was feared as a witch by her Chinese neighbours. Also she was said to be a prostitute, as some of his unfeeling mates liked to remind him; but he never accepted this.

Although I was fascinated by the thought of this secretive quarter and aching with adolescent desire for its exotic girls, my entrenched inhibitions, shyness and cowardice had so far kept me out of it. But it seemed unjust to me, who regarded myself as the artist, the bohemian, the adventurer and romantic of the radar workshops, that one of my comrades, and he the most prosaic and unimaginative of us all, was having a passionate love affair with a Siamese witch while I was spending lonely hours in the camp’s sterile cafeteria. And so, the evening before the awakening described above, I had let myself be carried along with the gang, whose prescription for my troubles was drink, drink, drink.

There are a few narrow windows in the wall of forgetfulness surrounding that night. Since I disliked beer and whisky I probably drank a lot of sticky-sweet liqueurs. I remember swaying as if my centre of gravity was orbiting like a moth around a light, while I raised a glass in a bar, empty but for one of my comrades who had stayed to watch over me when the others had disappeared into the unknown, and three Chinese barmen observing me with deferential smiles. And then I was on the phone to the station guardhouse, swearing that I was someone else and another someone else was doing my guard duty for me that night, until my mate poured a drink into the telephone and I was cut off. Finally a glass of brandy knocked me stony sober in a dancehall called the City Lights, leaving me on a gloomy island in a sea of hilarity, so that I saw what a horrible place it was, like a huge dark derelict railway station with vaguely indecent paintings on the walls and a raucous band far away, a dense throng of Chinese, Malays, Indians and whites dancing, and a few servicemen propped semiconscious on the tables. Then I was marshalling a group of my friends into trishaws, dissuading them from visiting the brothels, and racing through the silent streets to catch the last ferry, at half past one, to the mainland.

Something rather incomprehensible happened on that ferry. I was slumped on a bench on deck, half asleep and trying to remain unconscious of the reeling rout packing the deck around me, when I became aware of a persistent annoyance: a face thrust near mine and bellowing at me. It was that of a loutish fellow from the camp who spent his days insulting all who came near him. When I think of him now I realize that he must have been mentally disturbed, but I did not understand this at the time; in fact I had already made up my mind that I was going to challenge and fight him the very next time our paths crossed. This rather public-schoolboy determination is so far from my nature that I am sure I would have somehow evaded my commitment; however, as it happened (and I do not know how it happened), the occasion never arose. As the irritating growling and yelping continued I slid down on my bench, brought one knee up to my chest, planted my foot against my tormentor’s pulpy ton-weight centre of gravity, and, without troubling to wake up any further, vigorously straightened my leg. The ugly face was withdrawn and disappeared with satisfying finality.

It is surely a mere coincidence that I never saw the man again. We were a shifting, rootless society; people were posted to other camps for no known reason, repatriated for discharge, or sent off to a hill station for rest and recuperation, sometimes at very short notice. I never enquired after him. I like to think he is in orbit still.

Associated with any object having weight is a point, called its centre of gravity, such that the object responds to any external force as if all its weight were concentrated at that point. (I glide over technical distinctions between weight and mass, centre of mass and centre of gravity, as they are irrelevant to considerations of bodies – such as ours – in the almost uniform gravitational field obtaining near and on the earth’s surface.) Thus my own centre of gravity can be seen as the nexus between my materiality and that of the rest of the universe, the umbilicus of my gravitational being. Body parts that have achieved iconic status include the brow (the Enlightenment thinker lets his head fall forward as if weighted down by its contents, and buttresses his forehead with his knuckles), the heart (in the days of sensibility orators would signal their sincerity by clapping right hand to left chest), the loins as the ageless seat of desire (rock-star sex-deities propose the groin for ritualized lust). Today a purely conceptual point should be added to the list, the centre of gravity, the bearer of the truth that we are wholly and without surplus parts of the material world.

I say ‘purely conceptual’ because an object’s centre of gravity does not always lie within the substance of the object. For instance the centre of gravity of a bowl is in its hollow, while that of a double star is somewhere between its two components, and nearer to the heavier; both revolve about it, but it may not lie within either. The centre of gravity of a high-jumper’s body follows a trajectory determined by its weight and the force imparted by the legs at take-off, which the jumper tries to maximize – and then by arching the body like a horseshoe he or she can get each part of it in turn over the bar while the centre of gravity passes beneath it, thus stealing another couple of inches of height above what seems possible. In fact any mobile human body’s centre of gravity is in perpetual negotiation with the external world; it is a coin spent and recuperated, the price and profit of passage through space.

Can one ever lose one’s centre of gravity? In metaphor, perhaps; in the fantasy of the spiritual, of being rid of the ball-and-chain of embodiment. Not in dreams though, if mine are anything to go by, being all too often of precarious flight over horrid depths or slipping and overbalancing on the verge of precipices. And certainly not in reality, not even in the experience of weightlessness, in which one’s physical response to non-gravitational forces is still ordered by the centre of gravity. However, there is a slight incident that in long-distance memory feels like an instance of loss of the centre of gravity. Like the drunken episode described above, it answers to the recall of my youthful sojourn in Malaya.

Left to my own purposes in the camp I soon discovered a little theatrical society that spanned the straits between service personnel and the intellectual elite of Pleasure Island. This sybaritic group never got around to putting on a performance, but in the processes of choosing a play, designing the setting, reading and rehearsing, it provided amusement to its members. That at least is how it seemed to me, ignorant of the secretive politics that agitated one or two radical young Chinese members of the society and were perhaps discussed only in private by their seniors. Our mentor was a cultivated expatriate school headmaster who, with his wife, entertained us bountifully on their airy, shaded, verandas. Two or three technicians of the same lowly status as myself, undergoing National Service before entering university; Mike, an anarchical intelligence officer who abused his rank to liberate me from the tedium of the radar workshop by sending for me to undertake urgent missions, such as translating some bit of French pornography I found as baffling as he did; a rubber planter deeply versed in Britishness; the beautiful Bee, an Asian Audrey Hepburn; Mavis, of some lovely concoction of races but convicted of seriousness, having been caught reading a British Council pamphlet on Milton during a picnic … such were my new soul companions.

Picnics were the essence of our lifestyle. Shaded by the coconut palms that leaned protectively out over the broiling beaches and womb-warm coastal waters, we lolled and laughed; I probably held forth, more than was appropriate for one so inexperienced, on the tumult of ideas fermenting in my head. I had a theory of God as a construction out of the immediate data of mystical experience, which lost us many a half hour; also a demolition of the concept of free will, which one day we decided to put to the test by making no decisions at all. Mike and I were swimming when this experiment was to begin; we soon found ourselves adrift in a gentle longshore current, which seemed perfectly apropos. We had perhaps taken a glass of wine. As the dark-green wall of close-packed vegetation behind the beach glided effortlessly by we intoned a favourite poem of our sect, Thomas Love Peacock’s grown-up rendering of the old nursery rhyme about going to sea in a bowl:

Fear ye not the waves that roll?

No, in charmèd bowl we swim.

What the charm that floats the bowl?

Water may not pass the brim.

The bowl goes trim. The moon doth shine,

And our ballast is old wine.

… and we droned and drew out the refrain in hollow tones, again and again: ‘And our ballast is old wine …’

Nothing went wrong; we were not swept out to sea and thrown ashore on a desert island, or snapped up by sharks. Simply, we remembered that the distance we had travelled was real, and that we would have to walk back – that is, our centres of gravity, our wills and weights, had been shipped along with us in the bowl of tipsiness. So we struck out for the land, abandoning the search for an experimental proof of my theory of free will, whatever it was.