‘But why would a morphogenetic field have to be discarnate?’ asked Patrick. ‘Why couldn’t it be a genetic inheritance?’
‘The rapid accumulation of cultural and behavioural habits cannot be explained genetically,’ said Jean-Paul, ‘because the geneticists insist that behaviour does not modify the genome. Adaptation can only occur through the slow, blind process of natural selection, shaped by the accidental mutations which give a slight reproductive edge to their carriers.’
‘Anyway,’ said Crystal, ‘the extension of the theory into “morphic resonance” completely blows the genetic connection. After the first crystallization of a solution, which may be very long and difficult, the process grows easier and easier, even in laboratories remote from each other, where no exchange of information or crystals has taken place. The solution exists in a field that is becoming increasingly grooved and tilted towards crystallization.’
‘These grooves of habituation,’ said Jean-Paul, ‘are what Sheldrake calls “creodes”.’
While Jean-Paul and Crystal tried to establish the reality of this phenomenon for Patrick, he was already preoccupied with its implications at another level. When the world was read in terms of habits, time lost its bald authority. It consisted of endlessly, organically altering textures: of crystals which formed faster and faster but, as they did so, formed more and more conservative fields, of islands of novelty erupting and then, as related habits formed around them, becoming archipelagos, stretching back towards continents of deep habit. Time itself was in an evolutionary frame. This idea pressed in on him confusedly as he tried to map it over his own subjective sense of change.
‘Time looks very different,’ he managed to say incoherently.
‘Ah, yes,’ said Jean-Paul with an appreciative smile. ‘Our insistence that a second is a second is a second is a formality which may be useful for making lunch appointments, but not for understanding the true nature of reality.’
‘It’s not even that useful for making lunch appointments,’ said Crystal.
I had to stop working to have dinner with my adorable Angelique.
The only creode I’m helping to establish is casino writing, and I hope I can make a modest contribution to literature by preparing a morphogenetic field for the next dying novelist who tries to push his plot forward in this gilded setting. Perhaps I can do more, and all over the world, to the despair of their managers, casinos will start to fill with coughing authors, stooped over their notebooks or holding X-rays up to the chandeliers and neon flamingos to remind themselves why they can’t afford to stop working.
Before we had dinner, Angelique lost another half million. Ten of our twenty-five million is gone, and if her luck doesn’t change we only have another fifteen days together. Some people might think it pedantic not to carry on after the money has run out, and for a while I found myself wavering on this point, but Angelique is right to be adamant. There might seem to be something touchingly human about spending the last four months of my life with the woman I love, being reassured, being nursed (when she’s not at the casino), introducing her to fish fingers; but imagine the mediocrity of such a resignation after we have strapped ourselves to the wheel, after we have distilled time in the retort of our unbreakable contract, so that each moment we spend together falls, drop by drop, like liquid fire on to our outstretched and writhing tongues.
Yes, Angelique is definitely right. Besides, she might win, and then our extraordinary happiness will hold.
I try to challenge that happiness to see if it is false. Am I wedding myself to Fortune because it is the unreliable sidekick of a reliably nasty Fate? Parting from Angelique is almost as terrifying as death, and yet I expect to survive it. Am I using her as a training ground for extinction, manfully putting the pistol to my temple and firing a blank?
No, on the contrary, the two endings enhance each other: leaving her body and leaving my own body have become as beautifully entwined as entering her body with my body.
Walking here from her apartment, I saw aqueducts of rainbows arching down the polluted avenues. I was ready to die because I was entirely fulfilled, and I was ready to live because I was entirely ready to die. I had never felt less indifferent to life or more indifferent to death. This moment could not have occurred at any other moment, nor could it occur again at any other moment. We walked in silence until we had almost arrived, and then Angelique turned to me and said, ‘What a feeling,’ and we kissed on the steps of the casino.
Time may pass quickly when you’re having fun, but when you’re happy it almost stops. Heavily freighted as Cleopatra’s barge, it can’t be expected to flit along. All ideas and all impressions are accepted by a mind with no motive to shut down. The more conscious I am, the slower time moves. The toll is that I have to stay conscious of death, but if I insisted on ‘having fun’ instead, I would hurtle down a wall of ice towards the very thing I was trying to forget. Standing on the steps of the casino, I thought of saying to Angelique that if we want to slow down the approach of death we must entertain it ceaselessly, but she knows that already; it’s only thanks to her that I’m realizing it at all.
As I begin to experience more freedom, the definition of what it is changes. Freedom is always what I don’t have, because it refuses to be possessed. It may have a ‘field’, though, in which I can learn to spend more time, and for that I can never thank Angelique enough.
I suppose I’ll have to burden my characters with more ruminations on this subject. I need to place my own feverishly textured sense of time in some scientific framework other than hallucination. Fiction, of course, textures time in its own way and superimposes further layers of elasticity and roughness. One character can assess the meaning of her entire life, while another, apparently caught in a world of molasses, just manages to light a cigarette during the same period. Dialogue gives us a bracing sense of honesty because it appears to take place over the same duration as the rest of life. The characters would take as long to speak what they say outside a book as they do within it. On the other hand, we are reading and not listening and, with any luck, what they have to say is less diffuse than most conversation, and therefore artificially compressed.
So, what am I going to do with these characters of mine? It might not be implausible for their train to break down at Didcot. If it speeds its way to London uninterrupted, they only have fifty-five minutes to solve the riddle of consciousness, an unfair pressure to put on any conversation.
I’ve just seen my darling Angelique collect a stack of 100,000-franc counters. That means that I have a while before we go back to her apartment. It’s tempting to eliminate dialogue from the next section of On the Train, to ruffle the smooth surface of equal duration, to plunge into a speculating or remembering mind while the rest of the world achieves almost nothing.
‘We can’t already be in Didcot,’ said Patrick.
‘We may not have time to crack the code before we arrive at Paddington,’ said Crystal.
‘We could be going to Vladivostok and still get nowhere if we refuse to look into the heart of the matter,’ said Jean-Paul.
‘And what’s that, monsieur le professeur?’ said Crystal.
‘Dualism!’ said Jean-Paul.
‘That old chestnut.’
‘Two old chestnuts,’ Jean-Paul corrected her.
‘If we’re going to have two, we might as well have three – a soul as well as a mind and body.’
‘No, no,’ said Jean-Paul, ‘two chestnuts is more than enough, I assure you. My terrible confession is that I am convinced by certain philosophical arguments which dissolve in the light of my own experience, but which I would nevertheless like to resolve in their own terms.’
‘But if the terminology of the arguments is inadequate for your experience, why not chuck it out?’ said Patrick impatiently.
‘Ultimately I do,’ said Jean-Paul, ‘but penultimately I would like to convince some of those who occupy my abandoned positions that they should abandon them as well.’
‘You’re a missionary,’ said Crystal.
‘Yes, I’m afraid so,’ said Jean-Paul, opening his hands in a plea for clemency.
‘I knew a philosopher called Victor Eisen,’ said Patrick, ‘who worked on the problem of identity. Nobody knew better who he could properly be said to be if half his body happened to be replaced by Greta Garbo’s, which it wasn’t, by the way; or his partially damaged brain was transplanted into a robot’s body after three hundred years in a cryogenic vat. His autobiography, on the other hand, is dry and shallow, because he forgot to pay attention to the experience of being alive.’
‘That is not a problem confined to philosophers,’ said Jean-Paul. ‘The question is what attention do we pay to the experience of being alive. Is it necessarily dualistic?’
‘Or troilistic.’ Crystal smiled. ‘You know my woefully simple position on this question, namely, that our perceptions and sensations are indeed dualistic, but that they needn’t be. We can experience non-duality.’
‘Yes, I do know your position,’ said Jean-Paul, bowing to her in the Indian style.
‘I would go further,’ she went on, ‘and say that we should make those peaks of non-dual experience into the ground of our being.’
‘You call that a simple position!’ said Jean-Paul, looking genuinely shocked.
‘And my simple position,’ said Patrick, ‘is that we can make our experience as fragmented as we like, but that it isn’t a flaw in reality, just a fault in the transceiver.’
‘And yet that advances nothing, because we then have to know whether the fault is inherent to the transceiver,’ said Jean-Paul. ‘Is it a dualistic transceiver?’
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ an announcement came over the system. ‘Due to circumstances beyond our control…’
‘Fucking Didcot,’ muttered Patrick. ‘Why does one always get stuck in Didcot? And in the fog.’