Why do I bother with On the Train? If I have anything to say about the all-and-nothing subject of consciousness, why don’t I just spit it out? Most things that can’t be explained have the tact to remain unknown, whereas consciousness remains inexplicable despite being the only thing we know directly. One way of reformulating this mocking state of affairs is to say that the first-person perspective, which is the only witness to the quality of consciousness, cannot translate into the third-person perspective, the source of the scientific observations on which explanations are built. I had hoped to embody this frustration by writing a third-person narrative which is a flagrantly displaced first-person narrative. I also imagined that the tensions of these fictional conventions would create intriguing parallels with the tensions of the scientific method: the way the ‘observer effect’ and the participatory reality it entails conflict with the attempt to organize nature into laws; the way that the immutability of those laws conflicts with the claims of evolutionary theory. Ultimately, the way that science forms laws, by assuming that what has happened in the past will happen again in the future, means that science must by its own logic judge itself to be an inadequate description of reality, since it always has been in the past. There could have been a beautiful interplay between all of that and the notorious unreliabilities of narration.
Yes, if I had the time (and the intelligence), imagine the Fabergé bauble I might have wrought, nesting miniatures of itself, wrapped in a golden web of connections, at once floating and fundamental, compact and complete. It hovers before me, not unlike Macbeth’s dagger, a reproach, a temptation, an illusion.
Still, there are things I can think about better by arranging them in a third-person narrative and so I’ll plug on with my novella. Besides, I’m in a state of relative calm ideal for resuming On the Train. I’ve got hold of Heidi and she says that Ton Len will be coming down here next Friday with her nanny and a camera. For the last year I’ve had to try to set aside my frustrated paternal love so as not to go mad, but now it’s fountaining irresistibly.
And yet as I sit here in front of this faded raspberry farmhouse, on a broken wicker chair, under the dusty eucalyptus tree, I feel the tingling of destiny, as if electrified sand has been poured through the crown of my head and is fizzing down through my body. I am grateful that my own mind is being ripped open again and again by dying and gambling and Angelique and my adorable daughter and the beauty of this island. The mess that’s emerging, a confessional diary overwhelming the fragments of a speculative narrative, at least reflects the truth of my experience, the fact that every contemplation is interrupted, and that every interruption becomes a further object of contemplation, and that this rhythm of delusion and revelation feels as if it’s essential to the nature of consciousness considering itself.
I keep thinking of my daughter’s birth. The green accessories of the operating theatre, the friendly foreign nurses, the hard white light. Supine Heidi screened from her lower half by a tactful little curtain. The doctor performing the operation as crisply as a man tying his shoelaces. A Caesarean section could not distract him from planning a game of golf with his assistant. And then, with the flourish and the tenderness of a wine waiter, he eased the baby from her mother’s womb and held her towards us, bloody, slimy, purple and open-eyed. I looked at her and saw that her eyes were full of knowledge and feeling. I had the intuitive certainty that she was already a person, without a vocabulary, a birth certificate or a wardrobe, but still a psychological unit whose development would take place in relation to something that was already present. What I loved so effortlessly was not something that was mine or something that was cute, but a person who was radiantly herself. It was not just her emotional intensity – she was furious to have the roof of her home cut open and to be dragged into the glare and pressure of a dry new world – but the person having the emotions who was present.
I realize that if I look into the implications of this intuition, it conflicts with my equally strong conviction that the self is a ludicrously contingent nonentity. Am I then locked into a debate between self and soul? These are not abstract questions, they are at the heart of finding out what the hell is going on. There isn’t a human being on the planet who doesn’t have a vocation for making sense; some people are just better at convincing themselves that they can.
Enough! This is just what I mean: these kinds of speculations are much better off in a third-person narrative where the self-contradictions can be reorganized as varying points of view within a lively debate.