The Making of Incarnation by Tom McCarthy

Author:Tom McCarthy [McCarthy, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK

3. The Norbert Wiener Appreciation Society

They do this thing at Canard where they wrap a poached duck in soft clay and fire it in a kiln for half an hour. To liberate the roasted bird, whose juices the tightly fitted carapace has kept intact, removing any need for basting, they smash the hardened earthenware embalming with a hammer – right before you, at your table. It’s a Celtic recipe. The clay comes from the Evenlode by Charlbury a mile away, thick mud borne down there from the Cotswolds, sedimenting as the river winds its way past Ascott-under-Wychwood, Chadlington, Stow-on-the-Wold … The waiting list for tables seems to wind for just as long; Garnett tried once to get a reservation, and was offered an early-evening slot six months away. But Pilkington … Pilkington’s managed to grab a place for them in the two days since dropping him a line, asking to ‘pick his brains’. The man’s hooked up in many ways, through channels Garnett has learnt over the years not to enquire about too much. He’s waiting for him in a quiet little enclave, a snug almost, in the corner. It’s the best spot in the restaurant; they won’t be overheard.

‘My Anthony. Still tying paintbrushes to sheep?’

‘Things have progressed a little since then – as you know …’

Their hands unclasp and they sit down. A waiter passes by with bread. After he’s gone, Garnett enquires:

‘How’s Thérèse?’

No small talk, this – more of a plunge in at the deep end. Pilkington’s wife was diagnosed two years ago with Parkinson’s. Her state is not improving: tremors, cogwheel rigidity, pill-rolling fingers, festination … Pilkington uses the medical term for each of these symptoms, not bothering to translate or annotate, since he knows full well that Garnett understands them.

‘It’s ironic,’ he says when the list’s exhausted, ‘us two talking about this.’

Here, too, Garnett can follow perfectly, no need to gloss: they’re on the same page – same pages. The Human Use of Human Beings: the passages devoted to Parkinsonianism. Voluntary feedback regulating a main motion fails to establish equilibrium with postural feedback working in the opposite direction … oscillation levels spiral out of control … the patient reaches for a glass of water, and his hand overcorrects, swings too much, draws a too-wide arc … For Wiener, everything was feedback. When I pick up a cigar, I translate into action nothing other than a feedback mechanism, a reflex turning the amount by which I’ve not yet picked up the cigar into an order to the lagging muscles. When I shoot down a plane, my limbs on the ack-ack gun and the wire along which the firing order hums its way towards the earphones clamped round my head, the vacuum tubes that plot the plane’s path on a radar screen, and thus the timeline from which approach gradients to the spot of air it’s occupying right now can be extrapolated to predict the spot that it will occupy two seconds hence: all these make up an integrated circuit, in which servo-mechanism isn’t just the mode of mankind, but his measure also.

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