The Revolt of Aphrodite by Lawrence Durrell

Author:Lawrence Durrell [Lawrence Durrell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571288724
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2012-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

VI

Human attention is fragile and finite; won’t be mastered; can’t be bribed; is always changing…. Ah, for one moment of that total vision which might reorder the whole field and make it significant. I suppose from the outside it must have seemed like a progressive melancholia—I mean, resigning from the firm (no reaction to this) and locking myself up in the country in a desperate attempt to abdicate, along the lines suggested by Julian. Not to invent any more. Somehow one day one must try and stop being one’s own little hero—eh Charlock? You can do it for a year or two at most without faltering. It’s all very well, solitude and misanthropy. The beard I grew was patched with white; it gave me a startled look. I had to buy heavier lenses for my glasses. I was drinking a good deal and smoking too much. But it was a pleasure to let my appearance run to seed, to wear torn pullovers and knee-bulged grey bags. Nor was I completely cut off, except from Julian; he was biding his time, I supposed. I spoke to others on the phone, long conversations full of non sequiturs, yes, and common-room pleasantries. And all the time, unknown to my conscious me, that bloody old mass of wires I have called Abel was maturing. A certain resignation set in, too, walking about in the snow, hammering out Bach, skating in a deep muse upon the frozen waters of the lake. Well, so be it; if I must occupy myself, what better way? Besides, who would ever understand poor Abel, his foggy calculus of human potentials based upon the first cave-man chirp of the human voice? I was also preparing my revenge on Julian.

You may say that such an instrument could not possibly predict; but the future is only the memory of the past extended into the future. The backside of the moon of memory, if you like. The prediction of stars in the sky as yet undiscovered by the lens—that is a fair analogy. From the birth-cry to the death-rattle most lives can be plotted. I shall spare myself the eight lines of maths which resume this statement—crisp pothooks, shell of the cosmic egg. How little one needs to divine the human potentials in a single given life; translate through vibrations back to memory and thence to situation. Something the pundits of the firm will not fathom. When they take Abel apart they will be left with a mute collection of wires, like a human skeleton. Where is the soul of the machine? they will cry. Ah me! An invention as singular, original and definitive as the telescope. E pur si muovi‚ and so on.

The proof was in the pudding; and I had a pitifully small abacus to work with—just the people who had collided with me like rogue stars: just their sayings, visions, and the few facts I knew about them. I took over the big musicians’ gallery for my keyboard, mounting the

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