Rock 'n' Roll (8 page)

Jan has calmed down. He selects a record to play.

JAN
Yeah … the Grateful Dead must be so envious of the Plastics …

The record starts to play—‘Chinatown Shuffle' by the Grateful Dead.

JAN
(
cont.) (after a moment
) How's Magda?

FERDINAND
What?

JAN
How's Magda?

FERDINAND
I don't know.

Jan nods sympathetically. They sit listening.

Blackout and the Grateful Dead continue through amps.

Smash cut to Cambridge. May 1976. Interior and garden.

The dining table is cleared for a tutorial.

LENKA,
aged twenty-nine, is waiting for Eleanor. Lenka personifies a period look from her granny glasses to her smock and sandals. She carries her books in a canvas shoulder-bag. Her hair is long and unkempt. Lenka has a Czech accent.

Max is sitting in the garden with
NIGEL,
who is about thirty years old.

Eleanor enters the dining area, wearing a tea cosy for a hat.

ELEANOR
(
entering
) Right. Sorry. Off we go.

They need a few seconds to get launched.

NIGEL
Are you still a member of the Communist Party, Max?

MAX
Yes.

NIGEL
I find that fascinating.

MAX
I know. (
shouts for help
) Nell! Nigel's here!

Eleanor makes an impatient sound, gets up, goes swiftly to the frontier between indoors and outdoors.

ELEANOR
Shush—it's Alice's nap.

Indoors, a five-year-old starts calling for ‘Granny'.

ELEANOR
(
cont.
) Oh, for heaven's sake!

NIGEL
Should I -?

ELEANOR
No. Hello, Nigel.

Eleanor hurries back through the dining area.

ELEANOR
(
cont.) (to Lenka
) Sorry.

Eleanor leaves towards the child, already addressing endearments.

NIGEL
Was that a tea cosy on her head?

MAX
Yes.

NIGEL
(
pause
) Do you mind if I ask you a question?

MAX
She didn't like me saying you couldn't tell her wig was a wig.

NIGEL
No, not about that. But with Communism, my paper wouldn't be allowed to criticise the government, or even … well, you know what I mean. If you had your way, the
Cambridge Evening News
would be a very different sort of newspaper. As would all the media. Well, you're much
cleverer than me. Obviously. So my question is: am I missing something?

MAX
Yes.

Max gets up and goes indoors.

LENKA
Hello.

MAX
Hello. I'm Max.

LENKA
I know. We met once with Jan.

MAX
Jan's friend.

LENKA
Lenka.

MAX
Lenka. He went home.

LENKA
I stayed.

MAX
Of course. Philology?

LENKA
And Classical Studies.

Nigel comes passing through.

NIGEL
I'll go and rescue her.

He leaves.

LENKA
Eleanor is wonderful!

MAX
So, what …?

LENKA
Consciousness in Sappho.

MAX
Oh, well, yes, Eleanor's your man for Sappho.

LENKA
But you for consciousness.

Lenka smiles at him.

Eleanor comes back, now wearing a wig.

ELEANOR
Sorry. I hope I didn't frighten you. (
to Max
) You might have told me. What are you doing home anyway?

A passing kiss.

MAX
Don't see enough of Esme.

ELEANOR
Well, as you see, Lenka—

MAX
Can I listen in?

ELEANOR
What? No!

MAX
Fly on the wall.

ELEANOR
In the ointment, more like.

LENKA
I don't mind, Eleanor.

ELEANOR
I do.

MAX
Oh, come on, consciousness is my sack, after all.

ELEANOR
I think you mean your bag, but be that as it (may)—

LENKA
Actually, I read your book, Professor Morrow.

MAX
Class and Consciousness
or
Masses and Materialism?

ELEANOR
Sappho's not in there, is she?

MAX
Ha-ha, Cecil B. DeMorrow; no, she isn't.

LENKA
It made things clear for me.

MAX
I'm definitely staying.

LENKA
I think you're wrong, you see.

MAX
Great.

He sits down opposite Eleanor, rubbing his palms together. Lenka's place is diagonal to Max down the table.

ELEANOR
Max.

MAX
Esme's going to be here in a minute to pick up Nigel and the kid. (
to Lenka
) Child-minding. She's a doting granny, don't pass it around.

Eleanor laughs, pleased. Max squeezes her hand. A moment.

MAX
(
cont.) (to Lenka
) Go ahead.

ELEANOR
You don't know the text.

MAX
Fine. Call me Max.

ELEANOR
She doesn't have to call you anything, because you're not—

MAX
Fine.

Eleanor gives Lenka the nod.

ELEANOR
Will you start?

LENKA
(
pause
) No, you start. No, I'll start. (
pause
) My mind's gone blank.

MAX
All right, I'll start—

ELEANOR
(
shouts
) You don't even know—

MAX
Fine.

ELEANOR
I'll start. Sappho begins, ‘He seems to me equal to a god …'

LENKA
Right!—She begins not with the love object but with the man who's getting all the love object's attention—which to Sappho makes him seem equal to a god. I see it as
a group of friends round a table having lunch maybe, and in the poem Sappho is describing what it's like to experience love and desire and jealousy. Because there, down the table, this
man
is leaning in to listen to her girl's sweet speaking and lovely laughing, and it's Sappho's
body
that goes beserk. Her
heart
jumps around like a bird beating its wings, her
eyes
stop seeing, her
tongue
breaks, her
ears
fill up with noise, her
skin
goes hot, then cold and clammy, her
body's
out of control—it's all happening like that, in the third person, these
things
are behaving like that. Out there.

ELEANOR
But the first-person singular comes back—‘I'm green, I'm gone, dead or almost.'

LENKA
So, okay. But the subjective experience of the objective world
when that world includes the poet
is obviously paradoxical—

ELEANOR
‘Obviously' is a word I don't allow. It usually means that something is far from obvious. For instance, can you lump together what's in Sappho's consciousness with what's physically ‘out there' in the objective world, like the birds and the bees?

Max nods and does a thumbs-up: yes, you can.

ELEANOR
(
cont.
) Experiencing love is different from experiencing a bee sting.

Max converts the gesture into waggling his hand palm-down.

LENKA
The paradox I mean is that Sappho is describing her own consciousness from outside itself, she describes the feeling of love as objectively as she might describe being stung by a bee.

ELEANOR
What she is
describing
is the physiology.

MAX
Same thing.

ELEANOR
(
smoothly
) Which is obviously not the same thing.

Max picks up on ‘obviously'. Eleanor affects not to notice.

ELEANOR
(
cont.
) Seemingly not the same thing. When you say, ‘I love you,' you're not saying ‘Darling, I notice some rather unusual events in my body.'

Max nods vigorously to disagree.

ELEANOR
(
cont.
) Unless you're odd.

Max smiles at her.

LENKA
(
agreeing
) Unless you have a materialist agenda.

Max smiles at Lenka.

ELEANOR
And anyway, Sappho's list of symptoms could be describing other causes, like fear or embarrassment, or influenza, for that matter.

LENKA
Exactly! How do we know it's love? Because the poet knows! The mental separates from the physical. Sappho has a mental cognition of
love;
not influenza.

Max mimes despair.

LENKA
(
cont.
) If she's stung by a bee, she feels the sting, and she locates the bee in the objective world. If she's stung by love, she locates Aphrodite as the stinger.

Max is dumbfounded.

ELEANOR
Aphrodite?

LENKA
Aphrodite exists for her. Like Eros. Like all the gods. They become the acting agent, and Sappho becomes the object acted upon.

MAX
Hang on.

ELEANOR
Yes, hang on. (
to Max
) You just be quiet.

LENKA
‘Aphrodite, come to me!' she cries. And, ‘Eros shook my mind like the wind shakes the oak trees' … ‘Eros!—who melts my limbs, sweet-bitter rascal …'

Max puts his head on the table.

ELEANOR
There are some among us who possibly consider Aphrodite and Eros to be a sort of metaphor …

Lenka rounds on Max.

LENKA
There are some among us who think knowledge is advanced when we give something a new name. Goodbye, Eros; hello, libido. Goodbye, Muses; hello, inspiration.

MAX
There are some among us who thought we'd liberated reason from our ancestral bog of myth and claptrap. Inspiration doesn't exist either, by the way, except as so many neuron-firings whizzing about the cortex.

LENKA
Maybe we lost something older than reason, and stranger than your pinball machine which thinks it's in love.

MAX
Pinball machine isn't bad. It does love. It does inspiration. It does memory. It does
thought.
If mental is separate from physical, how does it make Sappho go hot and cold and deaf and blind at lunch?

LENKA
I don't know. Sappho didn't know why things fall to the floor. So what? They fell anyway. She looks down the table and she is in love separate from her body. (
She plays her trump.
) If it's an illusion, who's having it?

MAX
Not ‘who'—'what'. Her brain's having it.

LENKA
Her mind?

MAX
Her mind
is
her brain. The brain is a biological machine for thinking. If it wasn't for the merely technical problem of understanding how it works, we could make one out of—beer cans. It would be the size of a stadium but it would sit there, going, ‘I think, therefore I am.' (
to Eleanor
) You're very quiet.

ELEANOR
Well, I've heard it before.

Lenka laughs and brings out her roll-your-own kit.

LENKA
What you like about brains, Max, is that they all work in the same way. What you don't like about minds is that they don't. To you consciousness is subversive—because
your
thing is the collective mind. But politics is over. You're looking for revolution in the wrong place. Consciousness is where it's at now. We have to rediscover our human mystery in the age of technology. Have you read
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?