Square Wave (20 page)

“So then how much of this is, well, reconstruction, imagination?”

“Well, the prose, the diction, the point of view are mine, however close I come to occupying their standpoints at times. It’s the binder, the frame. I haven’t tried to recreate the past, only represent it, in my terms. That’s all Herodotus. He is a master of form, I think. And it also means I haven’t attempted the kind of philosophical history Hegel wanted. I don’t know if that’s possible, to go native in the distant past.

“But I’ve followed Herodotus only so far. There’s something right in wanting a properly scientific history. Certainly we can’t go back now to the older, more poetic form. So, the details, I haven’t taken the liberties he did. They’re all strictly culled from the sources. So it’s not an imaginative act at all, if that’s what you mean by ‘reconstruction.’ I haven’t filled anything in. Whatever gaps there are in the sources are still there in the presentation. That’s why they’re fragments.”

“I noticed that.”

“That’s because I’ve stuck with the known facts, as far as they can be known, anyway. I’ve looked for convergences, checked one voice, one account, against another. Any details that ended up in dispute I’ve left out or signaled. But for a lot of the material—most of the psychological details—there just aren’t multiple sources. The records are spotty.

“But unless I had a reason to suspect error or deceit, I’ve let them stand. If I’d stripped out every detail that couldn’t be corroborated, there’d be no texture left. And the texture isn’t really incidental, for me. It
is
the history. To thin it out in the name of some sort of definitive history would be a mistake, I think, when there are so few conclusive facts. It would reduce it all to this trivial nub of truth. I’d rather let some of the impurities remain.”

Kames stared into him. “I’m not asking you to change them. I’m trying to get a handle on what you’re doing. It doesn’t sound like you’re imagining things in the ordinary sense. But there’s a kind of precariousness to it, don’t you think?”

“‘Precarious’ is just right. It’s history out on a limb, at least some of the time. But there is always a limb, at least. Nothing’s being included just because. For all the elements, and their selection and arrangement, narratively, there’s something in the documents that lends them support. That sounds impossible, given the level of detail, but that’s what’s so odd about the evidence, especially what I have from Rutland, and also from the monk. They’re so rich in sense details, internal and external, it’s made a scenic style possible—without having to imagine anything.

“The only imaginations at work here, if there are any, are the ones of the authors of the source documents. What it is, really, is a completely granular history. Around that, I’ve supplied some of the more general details about what we know of the time and place, and bits of analysis or explanation where it’s well supported.

“You see writers, sometimes historians, sometimes journalists, attempt this sort of thing with contemporaneous histories. This is history in the manner of Thucydides. But they can gather any amount of details on the subject they like. Everything still exists. But for a history of four hundred years ago, from a remote part of the world, where what we’ve got is mostly all we’ll ever get? Either you go the way Herodotus did, or you write a threadbare, schematic history. Or you get very lucky with your sources. And I’ve been lucky. Mostly by birth.”

For a moment Kames looked appeased. Then he leaned forward slightly, put his hands on his knees. “So what are you finding exactly? I see that you aren’t, in these pieces, much interested in explanation. But if you were to compose an accompanying commentary—you could do that later—what would you say, to begin, about the knots in the moral and political orders of the period?”

“That’s still hard to say. I don’t know how all the pieces fit together, or that they will. There’s a king besieged not just by the Europeans—the Portuguese, since he came to power, and then the Dutch, the more recent arrivals—but by his own people, in a rebellion. There’s a scholarly class of priests, linked to the nobles, who are themselves linked to the upper echelons of the military. There’s this mix of commercial and martial conquest in Sri Lanka, and behavior in the kingdom that in less strange times would have to be called paranoia. At the same time, in England, there’s a royal, Charles II, being restored after a fallow period, and then London being eviscerated by the bubonic plague soon after.

“Then the political dynamics: Rutland and Knox and their crew having left from Cromwell’s England, watching another ruler try to keep his kingdom in one piece, sometimes, but only sometimes, against the will of his people. And the king’s seeming admiration of the Europeans, their manner. There are all these less sinister relations between the natives and Europeans—admiration, respect, in both directions—some through force of circumstance and others based only on misunderstandings.”

Kames seemed to frown. Perhaps he was simply thinking hard.

“If you mean more analytically, almost everyone involved, in incompatible ways, is trying to start certain things over, on better footing. Clearings, you could call them. Conceptual or political ones, not ethnic ones per se. So they aren’t obviously irrational, any more than the Glorious Revolution was in sweeping away absolutism.”

Kames dropped his head, twisting it to the side. “There is that view.”

Stagg narrowed his eyes as he stared at Kames’s fallen locks. A grin formed on his face, though Kames, face still down, couldn’t see it. Kames lifted his head suddenly and pursed his lips. “And these martial and scholarly orders, you have a chapter, or a scene or whatnot, on this? The ties there interest me, and many at the Wintry, actually.”

“Well, I have some description of the martial strategies used by the Sinhalese against the European outfits—‘Christian armies,’ Knox calls them—who of course had the better arms. But better techniques, that’s not so clear. The Sinhalese used the terrain to their advantage, relied on deception and surprise and speed. Like any overmatched opponent, really. And they played the Europeans to a draw for a long while. 310 years. The end game was very drawn out. Which is victory of a kind.”

Kames nodded and blinked heavily. “And what’s the end date, for you? How far do you plan on taking this?”

“For the talks, we could stop at 1680, with Charles dissolving Parliament, and Rutland and Knox returning to England. Eventually I’ll take it further, as close to the present as I can, I think, with the other sources I have from later centuries. Those are still mostly back in England, in my grandmother’s country house, actually. I’d also like to include the British return to Sri Lanka a century later.”

“For now, though, five talks are what we are thinking?”

“If that works for you. I think I’ll include some sort of commentary, as you mentioned. A supplement I can save for the last lecture, a gloss on what came before. Or is it better to present them with no explanation? Maybe that’s too much,” Stagg said, fingering his trousers.

“Why don’t we see how things shape up first. Say we tentatively schedule the talks for the last week of October. Six weeks’ time. You can show me the drafts before then, and I will pass them on to the board. On that basis we can consider you for a fellowship. We can also think about publishing the pieces, as revised lectures or something else, in the Institute’s monthly journal. For the talks themselves we can pay you a small commission, and your status for now will be affiliated researcher. It’s not enough to live on, of course,” Kames said with a tap of his pen on the papers. “But it’s something anyway. Perhaps you have money left from your graduate stipend?” Kames got up from his chair. “In any case.”

“I have some saved from teaching. But most of it’s coming from freelancing,” Stagg said, rising.

“Ah. Commissions like this one? Maybe adjunct labor?”

“No adjuncting. Really it’s whatever assignments I can pick up right now. The commission definitely helps—thank you—and if I can turn this project into a full-time matter with the fellowship, even better. The part of school I miss. Now I’m juggling research with mundane things. Earning a wage.”

“Right. Yes,” Kames said without listening. “Actually, you know, there is one other thing we should discuss.” He sat down again.

“Yes?” Stagg said, doing the same.

“About the Institute. I have this chat with everyone who wants to research here, whether on a provisional basis, like you, or as permanent staff. Most of it you’ll know, but I feel it’s a responsibility I have.

“The Wintry isn’t celebrated in all quarters,” he began. “The casual indifference that greets standard think tanks and research centers, we don’t seem to get that. That’s a mark of distinction, in a way.

“The universities are bothered by the public debates we’ve set off about education, the blinkers we’ve raised on the entrenched way. It must be a little unnerving, to see us producing work that isn’t socially and politically inert, invisible except when reinforcing the established ways, fit only for the conference circuit, the academic presses, and, finally, the mausoleums, the university libraries.

“And we’ve done it without sacrificing any seriousness. The proof of that has been their concern for our poaching. Many of our senior fellows are drawn from their highest ranks. Our credibility is mostly unassailable at this point. We are neither a practical policy think-tank with the usual ersatz scholarship, nor simply a first-class research institute that’s insulated from the broader culture, like the Institute for Advanced Study, say. We’re a kind of hybrid, unaffiliated with any external body, with no reigning political doctrine, where thinkers can come to conduct unusual or contrarian—potentially paradigm-shifting—research. The number of MacArthurs our people have won, for instance, it’s exceptional. So what’s unique about us is temperamental almost. The focus is on giving uncommon ideas a hearing without repercussion.

“More than that, though. It’s also the way we open out onto the world. The atmosphere here, the chance to intercede in the culture, which our fellows take seriously, and the very generous endowment our donors put in place early on, means we are the ideal place for a certain sort of intellectual.

“You’ve known of our satellite discussion groups and lecture series, springing up around the country, I take it?” Kames asked.

“I attended a talk—in London. On Fourier’s flaws.”

“We are there too. The endowment funds all of this. We’re injecting ideas, complex, careful ideas, but bold ideas, into the world with a speed no university can match.

“But our mission’s considered problematic. And not just by the universities. Why, I don’t know. That we don’t take politics, democracy, to come before philosophy? That’s a very anti-Socratic view. That we don’t mind testing truisms? Probably it’s that we don’t do it in a way safely disengaged from actual life. Corrupting the youth, they’ll say.”

Stagg felt a buzz in his chest.

“But what has really changed, I think, is the surrounding circumstances: ‘at a time like this.’ The attacks at the turn of the century, 9/11, then the ones in Spain and England, for all the tragedy they wrought, seem to have freed something up in people—peoples—who substantively couldn’t be more different. The discord, this interminable collision of interests that will not yield, the impossibility of any course sticking for more than a moment, until the next election, and, more than anything, these voting blocs that are persistently defeated, cycle after cycle. All this has left people… primed.

“The planes, the falling towers of World Trade, were the sparks to this charge. Then there was an exploded space, a place from which another look at our political mechanisms, the entrenched methods of coordination and decision making, became not only possible but unavoidable. They stood exposed.

“It’s taken a few years—almost three decades now—but not that many. The Wintry was quick to recognize that space, I would say, and we’ve been effective in suffusing the atmosphere with, well, reconceptions of the social world, ones that aren’t definitively aligned with any active political tradition, and certainly not with any of the parties and their ragbags of ideas and policies. It is confusing the order, what we do. Clouding any Archimedean vision of political process. We are not so easily forgotten about.”

The buzzing recurred—Stagg’s phone, in the inner pocket of his blazer.

“I tell you all this, as a prospective fellow,” Kames said, “because these are complicated times for the Wintry, or really anyone looking to scrutinize form, the shape of things. You are doing that, it seems, but obliquely: the collision of several historical orders, the trajectory of a family, and then, in an enacted sense, of the form historical inquiry might profitably take. All this interests me, us. I’ll be curious to see what your genealogy unearths, tells us, now, about today.”

“I should be able to get something polished to you in a few weeks, the first talk, or piece.”

“Fine. Very good.”

Kames walked Stagg to the oak doors flanked by enormous bay windows, concave like eyes.

Outside, on the honey cobblestones, Stagg checked his messages. A text only: “Jenko billiards. Downtown ASAP.”

16

The cues were in three and four pieces, ragged spikes of maple shorn by an undetermined force. Several of the tables closest to Stagg were on their knees, half their legs having been blown off at the joints, leaving them buckled, with cloths sloping. The balls were cloaked in soot, mildly discolored or worse. Most were numbered, stripes and solids, meant for games of eight- and nine-ball. There was also a small share of unnumbered balls, continuous pinks, reds, blacks, greens, browns, blues, and whites.

In the back of the hall, beyond a sodden curtain fallen to the ground and a line of sharded glass, lay the remains of a table of great dimensions—for snooker, and billiards as well, judging by the white ball resting against its edge. The table had lost all its legs and lay flat on the ground. The cloth had burnt off, but evenly, completely, and the dense wood had turned a rich charcoal tone. The plane of the table was still flat and smooth, and though the airier wood of the cushions was only ashes now, the metal frame, marked by pockets at its joints, skeletally cordoned off the space. Stagg thought it looked as though it were meant for a different game entirely, perhaps one played with clubs instead of cues; or if not that, then a kind of billiards where players lie prone like snipers to shoot. The posture might not suit the billiards clientele. But then, he thought, they did enjoy the hunt traditionally.