SYLVIE'S RIDDLE (15 page)

Everybody's searching
high and low, no one notices me

Headlights hit the windows, nervous drinkers hit the
f
loor

Sirens are wailing, please
tell me who they're wailing
for

The labyrinth's alive tonight as silence
is
transformed into heat

I
heard somebody shout they're turning mystery to meat

I
can hear the angry wind po
unding and pounding on the door

Blindfolds and chains, and the traffic's ever-growing roar

He'd obviously been reading some of her books, looking at some of her pictures. Maybe he'd been having an affair with Henry too. There was no copyright on this material. The student had also given her a book about him. It appeared to have been written by a once-faithful roadie, pimp and all- round servicer of Darcy's requirements.

The writer tried to remember at one point how many women he must have put Darcy's way. Going down to the auditorium during the interval to pick up the chosen creatures and get them back-stage passes with a minimum of fuss. To let them in to the light behind the darkness; or was it the dark behind the light? For at least one three-month period, pander and lord were both only too aware that each one of these chosen creatures was being infected with a non-specific, but undoubtedly anti-social, virus. Not that this stopped Darcy going at it like a rat up a drainpipe. As his Boswell now put it: 'Paul Darcy is an unscrupulous fucker, but on a good night, he's still one of the best singers in the world.' And in between getting pissed, getting stoned, and getting laid, he obviously read a lot. Everybody's in this bloody labyrinth these days, she thought, and made a mental note to phone Henry later.

Sylvie spent the first few hours of the day in the Signum's library. This was the heart of the building, and the real reason it existed at all. Friedrich Euland, a refugee from Vienna in the
19
30s, had chosen to risk the bombs falling on his precious book collection in Liverpool rather than have them fall on his precious book collection in London. He had come to detest all crowds and Liverpool was smaller; it was as simple as that. His British devotee, James Almond, who subsequently wrote his intellectual biography,
Euland: Melancholy Anatomist,
doubted that Euland had gone out much by that stage in any case, his psychological condition being so severe that the only place he could feel comfortable was surrounded by his books and prints. No air-raid warnings would ever have evacuated him. Almond argued, with some conviction, that Euland's disablement for normal life facilitated his thought. He drew parallels with Darwin and Proust. Sylvie was sitting under the alabaster bust.
Euland was a small man, with a large moustache, his gaze fixed perennially elsewhere; anywhere, it seemed, but here.

He had gathered together a rewarding collection of scientific images from over the centuries. She had picked up some of her obsessions from him, though he would surely have been astounded at the destinations she was now carrying them towards. We constellate reality, form images of it, challenge it, destroy it, form new images, but certain motifs seem to remain constant. The question was this: when technology trans- formed the possibilities of image-making, did this alter our underlying psychology, or merely amplify it? Had the pictures from the Hubble Telescope changed our sense of being in the world, or merely extended it by powers of ten? Once only the monarch was the centre of the circle of the world, his or her face impressed on every coin. Then technology had permitted all sorts of new images, a proliferation of them beyond any anticipation, and what had we done with those images? Had we displaced the notion that anyone was the centre of the circle of the world, or merely multiplied it? The astonishing fecundity of the images of musical celebrities, even their voices at the centre of those circles of the world that were once black vinyl and now shiny metal, playing from millions of machines all over the world, little gleaming tabernacles, this fecundity of voice-imprinting and image-making hadn't necessarily shifted the basic psychic parameters at all. She suspected that this was what Euland had come to believe by the end, and she believed it too. What did we call them, as they shone up there, and we crooked our necks? Stars. What did we call Elvis? The king. How brightly they had shone, and how everyone had bent the knee, offered the body, paid the coin. We were still in a glittering kingdom, living with the afterlife of images.

Euland had no doubt that worship, often of the most murderous variety, was an ineradicable part of the human mind. But what had we left ourselves to worship, in the vast clearings of modernity? The world of commodities, according to Euland, expressed itself philosophically not in the works of Marx and Engels, but in the words of nihilism. Unattributable makings issuing from the en
gine of manufacture, an engine
without purpose except to enlarge its own productiveness. This machine of creation made commodities the way, in Darwin's scheme, the blind idiot called Nature made creatures - some for life, others for destruction
, with no moral filament to dis
tinguish between them, except their 'fitness for survival', a phrase Euland could never encounter without horror, because it made him fear that Nazism was not a hideous deformation, but an emanation from the brute core of human existence itself.

He had become greatly preoccupied after the war with the figure of Magda Goebbels. He felt that she had stepped out of Euripides and into the history of Europe: Medea slaughtering her children, not because she was in a rage at
Jason
any more, but simply at the thought of a world without Hitler, a de- Nazified world unfit to inherit her little ones. So she poisoned her beloved chicks and then allowed herself to be put to death in turn. She had once, noted Euland, been thought the most famous mother in Germany. Beautiful children spawned by her malignant dwarf of a husband.

The book before her was Euland's
Notebooks and Papers.

Sylvie often returned to them, and then extrapolated at a rate that had begun to alarm even her. What she was trying to do now was link images and mirrors. The technological link was simple:
speculum
and speculation, mirrors in telescopes and miscroscopes, facilitating images and the de-coding of images, mirrors in cameras doing the same. She was less convinced that the psychological aspect had been properly broached.

For years in the
19
60s every time a young man looked in the mirror he wanted to be one of those four faces; the four faces of the Beatles. Or maybe the Stones. Or Dylan. And every time a girl looked into a mirror she wanted to have one of those same faces looking back at her. And yet John Lennon had to spend the rest of his life trying to find a man there, a human being, no more, no less. A man whose father had walked out on him, and whose mother had been killed by a speeding police car. He knew that the image, whatever its proliferation in millions upon millions of copies, could never replace the face in the mirror. You finally had to come back in solitude to that. The persistence of that vision was irreversible. 'I'm just an ordinary man,' the Beatle cried, to universal incredulity. And yet in one sense of course, he was, for what else could he be? And what did Bob Dylan see when he looked in the mirror? Did he see Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota? Or something entirely different? Did he really see the myth he'd made of himself? Did the same creature come out of the labyrinth as had once gone in?

When the Christian looks at the figure on the cross he sees lots of suffering behind and plenty more on its way. Inescapable anguish and suffering. So offer it all up to God. But what did William Blake see? Glory. Resplendent glory. That's what he said, and there seems no reason to disbelieve him. And what did the Easter Islanders see when they stared up at those vast stony gods they themselves had hewn to palliate the powers that would destroy them anyway? They saw the vast nails that held earth to heaven, and would never come loose. The whole of the island was a mirror to the skies. Were all images mirrors then, to some extent? Did they all simply reflect our beliefs, our wishes and our pain?

Euland saw with great vividness that the ancient categories of rhetoric, the facility to blind and deafen the moral faculties with persuasive power, hadn't been in any way negated or even diluted by modem technologies of communication; they had simply grown greater and greater. He found due cause for terror here. He knew the voices of Hitler and Goebbels, the husband this time not the wife; they had been planted in his head by the radio, but no radio signals could ever take them out again. He had meditated long and hard on the lethal temptation of all verbal magic harnessed to power: a fake enchantment for a disenchanted world, a simplification of reality resulting in murder. A new mirror from which you would emerge transformed, an image replicated over and over again, shaping a new reality, a new kingdom, a new Reich. And you would be one of many. Your identity could be reflected in everyone else's. A consonance of images, since all dissonant ones would have been eradicated. There was one thing of which he had no doubt: in the iconography of power, the sacrifice of any member of the ruling group was always the brief preface to a much greater sacrifice of those outside it.

The facilitating void of the mirror, Sylvie wrote in her note- book, quicksilvered to give you back what you gave it; but not precisely. Left and right stayed the same as they did on the other side of the looking-glass. Only selected elements of reality were reversed. She remembered how Judy Garland sang to the photograph of Clarke Gable in the film. And he was just as real as if he'd been there. Was she meant to be seeing him, or the image of her own desire in which he was reflected?

She wrote down two words at the bottom of the page, followed by a query: Imago ... phantasmagoria? Then she read the passage from Euland's famous essay, in Almond's translation.

*

No
escape from images in language. Words
ca
rr
y
their
own
history inside them, like the flesh beneath a turtle's carapace. Etymology: screams and sighs inside that word. Love, hatred, conquest, defeat, birth, death. Some of these words still have fragments of skin attached; some have barely ceased whimpering. Some are locked in the scriptorium, others in the lazar-house. Words are sometimes angels chanting
halleluiahs
, sometimes the befouling of the spirit at the inquisitor's bleak bidding. Mirrors, and so, like mirrors in the houses of the dead, we drape their
fl
ashing s
urf
aces with dark sheets. Lock them aw
a
y in the high room where we keep the dictionaries, those chronicles of suspicion and depravity. Definitions, incantations, monstrous anathemas.

Ariadne's Bobbin

Facilitating Void upon the wall/ Who
is
the fairest of them all?
No answer came the stem reply. You don't get the same class of mirror you did in Snow White's day, that's for sure. Sylvie stared at the flashing light on the telephone. 'Maybe I should just pop over to Hamish and ask him who called.' She pressed the play-back button. Henry.

'There's going to be a pizza here with your name on it tonight, and a nice glass of chianti. Any chance?'

Yes, in fact there was a chance. It was clear-out time in Sylvie's life, and she'd decided she'd better get on with it. Owen's behaviour had finally forced her to a decision, and she now felt it was time to be ruthless all round. She really couldn't afford to drift. She had slid into Henry's arms, more to comfort him than herself. Or had she? That's what she now told herself, anyway. She would tell him tonight that their relationship couldn't go any further. And while she was at it, she would take her notebook and make any final jottings she needed on the Picasso engravings. Her relationship with Owen was finished; any sexual stuff with Henry would be over as of tomorrow morning, though she'd give him one good valedictory night; he'd certainly get his pizza's worth. She'd be his comfort woman and there'd be no hard feelings. The thing she must get on and really finish was her book. It was time to move away from the Signum Institute. What a lot of moving on I'm doing, she thought. She and Henry must stay friends, if it were at all possible, but she had a feeling that Henry was going to need to fill a hole in his life, and that hole might well be filled by someone who wasn't all that keen on seeing Sylvie turning up for her take-away pizza once a month. A fragrant Shrewsbury lady needing permanent company would soon see Sylvie off.