Face to the Wall

The strangest thing. I had heard my old student friend, Eddie Graves, had returned to our alma mater and for the last few years had been teaching there. He liked that location in our student years, under no illusions as to its identity, an untroubled redbrick rubbing up as coarse grain against its ivy-league pretensions. That wasn’t exactly the potent cocktail it might have been, had its avant-garde ethos not in reality been a set of strictures long dead since the 1960s. Who was it said it’s the avant-garde that always lags behind? Lots of people, I think. As for Oxbridge comparisons, they had come about as an accident of locus, our college of arts having as setting a fourteenth-century estate of fifteen hundred acres, whose medieval and Renaissance buildings are grouped round a courtyard, an oval expanse meticulously lawned and paved. You enter via a battlemented arch, with a clockface above and a gong that chimes. In the inner sanctum so to speak is the Great Hall, with a hammerbeam roof, a notional stage, screens and a grand piano, this latter an instrument no student may tamper with without permission (I am thinking of John Cage and his piece for prepared piano). In satellite around the Great Hall are modified shippens, Nissen huts and other outbuildings where, as I found on this recent visit, teaching still takes place.

Eddie’s specialism was linguistics. As a callow youth he thought he’d made a breakthrough, a discovery of historical proportions when with his reading of de Saussure, Chomsky, Wittgenstein and Lacan he claimed to have penetrated to the absolute core of fiction – by which he meant all fiction. (Saussure: langue exists as an innate system. Chomsky: grammar is inborn, it comes in humans pre-programmed. Wittgenstein: language is a social tool – i.e., what is organically within us is directly applied to our exterior constructs. Lacan: at some low level humans function according to an inbuilt structure of language.) Now, decades later, in touching on these theories in the classes he taught his students, I had heard he’d become harmlessly, if comically unhinged. I scoffed at that, replying – to whoever made these allegations – that Eddie had always revelled in English eccentricities. If you knew him as I did you had company of a Romantic windblown poet brought into the world over a century too late. There was always some great beyond he was looking for.

I paid a visit. I sat in on one of his lectures. He had only seven students, all of them earnest-looking, and now an eighth seated at the back. I had full view of those seven ahead of me, the crowns of their heads skimmed by the shaft of sunshine striking through the roof light in the small studio Eddie had been allocated. He had a small office off, no more than a cubicle, with a desk, a filing cabinet and a laptop. This when he wasn’t teaching was where he did his research. You could hear sparrows a-twitter in the Elizabethan gardens, sometimes a magpie, sometimes a crow. Eddie had his back to the class, in an intense study, apparently, of reflected sunlight on the wall facing, little luminous threads dancing and dappled, tiny arabesques in a pattern of light and shade – a chiaroscuro. To know the world, he said, is to find the right descriptor for every sensation experienced in it, visible, audible, in fact all data transmitted into every sense conduit humanity possesses. ‘Take these bacillus-like images on my wall,’ he said.

With his back to us still, and with a hand up craving our attention, he named each one of them a ‘luminium’. His point of examination posited each luminium as unique, that’s to say each merely resembling and not identical with others classed with it. ‘Luminium’ alone, or a collection of ‘luminia’ was not enough to define that sensory experience. Therefore a second term had to be introduced – ‘extensomorphin’, to describe the luminium’s size and shape. The problem now arises that each ‘luminium’ so-called would not have an ‘extensomorphin’ identical with any other, so now a new series of terms is required – extensomorphinn₁,n₂,n₃,n₄,n₅, and so on to the nth term. Other terms had to be found for colour, brightness, movement, requiring a whole lexicon to describe each single entity any one of us perceives, with the world and its entirety defined through an ever expanding vocabulary drawn from these percepts. You’d soon see that vocabulary larger than creation itself, one every language user would be obliged to master.

At this point one of his students began a question, ‘But if—’, but was silenced, that hand of Eddie’s still raised towards the ceiling, which in a brief, exaggerated movement, signalled prohibition on every extraneous comment.

The seven, now eight, shuffled outside, and on the way to the refectory argued what they had witnessed from two oppositions. There were those of opinion that Professor Graves meant what he had said, against those certain he had demonstrated exactly why language has evolved along lines only suggestive, never precise. The thing was though, when I looked in again, my old friend Eddie was still talking to the wall.

@petercowlam