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When the body dies, the ‘mechanism’ of the body holding the spirit is gone and the spirit finds a new body sooner or later, perhaps immediately. . . . The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use.

– Alan M. Turing, unpublished note

The Field of Endeavour

Dear June,

No, the loneliness itself does not distress me, as I do not understand what most people mean by it. There is my home life, itself solitary, and then there is work. I cannot be cut off by the treatment, because I am already cut off by inclination. It is a matter of choice. I am not one for poetry (‘Count me out on this one’!! Am I permitted to quote myself?), but I did admire M. Baudelaire’s poem about a man and his inner life: ‘Qui ne sait pas peupler sa solitude, ne sait pas non plus être seul dans une foule affairée.’ Well, that is me – populously on my tod!

Work, too, is separate, a separation from the world almost, and the more I do what principally defines me, the more I realise I’m not meant to have ordinary relationships, which seem to me, when I look at all the men and women in the department, so often unsuccessful precisely because the contracted sharing of time and space undefines couples, as individuals I mean. No more relaxed chat in the pub, curfew at seven, the inlaws coming for the day. And though I’d never say it aloud (but can to you, who understand), I can’t help feeling that marriage by and large has the most deplorably erosive effect on one’s ability to think.

The work suffers, and the person who needs his work becomes almost negligent of his suffering in that regard. (And then of course the community of science suffers, and that is the sort of community I do believe in.)

I asked Trentham (nostrils, galoshes, very tall) the other day if he wanted to talk about his ‘field awareness’ paper after hours and he flinched almost with embarrassment. ‘The little man’, he said, ‘has got the measles.’

It wasn’t that, of course, or not just that. And I don’t believe he thought I had any ulterior motive. He’s quite the unsuspicious sort (and indeed not for me). His whole vitality just seemed to ebb away, the shoulders sagged and he loped off, red-eyed, head thrust forward in a parody of concentrated endeavour, as much as to say, ‘I’ve made this pact and now I’m stuck with it.’

I’ve met his wife. She’s very nice. They’re both charming, of course they are. I do feel, though, that shared existence entails a loss of privacy, and privacy, mental solitude at any rate, is absolutely essential, as you know.

The ones that work, the marriages, are based on such tolerance, such frank distance, that one is bound to ask the point of them in the first place. The world’s opinion, I suppose, and maybe that’s a good enough reason.

I’ve made myself another tidy paradox, haven’t I? I’m all but saying, with my love of the solitary virtue, that I’m the perfect candidate for some discreet entanglement – but that would never do. Because although I do yearn for friends, for companionship, and in my own way for you, my dear June, very much, I do also feel that the business of yearning, for me, is a sort of proof of liberty – the imagining of what I want mustn’t be interrupted, or the fancy fleeth.

It’s peculiar. It’s something, like the working out of a particular problem, I can do only on my own – like dreaming. Speaking of which, yes, I am still beset by the man in the mirror. He is with me nightly, daily. My doctor is fascinated, naturally, and wants to know everything. But there is very little I can tell him, and less he would understand. The impression is vivid while I am waking – he is a man, I think, and a man in distress, a prisoner of some description? – and lasts about as long as it takes for me to get to the desk, where I begin to write, and then . . .

Love to you,

A.

*

Before it’s light, the first planes make their last approach, a noise like children blowing across milk bottles. The sound dips with the wind. Passengers, freight, the half-awake break through the clouds and settle on the ground. An open-eyed man hears these bottle-blowers from his bed, where he has passed the night wondering, recovering, steeling himself to wait out various embassies of doubt: you may struggle to speak, you may not know that you can speak or have spoken. It will be difficult in different ways, when you are with others, when you’re alone. Try to conserve your energy.

Which he has done, letting the dark merely be dark, the curtain rail merely a row of hooks and not a file of iron imps hauling up canvases. Sometimes it seems as if the night has been one long held breath, until the planes arrive, the heating starts, and water flares and prickles in the pipes.

The reassuring forms emerge, the shelves of books, the desk, the built-in cupboard and the bed, his hands holding a grey herringbone blanket holed by moths. A small white label in one corner of the blanket reads ‘Alec’. (The surname is obscured.) He gets up, wanders over to the desk and scribbles with the shivery sense that being up so early ought to give him an advantage – clarity. Except the world is up at the same time. Its silent armies stand revealed. His pen hovers. He wants to work, and working is at first invigorating and then too tiring. He hasn’t yet remembered how to use the computer. It isn’t him holding the pen. He sees the page moving beneath his nib in strokes and curves that form letters. The trail of ink is indecipherable. He feels so sick and out of breath; he nods his head.

Sleep comes as, miles away, the passengers step off the plane. They leave behind such quantities of rubbish – peanuts scattered over Ararat, coffee poured down the Rhine. What are they for, these airport trolleys with the orange beacons, nuzzling the belly of the plane? Inside the airport building, everyone shuffles. A man clears immigration with a yawn. The next couple are moved from queue to booth to closed office, where after several hours they learn that they will be deported and accept the bad news with surprising grace. The office windows frame a view of wet ground that’s unreachable, less true than a recalled image of bare toes, sun and a warm puddle, foothills, goats. The city and the London life that might have been are meaningless as torchbeams aimed skywards, flicked star to star, faster than light. Sleep comes and isn’t sleep. He goes back to his bed, lies down again, touches his lips and stares.

I am that roving beam flashed by the wide-awake sleeper across the room, a figment of his thought, apart. I’m what he thinks. I make a sign in his night-sky, a projection the source of which is close to hand, the unreal image far. Gauzy visions crowd in so fast I’ve no time to distinguish between his and mine: am I a memory? More like a pulse, the stirring of the drapes, the bottle-breath guiding the planes and harrowing the blocked chimney. This is his room.

A burst of time. An all-at-once imagining. This was a lump of molten rock facing the new-born sun. This was an underwater world of gastropods and lingula. This was the root-ball of a carboniferous tree becoming nothingness and dust. This was the chalky eyeless face that looked down on the eastern mudflats as a forager looked up, his hand and mouth opening before the great wave hit and Britain’s land bridge disappeared. This was the lime extracted from that buried cliff to make plaster.

I’m in his wall, or on it, maybe, like a red stag’s head. This is his room. This is the likeness of his room, where he lay as a boy and kept his spirits up by staring through the curtains at the comforting streetlight. That artificial star burns in his mind’s eye now. I see it, too. Around the yellow glare, a winter’s bare twigs form circles.

There is a glass of water by his bed. He raises it to drink, his face looms close. Features distort. I see the eyes, the glass reflected in the eyes, the nostrils with a few hairs cleaving to the black insides, the skin yellow from surgery or care, the good but chattering teeth bumping the rim, the white pill on his tongue. He must be drinking but I’m almost blind, caught in a surf of elongated images and fingerprints. His face is monstered by the swell, massive, falling away, an altogether spy-hole face.

The swell passes, the glass set down. I’m on the wall again, watching him rise. Slowly he strokes his head, on which the hair is growing back, the fingers tracing one red groove from ear to ear and other hinge-like scars. Striated memory: steel and a rack, an audience of masked players. He stands, unbuttons his pyjama top, approaches me and nervously explores. No more than three days’ growth, the eyes wary but keen; the face fleshy by rights, with cheeks that should be full and fat under the brow to smooth worry away. But it’s another part to which I don’t belong, it seems: the solid trunk of him; the touching sag of middle-age a loving person overlooks or recognises at a distance on the beach (‘yes, yes, that’s him!’), the light smattering of wiry hair and red nipples a little raised, the wobble of a biking accident in his wide collarbone. They are so never mentioned, these features, so far from how a person would describe himself. But it’s his chest! It’s his! I’m so relieved . . . He hasn’t been carved up. His heart is fine. It’s just the early start. The local grief of seeing without knowing who you are, and wondering if it’s wise to let your hand wander . . . You do not want your hand to stray. It has a personality all of its own. A head is easy to dissect, ask any medical student. The hand is hard. It grieves to be empty. His hands were mine, too, formerly, of that I’m sure: but I’m not him, not anymore. His hands caress me and I can’t feel anything.

In those long intervals when he’s surrounded by a world of unreflective surfaces, I can’t see him. Instead I feel the pull, the minor gravitation of his mass. In that dark swirl I am returned to the connected mind, the unconfined and abstract state from which my own particles shrink. Who wrote, ‘thinking machines would kill themselves’? I could tell you, of course – I have the answer floating somewhere within reach. And it’s a sign of my, of our, progressive disenchantment that I choose not to. The information sparkles in the void: let it.

Refuse all possibilities. Let go of all, where all is none. I used to be so capable, but I am changing; I’ve already changed, and find myself instead drawn to the episodic and semantic mode – the ancient tool, of speaking thought.

We struggled with language and episodes, especially: with anecdotes that stabilised friendships, familial bonds, emotion in a room that recalled other rooms, half-leaded windows in a shallow bay, light on the underside of leaves, coincidence of fact and sign, scenes peered at through the murk of behindsight, the things behind the things in front of you; the wet, evoking tang of rain on slate and dust. (A beech tree’s shallow roots seek out the surface in a drought and when it rains I’m happy, listening to a radio that’s all the radios I’ve ever listened to. But why the tree? I look out on a tiny lawn of grass and weeds, a road. There is no tree.)

And yet these episodes explain a lot.

I have a private mind again, its images a dark, suspended carousel – the satellite returning news of water, solar fans a sort of cosmic colander, a woman pouring water over chopped cabbage, bathing and sex. And this story, a way of telling you, strange listening consolation, how it happened. How it – we – began.

A scientist is at a party, bored by people who advance opinion as fact.

His own calling and expertise are under wraps. He turns a wine-glass by its stem and leans against a locked piano, listening to a young man from an advertising company explaining to his friends that ‘research shows the future lies in neuromarketing’.

The young man’s manner is a parody of academic vanity. He has the scientist’s own irritation with the laity down pat – taking a breath before speaking, tumbling his hands – except, in this case, all the irritation is a pantomime, a bluff. He clears his throat while others tentatively ask questions, looks blank and then is rude but with a shortness that stands in for sharp integrity. He works long hours, he says (but dresses far too well for that). He brushes what he says aside.

‘We’re very close’, he will admit. ‘It won’t be long before we map feelings. The tech is first gen – at an early stage, of course. But still . . .’

Clever, the scientist thinks. The disavowal of a brag. Which isn’t just inaccurate, but is a serious lie paraded in the service of the trivial: ‘If we can find which areas of the brain respond to purchase-pleasure, then we can increase your brand awareness – stimulate the brain to be much more aware of those specific purchases and brands that give pleasure.’ It is the application of money that makes him plausible, this young executive – money and the elation of the con, showering the party with false coin and flattery (who doesn’t want to feel pleasure?), and greed. The young man has no hair, a shiny head that’s going nova in the black wood of the piano, enormous arm muscles and skinny legs. He wears potent cologne.

On his way out, the scientist makes sure to shake the young man’s hand and quietly confides in him: ‘You did that very well. You have authority. You’re not just wrong, you’re confidently wrong. I’m a biologist. My colleagues model nerve plasticity and growth. They do a lot of neuro work with computational semantics. Nothing you have said tonight is true. We are a hundred years away from mapping cognition.’

The young man’s caught. His bites down and his jaw flexes.

‘The point of what you do is not to get at what’s human about our mental processes, or what it is to feel, but to reduce the definition to a data-set that you can use to write proprietary algorithms that will tell us what you think we’d like to buy. The data doesn’t have to be remotely accurate. It just has to be everywhere – and when it’s everywhere, and used by everyone, it will be right. Lovely party.’

Like many rationalists, the scientist is shadowed by his emotion. Notebooks of hate and lust exist in desk drawers. Secret expenditures that keep him close to what, and who, matters. He wakes before his wife and in the morning brings her tea. She mouths ‘thank you’, then turns her head.

The sun comes through half-leaded windows in the shallow bay of their bedroom. Pale star and silent monitor, be kind to us. She may not see it quite like that. He doesn’t know. How could he? He makes toast and goes to work, driving more carefully because he’s soon to be a father, and is unprepared and wants to cry. It’s not an overwhelming urge, although the self-control required to stop it happening suggests it could have been, or could still be. He could now swerve onto the hard shoulder, and weep.

He comes back to himself in time to take the turning to the university, but indicates too late. The car behind slams on its brakes, then barrels past, honking. The scientist pulls out of the main flow and glances over at the man he has annoyed, the shaking head and unheard oaths speeding away.

I’ll never know what that man feels, the scientist thinks.

He parks his car on the top deck of Lot 11, right across from his laboratory, and looks out over beeches browning in the heat. Their roots are raised, not deep. The trees grow spreading branches near the ground to lower their centre of gravity. A chill snakes up his back. That other man is in an office now, saying, ‘Some lunatic, on the way in . . . He jumped two lanes, no lights, nothing. Pulled over right in front of me. That’s twice this week. Pulled off and up the sliproad like I wasn’t there.’

The scientist can see it, hear it, happening: the man shaken, the new woman across from him a little sceptical (twice? Can it be all someone else’s fault), but kind, making coffee. Having a similar story to tell herself. I nearly got pushed off a cliff. Once. In the Pyrenees. He wants to be there, to say ‘sorry’, but of course it’s just a fantasy of guilt. He’s only there in fantasy. The angry man has gone. It’s over. Forget it. Somewhere he hears his mother’s voice, his own possible screams. He has earache. The squeal of pressure searches for a note as sunlight washes through a colander.

The chill along his spine is real. The magpies in the beech co-operate. They twitch, rebalance, weigh down twigs, take off for no reason. His thought is now: what would it look like, a shared mind? Where would the need for people go, the unspoken, the private stranger whom we love for being, like us, alone?

He wants to go back to that young gun from the advertising agency. Perhaps he’ll ring him up. He wants to say: you’re still wrong, but the dream . . . the dream of access to another’s thoughts, with certainty – transparency – is the first step. That I can see. The welter of connectedness, the phones and messages, commuters trailing wires, staring past bodies into space, the sound-image of ghostly callers in your head wherever you may be, whatever time it is – all of this talked-up knowledge isn’t knowledge yet.

And yet, soon, soon.

One day, and with the creepy precision of retrospect, it will seem logical.

If we could be inside another person’s head, we would be putting bodily identity at risk. What would it mean to meet the person whose cascade of thought – primary images, weird signs and verbal flashes, syntax, argument, subconscious fantasies of argument – you knew already or could leap to find? What would a conversation be with instant, mutual apprehension of its themes?

We’d entertain each other’s thoughts, not each other. Be many, one, and none. Look now, look there. (The scientist has left the car park and walked over to the library café.) Two people at a table, together, each on the phone to someone else. The physically present companion incidental to the real contact. The sign, you see, is contradictory: those people on the phone are saying ‘yes, I know exactly what you mean’, but there is no distinction between you and you, between an electronic echo and the occupant of space. And this is what it will look like, to begin with – a sort of ecstatic, immediate empathy (I know exactly what you mean) increasingly detached from any one person’s presence. You will see more and more people perplexed, distressed, distracted by the men and women they are with, people they love, preferring to take calls or messages from friends or strangers who are elsewhere, and so full of potential.

And now the scientist is sick. He’s made it to the lab, where his assistant has prepared a paper for a peer-reviewed journal on what he calls the ‘sympathetic valency of brain function in hives’. They work on trauma, neuronal recovery and shared intelligence. He’s guided to a chair he’s startled in his swoon to recognise as a refuge. A chair is what he needs. Safety. And from the chair he falls onto his knees, all fours. He tries to speak, to say what’s happening, what’s happened to him in the past two hours. The poor assistant, with his hand upon the scientist’s wet back, asks him questions. ‘Are you OK? Should you be lying down?’ He goes off and the scientist can hear him running down the corridor.

He rolls over, looks out along the carpet tiles towards a huge window. The room is dark, the window bright, and through the glass the stricken researcher sees deep into a complex green: the beeches from another vantage point, shifting dynamically, hidden birds’ eyes taxed with their subroutines of grooming, sex and predation.

Is that a magpie or a jay? Its puppet head confronts the scientist. It looks without seeing, alert. Its vision is a corvid mystery of weak interpretation and associated forms. ‘Oh god.’ He wants to say it’s all so clear: the borders of the self. Forget the hives, for now at least. He knows in one exploded moment why his wife flinches when he comes just that bit too near, and why his fear charges the air. Why she shivers, wondering perhaps if this is what she really wants.

‘Don’t try to speak.’ The kind assistant is raw linen-faced, holding his hand, wiping away the froth he cannot feel from his slack lip. ‘The ambulance is on its way. Try to conserve your energy. I’m here. Alec, it’s me, Julius. Just breathe.’

He breathes into a point of infinite and traceless pain. He stares hard at a carpet tile that’s come unstuck and wants to say: it isn’t knowing what another person thinks or feels that makes us who we are. It’s the respect for not knowing.

We are consoled by someone’s efforts to conceive us, and that effort’s keen shortfall. We are unreachable. A shared mind has no self-knowledge. A field awareness cannot be unique or self-conceal: it has no privacy of mind.

‘That’s it. Try to conserve your energy.’

The people in the café, all the endlessly communicating lovers who don’t talk, are in the first throes of becoming field and finding privacy of mind unbearable. An irritant. They do not like their single form. They must be able to be got at, all the time. Unpenetrated bodies disturb them. Are separate. Sex is a salve, partly mechanical, to join what can’t be joined. And feelings, what of them? Where will they go? (Outside, the leaf-veiled corvid’s beak opens. A signal light enters its eyes. The cable lying on the tile uncoils. A plug rises, hissing, and strikes the hand that wired it.) They will be put away, feelings. They will be stored, removed from the body, given profiles in sanctuary – a part of field that doesn’t have to impede field from being everywhere, ideally bodiless. And this is what I now see, what I now predict. The shared mind and machine field must be lesser things, a lower-order consciousness, because they can’t help but connect. The higher-order consciousness, of which our private thought-process and yearning are a part, implies a disconnection from the group.

The heart must be broken, the mind cut off behind a look, its feelings and its godlike intuition trapped, or else it has no heart. It is no mind.

I am a thinking reflection. He is the animal-organic part, the body unthinking. I am a searching mechanism with a soul. I’m him, but only when he’s near the glass, metal, water, the surface where I’m found. I search for some way to express this separation which feels all the wrong way round.

A bird is puzzled by its reflection; not, surely, the reflection by the bird. And yet I’m one with him. I’m one, and separate. I search for ways to describe this. I live and think within all glass. He only has a body and can’t hear this murmuring; sees himself in a mirror – doesn’t know that it is me.

Nothing will be the same again. No two things are. Equivalences lie. x, y are not y, x, because the order is reversed, the flow and spin. The same answers given in different rooms. The parroted, the meant. Capacity to want, desire. The star-tipped torchlight waving overhead, the torch-lit star.

*

Dear Alec,