suffer passively under ‘outside
forces’—to veer into any wind. As if . . .
“A market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could
create itself
—its own logic, momentum, style, from
inside.
Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened—that you had
dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The
illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can
do.
Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable. . . .”
“More Ouspenskian nonsense,” whispers a lady brushing by on the arm of a dock worker.
Odors of Diesel fuel and Sous le Vent mingle as they pass. Jessica Swanlake, a young
rosy girl in the uniform of an ATS private, noticing the prewar perfume, looks up,
hmm, the frock she imagines is about 15 guineas and who knows how many coupons, probably
from Harrods
and would do more for me
, she’s also sure. The lady, suddenly looking back over her shoulder, smiles oh, yes?
My gosh, did she hear? Around
this
place almost certainly.
Jessica’s been standing near the séance table with a handful of darts idly plucked
from the board on the wall, her head bent, pale nape and top vertebra visible above
the brown wool collar and through some of her lighter brown hair, fallen either side
along her cheeks. Brass throats and breasts warm to her blood, quake in the hollow
of her hand. She seems herself, gentling their feathered crosses, brushing with fingertips,
to have slid into a shallow trance. . . .
Outside, rolling from the east, comes the muffled rip of another rocket bomb. The
windows rattle, the floor shakes. The sensitive flame dives for shelter, shadows across
the table sent adance, darkening toward the other room—then it leaps high, the shadows
drawing inward again, fully two feet, and disappears completely. Gas hisses on in
the dim room. Milton Gloaming, who achieved perfect tripos at Cambridge ten years
ago, abandons his shorthand to rise and go shut the gas off.
It seems the right moment now for Jessica to throw a dart: one dart. Hair swinging,
breasts bobbing marvelously beneath each heavy wool lapel. A hiss of air, whack: into
the sticky fibers, into the dead center. Milton Gloaming cocks an eyebrow. His mind,
always gathering correspondences, thinks it has found a new one.
The medium, irritable now, has begun to drift back out of his trance. Anybody’s guess
what’s happening over on the other side. This sitting, like any, needs not only its
congenial circle here and secular, but also a basic, four-way entente which oughtn’t,
any link of it, be broken: Roland Feldspath (the spirit), Peter Sachsa (the control),
Carroll Eventyr (the medium), Selena (the wife and survivor). Somewhere, through exhaustion,
redirection, gusts of white noise out in the aether, this arrangement has begun now
to dissolve. Relaxation, chairs squeaking, sighs and throatclearings . . . Milton
Gloaming fusses with his notebook, shuts it abruptly.
Presently Jessica comes wandering over. No sign of Roger and she’s not sure he wants
her to come looking for him, and Gloaming, though shy, isn’t as horrid as some of
Roger’s other friends. . . .
“Roger says that now you’ll count up all those words you copied and graph them or
something,” brightly to head off any comment on the dart incident, which she’d rather
avoid. “Do you do it only for séances?”
“Automatic texts,” girl-nervous Gloaming frowns, nods, “one or two Ouija-board episodes,
yes yes . . . we-we’re trying to develop a vocabulary of curves—certain pathologies,
certain characteristic shapes you see—”
“I’m not sure that I—”
“Well. Recall Zipf’s Principle of Least Effort: if we plot the frequency of a word
P sub n against its rank-order
n
on logarithmic axes,” babbling into her silence, even her
forces’—to veer into any wind. As if . . .
“A market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could
create itself
—its own logic, momentum, style, from
inside.
Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened—that you had
dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The
illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can
do.
Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable. . . .”
“More Ouspenskian nonsense,” whispers a lady brushing by on the arm of a dock worker.
Odors of Diesel fuel and Sous le Vent mingle as they pass. Jessica Swanlake, a young
rosy girl in the uniform of an ATS private, noticing the prewar perfume, looks up,
hmm, the frock she imagines is about 15 guineas and who knows how many coupons, probably
from Harrods
and would do more for me
, she’s also sure. The lady, suddenly looking back over her shoulder, smiles oh, yes?
My gosh, did she hear? Around
this
place almost certainly.
Jessica’s been standing near the séance table with a handful of darts idly plucked
from the board on the wall, her head bent, pale nape and top vertebra visible above
the brown wool collar and through some of her lighter brown hair, fallen either side
along her cheeks. Brass throats and breasts warm to her blood, quake in the hollow
of her hand. She seems herself, gentling their feathered crosses, brushing with fingertips,
to have slid into a shallow trance. . . .
Outside, rolling from the east, comes the muffled rip of another rocket bomb. The
windows rattle, the floor shakes. The sensitive flame dives for shelter, shadows across
the table sent adance, darkening toward the other room—then it leaps high, the shadows
drawing inward again, fully two feet, and disappears completely. Gas hisses on in
the dim room. Milton Gloaming, who achieved perfect tripos at Cambridge ten years
ago, abandons his shorthand to rise and go shut the gas off.
It seems the right moment now for Jessica to throw a dart: one dart. Hair swinging,
breasts bobbing marvelously beneath each heavy wool lapel. A hiss of air, whack: into
the sticky fibers, into the dead center. Milton Gloaming cocks an eyebrow. His mind,
always gathering correspondences, thinks it has found a new one.
The medium, irritable now, has begun to drift back out of his trance. Anybody’s guess
what’s happening over on the other side. This sitting, like any, needs not only its
congenial circle here and secular, but also a basic, four-way entente which oughtn’t,
any link of it, be broken: Roland Feldspath (the spirit), Peter Sachsa (the control),
Carroll Eventyr (the medium), Selena (the wife and survivor). Somewhere, through exhaustion,
redirection, gusts of white noise out in the aether, this arrangement has begun now
to dissolve. Relaxation, chairs squeaking, sighs and throatclearings . . . Milton
Gloaming fusses with his notebook, shuts it abruptly.
Presently Jessica comes wandering over. No sign of Roger and she’s not sure he wants
her to come looking for him, and Gloaming, though shy, isn’t as horrid as some of
Roger’s other friends. . . .
“Roger says that now you’ll count up all those words you copied and graph them or
something,” brightly to head off any comment on the dart incident, which she’d rather
avoid. “Do you do it only for séances?”
“Automatic texts,” girl-nervous Gloaming frowns, nods, “one or two Ouija-board episodes,
yes yes . . . we-we’re trying to develop a vocabulary of curves—certain pathologies,
certain characteristic shapes you see—”
“I’m not sure that I—”
“Well. Recall Zipf’s Principle of Least Effort: if we plot the frequency of a word
P sub n against its rank-order
n
on logarithmic axes,” babbling into her silence, even her
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