The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman Read online

  Proposition: Time is a serial composition of apparently indivisible instants.

  Since the inception of the mode of consciousness we refer to as ‘the world’, man has always thought of time as in itself a movement forward, an onward flow leaving only a little debris behind it. Evanescence is the essence of time. And since temporality is the medium in which this mode of consciousness has itself been expressed, since time is, as it were, the canvas on which we ourselves are painted, the empirical investigation of the structure of time poses certain acute methodological problems. Could the Mona Lisa turn round, scratch her own background and then submit to a laboratory analysis the substance she found under her nail?

  No, indeed!

  Now this analogy, a striking one, implies that all phenomena are necessarily temporal in nature and roll forward en masse on wheels at the corners of the four-square block of space-time they occupy, shoulder to shoulder and bearing always at their backs the wall against which they all must meet that shooting-squad, mortality. Yet this model of the world does not make even so much as the formal acknowledgement of the synthesizable aspect of time as was made to space by the introduction of perspective into painting. In other words, we knew so little about the geometry of time – let alone its physical properties – that we could not even adequately simulate the physical form of so much as a single instant.

  The introduction of cinematography enabled us to corral time past and thus retain it not merely in the memory – at best, a falsifying receptacle – but in the objective preservative of a roll of film. But, if past, present and future are the dimensions of time, they are notoriously fluid. There is no tension in the tenses and yet they are always tremulously about to coagulate. The present is a liquid jelly which settles into a quivering, passive mass, the past, as soon as – if not sooner than – we are aware of it as the present. Yet this mass was intangible and existed only conceptually until the arrival of the preservative, cinema.

  The motion picture is usually regarded as only a kind of shadow play and few bother to probe the ontological paradoxes it presents. For it offers us nothing less than the present tense experience of time irrefutably past. So that the coil of film has, as it were, lassooed inert phenomena from which the present had departed, and when projected upon a screen, they are granted a temporary revivification.

  My student, Mendoza, offered me some investigations along these lines to justify the many hours he spent each day in the neighbourhood fleapits gazing at the panorama of revived phenomena with glazed, visionary eyes. Once he remarked to me in conversation: ‘Lumière was not the father of the cinema; it was Sergeant Bertrand, the violator of graves.’

  The images of cinematography, however, altogether lack autonomy. Locking in programmed patterns, they merely transpose time past into time present and cannot, by their nature, respond to the magnetic impulses of time future for the unachievable future which does not exist in any dimension, but nevertheless organizes phenomena towards its potential conclusions. The cinematographic model is one of cyclic recurrences alone, even if these recurrences are instigated voluntarily, by the hand of man viz. the projectionist, rather than the hand of fate. Though, in another sense, the action of time is actually visible in the tears, scratches and thumbprints on the substance of the film itself, these are caused only by the sly, corrosive touch of mortality and, since the print may be renewed at will, the flaws of ageing, if retained, increase the presence of the past only by a kind of forgery, as when a man punches artificial worm-holes into raw wood or smokes shadows of fresh paint with a candle to produce an apparently aged artefact.

  Mendoza, however, claimed that if a thing were sufficiently artificial, it became absolutely equivalent to the genuine. His mind puffed out ideas like the dandelion seed-head his chevelure so much resembled but we did not take any of his ideas seriously, not one of us, not any of them. Yet Hoffman refined Mendoza’s initially crude hypotheses of fissile time and synthetic authenticity and wove them together to form another mode of consciousness altogether. But we did not know that. We were content to laugh at Mendoza. We laughed uproariously.

  He dreamed of fissile time – of exploding the diatonic scale with its two notes, past and present, into a chromatic fanfare of every conceivable tense and many tenses at present inconceivable because there is no language to describe them. He produced sheet after sheet of mathematics in an exceedingly neurotic script to prove to me that time was amenable to the rigours of scientific analysis as any other notion; and, indeed, he convinced me, at least, that time was elastic for it always seemed to stretch out to eternity as I read them through!*

  His attitude to abstractions was this: abstractions only were true because, since they did not exist, they could be proved or disproved entirely at the whim of the investigator. How his wild eyes flashed as he spoke!

  By the end of his sophomore year, Mendoza was the clown of the senior common room. We looked forward to his essays much as London clubmen look forward to their weekly Punch. How we chuckled richly over our port as I read aloud the choicest tidbits! His classmates mocked him, too. Only Hoffman, with his Teutonic lack of humour, listened to the outrageous Mendoza with a straight face. In time, he and Mendoza became almost inseparable, though they made a strangely ill-assorted couple and together gave an impression of vaudeville rather than the laboratory for Mendoza sported flowing hair, abundant neckties, herbaceous shirts and suits of black velvet while his gleaming, impassioned gaze seemed to warn one to weave a circle round him thrice before approaching him. As for Hoffman, he was a model of propriety, well starched and stiffly suited, one of his cold, blue eyes wedged open with a monocle. His handshake was moist and chill; his smile was alpine in its austerity and he always smelled of medicated soap. He was already unnaturally brilliant and even his teachers feared him. Mendoza was his only friend.

  They worked together and they played together. Soon we began to hear the most disreputable stories of their exploits in the red light quarter. Now Mendoza had a streak of Moorish blood and read Arabic fluently. He followed up certain hints from obscure books and became more and more obsessed with the nature of time in relation to the sexual act. At length he devised a hilarious thesis concerning the fissile/tensile nature of the orgasm. He claimed that the actual discharge took place in neither past, present nor future but precipitated an exponential polychromatic fusion of all three, especially if impregnation were effected. He submitted to me an end of term paper titled, I recall: ‘The Fissile Potential of the Willed Annihilation of the Orgiastic Instant’. It described an experiment utilizing the talents of seven of the town’s most notorious whores and, if it proved nothing else, it showed that Mendoza was something of an athlete while his technical assistant, none other than our decorous Hoffman, possessed, against all appearances, quite remarkable sexual versatility.

  Mendoza described his results as ‘the perpetration of a durationless state possibly synthesizing infinity’. He claimed their enthusiasm had set up such intense vibrations every clock in the establishment burst its case. He submitted to the university bills not only for the services of the prostitutes but also for those of the clock-repairer. So we dismissed Mendoza. When he learned he had been sent down, he broke into the laboratory and smeared faeces all over the blackboards. After that, we heard no more of him. But Hoffman, of course, kept in touch with him. Indeed, it was the beginning of the first great period of their research…

  And so on and so on and so on.

  As he grew used to my continual presence, he gave me such heady blends of theory and biography three or four times a week and various forgotten tricks of the lecturer came back to him. He often hunted for forgotten chalk to draw diagrams on a blackboard which existed only in a memory of the university and bunched his fingers in an invisible academic gown. I found these gestures unspeakably moving. I filled his glass and listened.

  But none of these gobbets and scraps issuing from a mind blunted by age and misfortune made much sense to me. Sometimes a whole h
our of discourse plashed down on me like rain and I would jot down from it only a single phrase that struck me. Perhaps: ‘Things cannot be exhausted’; or ‘In the imagination, nothing is past, nothing can be forgotten.’ Or: ‘Change is the only valid response to phenomena.’ I grew aware that Hoffman’s Phenomenal Dynamics involved a hypothetical dialectic between mutuality and transformation; the discovery of a certain formula which speeded up the processes of mutability; and that he had often spoken to his teacher of a ‘continuous improvisation of correlatives’. But, for the most part, I was utterly mystified. And I would toast a little cheese on top of the stove, to eat with bread and beer for our suppers, rumble vague, indeterminate sounds I hoped the old man would interpret as those of a quickened interest and brood upon the changes I myself had undergone.

  ‘Mutable combinations,’ he would say, swig beer and belch. Then, scooping up a handful of magic samples, he tossed them in the air as in the game of five-stones, letting them fall with such solemnity I was almost tempted to believe, with him, that the haphazard patterns they made as they fell at the blind dictation of chance were echoed in flesh in the beleaguered city which, he informed me with irritation, was still managing to hold out.

  Now and then I asked a few questions, though these were mainly concerned with the facts of Hoffman rather than his conceptual framework.

  ‘Why did he and Mendoza quarrel?’

  ‘Over a woman,’ he said. ‘Or so Hoffman once told me, in a voice choked either with tears or with anger – I could not tell which for by then, of course, I was blind and reduced to nothing more than a cipher in his formulae.’

  It was a long time before he told me that woman had been the mother of Albertina.

  ‘And what happened to Mendoza?’

  ‘In the end, he spattered himself over infinity in a chromatic arc, like a rainbow.’

  Well, nobody would ever know, now, the cause of the fire that destroyed his itinerant time machine!

  And then there were my other distractions.

  Madame la Barbe was as reticent as a young girl. She raised the flap of the tent, deposited her gifts of cake, smoking pots of delicious coffee and now and then a savoury cassoulet on our counter and vanished with the most fleeting of smiles. Without her beard, she would have been a fat, aproned, hard-mouthed, grim-visaged French countrywoman who never stirred one half kilometre from her native ville. Bearded, she was immensely handsome, widely travelled and the loneliest woman in the world. She sat in her caravan and picked out sentimental songs on a parlour organ, crooning the wistful words of love and longing in a high-pitched, over-elocuted voice. Slowly, when she saw I found her neither risible nor disgusting, she started to confide in me.

  She had only the one dream: to wake up one day in the town where she was born, in her bed of childhood, the geranium on the windowsill, the jug and basin on the wash-stand. And then die. I found her sympathetic. She exposed her difference to make her living and had done so for thirty years, yet each time the gawping peasants came into her booth as she posed for them in white satin and artificial orange blossom, the Bearded Bride felt all the pangs of defloration although, of course, she was a virgin. ‘Each time,’ she said in her prettily broken accent, ‘a fresh violation. One is penetrated by their eyes.’

  The beard appeared with her breasts; she was thirteen. Never a pretty girl, always bulky and dowdy, she had hoped only to pass unnoticed. Perhaps a neighbouring tradesman in that grey, sedate town in the Loire valley where all the chairs wore antimacassars and even the shadows fell with propriety might marry her for her dot. Her father was a notary. The daughter took her first communion with a blue stubble of five o’clock shadow showing under the veil. The mother died of cancer and the father took to peculation. He was found out; he slit his throat with the common razor. It was an utterly commonplace tragedy. She started to live alone in the echoing, narrow house, hiding behind the shutters. She was fifteen. Soon there was nothing left to sell and the charity of the neighbours was exhausted. A circus came to town. Trembling, in mourning, muffled in veils, she visited the ringmaster and next day she was a working woman. She celebrated her sixteenth birthday at the carnival in Rio and had visited in the course of her career all the fabled cities of the world from Shanghai to Valparaiso, Tangiers to Tashkent.

  It was not her beard that made her unique; it was the fact that, never, in all her life, had she known a single moment’s happiness.

  ‘This,’ she would say, touching the frilled leaves of one of her potted plants, ‘is my monstra deliciosa, my delicious monster.’

  And her eyes would involuntarily stray to the little mirror on the wall. She had fixed one of her black mourning rosettes to its gilt frame. I visited her caravan with great circumspection and never without a small gift – a bunch of violets, candy, a French novel picked up in a second-hand bookstore. In return, she brewed me hot chocolate and played and sang for me.

  ‘Plaisirs d’amour ne durent plus qu’un moment…’

  But she herself had known no pleasure at all. She was a perfect lady. She had the wistful charm of a flower pressed inside a perfectly enormous book. She always used to call me ‘Désiré’. It was always refreshingly boring to call on her, like calling on an aunt one had loved very much in childhood.

  In the oracular limbo between sleeping and waking, my master once cried out: ‘Everything depends on persistence of vision.’ Did he refer to the peep-show alone or to the phantoms in the city? I took advantage of his blindness and his sleeps to go through the set of samples and, as far as I could, make a comprehensive catalogue of them, though this self-imposed inventory was complicated by the difficulty of ascertaining how many samples there were, since the numbers in the sack varied constantly and the work of classifying was almost impossible because they were never the same if you looked at them twice.

  I lost the notebooks containing the rough, inadequate list in the earthquake which, according to Mendoza’s theory, was already organizing the events which preceded it with the formal rhetoric of tragedy. And, with reference to the landslide, I do not know if I would remember Madame la Barbe as so pitiful, Mamie Buckskin as so ferocious or my master with such affection if I did not know, with hindsight, how soon they were all going to die. However, I remember that, however much the symbolic content of the samples altered, they all came in one of three forms e.g.:

  (a) wax models, often with clockwork mechanisms, as described;

  (b) glass slides, as already described;

  and:

  (c) sets of still photographs which achieved the effect of movement by means of the technique of the flicker books of our childhood.

  These sets usually consisted of six or seven different aspects of the same scene which might be, typically, a nursemaid mutilating a baby, toasting him over a nursery fire and then gobbling him up with every appearance of relish. As one moved from machine to machine watching the various panels of this narrative unfold each one another facet of the same action, one had the impression of viewing an event in, as it were, temporal depth. The photographs themselves had every appearance of authenticity. I was particularly struck by a series showing a young woman trampled to death by wild horses because the actress bore some resemblance to Dr Hoffman’s own daughter. There were also pictures of natural catastrophes such as the San Francisco earthquake, but I did not feel a shudder of anticipatory dread as I handled these; indeed, I even played through one set of theme and variations upon the subject of an earthquake through the machine, when my master was away drinking. And perhaps I should not have meddled with the machines, just as he warned me, at that… though Albertina told me her father always retreated in front of the boundaries of nature, so I do not think I had anything to do with the landslide, in reality.

  From my investigations in the sack, I came to the conclusion that the models did indeed represent everything it was possible to believe by the means of either direct simulation or a symbolism derived from Freud. They were also, or so the peep-show proprietor belie
ved, exceedingly numinous objects. He would never let me put them in the machines for him; he had even forbidden me to peek in the bag.

  ‘Just let me catch you poking in my sack,’ he remarked, ‘and I’ll cut your hands off.’

  But I was too cunning to be caught.

  Mamie Buckskin lived alone in a rifle range. Every morning she set up a row of whisky bottles along a nearby fence and shot the neck off each one. So she practised her art. She claimed she could shoot the tail-feathers off a pheasant in flight; she claimed she could shoot out the central heart of the five of hearts at twenty paces; she claimed she could shoot a specified apple from the bough of a specified tree at forty paces; and she often lit my cigarettes for me with a single, transverse bullet. Her rifles were fire-spitting extensions of her arms and her tongue also spat fire. She always dressed herself in fringed leather garments of the pioneers of the old West yet her abundant yellow hair was always curled and swept up in the monumental style of the saloon belle while a very feminine locket containing a picture of her dead, alcoholic mother always bounced between her lavish breasts. She was a paradox – a fully phallic female with the bosom of a nursing mother and a gun, death-dealing erectile tissue, perpetually at her thigh. She boasted a collection of more than fifty antique or historic rifles, pistols and revolvers, including specimens once owned by Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday and John Wesley Hardin. She spent three hours a day polishing them, oiling them and lovingly fingering each one. She was in love with guns. She was twenty-eight years old and as impervious as if shellacked.