sinopia

2018.03.15

“Groveler, are you, Thing?” the little boy said.

“Look, it’s just an idea. I’m only giving you the benefit of my experience.” He put his glasses back on. The child’s large dark eyes swam into his. For a moment he thought of the dove, trapped in its cage. He had the feel of the feathers on his hands, soft and dead: the little bones without pulse. He brushed his hand down his coat.

The child had a stutter. It made him uneasy. In fact there was something about the whole situation that upset him. He felt that the modus vivendi he had achieved was under threat; that life would become more complicated, and that his affairs had taken a turn for the worse.

They begged for one of the doves, to take home and keep for themselves. I know you, he said, you’ll be tired of it within a day or two, you have to take care of them, they’re not dolls you know. They wouldn’t give up: Sunday after Sunday, bleating and whining. In the end he was persuaded. Aunt Eulalie bought a pretty gilt cage.

Within a few weeks the dove was dead. They had left the cage outside, there had been a storm. He imagined the little bird dashing itself in panic against the bars, its wings broken, the thunder rolling overhead. When Charlotte told him, she hiccupped and sobbed with remorse; but in five minutes, he knew, she would run out into the sunshine and forget it. “We put the cage outside so he would feel free,” she sniffed.

“He was not a free bird. He was a bird that needed looking after. I told you. I was right.”

But his rightness gave him no pleasure. It left a bitter taste in his mouth.

This morning I dreamt: I had a long time ago commissioned someone to make me a waterwheel and now I no longer wanted it but he was still working on it. The wheel lay there and it was bad; it was notched all around, perhaps in order to put the blades in (as in the motor of a steam turbine). He explained to me what a tiresome task it was, and I thought: I had ordered a straightforward paddlewheel, which would have been simple to make. The thought tormented me that the man was too stupid to explain to him or to make a better wheel, and that I could do nothing but leave him to it. I thought: I have to live with people to whom I cannot make myself understood. -- That is a thought that I actually do have often. At the same time with the feeling that it is my own fault.

‘The situation of the man, who so senselessly and badly worked on the waterwheel,’ he adds, ‘was my own in Manchester when I made what were, with hindsight, fruitless attempts at the construction of a gas turbine.’ But more than that, the dream is a picture of his present intellectual situation now that the Tractatus had been proved inadequate. There it lay: ineptly constructed and inadequate for the task, and still the man (himself or Ramsey?) was tinkering with it, performing the tiresome and pointless feat of making it still more elaborate, when what was really needed was a completely different, and simpler, kind of wheel.