McGill August

DIRTY BITS

Easy question: where were you when you first discovered the Continuum? (The tautology of ‘first discovered’ is deliberate – there are many rediscoveries.) If the answer doesn’t come immediately to mind then, oh dear heaven, you’ve yet to experience the life-defining moment, and the next few dozen words are the most important you’ll ever read.

For me it happened in Miss Henderson’s classroom, Primary 6, on a hot Friday afternoon early in the summer of 1956. Miss Henderson had designated the last half-hour of the school week, 3.20 to 3.50, as Silent Reading Time – a torture hideous beyond the wildest devisings of the Portuguese Inquisition. I was drowsing, stuck on some Col or other, through John Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest. Beside me my best pal Pete Hughson, who prowled the outermost margins of literacy, had given up on the Gideon New Testament, having found none of the dirty bits I’d told him abounded in St Paul’s First Epistle to the Thessalonians. With his left hand he still held the book open, but with his right he’d snuck round to the back of his head, plucked out a louse, half-strangled it and laid it in a patch of sunlight on the desk, beside the inkwell. Now he was poking it with his index finger and enjoying its death-agonies.

“Lookit that wee bastit wriggling,” he whispered.

I wanted to reply and call him a midgie-raking bugger, but Miss Henderson looked in our direction and gave her wee cough that meant “one more word from either of you working-class tykes and I’ll Warm Your Fingers for you, weekend or no weekend”. She was from the Isle of Skye; she died last year, aged a hundred and six and still a virgin. So it was back to John Hunt, and the monstrous slow tick of my square-dialled luminous-faced watch. Pete dispatched his louse with a final squeeze and went off on the hunt for another one. I stared hard at the minute-hand, trying to detect its movement. “It’s twenty-five to four,” I said to myself. “Fifteen minutes till the bell. Soon enough it will be one second till the bell, a millionth of a second, a billionth, a trillionth, a squiggly-squillionth, but oh God, o horror of horrors – and here I have to resort to Poe-ish italics – it can never BE the bell! Ten-to-four, having no length, no dimensions of any kind, does not exist, and so can never happen! A time will come, call it five o’clock, when this torment will be over and there will be bread and damson jelly and sunshine, but ten-to-four will never have been.”

“Ten-to-four can never happen,” I told Pete as we walked home.

“Shup, ya daff bastit,” he said. He was still mad about Thessalonians. He became a butcher in Australia and as far as I know he’s still there, carving up the kangaroos, a Continuum-virgin.

But for me there was nothing left but the hopeless descent into addiction. I wish somebody could have told me that Zeno and Aristotle and a million other old foreign punters had been there before me, but we weren’t big on the Greeks up number thirty and I already had a reputation as a weirdo, so I suffered in silence the pain of the lonesome genius. I imagined having an infinite store of inch-thick slabs and piling them one by one into a column. When would my low column become a high one? When would I stop being able to jump from it with comfortable ease? The world became a nightmare of clines: when did poor become rich, thin become fat, ugly become beautiful, green become blue, a caress become a skull-shattering blow? How could a camel’s back be broken by a straw? How could Glasgow ever become Rutherglen?

There is, of course, no complete cure: once bitten by the Continuum, you remain a creature of infinitesimal gradation, incapable of giving an unequivocal answer to any question, an analogue animal increasingly at odds with an ever more digitalised world. You think old Heraclitus had it in a nutshell with “You can’t step into the same river twice”, then you discover that Cratylus dazzlingly trumped him with “You can’t step into the same river once”. (That’s my second-favourite remark of all time, after Shaw’s, “I can’t stand men and women.”)

And weakened by the infection, you become easy prey to related viruses, such as Paradox. “All Scotsmen are liars,” says the Scotsman. “And that’s the truth.” You weep for Tristram Shandy, trying to write up his life but living it faster than he writes it, so condemned to be forever chasing his own tail; for the Red Queen, running as hard as she can to stay in the same place; for poor old Yossarian, condemned to an infinite number of missions in the hostile Italian skies. Last month on the Hamnavoe, ten minutes out of Stromness and just rounding the north end of Hoy, we heard this on the tannoy: “Ladies and gentlemen, please ignore this announcement: we are merely testing the vessel’s audio systems.” Dangerous enough, but damn me if they didn’t repeat it eleven more times. By the time we reached Scrabster about half the passengers, including most of the younger ones, unused to such intense doses of impossibility, had died of Exploded Head Syndrome.

All you can do is cling to the fragile raft of sanity, and that means finding heroes, models of good sense. I’ve settled for Richard Porson (1750-1808), who was able to recite the complete works of Milton (Latin and English?) backwards as well as forwards. I’m trying to emulate his feat, as a prophylactic against Alzheimer’s. I owe my knowledge of him to my Odyssey of Oddities, from which I have also plucked the following problem, especially interesting for me because it elicited from my wife what must surely be the wrongest answer ever made. How long would it take to make all the possible arrangements of 15 books on a shelf, at the rate of one change per minute?

“Oh, ages,” said Morag.
“How long?”

“Hours.”

“How many hours?”

“About three.”

The correct answer is 2,487,996 years. Choose your favourite fifteen titles and try it.

Which reminds me: somewhere nearby on the Two Ravens Press blog you’ll find Sharon’s disquisition on Two Ravens covers. Reading it, I recollected a small ding-dong we’d had about which of us had the poncier, pseudier title – me with my Most Glorified Strip of Bunting or her with her Long Delirious Blah-blah-blah. She offered a simple word-count, putting me ahead at six-five. I countered with the fact that her effort had more lexically pregnant items – surely a more reliable indicator of ponciness? I claim fifteen-love.

Not that it matters: I gave up the search for the perfect title when I realised that Thurber had already completed the quest way back in the thirties, with The Dog that Bit People.

No point trying to improve on that, is there?