SCHRÖDINGER'S CAT v.4.9.1

Chapter 2 - THE GREEKS

Schrödinger's Cat had always believed in multiple universes, and by logical inference, in multiple existences. For instance, he believed he had himself had another existence as a post-Impressionist painter. While in the guise of this alter-ego the name he had gone under was Seurat, though most people who knew him well, and even casual acquaintances, had called him Georges. Not that Schrödinger's Cat could paint, or even draw. Somehow his claws always seemed to get in the way. Another dead end in the labyrinth of evolution, he rationalised, in his own, philosophical way.

Not that being unable to paint bothered him. He enjoyed being a conceptual rather than a practicing artist, no less a conceptual post-Impressionist artist - a little known fact, that such a creature should exist. He just sat around all day conceptualising the large canvasses covered in tiny points of complementary colour he would have painted, had he actually been born a Frenchman in the year 1859…and had he not been impeded in this ambition by the vagaries of evolution, nor been the fluffy figment of imagination of a felicidal atomic-physicist from Vienna named Erwin.

Georges was just happy his name had not been passed down to Posterity as Erwin's Cat.

Back in England, Harry did not feel like dwelling on the passing of his father, nor on the events that had preceded his death. He did not want to risk losing his certainties in the murky realms of the metaphysical, and chose instead to reject any explanations intuition might offer in favour of cold, hard facts, at least what Harry perceived as the facts. His father was dead; he, drug-dealing gambler Harry Lion, for whatever reason, and in response to whatever stimulus, was going straight. More than that, he was going home. He did not want to get drawn into the realms of Ouija boards and psychic mumbo-jumbo, or contemplate too deeply on the potential implications of his father having known he was about to die. All Harry wanted to do was to sort out the things that needed sorting, and then to get on with the rest of his life.

Strangely, he no longer felt any inclination for gambling. Instead of spending his nights hunched over a green baize table, imprisoned in a cone of light made almost tangible with smoke, trying to detect certainties in the unknowable void, he now went to parties, to meet people, to talk to and get to know them, and not just to maintain contacts or garner information; or he went to the cinema, where he would happily sit for hours, in semi-darkness, watching black-and-white films with sub-titles about people and feelings and relationships; or he would sit in local pubs and cafés, talking to, or just listening to ordinary people. Even at the parties, he would often just stand and watch and listen. Harry suddenly found himself interested in people, in total strangers, in what made them tick.

It was at one of these parties, in a featureless house in an ordinary street lined on both sides with similar, nondescript houses, somewhere in the bland suburbs of North London, that Harry and Alvira Starling met. Later, it would seem strange to him that Alvira should have come into his life at the particular moment she did. He had not then heard of Carl Jung's theories of Synchronicity and the subconscious will. Their meeting had therefore seemed of no consequence to him at the time. Alvira had been standing alone, literally a receding wallflower, and obviously very much out of her depth. Harry had been alone too - the tall blond with the impressive décolletage whom he had been talking to had gone off to exchange inanities with someone else. Tonight, for some reason, a watching brief did not seem sufficient to satisfy Harry’s needs. He wanted to talk to someone, about politics, sport, or the weather, it did not matter what, and Alvira was the only other person in the room who was not engaged in kissing, or dancing, or in conversation with someone else.

Alvira was tall, slender, rangy almost; her shoulders slightly stooped. It was obvious from how she stood that she was sensitive about her height, and from the way she dressed Harry already had her marked down as an intellectual, or at best some kind of social worker, even before she spoke. Not really Harry's type at all. But beneath the subdued floral print dress and the beige cardigan done up with one button at the level of her hips, Harry had discerned a more than passable figure, and partly concealed behind the wire-rimmed glasses, within the tightly trimmed helmet of mousy hair, he had noticed, she did have a very pretty face.

Finding himself drawn to Alvira, if only by the reticent nature of her charms, Harry decided to approach her. Usually, when Harry approached someone (other, that is, than with Sammy and Tammy), being a not unattractive chap, his approaches were well received. On this occasion though, he was in for a surprise. Harry did not know this, though he really should have suspected it, if only from the way Alvira was standing, and the fact that she was alone. There had to be some reason why a woman like her, any woman for that matter, should be standing alone in the middle of the capital city of England, on the perimeter of a crowded room.

The reason was simple enough, if only Harry had taken the time to watch and listen. If only he had taken the time to think.

The reason was that Alvira Starling was an island. In fact, she was a veritable archipelago of islands - not flung wide upon the ocean of the world, but stacked high upon one another, an embattled, fragmented pinnacle towering into the sky. Who but reckless gambler Harry would have dared approach that soaring edifice, let alone have attempted to scale its daunting slopes? The white cliffs of blessed Albion itself, which underlay the outer limits of that pinnacle, demarking the point where Alvira ended and the rest of the world began, intimidating as they were, were as nothing compared to the upper redoubts and embrasures the would-be interloper would have to breach in order to gain access to her lofty world.

Alvira Starling was an island to anyone, or to anything real that tried to approach her. She was even an island to herself.

She spent her working days, and many of her free days too, ensconced in the archival island of the faculty of philosophy, cradled within the architectural island of the stone buildings of Cambridge University, marooned in a womb-like wooden cubicle, examining islands of ossified thought. In short, Alvira lived her life swaddled and protected within the intellectual island of Academe. She had even bought a house on the geographical island of Ely, an insular swell of ground, breasting the broad, becalmed ocean of the fen-land landscape. And all of this dizzying structure rooted firmly in the soil of the physical island of that native Albion, white-skirted virgin that she was, set firm against the world.

And here Alvira was, alone at a party where nobody knew or cared about her, thrust into the mundane world of the metropolis, surrounded by hordes of pagans and their materialistic gods and beliefs and rituals, deprived of the security of her insular defences, hence utterly defenceless, and utterly alone.

All of this, this geography of isolation, Harry was about to discover for himself.

“Hi. I’m Harry. And who are you?” he had said, as jauntily as he dared. The look of disdain he received as reply told him he really should not have asked.

“I know let me guess. I’m good at names. Felicity? Audrey? Fran…?

“Please. It’s Alvira. Don’t you have anything better to do with your time?” Harry decided it would be best not to answer that honestly.

Harry, expansive American that he was, had quickly found himself alternately despising and pitying Alvira for her insularity. Somewhere, he realised within a few minutes of starting to talk to her, and without knowing exactly how or when, he must have posed a threat to the cherished bastions Alvira had erected around herself to give some stability to her life. Perhaps it had been his glib dismissal of all academics as inaccessible and unworldly zombies, or his reasoned disclaimers on the total anachronism of the English way of life. Perhaps it had been his utter ignorance of her much-beloved philosophers - those wise, and aged, and ostensibly asexual men who Alvira deemed to have been long enough dead to no longer pose a physical threat to her. Or perhaps he had inadvertently - if not entirely unintentionally - breached the first of those sexual redoubts she had raised against him, or against any other innocent, charming, slick, knicker-groping, sexist bastard like him, as Alvira perceived it, who happened to come along. Either way, by the time Harry came to ask her about the book she told him she had come to London to research at the British Library, Alvira was herself not only an impregnable island, but also, to Harry at least, an exceedingly closed book.

"You wouldn't be interested," she had said, looking resolutely at the floor.

"Come on, I'd really like to know," Harry had insisted.

“It’s too complicated to explain. You wouldn’t want to know.”

"Sure I would. Why else would I have asked?"

"I'd rather not talk about it. We're just different kinds of people." Implying, of course, having known Harry for all of seven minutes, and therefore knowing him for exactly what he was, that the book - her inner thoughts and values made tangible, and therefore vulnerable - was too important, or too sacred to be exposed to Harry's irreverent glance. Harry pressed her once, twice, but Alvira refused to say anything more about it. Harry felt he had been unfairly pre-judged, and the conversation had trundled on laboriously from there for a while, as Harry trawled through the wreckage of the battle-field of polite conversation, trying to find some unshattered remnant of dignity that might offer hope of a truce at least. After about five minutes Harry had surrendered and said good-bye, and had gone off to get himself another, sorely needed drink.

Later that night though, Alvira was to prove more forgiving. Sometime after his third or fourth glass of wine Harry had found her, still alone, still standing in the same spot where he had left her, and for some reason he did not fully understand, he had started to talk to her again. This time she had been more responsive, though Harry still thought it best to steer clear of the thorny subject of her book. After he had offered and fetched her a palliative glass of wine, he had even found himself expressing an interest in learning more about her unworldly Greeks. It was something he had said on the spur of the moment, though even as he spoke, he had realised he actually meant it – an aspiration driven, no doubt, by the growing need he felt to understand more of the world, of what made it what it was. Uncharacteristically, or intemperately, Alvira had told him she would help.

At the time, Harry had thought she was only saying that to deflect him, to humour him, or to make him leave her alone, but for all her lofty entrenchments, and for all her other, more minor limitations, Alvira Starling was a woman of her word. She gave him a number where she was staying. The next day, sober once more, yet still fully committed to his new-found thirst for knowledge, Harry called her up.

"Hi! It's me, Harry Lion. From the party last night. Remember?" Harry thought he heard a small groan of panic on the other end of the line before he heard Alvira's voice saying yes, of course she remembered, how could she forget.

"So, how are we going to do this?" Harry asked enthusiastically.

"Do what...?" Alvira asked, much less enthusiastically, her more characteristic reservations surfacing again, sensing in the light of day the dark, ominous shadow of sexuality looming Munch-like at her shoulder.

"Philosophy, my dear. How do you plan to turn me into a fully paid-up philosopher?"

"Philanderer more like it. Listen Harry. God I am not, and a philosopher you will never be..."

"You know what I mean."

"Be more precise then. Think about what you say; say what you mean. Philosophy has to do with the meaning of words, the details. Language cannot be used loosely if you want to express a truth. " Harry apologised, as precisely as he could, feeling himself suitably reproved.

"So how ARE we going to do this?"

"How we are going to do this - if you really are serious - is, I give you the titles of the books, you read them, and we see what happens. If you need any help you know where I am, but please..., don't call me every day."

"I promise. Better than that..., I'll make you proud of me."

"The only men I have ever been proud of are all dead," Alvira said, perfectly calmly, perfectly straight. A cold shiver ran up and down Harry's spine. The image of a cross-dressing Norman Bates loomed before him, knife in hand, silhouetted against a white shower curtain, as his own precious life blood swirled towards the plug-hole in dark rivulets around his feet. He hurriedly asked Alvira for the titles of the first books he would need, and said he would call her in a few days.

For the ancient Greeks, or so Schrödinger's Cat had read, there had been no such thing as a separate Church, or religion, independent of the State. The Church was religion; religion was the State. It was that straightforward, for the ancient Greeks, at least. Schrödinger's Cat thought this sounded a dangerous relationship, one not at all conducive to the freedom of rational thought.

It seemed to him too that the Sumerians who had preceded the Greeks had been more than content with their Mythos - an image of the world perceived and understood through myths and the powers of intuition alone. They had looked at the world, and had understood it, and their own place within it, for what it was. For them, that had been enough. They had seen no reason, had felt no desire to intellectualise that which was obviously so of its own accord. Not so, the logically thinking Greeks. They, it seems, had felt too keenly the need to apply their newly acquired powers of reasoning to understanding the world in which they found themselves to exist.

So, along had come the Ionian, the Abderian, the Ephesian, and the Athenian philosophers, who in their greater wisdom informed the other citizens that their Gods, their Fates and Demiurges did not, could not exist. Theirs, they said, was the only true version of what reality was. Sadly, for the progress of the cause of reason they claimed to espouse, each had a different interpretation of that reality, but people had started to believe the things they were saying. They had started to believe in the power of the Logos - the new religion of logic and reason.

They had all started to think, in the same self-deluding way.

Thus, the new Logos soon became the new Mythos of the rationalising mind; a world picture derived through the application of reason supplanted a world picture based on intuition and myth. Schrödinger's Cat thought that somewhere in the process something valuable had been lost. The ancient mythology had been banished to the realms of mumbo-jumbo and the subconscious; so-called common-sense, rationality had prevailed.

Before he realised what was happening, Alvira Starling had become for Harry his remote, though seemingly necessary life-line, his umbilical cord, tying him into the pulse of those early Greeks. Her instruction, it could be justly said, was no more than cursory. She did no more than point him in the right direction, by phone mostly, or very occasionally by abbreviated note. As she had said, she simply told him what books to read, which authorities to refer to, which texts were seminal to later thought. The rest she left up to him. Sometimes she did deign to discuss what he had learned, and whether the conclusions he had drawn were logical, or totally wrong. For Alvira there could be no possible state between these two extremes. Being different kinds of people, of course, Harry's interpretations were almost invariably wrong.

Still, Harry applied himself stoically to his task. Often he despaired of it. Sometimes, infrequently, he thought he understood - could finally discern the coarser threads of the intricate pattern of ideas and concepts and relationships that Alvira assured him did contain the seeds of all truth - and gradually, as the few days he had thought he would need to tidy up those "loose ends" spilled over into three and then four weeks, he managed to convince himself he knew what was going on.

This, then, is what Harry learned about those ancient Greeks, under the guidance of insular Alvira Starling, and in his own, inimitable way.

The Ionians had come first, as far as Harry could make out. They had lived in a place called Miletus, and were known as the Milesian school, though why with an 's' and not a 't' Harry could not figure out. Oh well, he thought, what's an 's' or a 't' between friends? The Milesians, apparently, had been the first to exercise what would now be described as rational thought. Their aim had been to discover the essential nature of everything - of all things that could be known in the world through the application of the senses. This, for the Milesians, really had meant all things; they saw no distinction between spirit and matter, and thought that even matter was alive, and an integral part of a universal whole.

The first of the Milesians had been named Thales. Thales believed that the primary stuff of existence was water. Another was called Anaximenes. Anaximenes thought the primary stuff was air. Then came Anaximander. Harry was not sure of the correct way to pronounce it, but he was crazy about his name. Anaximander saw the world as a warring concourse of all the opposing elements. From the evidence of his senses (a risky act of faith, seemingly, for any philosopher worth his salt to make), he concluded that the primary stuff could not therefore be any single one of these. Good-bye Anaximenes' air as candidate; good-bye Thales' water as putative primary stuff of life.

There was something in Anaximander's theories that Harry liked almost as much as he liked his name. Having demolished all rival theories, he proposed that the primary state of matter was an undifferentiated mass having limitless extent. This mass he called apeiron, and claimed it included all the elements - air and earth and fire and water - all present in their latent form. The apeiron, he said, was without boundaries, either internal or external. It was infinite and indivisible. Harry thought that, had he been able to read Greek, the Buddha would have smiled his inscrutable smile at this interpretation. Anaximander's apeiron sounded exactly like the Buddhist void.

Harry really did like Anaximander, apart from being crazy about his name. Anaximander had envisioned the earth as a cylinder, some twenty centuries before Columbus said the Earth was round. No-one had laughed at Anaximander's theory; it solved a problem that had long been puzzling all logically thinking Greeks. He placed his cylindrical earth at the centre of a spherical universe. Thus situated, it stayed where it was; being equidistant from all points of the universe, it had no cause or reason to move. There was one other thing about Anaximander that appealed to Harry. He had thought the origin of life was to be found in the action of warmth upon water; that the first living creatures were fish-like, and that all other creatures had evolved from this primary form.

"The way I see it...," Harry said when he phoned Alvira one day for an impromptu tutorial, trying to impress her with the ability he was acquiring to trace the thread of logical thought as it wound its way through the tangled skein of history.

"...this Anaximander was a sort of proto-Darwinist!"

"His ideas were reflected in some of Darwin's theories," Alvira corrected him.

"And Empedocles?"

"Yes..., now he did believe, like Darwin, in the survival of the fittest forms."

"Wasn't he the one who said there were two motive forces..., strife and love?" Alvira did not reply. She was beginning to know Harry better. She was not going to allow herself to be so easily drawn.

Pythagoras came next. Harry had known Pythagoras had something to do with triangles; the area of a triangle was equal to the sum of its equal sides, or something like that. Pythagoras had lived in Croton, high on the instep of the boot of Italy. His school of thought had therefore come to be known as the Italian school.

"You do realise Pythagoras was a misogynist?" Harry ribbed Alvira. "He lumped females together with darkness and plurality as being bad."

"He elevated spirit above the mortal flesh," Alvira replied, again refusing to be drawn, but Harry was already off, reeling her in on another line.

"OK! So, what about this thing he had with numerical order in music? And a one..., and a two! And a one, two, three, four! Something like that, or what?"

"Not quite Harry. He took it as proof of the order, or limit, to be found in the beauty of the kosmos. The imposition of mathematical limit on the elements of sound proved to him that harmony could be achieved, even from discord."

"I wonder what he would have made of us?" Harry countered.

"Can you count to ten, Harry?" Alvira replied, and hung up before Harry had even got as far as two.

The next important thinker Harry picked out was a guy called Heraclitus. He had been the first, as far as Harry could make out, to have proposed the concept of this thing called the Logos. Heraclitus believed the world was in a state of eternal becoming, and that this perpetual process of change arose out of a cyclical interplay of opposites. Every pair of opposites, in Heraclitus' view of the universe, was a unity, and this unity he called the Logos. It seemed to Harry that what Heraclitus saw as a unity was, in reality, a duality. But then what did he know? He was just a retired gambler, one who had lost money often enough on a singleton ace to a pair.

Harry was so confused by this that he found himself skipping over the next few Greeks. Even their names had been dull. One of them, Parmenides, he did remember, had opposed everything Heraclitus had said. Parmenides had thought change was impossible; it was an illusion created by the senses, nothing less, nothing more. And there had been Empedocles, who had jumped into Mount Etna to prove his divinity. Apart from that, only one other name had stuck - Zeno - though other than having invented a famous paradox about a hare and a tortoise, Harry could remember nothing about what this Zeno had thought. He sounded to Harry more like a character from a comic book - something like, "Captain Zeno Conquers the Universe!" - but no pictures, and when it came down to it, not really worth the read.

Democritus was the next philosopher Harry took any notice of. Democritus had tried to reconcile the eternal becoming of Heraclitus with the unchanging being of Parmenides. Harry thought this probably made him a Dualist, though after his confusion with Heraclitus he was not entirely sure. Democritus believed there was a distinction between spirit and matter, that matter was composed of tiny particles called atoms, and that everything that occurred in the world occurred by chance. Harry could buy that last part, having found himself on numerous occasions the hapless victim of that elusive thing called chance. Democritus was said by some to have had a pal named Leucippus, though just as many claimed this Leucippus did not exist, that he was just a fictitious construct of someone's, maybe Democritus' imagination. Whatever, together or not, as the case may be, Democritus and Leucippus believed the whole of reality could be included within the concept of change. All of this was way back in the fifth century BC.

Two and a half thousand years, and several umptillian changes later, a bunch of wise Europeans had come up with the very same idea - about the world being composed of atoms - and had decided to call it their own. This earth-shattering discovery they had then used to try to shatter the Earth.

"Don't you find it strange that the theories of the Greeks all seem to have been picked up later by somebody else?" Harry asked Alvira.

"No! Why do you find it strange?"

"Well..., it either means they were right, or someone else keeps making the same mistakes and yet still manages to convince everyone they might be right."

"There are no absolutes in philosophy. There can be no right or wrong."

"That may be, but in the real world, I guess the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki wouldn't have needed much persuading about the right or wrong of what they were going through."

"Philosophers don't guess..., and anyway, that's a question of ethics."

"No, Alvira! That's a question of the little guy getting shafted to prove the right or wrong of some bigger guy's point of view."

"Good-bye Harry!" Alvira said, and hung up again.

Plato was an altogether different kettle of fish. He believed in function and in virtue, and in some things he called Ideal Forms. Want to cut a vine? Then get yourself a knife, is what wise old Plato said. Not just any old knife. Get one that cuts well, one that has been designed expressly to that end. This is its function, to cut; its virtue, to cut as well as it possibly can, to aspire to its Ideal Form. The same applied for eyes and ears, and even for Man himself - to see and hear as well as possible, to live as best he could. How many Greek knives, Harry wondered, had spent their working lives, fretting and striving, trying to live up to the performance standards laid down by an unknown cousin from an ethereal world? As for himself, Harry felt he had performed his function, all things considered, about as well as he could.

And then there was Aristotle. Everyone had heard of Aristotle, even ill-informed, under-achiever Harry Lion. Not many people though had much idea of what he had thought. After reading the books Alvira suggested, Harry concluded that (apart from having dismissed earth and air and fire and water as putative primary stuffs of life, replacing them with something he called the Fifth Essence - an immaterial, all-pervading substance, much like Anaximander’s apeiron, and the Buddhist Void), what Aristotle thought was that the true purpose of life could best be served by doing as little as one possibly could. Everything was evolving towards its final state of its own accord, he said, no need then either to hinder or help it on its way. Harry liked Aristotle almost as much as he liked Anaximander. Aristotle, the minimal-activist, sounded like Harry's sort of chap.

At the end of four weeks Harry felt he knew all he needed to know about the philosophies of the ancient Greeks, and was eager to know who and what came next.

The canvasses Schrödinger's Cat, Georges, the Post-Impressionist painter liked to imagine were of scenes in the parks in Paris on Sunday afternoons, or of the circus, with acrobats and horses, the enthralled faces of the crowd. Georges loved the circus, and Sunday afternoons in the park. The paintings he imagined were composed of small dabs - tiny paw-prints of colour - applied all over the surface of the canvas. These dabs were arranged in such a way that when seen from a distance they were no longer just dots of complementary colours, but together created the illusion of those circus horses and acrobats, of those Paris parks on Sunday afternoons. Georges often thought of his compositions as mathematical equations; sometimes he thought of them as musical too, which many would say is the same thing. He hoped someday someone might make a musical about his paintings, and call it something like "Sunday in the Park with Georges".

On reflection, Schrödinger's Cat thought his paintings would have met with the approval of Democritus. A confirmed Atomist, Georges' canvasses were composed of tiny particles of colour; he was certain his Greek forebear would have seen in them a perfect visual representation of what his own words had strived to say. Plato, on the other hand, Georges felt equally sure, would have condemned them for diverging too far from his ideal of what a picture of reality should be. Surprisingly, for a mathematician, Plato seemed to have had little appreciation of the subtleties of art. Aristotle, he knew, would have admired the paintings, if only for Georges' an-atomists' powers of observation. He had a suspicion though that Aristotle was more interested in the work of a Flemish painter named Rembrandt van Rijn. Perhaps he had heard that this Rembrandt would one day make a portrait of a bust of him, and like Georges in his musical aspirations, hoped that someday someone would write a book about this tenuous relationship and call it something like "Picture This".

As for the Buddha, Georges knew he would have looked at Georges' paintings and smiled an inscrutable smile.

To be continued...