Method of Loci

On the train yesterday I had such a good idea that I thought I’d never forget it. By the time I’d found a backstreet hotel it had gone. Today I’m on the return trip, hoping that inspiration will strike again. It just has, in the same place as before. I scribble

It’s not the species with the richest range of noises who developed language, but those who used gesture. In our brain the areas controlling gesture and speech are still close. So it’s no surprize that Greek orators remembered speeches by associating each part to a room of their house, imagining they were walking around it. Language began with a spatial component — more dance than song. If we purify language, we restore gesture and arrive at poetry with its ritual and rhythmic repetition — something that points rather than arrives, capable of referring to things beyond reach.

Forgive me. I’ve forgotten to say where I am. I’m actually in a train leaving Rabat, the air conditioning breezing into my face. I enjoy travel. I use cities rather than rooms. The content of my life long forgotten, historians will misread it as a hollow quest. The woman opposite me is about 30. We introduced ourselves while the train was in the station. When the station-master, proud in his buttoned uniform, unfurled his flag and blew his whistle like a star-struck referee, tons of straining steel gathered to a single tone, and the train choochooed like a child, throwing out balls of cotton wool that stuck to the pure blue sky. We shared for a silent moment the romance of steam, then carried on chatting about property prices in London. Now we’ve agreed on another silence. She has very mobile eyebrows. That’s what leads you to look into her eyes — currently closed — which are blue/grey, strange in a brunette. She has the complexion of a blonde too — blondes get stared at here, so maybe she’s dyed her hair. She’s modestly dressed, though if you know where to look you’d know what she’s trying to show off. She said she worked in the embassy. I said I’m trying to establish a logistics network for hi-tech importers. I also said, to make things easier, that I was unmarried. “Me too,” she replied, as if this Dickensian coincidence bound our fates together.

Beyond the points and crossings of suburbia our rhythm settles. The train gains pace past the shanty towns that cling to the tracks. Every so often we pass someone standing by the line like a sentry, their blank face inches from our window. Sometimes there are stations, but we don’t stop. No houses are near them, not even a path leading away — just a platform and a sign in stylised arabic. I can recognise a few words now; sidi, meaning water-hole, appears on many platforms. In Rabat I bought a few things in the market without sounding too much like a tourist. Visits to Waitrose had prepared me for the range of fruits but not their size. I didn’t need to point, I already knew some names. In the 9th century Arabs brought the first oranges from South-east Asia to Europe, naming them after the colour of these desert sands — Naranj.

“I must have dropped off,” she says.

On the journey from the window to her face my eyes flick across her uncrossed ankles, and her knees as far apart as her skirt allows.

“We’re only just out of the city.”

“This line’s terrible. It’s single track most of the way, the train has to go off into a siding for other trains to pass. Yesterday it did that and we waited for hours. No one knew what had happened. I watched the sunflowers. I could see them turning, that’s how long we were there, and the heat was unbearable, Not a puff of wind. I didn’t think it was safe to leave the train, so I just closed my eyes, and fantasized about those cold showers you get on beaches.”

I’m an acknowledged expert on sunflowers, and fear that I might launch into a lecture. As the silence extends awkwardly, I can think of nothing else to say, so I tell her about how Van Dyck used sunflowers to symbolise his patrons’ loyalty to the king. Then people used them to symbolise a similar subservience to Van Gogh. A field of sunflowers is like Warhol’s duplicated trademarks.

“You don’t sound like a businessman,” she says. She’s right. Instead I should have asked her what she’s fantasizing about now.

Why do people lie? A child’s first lie is a breakthrough, a realisation that there’s a gap between self and others. Lies can continue being used to establish that difference, to gain advantage in some other way, or just for fun. I arrived in Casablanca 3 days ago, early for a Semiotics conference. I’d arranged some slack time in case the planes were bad or I got a tummy bug. I decided to take a train, not because I wanted to go anywhere in particular, more to see the country. This is the joy of train journeys — you know the beginning and the end, but the rest is a continual surprise. At school I was taught that the engine was the verb, that nouns were pulled along by it, and that every train needed a guard’s van; a full stop. Trains are a universal language. Just as railways hug the valleys, so thought needs nouns and verbs. The paraphernalia of signal boxes, level crossings and lost property offices spontaneously developed across the world. All railways have the same deep grammar, give or take a gauge. Polyglot India has 5’ 6”, 1 metre, 2’ 6” and 2’ gauges.

In this country the contrast between the capital and countryside is most extreme — the city’s minarets, narrow alleys and irrigated courtyards, then beyond, this desert: horizontal, female, rolling dunes. Naranj. In the beginning goddesses ruled. Then, thousands of years ago, the first city grew and gods took over. Goddesses became the consorts of warriors or were demoted to vegetable deities, naked until about the 6th century. Cities are vertical, full of straight-lines, ruled by straight-talking men. St Paul and Aristotle taught that women should be silent. Only crones natter.

“I read it in a book,” I said, “I don’t have much to do in the evenings, you see.”

“Ah, the strong silent type.”

One test of an author’s knowledge of his characters is to ask what they carry in their pockets, what songs they hum, what TV programs they stay in for. I carry pen and paper, hum “Streets of London”, and watch Marlon Brando bios. Now that I’m coming clean I should add that I know this woman too. While preparing for this trip I read the previous conference proceedings, partly to look at the photographs so that I could put names to faces. In one photo taken at the final meal, Dr Rees was shown with, according to the caption, his wife. It was in Hawaii, and she was wearing the full outfit — grass-skirt and a flower necklace. When his wife said to me that she worked in an embassy I was surprised. If she wanted anonymity, why not say that she’s a tourist? After all, it’s the truth. I tried to recall if there’d been any gossip about Rees. I’ve never met him, but his theory of 2-dimensional grammar has shot him to fame. We’ve crossed swords in the odd periodical, my deep grammar cutting through his parsed landscapes.

She tries the usual dinner-party subjects. We negotiate towards enlightened PC western positions on politics, tourism, global warning, 7/11 — establishing roles that we’ll play for the rest of the journey, then tacitly agree on another pause as if pacing ourselves. I recline as far back as I can. I’m drifting away when her foot rests against mine.

“Sorry,” she says, and withdraws it.

I smile, but don’t open my eyes. I suspect she’s checking my sexual orientation. An Englishman in his twenties, unmarried in North Africa — well, you can put 2 and 2 together. A shame, because otherwise there’d be a satisfying inevitability about the plot: gaining physical revenge over my intellectual rival Rees. Perhaps afterwards she’d accompany her husband to the “Grammar of Dimensions” session, it being part of the deal that in public they should behave like a happy couple. When my name’s announced he’d nudge her, saying “here’s that clueless jerk I was telling you about”. Then she sees who I am, her lie made flesh. At the coffee break Rees would come over to congratulate me. “Incisive”, he’d say (meaning “Simplistic”). “I don’t think you’ve met my wife. Mary, this is Dominic Shaw.” This would be the story’s make-or-break moment. What should I say? How could I humiliate him without harming her? But it’s all academic. Not only is my paper entitled “Transgendered Gestures of Fractal Grammars” but I’m the gay rep for the National Union of Lecturers, to which he belongs.

Suppose we did construct an eternal triangle — husband, wife and lover. I’m not saying it’s impossible; I’m sure there are ways I could satisfy her if she insisted. Indeed, my tendencies would add a certain piquancy, making the usually isoceles triangle more regular. But there’s another triangle I’m interested in where the trust between Author and Text is undermined by the Reader who, seduced by the text, betrays the Author who thought the text was his forever. How can the Author stake his claim? By closing the gap between him and the text using confessionalism and self-exposure. I could so easily have tied up the plot by denying my sexuality, by asking about her fantasies, but I chose sincerity over pattern. I hope my honesty’s rewarded.

Ticket inspectors need to be physically imposing here. Ours is no exception. He blocks out the sun as he squeezes along the corridor then fills our compartment. His “Merci” reminds me how colonialism survives longest on the railways. She locks the door behind him, yanks down the blinds and stands before me, hands on hips.

“Here’s where the train stopped last time,” she says, “So hot.”

“There’s something you should know,” I mumble.

She turns away slowly, almost balletically, the sun caressing her contours, then she kneels, leaning forward on her seat.

“Don’t worry, Dom, I’ll make it easy for you,” she says, raising her backside towards me, pulling up her dress. “Just use your imagination.”

“But what will I say in the coffee break?”

“How about ‘Pretty as a sunflower’?”