Thinks . . .

Book by Lodge David

One, two, three, testing, testing . . . recorder working OK . . . Olympus Pearlcorder, bought it at Heathrow in the dutyfree on my way to . . . where? Can't remember, doesn't matter . . . The object of the exercise being to record as accurately as possible the thoughts that are passing through my head at this moment in time, which is, let's see . . . 10.13 a.m. on Sunday the 23rd of Febru—San Diego! I bought it on my way to that conference in . . . Isabel Hotchkiss. Of course, San Diego, 'Vision and the Brain'. Late eighties. Isabel Hotchkiss. I tested the range of the condenser mike . . . yes . . . Where was I? But that's the point, I'm not anywhere, I haven't made a decision to think about anything specific, the object of the exercise being simply to record the random thoughts, if anything can be random, the random thoughts passing through a man's head, all right my head, at a randomly chosen time and place . . . well not truly random, I came in here this morning on purpose knowing it would be deserted on a Sunday, I wouldn't be interrupted distracted overheard, nobody else around, the telephones and fax machines silent, the computers and printers in the offices and workrooms in sleep mode. The only machine humming to itself, apart from those in the Brain, is our state-of-the-art coffee machine in the common room where I got myself this cappuccino with cinnamon no sugar before beginning the experiment, if that's not too grand a word for it . . . The object of the exercise being to try and describe the structure of, or rather to produce a specimen, that is to say raw data, on the basis of which one might begin to try to describe the structure of, or from which one might infer the structure of . . . thought. Is it a stream as William James said or as he also rather beautifully said like a bird flying through the air and then perching for a moment then taking wing again, flight punctuated by moments of . . . incidentally how is the audiotypist going to punctuate this? I'll have to give instructions, say put dots for a short pause, and a full stop for a longer pause, new para for a really long pause . . . This thing is voice-activated, stops if you don't say anything for about three seconds, but there will be perceptible pauses in the flow of words under that threshold . . . Nifty little gadget . . . Isabel Hotchkiss . . . I recorded us in bed to test the range of the condenser mike, left it running on the chair with my clothes without her knowing . . . she made a lot of noise when she came I like that in a woman . . . Carrie won't unless we're alone in the house, which doesn't happen very . . . Jesus Christ I can't have this stuff transcribed . . . impossible . . . even if I sent it to an agency under a pseudonym, from a box number GPO Cheltenham, it would be too risky . . . even if I pretended it was a piece of avant-garde fiction the names . . . there's always a risk somebody would recognize the names and send it to Private Eye or even try to blackmail me, fuck, and I can't change the names as I go along, too difficult, too distracting, I'll have to transcribe the bloody thing myself fuck what a bind. But perhaps it's just as well, otherwise I might subconsciously censor my thoughts for the typist . . . In fact perhaps I already did, when Isabel Hotchkiss first came into my head . . . after all the essential feature of thought is that it's private, secret, so knowing that somebody else, even some anonymous typist, was going to listen to this would completely distort the experiment, I should have thought of that . . . But then I only got the idea this morning in bed, lying awake in the dark too early to get up, I didn't sleep well, a touch of indigestion, I didn't really like that starter Marianne served, crab mousse or whatever it was . . . What I need is one of those software packages with speech recognition so you can dictate to your PC . . . only I believe you have to speak very slowly and distinctly, which might be inhibiting, spoil the spontaneity, if you had to pause . . . like . . . this . . . between . . . every . . . word . . . Still, it might be worth looking into if I do much more of this sort of thing, no doubt they're improving the software all the time . . . Where was I? You don't have to be anywhere, remember. But it was something interesting . . . Isabel Hotchkiss, no not her . . . not that she was uninteresting . . . What a lot of pubic hair she had, black and springy and densely woven, like a birdsnest, you wouldn't have been surprised to find a little white egg warm inside her labia . . . James, yes, William James and the stream of consciousness or the bird of consciousness, that was it . . . I wonder where that tape is, did I ever erase it? Wouldn't want Carrie to find it . . . pissed off with me last night because of the way I bullied, she said bullied, I would have said argued, remonstrated, at the dinner party last night with Laetitia, Jesus imagine being called Laetitia, Letty not much better, Laetitia Glover her crap about the Indians and the earth and Chief Seattle . . . That was a delicious steak last Wednesday . . . completely illogical of course to eat steak in restaurants, though it was the Savoy Grill, they must get their meat from the finest herds . . . even so it's daft to renounce beef at home and eat it out I have to admit . . . but then you don't have a menu at home so there's no temptation . . . I do love a juicy steak, medium rare, branded with the lines of the grill on the outside, pink and slightly bloody on the inside . . . [sighs] . . . BSE has deprived me, BSE and AIDS between them have made two of the greatest pleasures in life, prime beef and wild pussy, possible causes of a horrible death . . . sad. Even domestic pussy isn't the same since we . . . I wonder did she really come off the pill for health reasons or was it to make me use condoms? Trouble is, I can't tell her I've stopped screwing other women without admitting . . . of course she must have guessed that I haven't been a hundred per cent faithful all these years, but we've had a tacit agreement she wouldn't kick up a fuss as long as she never knew about it . . . When she asked me what I had for lunch with the publisher I said chicken she said 'What kind of chicken?' I said Chicken Kiev off the top of my head, a bit naff for the Savoy Grill, Carrie obviously thought so too, and my breath didn't smell of garlic, she probably thought I'd been having it off with somebody in London and the publisher's lunch was a story, ironic that . . . Perhaps in the vegetarian future people will use adultery as an alibi for eating meat . . . fuck in public and slink off afterwards to seedy beef hotels that rent private dining rooms by the hour . . . How come I'm thinking about beef? I was thinking about . . . about William James and consciousness as a stream or consciousness as a bird, flying and perching . . . the interesting question is, are those perchings of the bird completions of a thought or pauses in thought, blanks, white space or white noise would be better because there is brain activity still going on all the time or you would be dead . . . I think therefore I am true enough in that sense . . . Must be the best-known sentence in the history of philosophy. What's the second best I wonder? But is thought continuous, inescapable, or is it as somebody said against Descartes, sometimes I think and sometimes I just am . . . Can I just am without thinking? The verb to am . . . I am you am he am she am they am, meaning to merely be without thinking . . . but is thinking the same as being conscious, no . . . There's a distinction between passive consciousness, receiving, identifying, organizing signals from the senses, aware of being alive, of being awake, and reacting to the stimuli . . . so not exactly passive then . . . but not formulating coherent thoughts either . . . So say there is a, not a distinction, but a continuum, a continuum between an almost vegetative state, no scrub that, plants aren't conscious even if Prince Charles likes an occasional chat with his geraniums . . . Say there's a continuum between a mere processing of sense data, I am hot I am cold I itch, at one pole, and abstract philosophical thinking at the other, with an infinitely graduated series of stages in between . . . Yes but it's possible to do both at once, for example driving, it's possible to drive a car without being conscious of what one is doing, changing gear, braking, accelerating, etcetera, quite efficiently and safely, while thinking about something entirely different, about consciousness for instance. So where does that get us?

Ah, a blank, a definite blank, for an instant, not more than a second or two, I didn't have a reportable thought or sense impression, my mind as they say went blank, I thought of nothing, I just ammed . . . So when a train of thought suddenly gives out collapses you just am, you go into a kind of standby mode ready for thought but not thinking . . . like the hard disk spinning in a PC that's switched on but not being used, like the coffee machine humming to itself ready to make coffee but not making any . . . Of course this experiment is hopelessly artificial because the decision to record one's thoughts inevitably determines or at least affects the thoughts one has . . . For instance I feel a little stiffness in my neck at this moment, I move my head, I stretch . . . I swivel round in my chair . . . I get up . . . I walk from my desk to the window . . . all these things I would normally do without thinking, I would do them 'unconsciously' as we say, but this morning I'm conscious of them because I hold a taperecorder in my hand, Olympus Pearlcorder, specifically for the purpose of . . . That was a good paper Isabel gave at San Diego . . . on modelling three-dimensional objects, she sent me a copy afterwards, there's a true scientist for you, you shag her senseless in her hotel bedroom and she sends you an offprint of her conference paper afterwards by way of a memento . . . Dead now poor Isabel Hotchkiss, breast cancer somebody told me, fucking shame who'd be a woman, one in twelve chance your tits will kill you, or try to . ...