Art & Lies Read Online Free PDF Page B

all known facts.
    But not all facts are known and what is known is not necessarily a fact.
    There is a further trouble; no matter how meticulous the scientist, he or she cannot be separated from the experiment itself. Impossible to detach the observer from the observed. A great deal of scientific truth has later turned out to be its observer’s fiction. It is irrational to assume that this is no longer the case.
    Part of the problem with the neutral observer, who is in fact romantically involved with his subject, is that some time must always elapse between the experiment and the record of the experiment. Infinitely tiny, perhaps, but even without a lover’s gaze, how many fantasies can force themselves into an infinitesimal space?
    I know how difficult it is to say exactly what happened even a moment earlier. If someone were with me, their testimony might corroborate my own, or it might not. And if there is a photograph? The camera always lies.
    The most awkward fact in all this doubt is this: remembering, which occurs now, at this split second, does not prove that what is being remembered actually occurred at some other time. I may be convinced that it did, especially if a number of others, the more the better, are convinced too. When I am alone, and the experience, the emotion, the event, was mine and mine alone, how can I say for certain that I have not invented the entire episode, including the faithful memory of it?
    It could be that this record set before you now is a fiction.
    On what can I depend, if not my past, if not objectivity, if not the clean white coats of science? Should I acknowledge the fiction that I am? A man made of nothing but space and light, a pinpoint on a pinpointed planet stitched among the stars? Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie. A man caught on Time’s hook.
    What can balance the inequity of that vast space, which never ends, and my bounded life? Bounded yes, but not by mortality, which is not what I fear, but by smallness, insignificance, which is what I do fear. The unlived life. Life in its hard shell safe from the waters above and the waters below. The home-and-dry life. Sound. Dependable. True?
    The train had reached the coast. The sea-light crept in tentacles along the floor. Long waves of light that atomised the solid seats and rigid tables. The train itself wavered.
    The man shut in the bright aquarium floated on his own thoughts. His thoughts bubbled out of his head in cartoon exuberance. He caught them, blew them, burst them. He dived down through the layers of light to his shipwrecked past. He had sunk himself so often that he found a whole fleet of boats, ghostly, unattended, changed by the pressure of the water and the work of time.
    How much of any value could be raised?
    The man forced open a small door. There were his toys, his narrow bed, the place where no light had ever seemed to fall. When he remembered his childhood it was dark, except for a short space in the afternoons between three and four o’clock. Except for two years coloured red.
    Above him the water shifted in chessboard squares of dark and light.
    How many fantasies in an infinitesimal space?
    The sun has turned the sea to diamonds. Behind me, the roar, roar, roar of the motorbikes on the motorway. The definite world of flywheels and tarmac is only the sound of bottled bees.
    The dirty sea is changing. It is no longer grey, no longer blue, no longer green, but white and white in peaks and troughs that shape themselves to the curve of my eye.
    I confess that I am frightened of the sea. There is the sailor sea and the commercial sea, the oil-well sea and the fishy sea. The sea that tests the land through sublunary power. The rise and fall of the harbour sea and the sea that exists to make maps look prettier. But the functional sea is not the final sea. There is that other sea simply itself. A list of all the things that the sea does is not what the sea is. Today, the sea has jewelled its