Victoria Sees It by Carrie Jenkins (love letters to the dead TXT) 📕

no language at all, in which case I am actually all ears.) So Newton’s experimentum crucis sees him showing how light falls apart. What it takes to break it. Crux is also the root of our word excruciate, because crosses can be used to torture bodies as well as point them in a certain direction. We still make many devices that serve both purposes. Newton fractured light by inducing a kind of deep nakedness, a rainbow-revealing of what had been hiding in plain white sight all that time.

But who comes here? I am invisible. And I will overhear their conference. Now consider ghosts: we also call them spectres, whose root is the Latin specere—to look, to watch, to see. A spectre is something we “see” when we are “seeing things,” as an apparition is something that “appears” to us. The spectrum appeared to Isaac at his home in Lincolnshire. He got out of Cambridge too, driven away by the Plague. As in, the Black Death. A sickness named for the absence of light. A good time for ghosts, things that don’t need bodies.

Even light needs a body of sorts, it turned out. Newton called little bodies of light “corpuscles.” Then Einstein got knowledge’s knickers in a twist by pointing out that light sometimes needs little bodies and sometimes not. He said this means we have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do. Do they, though, if they are really contradictory? “Explain” is a very high bar—I feel as though the theories would have to cooperate to clear it, not compete. We are faced with a new kind of difficulty, he says. Not really, my dude. This is an old kind of difficulty.

Not to mention one we’ll be funnelled back around to in a moment, when it turns out things that seem very small to us don’t behave in ways we can reconcile with the behaviour of things that seem very large to us. Each time, the same question: which theory is right? You must choose, although the choice is impossible. The whole idea of an experimentum crucis is to create a fork in your road so that you cannot continue in a straight line. To force an excruciating choice. Shove you one way or the other, down the path towards the right answer. That sounds incredibly useful.

There’s just one tiny problem. Oh, Isaac, just one more thing…there’s no such thing as an experimentum crucis. The fork never arrives, the comfort zone is never breached. Maybe that’s why Hecate, goddess of the crossroads, is always looking three ways at once. Lemon again—he taught me that Willard Van Orman Quine put it this way: Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. For example, you never have to admit you saw a ghost if you are willing to say you were hallucinating. So really, all experiments are just exercises in rebalancing your world view.

Now that’s fine as far as it goes. But there’s something going on in the background that we aren’t dealing with: how that balancing act tosses us around in another dimension. The one we all don’t want to admit exists at all. The subtilest Medium there is. We cannot quite pretend not to notice. I suspect there is something in the temporal lobe, something we can’t switch off (temporal for the passage of time, you know—for the greying hair of the temples). But with our knowledge lenses on, all we see are a few of its ghosts, its traces, and at these we throw our most abstract labels. Stupid words like meaning, value, spirit. To help us keep the phenomena distant, poorly understood, unbroken like white light. Nothing to see here. But there is something to see: there’s us. We cling to this power, define the lines of its force fields like iron filings round a magnet. What are we so afraid of? That if we admit it’s there, it could suddenly shift? Realign? Or that we might not be anchored: that we might come loose from the pattern our people are making. Drift away.

Escape.

If we ever reach that other kind of experimentum crucis it will not present in the shape of a fork and there will not be any signposts. The assay will be made in perfect darkness, and that will be the entire point.

It’s coming.

Chapter Eighteen

“Victoria?”

Jeff used my name in the interrogative mood to call my attention back to him. If I forgot to nod and say “mmm hmm” every so often he would assume I wasn’t listening. He was usually right. Jeff the therapist. Therapist therapist therapist…I’d sit there saying the word silently to myself until it lost meaning. By the time of these later sessions, I had to gel myself into this kind of blank state, so I’d stare at the straight rows of bland self-help books behind his neat black-grey hair, the spotless beige carpet, the killer neutrality of the wood-framed sepia pictures. All somehow depicting nothing. We made our symbols weak; we can’t complain now if they won’t do anything for us. Can you imagine language, once clear-cut and exact, softening and guttering, losing shape and import, becoming mere lumps of sound again? Some people say this is what it’s like to have a stroke. The Aether, the medium of meaning, starting to glop together and move about by itself, strange fingers of it poking up here and there then reabsorbing into the ooze. Marbled undercurrents of colour tugging at our attention, a weedy, slimy semantic death by drowning.

I haven’t been able to say this to Jeff: men scare me. Because how could I? What is the word for this kind of attitude? Sexism? Reverse sexism? Is reverse sexism the reverse of sexism? To ignore the massive likelihood that if someone kills me or rapes me today it will be a man,