Feed My Dear Dogs. Emma Richler

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СКАЧАТЬ grief, as if that bad thing has already happened, it is news. Mostly I do this late at night when I cannot sleep, I picture it, all the ghastly outcomes, beginning with small things, such as no more binoculars and always ending up with the same doomy thing, Mum going missing, which is a ridiculous fear to have and plain silly, but I saw it in my head, so now I worry, and I feel responsible, so I will have to watch out, like in that poem Mum reads to Gus from Christopher Robin.

      James James

      Morrison Morrison

      Weatherby George Dupree

      Took great

      Care of his Mother,

      Though he was only three.

      James James

      Said to his Mother,

      ‘Mother,’ he said, said he;

      ‘You must never go down to the end of the town,

       if you don’t go down with me.’

      There is a tip-off in this poem, when the mother goes missing, that James may be imagining things. Here it is. James bashes off on his tricycle at breakneck speed and petitions the King. Nothing wrong with that. But the King’s name is JOHN. I looked this up. The right king at the time of Christopher Robin was George VI. Good work, Jem.

      King John

      Put up a notice,

      ‘LOST or STOLEN or STRAYED!

      JAMES JAMES

      MORRISON’S MOTHER,

      SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN MISLAID.’

      James may be imagining things, but he worries, and you can’t take the worry out of the boy, even with bare facts. Your mother is right here, around the corner, coming soon. James James has a problem with fear and worry, and he is only three.

      I check out the basket, which is brimfull.

      ‘Whoa!’ I say. ‘Binoculars.’

      There are questions I want to ask my mother today, but never will, not even in fun, in the spirit of the Why game, say, because these questions would worry her, and worrying is bad for her, alarming as I now find strong light and some frequencies, and society at large. The great world. Everyone needs protection from something.

      Worry. This is an interesting word and it derives from the Old English wyrgan, a hunting term meaning to kill by strangulation, and worrier, for so long, meant someone tormenting something or someone else, most typically an object of desire, and not until modern times has worrying become a word for a self-inflicted torment, that passion all one’s own. I worry.

      Whither thou goest, I will go.

      Come back.

      Still no passenger ships, but I do not rule it out, I do not rule out the Moon. Or thereabouts.

      When the small lovestruck boy with the fluffy blond head and single suit of fine clothes, finally touches down to Earth, in an African desert, he meets a snake, a funny old creature, he observes politely, slender as a finger, flicking through the sand, he reflects, a chain, colour of the Moon.

      —Bonne nuit, he says.

      —Bonne nuit.

      —Where did I fall? What planet is this?

      This prince is homesick.

      —I can take you farther than any ship.

      —Will it hurt much?

      The prince has a single vision of a rose and he closes his eyes, I am sure of it, to keep the vision in, and just as he falls, ever so briefly, both feet lift off the ground.

      Navigation is an art. The DFC is an award for distinction in flying. Well done, little prince.

      Whoa, the Moon.

      On 20 July 1969, Apollo 11 approaches the Moon by way of its shadowy side, lit only by earthshine, and seeming blue-grey to Neil Armstrong whose heart rate rises to 156 beats a minute. He has a vision of a great sphere, a perfect round evoking Earth, something he takes as a sign of welcome, and the blackness of the sky is so intense, the surface so inviting, it recalls Earth again, a night scene illuminated for the cameras.

      The Apollo lands in the Sea of Tranquillity and, before stepping out, Buzz Aldrin celebrates Communion with a chalice lent to him by a Presbyterian church. On the Moon, he appreciates one-sixth gravity and the sense of direction it gives him, a feeling of being somewhere, he says, something he will miss once home, where he drinks too much and suffers from bipolar disorder, quite understandable in a person who has flown so high, achieving a flight of true distinction, only to splash down suddenly to hopeless dreams of return.

      —See my planet, says the prince. Right above us … but so far!

      —So what are you doing here?

      From here to there. How far? Not very.

      Robert Falcon Scott. Wednesday, March 21. Got within 11 miles of depot Monday night; had to lay up all yesterday in severe blizzard. Thursday, March 29. Last entry. For God’s sake, look after our people.

      From here to there. What do I need? A small suitcase, a fine pair of shoes. A tiny nip of venom, a stroke of a knife. Escape velocity.

      Gravity is a universal law of attraction. Escape velocity is the minimum speed required to keep moving away from a planet or star without falling back to the surface or entering a closed orbit around it, and gravitational pull diminishes the farther the surface of a star or planet is from its centre. In the case of a black hole, a star with a concentration of matter so dense it falls in on itself, and with a gravitational field so strong, spacetime, as Karl Schwarzschild first explained, will curve around it and close it off from the rest of the Universe so nothing can escape it, not even light, trapped in a body whose radius is less than a certain critical number, and where the escape velocity is equal to the speed of light. This is the Schwarzschild radius, a short straight line to the horizon of a black hole through which no signal can pass, named after Karl, astronomer, pioneer in optics, soldier, German Jew, b.1873, d.1916, winner of a posthumous Iron Cross for his pains on the eastern front, a horizon, you might say, he never escaped.

      Black hole, dark star, dark matter, over 90 per cent of the Universe is invisible, unknowable. So far. Black hole, foxhole, dugout, trench, dead soldier, unknown soldier, mark him with a cross. Lost, stolen or strayed. Dark matters. I will find her. What do I need?

      Begin with an eye.

      Galileo will go blind, but in 1609 he points a telescope at the Moon from his garden in Padua, and in the shadows, he finds mountains and seas, writing, ‘Its brighter part might very fitly represent the surface of the land and the watery regions darker.’

      An eye is a camera and it is 80 per cent water, forming in the dark of the womb into a small sphere with a lens in front, and a screen at the back with 137 million separate seeing elements, and nerve lines leading to the brain where out of a storm of electrical charges, a picture ought to appear, with all the qualities a person expects, of colour and light, СКАЧАТЬ