Animal Spirits

Things get really interesting when common sense is wrong. (Karl Popper.)

As Aldo begins to die thoughts jostle and mash into his briefest of moments, not least: Where am I? On top of Wren’s squat little pile in Broad Street, home to his most impressive keynote lectures? Or floating in space, wrapped in a cotton sheet. A sheet, or maybe a spinnaker – he’s sailing perhaps and as for much of his life, the drugs have the tiller. What a confabulation opiates can muster when they catch the wind! He senses a sliver of his mind, rational and cool, is dissociating from his fear and is futilely storing the experience to create a future memory. Aldo becomes intensely aware of his body, blood thumping in his ears, his mouth dry and terrified. He cannot move or speak, his mind dumb with fright, gripped by an iron fist of inevitability. He hopes they do it quickly.

But it is Lloyd alone who finishes him off. It is Lloyd who steps forward to dispatch him with skill and competence, trying to forget all before, suppressing the pain and injustice so he doesn’t botch it. Martha, blank and traumatised, is looking past the two men, staring at the edge and beyond. They planned this together, every step, down to this final one. Aldo closes his eyes as Lloyd pushes.

So this is how it happens, thinks Aldo. So these are the thoughts now occupying the space soon to be vacated by my mind. Unique in a way previously unimaginable. Aldo drops fast and so far, but it is a weird, stretched-out speed, unfurling, the design undone, the double helix, his blueprint, unwinding. Entropic, unrecoverable, ultimate. Is that Roethke: How the body and the spirit does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end? He got the Bollingen Prize for that, deservedly, Aldo’s index mind judges, for the last time. He figures physics must be changing. Is this my mind’s attempt at coping with something so monumentally final? Physics reorganises its laws to accommodate his departure, with all that is suddenly history collapsing into the moment. I wish I had more time, to investigate that! There is a fleeting sense of these thoughts being wasteful, of time. But I’d like to research this, says his professing, enquiring mind. It’s what I do, I’m designed for this. Kant peers through the chaos, reminding him that experience is unified by the mind, that the human mind is a device for telling coherent stories. Kant’s unifying constructs, like cause and effect, apply only to the veil of sensations, Aldo’s mind scrabbled. What about that which lies behind the veil? A flash of insight intrudes comically. The goddy proles infesting The Ramsey Centre on St Giles will try to pray for me! The horse and cart that are cause and effect uncouple and Aldo now knows they were never designed to be so cojoined.

Here I go, he acknowledges, as he falls through the void. Here I go. There is comfort in the repetition. The falling becomes lightness in his body, which settles, restful around his mind, adopting a coordinated stealth - the rumoured eye of the now understood storm. Matthew Arnold’s dreaming spires will become, like himself and his legacy, nothing but a faint impression on the memory imprint that is Oxford. An Oxford memorialised by countless students, academics, researchers, teachers, administrators and assorted gownsfolk; townsfolk including plumbers, nurses, doctors, cleaners and the cobbled roads’ sweepers. It’s dark and quiet, and the cobbles shake the last bike frames as rutting students track from college dorm to college dorm; the road sweepers’ carts are parked, still, dust settled.

His streets are empty.

Now, the blanketing obliteration melds into soft unframed darkness, coincident with a perfect calm realisation. Aldo knows he will not feel the sudden arrest that is coming at the end of this fall. With this knowledge comes a sublime peace, and his final thought.

I’ve had a lovely life.