The Enchanted Clock Read online

  This specifically human “thing” speaks to me. Yes, the instant dilates now, and I coincide with what I feel, think, do, and say. The before and the after surge up, seized and incorporated into this flash, written as they are in amorous interlace. Though absorbed, resorbed, the course of time does not become a point on a horizontal line running toward a goal. Now has neither duration nor end. My dilated present is also not the vertical straight line that carried off my roommate of ten years, Teresa of Avila, toward the Infinite Love of her Beloved Spouse, all in capital letters.

  Now: the expanding instant gathers together distinct universes from scattered times. It holds them together. Neither flees nor passes, neither captures nor effaces. Immobile, fleeting, singular, permeable, changing, persistent. All these traits from the explosion of time interest me. I desire them or detest them. Momentarily, locally, they constitute the spaces I inhabit (Levallois, Versailles, Fier d’Ars, the Lux, Shanghai) or the stories that attract me (Louis XV, Claude-Siméon Passemant, Theo’s labs). Appearing suddenly and recomposing, these versions of time bind together in my now. Thanks to them, I settle down and travel myself; I lighten and re-create myself, disappear. I am their vibration, their copresence.

  Is it a fiction, this now? Certainly, since in it I am telling of my Astro, Claude-Siméon, la Pompadour, Stan, and Marianne with her new Swedish CEO. Time is not eclipsed; it is accumulated and maintained. Now is not that time-out-of-time of the unconscious according to Freud, in which series of events, as in a dream, do not relive the past or predict the future but reveal vigilant desire. Nor is it the time of depression, which fails to pass because desire is frozen and in which speaking withers into silence, the body drowns in tears, life is annulled in suicide.

  Neither dream nor depression, yet I know all about it. Emerging times cohabit and are distinguished in my now, spacetimes that encounter one another without being abolished. In the encounter between Theo, Nivi, and the king’s clockmaker, we are in tune body to body, heart to heart, autonomous and correlated. Through the narrative I’m making of them, I do not take on values as my own: I adjust drives that escape me, and I escape the present. Thanks to traveling desires, now is not outside time, does not flee like an arrow, is not absent; it spins tendrils. From its plural atemporality there emerges an extreme time: the now of fiction. Madness at a breakneck pace but under strict surveillance. Everything is possible, and everything eclipses. Fullness of the self outside the self.

  9

  WHERE ARE YOU, ASTRO OF MINE?

  You haven’t written me for a week, but that doesn’t mean I’ve left you, since I am with your ancestor Passemant at the time when Mme du Deffand was writing to Voltaire: “If you don’t write me, I shall say you are dead and have all the Jesuits say Mass.” These days we don’t joke about death, and neither the Mass nor the Jesuits have any authority. We love each other in a density made of silence, of unbreakable complicities, of sensations enflamed to billions of billions of billions of degrees Kelvin. I’m trying out metaphors, appropriating your vocabulary to translate our way of being together: invisible to others, inconceivable for our friends, insane for ourselves. When you last came down to Earth in Paris, you said we approach the infinite condensation of the initial singularity that astronomers daydream about when they become philosophical. A sort of faith, in the end, this singularity. When I recover my wits and return to this side of the Big Bang—okay, it’s done, I’m here—I know that you are not as far as all that. You are in the depth of the sky.

  The “sky,” at 13.82 billion light years, where you are looking for the seeds of galaxies and that dark energy that constitutes the greater part of the universe. You are so far away from me, in Kourou in French Guiana or somewhere in Mexico, that I neither receive nor send you e-mails or texts. You’ll get in touch when you want to.

  Apparently you and your team are now 300–400 million years from the Big Bang? I’m only 500—poor me! At this rate, my A, how far are we going to get? You were saying exploration is not difficult; it’s the philosophical quest accompanying it that poses a problem.

  I was expecting that. What happened before this boundary of light? That is the mystery. The Nothingness that preceded the All, couldn’t it have already been a latent Being? All right, but how to go from one to the other? By hierarchical growth or by dissipating collapse? The one or the other, unless it’s both at the same time? Do you desire me, or is it that you are interested in my philosophical extravagances? I would like to believe you will say both, is that it?

  At the degree of intensity where I am with you, we draw our reflections from intimate darkness, and I am not surprised that being apart brings me so little suffering. Living at a distance in space and in time spares us the anguish of separation. This is well known (speaking as a shrink). Before us, someone had already asserted that an intimate knowledge of interstellar space dissipates the unhappiness of departure. Was it Pascal? Or Rimbaud? In any case, that’s where we’re at.

  Each in our orbit, travelers always under way. We don’t have to uproot ourselves like plants, and no need for animal warmth like mammals. Our “us” is not really terrestrial, in short; it is interstellar, you think. Cold? On the contrary: incandescent. That is the paradoxical advantage of our presence in spite of being apart: nothing can separate us.

  At the very instant when I think I miss you, remembering you brings me joy. After a few minutes, without my having said or even written the slightest word, you reach me with a vibration of the background radiation. Then I know your penis comes to me. And somewhere in the vicinity of the Cosmic Microwave Background where you state you are living right now, the pulsations of your neurons carry off both your tongue and mine, your skin, my skin, our blended blood. Your neurons arrive here in the waves of the Atlantic and the sands of the Conche des Baleines, where I’m constantly making love with you. Neither real nor virtual, we are attuned.

  Right after meeting you, I thought I would be able to suspend the copulation that transports us as soon as we think about each other. As of now, this is beyond my strength. I don’t want to, I am not able to. You have no need to tell me it’s the same for you. I know it. IT IS. It is like that. The pleasure of desire at will, without conditions. The inner experience plays out for two, whatever the supposedly real exterior may be. Finding you in Seattle, Grenoble, Paris, Mexico, Chile, anywhere, anytime, nowhere or never, neither presence nor absence counts. Only the explosion takes place, and the place continues its expansion into innumerable human and inhuman variants. We live its magic permanence, 13.82 billion years extending to you and me, as you say, in the 4 percent emerged matter, 74 percent dark energy, and the rest, 22 percent, which is just dark matter. I am replying that that’s called love. ILY.

  10

  KING, GOD, AND COMPLEX TIME

  There’s nothing scientific about it, is there, A of mine?”

  “In astrophysics, we have equations to describe this outpouring of multiple universes. Elementary particles permit their emergence. But the reasoning that imagines these unthinkable limits seems too abstract for those who have not known an amorous alchemy like ours. It is foreign to our senses as soon as we leave our labs. To such an extent that none of my colleagues wonders if there is a human experience that would be in unison with this ultratime that conjugates time that passes and time that passes by the wayside.”

  I like it that Theo gives his lecture course for me, but really he asks himself questions, seeks to justify himself, has doubts, and doubts his doubts. As is often the case, his teachings end with a question.

  “Besides, is it possible to personally experience all those times of the complex universe as revealed to us by current cosmology? Do we really need those intimate coups d’états to thaw disappearing time, to instill its absence in the provisional time that emerges? Can these times resonate in the heart of hearts of a man or a woman? And if that can happen, where is the cause, where is the effect? Do scientific discoveries modify our way of thinking and feeling? Or, on th
e contrary, is it the inner experience or our wandering fictions that leave their imprint on fundamental research?”

  As for me, I know what to call this human experience of the now. Quite simply, it signs ILY. No need for words—too romantic, pathetic, ridiculous. ILY is enough. I’m not going to tell Theo; I’ll write it to him one day, perhaps. To love, like to believe, credo: I give myself, you give yourself. To love from afar, at a distance, close by also, thoroughly, from the depth of the bowels, from everywhere, without security, with complete security.

  “There is time: That much is clear for everyone, isn’t it? Newton himself was of that opinion: he thought the universe was equipped with a master clock, as it were. My homonymous ancestor, your Passemant, read Newton, and not content to adopt his science, it seems he was its everyday artisan in that Society of the Spectacle that was Versailles. You know that aging, elegant society better than I do. In any case, Newton and Passemant listened to the tick-tock of that cosmic time clock, which for them replaced God but which they continued to call God. Newton and Passemant believed in it, projected themselves into it, into time; they were persuaded that this tick-tock proposed a more certain future than the revolution. Their vision lasted how long? Two centuries, a little more? Order, continuity, duration, simultaneity, absence, crises, perhaps, and new departures, necessarily. Catastrophic or fluid, it flows, it outflows and rebounds, always moving forward, obligatory. Everyone was educated like that, everyone believes in Time!”

  The twentieth century dismantled such self-evidence, but people don’t want to hear about it, and my Astro is amazed! Have they not demonstrated the asymmetry of matter in the universe, confounded absolute simultaneity, revealed that the observer determines the observed? All these discoveries should have knocked us sideways, but no, people prefer to recycle the deceptive evidence of the everyday, the old thinking. Why?

  “Quite simply because the binomial space/time seems incontrovertible. But gravitation deforms time. So long to a single temporal parameter! Newton’s time decomposes in general relativity. With that, how can you expect king and God to endure!”

  “That’s not the point we’re at now. Didn’t the Republic replace them?”

  “In appearance. But they did not really disappear under democracy’s laws. Kings and gods are still here to manage time. Not just through tyranny, dictatorship, Holocaust, or extraordinary endemic crises. But because spectators and Internauts believe the universe is stable, that it has to be, with time that progresses in a straight line toward capital-M Meaning. They lack security, illusions, traditions. They need time to reestablish the order of things, the social model, security, life! They need things to last according to their way … So they ask for time; they will keep asking for it again and again!”

  While Theo is philosophizing, Nivi thinks that Internauts are children, that we are all children. That Oedipus wants to settle a score with a father before seating himself on his right or taking his place.

  Astro continues: “So that’s what your patients tell you? The anxieties of the couch perpetuate monotheisms, I suppose … But you’ve noticed it yourself: the Oedipus crisis is just one of the possible psychic spaces. Humans invent others, unless I’m mistaken. They say shrinks notice it themselves, that other spaces, other times, are heard from the couch …”

  No point in intervening. Although Theo’s monologues are teeming with questions, I sense that the moment is coming when he is expecting no echo. Here it is. I am silent. I will write to him later that ILY is our quantum state. Yes, ILY evolves in time, so Nivi and Theo cannot know at any moment—none can know—what resolution, what choice or event to expect. Except by a calculation of probabilities, and even then. Nevertheless Theo feels and knows what I feel and know. If ILY is an infinite power, my duo with Theo reacts like a pair of quantum particles. What affects me affects him, wherever he is. ILY is our “spooky action at a distance,” an instantaneous correlation. Is time abolished, then? On the contrary, ILY provides another master clock to the universe.

  “There is no now in physics. Duly noted! But when the black body of the thermal equilibrium is linked to evolution, the quantic system enters a transitory state (the KMS state, according to the initials of its inventors: Kubo, Martin, and Schwinger). Its inherent time ceases to exist and is transformed into a complex, hypothetical time in two dimensions: real time and imagined time. A minute can last an hour, or jump from noon to 9 p.m.…”

  “This complex time has no chance of existing in our reality.” I think I’ve understood, and I want to reassure him. But he outstrips me, more subtle than I.

  “Other than for Nivi, the tightrope walker! You incorporated it into your very own now. A now not like the others, the Nivi now. Nothing like that astrophysical time that emerges from atemporality when we attempt to unify general relativity with quantum mechanics. My colleagues are convinced of it, I know their reasoning: I practice it; it goes without saying! And yet … I don’t let them in on what I tell you, what we experience, you and me. Don’t worry! Maybe some people will understand me. That’s not the problem. Nivi, I like your way of living in this now that belongs to you. My mind is at home in your complex time, my senses too.”

  I take his hand. His hand in mine. And our bodies, free of each other, in each other, limitlessly. And Astro would not be my Astro if he did not try to initiate me into his science so I can follow him to where he has got to with time. Not without maintaining my fiction, while smiling at the white hieroglyphic swan that watches us make love from the other side of the veranda. And thinking about his labs, Versailles, Claude-Siméon, 9999. That’s his way of being in love. In cosmological terms most of the time but giving of himself with his entire body now.

  11

  LOUIS THE BELOVED

  Today, Claude-Siméon Passemant, the son of the German embroiderer, is not afraid. Usually crowds make him sick to his stomach. But during this dry August night, with lighted windows, tables set up along the streets, fires and dances, he feels safe and warm. The moon is full. The Big Dipper shines in the heart of a celestial ceremony. With Charles Joachim, Jacques Germain, and Alexis d’Hermand, his day-student pals at the Collège Mazarin, he threads his way through the mob as far as the Conciergerie. Claude-Siméon, mixed in with the people of Paris—who, having apparently forgotten the bankrupt bank and the bottleneck of taxes, are shouting at the top of their lungs, “Long live the king!”—finds himself shouting it as well.

  Jacques Germain, the most assiduous of the three in their philosophy course (which is what they call theology at Mazarin), wants to go to Mass at Notre Dame the next day, but Claude-Siméon protests: “Forget it, it’s for the regent, the court, the red robes!”

  At the festival of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, the king, who is only ten, felt sick during the service. He developed a strong fever during the night, and twice they had to resort to bleeding him. Everyone in the city feared it was smallpox. Now that his recovery is certain, joy is overflowing.

  Charles Joachim’s cousin, a woman from Les Halles, is among the deputation to the Louvre. She takes an eight-foot sturgeon there, and butchers offer beef and mutton; there are also the coalmen with their cockades and their drums. Accompanied by his favorite in the group, Alexis, who is keen on geographical maps and strong in mathematics like himself, Claude-Siméon decides to attend the free performances at the Opéra and the Comédie-Française. They will have their opera glasses, will try not to miss anything happening on stage—whirlwinds, masquerades, fireworks, words falling like rain and pulverized into farce.

  Louis is only eight years younger than Claude-Siméon. That’s a lot; that’s nothing. But he is the sovereign, and all the adolescents at Mazarin celebrate the royal recovery the way they venerate a god—that god they will not become, even if they secretly wanted to, but who knows, things shift, times change.

  “Never has a people loved their king so,” says his father with a learned swagger, playing the part of the respectful nobleman.

  Papa Lal
lemand (speaking of him) is taking his time to die. He remains cloistered at home, though not without following events, above all the coronation. He pushes his son to seek a position higher than their modest condition, as do his lodge brothers, who come from Austria, Aberdeen, or Exeter, who speak of a certain James Anderson and are fired up by the idea of translating his Constitution.1 Claude-Siméon barely understands what they are saying—the same thing and its contrary, it seems to him, a world before or beyond the visible world. Moreover, Papa Theodore is so careful with his words that scarcely has he pronounced one than he reverses it, enough to give you the headache that will become chronic for his son.

  “Never has one seen such love, nor heard such a fuss,” says he about the crowning of the young king. Mysterious, Papa Theo? As always a sidestep: Theodore Passemant is not really comfortable with the terrestrial order of things. Nothing can be done, that’s destiny. Passemant the son, Claude-Siméon himself, is certainly taken with the young sovereign. When Louis is twelve, he will be fully king, crowned at Rheims in 1722. Good riddance to the Regency!

  A tumult of love: three thousand tables, eighty thousand bottles of champagne, a gigantic buffet where everyone helps themselves and their hunger. Today, we admire the child-adolescent, bursting with youth, grace, beauty, among the diamonds, the flowers, the cries, the incense … High Mass at Sainte-Geneviève … Competition for the Saint Louis prize at the Tuileries … Too bad for Theodore, who grumbles in his corner: “Never has one’s health been celebrated to this extent. And far too costly …”

  Claude-Siméon will always remember the portrait of this Louis XV as he imagines him then—already sovereign, though a child. Obviously he didn’t see him; he’s in the parade of celebrators with Jacques Germain, Charles Joachim, and Alexis d’Hermand. But he’s able to imagine him all the better. And he will respect him, since Theodore wants him to. He sees Louis in his mind as the young monarch of not quite twenty that Jean-Baptiste Van Loo will later glorify: with boots and a breast plate, his left hand on the hilt of his sword, the right resting on his command staff. Louis poses, his body stiffens in the attitude of majesty. His high forehead and the acute line of his nose are marks of nobility. But the pink cheeks betray the incurable spleen of the orphan and a furtive feminine gentleness. Under his elongated almond-shaped eyelids, large dark eyes languish, already blasé or turned inward. Inaccessible zenith. Depression mixed with the empire of the senses seems posed upon the head of a body raised for dancing minuets, hunting stags and women, being saluted by the troops.