imagined I had nothing in common with.But he
started the conversation and I couldn't be rude and
just cut it off.If I remember right, he pointed at the
SF book, wedged between my leg and the arm rest.
'You believe in all that stuff then, do you?' Scottish
accent, not strong, maybe Borders or Edinburgh.
I sighed.Here we go, I thought. 'Sorry?How do you
mean?'
'UFOs and all that'
'Well, no.' I riffled the pages of the paperback, as
though looking for clues. 'I just like science
fiction.Not much of it's about UFOs; this isn't.I
probably wouldn't read one about UFOs.'
'Oh.' He looked at the book (I was getting
embarrassed by its gaudy, irrelevant cover, and put
it away). 'Are you a student?'
'Yes.Well, no; I was.I graduated.'
'Ah.Science, was it, you were doing?'
'English.'
'Oh.But you like science?'
I'm sure that's the way he put it.I jotted a lot of this
down next day, and wrote a poem about it - 'Jack' -
a couple of months later, and I'm sure if I had my
notes with me they'd confirm that was how he put
it: 'You like science?'
So we got on to what he'd always wanted to talk
about.
He - yes, his name was Jack - couldn't understand
how people thought they could tell something was
so many million years old.How could anyone tell
what came when and where?He couldn't
understand; he was a Christian and the Bible
seemed much more sensible.
Ever felt your heart sink?We'd been on the road
two hours, we were barely past Northampton, and
I was stuck - probably for the whole of the rest of
the journey, judging from the guy's accent - beside
some ancient geek who thought the universe was
created about tea-time in 4004 BC.Holy shit.
Being young and stupid, I did actually try to
explain (I watched 'Horizon'; I got New Scientist,
sometimes).
Let the poem take up the story (from memory, so
make allowances):
And Christ, dear reader, what could I do?
Oh, I made the lame, half-hearted try;
I told him all was linked, that those same laws
Of physics, chemistry, and math that let him sit
here,
In this bus, with the engine, on that road,
Dictated through the ages what was so.
Carbon 14 I mentioned, its slow and sure decay,
Even magnetic alignments, frozen in the rocks
By the heat of ancient fires;
The associated fossils, floating continents,
Erosion, continuity and change
But from the first tired syllable, in fact before,
I knew it was pointless.
And somewhere back
Of all that well-informed-layman stuff,
Something a little more like the real me listened,
And looked at the old man's glasses.
- They were old, with thick frames, dark brown.
The glass too was thick, and thick with dust.
Dandruff, dead scales of old flesh, hairs
Cemented there by grease and stale sweat,
Obscured the views the scratches didn't.
And even if the prescription wasn't years ago
exceeded
By his dying sight,
The grime; that personal, impersonal dust,
Sapped the bulky lenses of their use
And, removed, inspected,
How could those rheumy eyes unaided see
This aggravation of their disability?
(This was when I was into using rhyme only very
sparingly, like any other poetic effect.)There was
more, rather labouring the point about 'views' and
cloudy thinking and so on, but passing swiftly on,
we come to:
He took in nothing.
My throat got sore.
The Borders came, and soon he left, met by his
sister
In some dismal little rain-soaked town.
OK?So Cut To:
Last week.Me with the hard core of the Creative
Writing Group on an Intercity 125, heading for
London for a reading at the ICA (Kathy Acker,
Martin Millar, etc).I was sitting across from Mo -
the good-looking Indian guy with the tash; very
bright; chose us instead of Oxbridge, God knows
why - and I tipped my microbottle of Grouse into
the plastic glass and took out the book I was going
to start reading, and Mo just tensed.I'm not too hot
on body language; I miss a lot, I know (you see - I
do listen to what you say), but it was like Mo
suddenly became an ice statue, and these waves of
cold antagonism started flowing across the table at
me.The others noticed too, and went quiet.
So I'd taken The Satanic Verses by Salman
Rushdie out of the old daypack, hadn't I?And Mo's
sitting there like he expects the book to bubble and
squirm and burst into flames right there in my
hands.
Now, I don't know how much you've heard about
the kerfuffle surrounding this book - it hasn't
exactly been front page news, and with any luck it
won't be - but since it was published quite a few
Muslims have been demanding it be banned,
withdrawn or whatever because it contains - so
they say - some sort of semi-blasphemous material
in it relating to the Koran.I'd talked about this
general area of authorial freedom and religious