The State of the Art(29)

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