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Portknockie, and the rattle of pebbles in the suck of the tidewash …
    Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
    I’ve got photographs of my mother with her brother. He was like Franz Kafka, all eyes and ears. Looked as if a blackness inside him was trying to join up with a blackness outside.Here’s one of his notebook entries written shortly before he died:
    18.2.22
    In the beginning was The Black. Sing it. Feel it. Hold it. Only The Black. O the too-muchness of The Black. In the beginning was the forever of The Black and it went on for ever. Then! After for ever! In The Black was The Rage growing growing growing. AAAAIIIIYEEEEEE! How it wanted how it waited. Yes, TO BECOME! So it NNNNNNGGHHH YNNNGGGHH AAAAAAAAA. Became. Now it is. Now it is Itself. The Rage. Sing it. Feel it. Rock in the cradle of it. NNNNNNNNNNNNNNN NNNNNNNYAHHHH. The Rage. It is now. It is beyond for ever. In it is every thing.
    I too feel The Black and The Rage in everything; maybe it’s a family trait. I’ve always felt them, even long ago with Judith when we saw the owl. I feel The Black and The Rage when I’m alone and perhaps even more when I’m not.
    Thinking about Helen and Isodor: I see them in the darkened laboratory at the top of that big old Victorian house in Oldtown West 71.1 can smell formalin and furniture polish, old upholstery and carpets. And that other smell: of a house where the parents have died. Bookshelves everywhere, busts and paintings, framed photographs of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, Hawking, Rilke, and Thelonious Monk. Also dead and Gorn aunts and uncles: if they weren’t scientists or mathematicians they played the violin.
    I’ve never actually seen that room but it’s very vivid in my imagination, always with rain streaming down the windows. Isodor is in his wheelchair; he wasn’t born crippled: he andHelen made the mistake of looking Jewish when some Shorties and Clowns caught them at street level one night. What they did to her doesn’t show. He was sixteen and she was twenty-one when it happened (I sometimes wonder why they were down at street level when they both had keys to the Class A walkway. Reality envelopes interest me). His head is shaved and he’s got a perspex window in the top of his skull. The Shorties and their friends didn’t do that – this is research. Under the perspex his brain looks like a strange and ancient coral. Wires from it pass through the perspex to a console where Helen moves a slider and watches her gauges. It’s the middle of the night; the curtains are drawn, the room is dark; their faces, dimly lit by the console, gleam with a religious fervour. I can hear the rain.
    Here’s part of the transcript for 16 February 2022:
    LIMBIC SYSTEM – SESSION 318
    (03:40. RAIN, MUSIC:
THE ART OF FUGUE
)
H
: Amygdala, site 26, right anterior: .5 sec, 80 Hz.
I
: (CHILDISH VOICE) Oh, oh.
H
: What’s the matter?
I
: The bed’s all wet. (CRYING) I’m sorry, Mummy, I’ll try very hard not to do it again. Sorry, sorry, sorry, Mummy. Not do it again, no.
H
: Was it the bad dream again, Izzy?
I
: No, it was a nice one: I was mountains, I was valleys, I was the rain.
H
: Did you like being the rain?
I
: Yes.
H
: Why did you like being the rain?
I
: The rain doesn’t know anything, the rain doesn’t have dreams.
H
: Amygdala, site 27, right anterior: .5 sec, 80 Hz.
I
: (YOUNG VOICE BUT OLDER THAN SITE 26) Oh yes, in the colours of the numbers, in the deep greens of the thousandsand the purples of the tens. Where the millions and the mollions and the riffling of the wherewhen and the why-when, yes, my way is always and the purpling of the tens returning.
H
: Tell me about your way.
I
: Always in the wherewhen of returning and the purpling of the tens, yes.
H
: How many tens?
I
: As the riffling, where it happens.
H
: Where what happens, Izzy?
I
: (NO ANSWER)
H
: Amygdala, site 28, left posterior: .5 sec, 100 Hz.
I
: