'Oh!' said Perny.
For Wizard Prang had materialized, complete with chalice,
and was sitting in his usual chair.
'Look, this is a bit embarrassing, but I didn't think
that you'd be back so soon, so I brought the computer in.'
'So I see,' the wizard observed drily. 'It wants its
daily hug, I expect.'
Perny ignored this. She explained politely that she needed
about twenty minutes to finish off a combinatorial spell. Wizard Prang
said nonchalantly that that would be fine. Perny
switched on. Her screen lit up with a huge array of characters. He could
see without getting up that there was a large random component in the
array.
'Ga ga again?' he asked pleasantly. 'Better call in
Ballcock Plumber I should think.' 'Plumbers charge
extra for house calls these days,' Perny said, equally pleasantly.
'Besides, everyone knows this place has no plumbing.'
'How was Toad-in-the-Hole?' the wizard wanted to know.
'We met hordes of people I know,' Perny said
enthusiastically. 'Peregrine Malpracters asked to be remembered to you.'
'What was a lawyer doing at a Familiars' Fair?'
'Just nosing about. Actually, he'd come all the way from
London to see the Squire who wanted his ne'er do well nephew cut out of
his will. Peregrine asked him what he had to leave, given that the manor
house was failing down and twice mortgaged. The Squire told him,
"Nothing whatever." Peregrine didn't think it was funny.'
'Moliére did,' the wizard muttered. 'The best thing to
do with such nephews is to appoint them to look into nepotism in the
family business, whatever that happens to be. The government, for
instance, and perhaps.' 'How did Radha's visit go? A
bit heavy I should say.' 'Only for the spectators,'
the wizard answered. 'Was someone else here then?'
'No.'
Wizard Prang moved over to where Perny sat in front of her
frenetic screen, coated in many colours, and affectionately massaged her
shoulders.
'Beware of the capitalist model of love, dear shishya.'
'How do you mean?' she asked. 'It
says that there's a pailful of love that has to be shared out to various
stakeholders. Some people get more than others, and quarrel about the
division; and after some time it's all gone no more claimants allowed.'
Perny perked up and grinned at the wizard.
'What a crazy idea,' she said.
'Isn't it,' he replied.
Wizard Prang went back to his chair and stretched out,
attempting unsuccessfully to relax while Perny started her calisthenics on
the keyboard. He calculated how long her twenty minutes would turn out to
be and sighed. Perny belonged to a new generation,
Computer technology was as natural to her as television to her mother, the
wireless to her granny, or as making fire was to Wizard Prang himself.
Sometimes, though, the wizard couldn't muster the spark; granny's cat's
whisker couldn't find the right spot on the crystal; Perny's mother's TV
would be on the blink; and Perny's computer would sulk.
Perny had no idea that her computer time differed widely
from clock time, nor did she twig that her frustration with glitches and
crashes (which are the migraines and epileptic seizures of modems and
chips) was burning holes in her robe. The wizard had to take care of them
on the quiet by invisible mending. All she knew was that he was tetchy
about her computer, and that this was totally unreasonable of him.
Wizard Prang found himself walking down the valley with
Ezekiel, whose movements were disturbing those dry bones. So that's where
he had heard the sound of a keyboard chattering. He had thought that it
was the sound that mice make, scurrying about their affairs behind the
wainscoting. But no, it was the disconnexion and connexion of dry bones.
Hear the word of the Lord ... Soon the printer would be
switched on, making a sound as homely to Perny as a tom cat purring. To
Wizard Prang that was the sound one would expect to hear from a tom cat
undergoing an unseemly operation without anaesthetic.
The wizard had a maxim: "Nothing works." Hyperbole certainly: some things
work only too well. Rifles usually go off when the trigger is pressed; but
even people do that. The wizard had often demonstrated that if you select
in advance an aspect of a typical modern situation that is heavily reliant
on technology, some phase of it will not operate correctly.
On his last trip out of Wales he had been to a Canadian
university. He bet a fellow traveller (who turned out to be a
conservative) a wine and water that at least one section of the moving
pavement to the aircraft would not be working. He won. The likelihood was
affected by the gate's being the farthest away from the concourse, but
that in itself is a law of nature: your gate is always the farthest away
from the concourse. Then he bet that at least one of the ten escalators
connecting the ground to the fifth floor at the university would be under
repair. He won again (three were not working). Wizard
Prang had been conducting an esoteric session that he called a Spell
in-Be' for the Department of Autogenetics, and he was the oldest person
there. He had bet the whole class a wine and water that he had once been
exactly the same age as every single person present, to any degree of
accuracy that could be measured. No one for some reason had taken him on.
But he had been right nonetheless; and it always gave him a very strange
feeling to think this particular thought. It said something about clock
time, about history, about archives in general, and above all about
illusion. Perny, who had been with him, said that since
he never gambled (not from conviction, of course, but because gambling
simply bored him) it was inconsistent if not immoral that he should go
around laying bets. He had replied that these were not bets in reality
because they never failed to win and that was exactly the sense in which
"nothing works". Wizard Prang's cooking timer boasted
two so called hour glasses. The sand in one (for eggs) ran for three
minutes. The sand in the other (for nothing ascertainable) ran for twenty
minutes. As the wizard completed these ruminations, the sand in the larger
clock ran out. He cleared his throat.
'How's it going?' he asked Perny.
'Oh, just fine,' she replied vaguely, gazing at the screen with the same
fixity that the wizard had once witnessed in a mongoose gazing at a king
cobra.
The mongoose had come to no good. However, behind the
Indian scenes the snake-charmer had compelled the cobra to disgorge the
mongoose. So perhaps it was all right. She looked up
and smiled.
'I'll only be about twenty minutes.'
Well done,' said Wizard Prang. 'I have a few things to do down in the
village.'
He kissed her on the forehead, and wandered out, leaving
the other denizens of his room to hear the word of the Lord.
'Am I disturbing you?' 'Never!' said
Silica Brick.
She sat at a spinning wheel, looking dishevelled.
She got up, embraced Wizard Prang, ensconced him in the
corner of the couch where she would soon conveniently join him, and
produced water and wine for him and wine and water for herself.
Somewhat later she pointed to the spinning wheel.
'I'll never make that damned thing work,' Silica said.
The wizard rose, and went to look. He unwound thread from
the bobbin. As it came off, and the tension was released, the thread
contorted itself madly. It looked exactly like barbed wire.
'You're over spinning,' he said, without offense.
'I can see that,' Silica replied. 'But if I slow the
treadle down the thread thins out and breaks.'
He picked up a rolag, as it is called in Wales, from her
basket of wool and inspected it.
'You haven't made this with enough love.' he observed.
'Well, it takes a time, you know.'
Time again. Wizard Prang sat on the
floor and sorted through a wodge of fleece. He picked up the carding
combs.
'Which is the left and which is the right?' he asked
her, but she didn't know.
He looked closely at the wire hooks. She was right. She
didn't know. He combed some fleece, and rolled it back
on itself many times across the carders. When he had finished making the
rolag it looked like a tube of air defined by perfectly aligned fibres of
wool. He inspected the wheel, and realigned that. He
worked the treadle, adjusted and oiled it. He sat Silica down facing him,
and placed the new rolag between them, with a carding comb on each side.
He set bobbins and other spinning impedimenta carefully in vacant spaces,
and lit the two candies he had found in one of the pockets in his robe.
Silica knew that she was expected to join in some
breathing. Eventually, the wizard spoke.
'Spinning, at least for the likes of us, is a hieratic
process. That means that all these things are consecrated to the sacred.
We do not earn our living this way. We are not craftsmen. Think of the
act of spinning as a sacrament, and of these appurtenances as
sacramentals. Then don't even consider how long it takes to nuke a rolag
well.'
Silica picked up the rolag with a kind of reverence, and
looked at it on the palm of her hand. She extended it to him as if
performing a ritual according to rubrics. Wizard Prang
rose, took the rolag, and sat down at the spinning wheel. His foot set the
wheel humming, and he was quiet for a time. Then he spun the rolag into
thread. Silica watched all this closely, sitting on the
floor beside him. She saw the harmony between the foot and the hands, and
the steady gaze on his face as he watched the thread. He did not seem to
be doing anything, apart from treadling. After she had
unwound the perfectly even thread from the bobbin, Silica wanted "tips" as
she said. 'The trouble is that you see yourself as
practicing to become a "professional" spinner. So there is an input wool.
There is an output thread. In between there is a machine and a competent
operator. Why doesn't it work? Because we are not in any profession at
all. We are reverently engaged in a mystical ritual. The celebration of
that ritual is a whole experience. What do I do with my thread, people ask
me. My automatic reaction is to ask, "What thread?". And then I remember,
and give them some if they want it. The point is that the thread isn't the
point.'
'What exactly is important?' Silica asked after quite an
interval. 'Is it the harmony of the whole procedure?'
'Not that': the Wizard shook his head. 'The harmony is
necessary, but pointing to that, relishing it, is an ego booster. "Look
what I can do!" it says. On the contrary, the objective is to lose the
ego altogether. The attention must be on the thumb and finger through
which the thread is being drawn out of the rolag in the palm of the hand
by the wheel. Lack of attention means a broken thread or barbed wire as
you have discovered. But attention to that, a special kind of poise and
respect for the process, takes attention away from the self altogether.'
'Non attachment? In the simple act of spinning?'
Wizard Prang grinned at her wickedly.
'I thought you had discovered that it only looks simple.
... Non attachment? Certainly. These teachings are not great big woolly
abstract theories. The best way to understand them is to experience them
by doing something properly. People ought to eat like that: but they
talk or read instead. People ought to do the washing up like that: but
others tell them that they take too long. If you take up spinning, get
lost in the act. Then you will store up personal power. You will also
get a good thread, which is a pleasing side effect.'
'It sounds like Zen,' Silica said, feeling slightly overwhelmed.
The wizard giggled at her. 'Sounds like Zen? What do you
mean?'
He picked up the discarded heap of barbed wire, and ran it
through his fingers.
'This is what happens when you lose your Zen, my
dear...'
Silica tried again from scratch with her tutor holding her
hands, changing her posture, commenting on breathing, and so forth. The
thread by now was at the least acceptable. But the important thing was
that the shishya every now and again suddenly experienced that the
spinning was just ... happening, and the process itself was somehow merely
using her services as an acolyte. She tried to express
this.
'You lose the ego and the attachment when you lose the
sense of purpose,' she said. 'The purpose is not the thread, and not
even the harmony. The purpose is no purpose. It's a contradiction that
you can assimilate only by experiencing it.'
After the spinning they did some tantric devotions
together. These can be made to sound lurid; but that is only because their
purpose of no purpose can be made to sound very purposeful indeed.
The wizard was thinking of leaving. Seeing this, Silica
replenished the glasses because she wanted to talk.
'You spoke about our kind of spinning not being
"professional", and I'm determined to remember the word "historic". But
you often denigrate the professions. They are hardly sacred vocations;
but surely professionals are usually dedicated people, who work hard and
conscientiously?' 'And just think what all that does
for their egos.' Wizard Prang sounded quite sad for them. 'That's why I
drew the comparison. A professional is attached to the work and to his
own ego in doing that work. Such a degree of self-importance is awfully
bad for the soul. And of course,' he added, 'it does the work itself no
good at all.' 'Those unhappy people believe that they
are right, whereas they deal with only one aspect of complicated affairs
namely the aspect in which they are held to be proficient. They aren't
proficient, if you judge by the results, but they have "correct"
qualifications, and the profession itself is a mutual aid society. Try
and bring home the standard of incompetence: you won't get anywhere
because the ranks will close.'
Silica found this a bit strong, and asked for
illustrations. Wizard Prang began with education. As he
had once pointed out to a Pompous Man, education is the process whereby we
teach future generations to despoil the planet, and to make as big a mess
of things as we have. What else have we to teach them? If we had another
brand of wisdom, why did we not teach it instead of leaving hints lying
about in obscure books?
'Schooling is based on a mediaeval model of the
university,' he contended, 'notionally "updated" for schools themselves
on a management model derived from the industrial revolution. This model
is hierarchical and authoritarian. It is reductionist rather than
holistic as to content, functional rather than organic as to
organization, repressive rather than expansionist as to psyche. And now
there is an emphasis on a so called "core curriculum", the object of
which is clearly to restrict the teacher's own initiative.
'The praxis of schooling is stuffed with ritual, from
initiation rites to rites of passage, from the arbitrary division of
time to the ringing of bells. It has failed to integrate mens sana in
corpore sano by encouraging the healthy mind to be not in, but in spite
of, the healthy body and vice versa. It has not done well in the
integration of male and female as preparatory to life not being able,
that Is, to say “mens and women's sana in corpore sano”...'
'Hell's teeth,' said Silica. 'Sorry,'
the wizard said: 'it was my Latin tutor wot did it.'
'She ought to be ashamed of herself. But I've got the point,' Silica
said. 'So all of this is a lousy foundation for the professions, is what
you're saying? How about medicine?' 'It is conceded
by physicians that nearly half of recorded illness is caused by
physicians. That is to say, it is iatrogenic there is even that special
word for it. One treatment has side effects; another treatment militates
against the body's natural ability to deal with some other problem; a
third treatment undermines the psychic identity of the individual. In
the case of dentistry, it is conceded that more than half the problems
are iatrogenic. Half? These are hardly marginal errors.'
'Well, I certainly agree that upholding the ideal of
health is not the same thing as the drugging and cutting that go into
relieving symptoms. But I personally support holistic doctors and
naturopathic treatments,' Silica replied. 'They are professions, after
all.' 'Just a moment,' cautioned the wizard. 'Why do
you think the adjectives for "alternative" or "complementary" medicine
are used? Of course there are enlightened physicians; but the
"profession" excludes whatever it falls to understand for as long as it
can. Those adjectives offer a very clever usage: acceptance that happens
to involve continued exclusion.' 'Osteopathy got in
...' 'How long did it take? At least half a century.
And acupuncture? The way to understand this is not through the socio
political infighting that change always involves, interesting as that
is. Look at the way engineers in their various guises of civil,
mechanical, electrical, production and so forth have behaved over the
years to guard sectarian privilege. It is essentially a matter of egos,
of attachment.' 'Attachment to knowledge, to power,
to respect, or to money?' 'Four aspects of attachment
... Any one of them can be deployed to generate the other three. And as
long as any of those things is a purpose, you have a profession and that
profession is self serving by definition.' 'So that's
why mums want their offspring to enter the professions. Pretty secure,
isn't it?'
Wizard Prang got up, and handed Silica his chalice. She at
first supposed that she was being asked to recharge it but it was still
nearly full. He walked across her room, leaned out of the window, and took
many deep and elaborately composed and completed breaths.
He came back towards her, tripped, and fell flat on his
face. With a cry of alarm, Silica put the chalice down
and rushed to him. He had rolled over onto his back.
'What happened?' she agonized. 'I
tripped over,' he said, putting his hands behind his head.
'What did you trip over?' Silica Brick was aghast. There
was nothing there but the carpet. 'I tripped over
nothing.' 'How is that possible?'
'Oh,' he said: 'I tripped over purposely.'
Silica tried to make sense of this, and then realized with
some embarrassment that he was still lying there. She held out her hand.
'Are you all right? Let me help you up...'
'Nonsense,' said Wizard Prang. Stand back.’
The wizard's recumbent form slowly and horizontally rose
to the level of where his midriff would be if he were standing up. He
stayed in that position for ten seconds, then slowly rotated. His feet
described an arc through the air which set them down precisely, smoothly
onto the floor. He lowered his arms in a beautiful gesture ... speaking
somehow of return.
'My God,' breathed Silica. 'What are you doing?'
The wizard walked over to Silica's coffee table, and
retrieved his chalice.
'Demonstrating my profession of wizardry, of course.'
'Do you often do things like that?'
'Hardly ever. It's pretty silly, isn't it?'
When Silica had recovered her breath, had a hug to confirm
her sense of reality, and refilled the chalice which was intended to
confirm his, she spoke about the profession of law.
'That's a bit different, isn't it?' she didn't really
enquire. 'After all, the law is an entirely self consistent body of
logic and everything comes down to a matter of correct interpretation.'
'Great.' said Wizard Prang. 'Let me know when that has
something to do with justice.'
Silica ignored his irrelevance.
'Perny and Toby looked in on their way back from the
Cotswolds. Did you know that they ran into Peregrine Malpracters? Now
he's a true professional: I remember that notorious case he was involved
in when he lived around here.' 'You mean the case of
the young man who murdered his parents?' 'That's the
one,' Silica said enthusiastically. 'Peregrine made a plea in
mitigation. They didn't hang the man,' she said for indeed hanging had
been the routine punishment at the time.
It was thought that hanging deterred the murderer from
doing it again.
'Do you also remember the substance of the mitigation
plea?' 'Fraid not,' Silica admitted.
‘Well,' said Wizard Prang, 'he got off hanging because
he was an orphan.' 'Good for Peregrine,' Silica said
rather faintly, making a mental filing note to think this over.
'The trouble about all this is,' the wizard went on,
'that professions define a preserve it's like a chunk of territory
hacked out of nature in which they make the rules. Economists, for
example, determine how the economy works, and politicians act
accordingly.' 'But economists never agree about
anything!' Silica expostulated. 'How could they?' he
answered. 'Each of them takes into account a few factors out of life's
rich pageant, and launches a model to fit. None of the outcomes makes
much sense, of course, which is why they all disagree.'
Silica clung to sanity like anyone drowning would cling to
a lifebuoy.
'Then why the hell do politicians take any notice?'
Wizard Prang collected the drinks this time, sat down
beside her, and rubbed her back.
'Point one. A politician can always find, and in Britain
even knight, as is usual, an economist to support whatever ideology is
in question. Everyone knows that the explanations are absurd. But, point
two, economists all agree on one thing which is what gives them
credibility. It is that money supply and interest rates are the
necessary and sufficient regulators of the social good.'
'They're not, of course ... ?' Silica trailed off
uncertainly. 'Mega usury has got more than half the
world starving,' said the wizard. 'And even just down the road these
thin, exiguous economic concepts project ruin. Hundreds of thousands of
young people are homeless in the inner cities, starting with London. And
in what a landscape!' 'You mean it's failing down?'
'Oh, worse than that,' said Wizard Prang. 'The new
landscape is the worst that any so called civilization ever produced.
Look at it. When accounting professionals get loose with the concepts of
economic professionals, you get the criterion of minimum cost per square
foot. Obviously, you end up with a matchbox.' 'We do
seem to have lost any reliance on human values,' Silica reckoned. ‘Is
none of our leaders willing to speak up for them, for art in
architecture, for example? Our erections do look faintly ridiculous
alongside the pyramids, and the Parthenon, Gothic cathedrals, and all
that ....'
She hesitated, and knew why.
'Fortunately, contemporary buildings will soon fall
down,' he carried on. 'In the meantime, the only one of our leaders
ready to speak out against professional nonsense and intrigue seems to
be the leader of the opposition.'
Silica was puzzled by this bold assertion.
'Him?' she said, unbelieving. 'Him,'
said Wizard Prang: 'the Prince of Wales.'
Perny's screen glowed self sufficiently in the
darkening room.
'Need the light?' the wizard said, as he poured his wine
and water. 'Oh. No thanks. Oh. It's getting dark.
Why don't you go outside and enjoy the sunset? I'll join you as soon as
I'm through.' 'Fine,' said Wizard Prang. 'Will you be
long?'
Perny's brow furrowed over the keyboard.
Then she sensed that he was waiting for an answer.
She waved her hand without shifting her gaze.
'Oh. Oh, no,' she said. 'About twenty minutes.'
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