#6Degrees From the Gulf of Siam to Pianosa via Anglesey

 “Phosphorescence is a process in which energy absorbed by a substance is released relatively slowly in the form of light. … When the stored energy becomes locked in by the spin of the atomic electrons, a triplet state can occur, slowing the emission of light, sometimes by several orders of magnitude.”

Phosphorescence is also the title of a book by Julia Baird that is the starting point for this month’s #6Degrees. 

On Awe, Wonder And Things That Sustain You When The World Goes Dark

I first read and heard of the word phosphorescent when I was fifteen. Our set text for “O” level GCE was Twentieth Century Short Stories. The first story in the anthology was Conrad’s The Secret Sharer which went on for 53 pages – so not so short.

The story did not appeal to me back in the day as it seemed too heavy with meaning and significance not to mention all the long-winded terminology of sailing ships and the sea. But it did introduce me to the word phosphorescent and I found that very interesting and mysterious. 

The side of the ship made an opaque belt of shadow on the darkling glassy shimmer of the sea. But I saw at once something elongated and pale floating very close to the ladder. Before I could form a guess a faint flash of phosphorescent light, which seemed to issue suddenly from the naked body of a man, flickered in the sleeping water with the elusive, silent play of summer lightning in a night sky. With a gasp I saw revealed to my stare a pair of feet, the long legs, a broad livid back immersed right up to the neck in a greenish cadaverous glow. – The Secret Sharer, Joseph Conrad

And so the anonymous captain of an unnamed ship hauls up his double from the sea.

Fast forward a decade to the hot summer of 1976 and a holiday week in Anglesey, After dinner at a restaurant one night –  and no doubt after considerable wine – we all took off to the beach for an impromptu swim in the dark. And there – in the black waters – my first experience of phosphorescence. You waved your arm in the water and a million miniature lights followed your every move. Magical. 

In Aiding and Abetting by Muriel Spark, the fraudulent psychiatrist Hildegarde Wolf has two patients both of whom claim to be Lord Lucan on the run after murdering his daughter’s nanny in mistake for his wife. Another doppelganger situation.

Mental health professionals and psychologists usually do not fare well in novels. Often the easy targets of satire, they are depicted as self-serving, deluded and quite bonkers.  All very unfair.

One exception is the title character of Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes. Because she has written a bestseller on the subject, she is considered an authority on psychology. Miss Pym is thoroughly sensible, although – here too – the subject is held up to ridicule. 

She read her first book on psychology out of curiosity, because it seemed to her an interesting sort of thing; and she read all the rest to see if they were just as silly. By the time she had read thirty-seven books on the subject, she had evolved ideas of her own on psychology; at variance, of course, with all thirty-seven volumes read to date. In fact, the thirty-seven volumes seemed to her so idiotic and made her so angry that she sat down there and then and wrote reams of refutal. Since one cannot talk about psychology in anything but jargon, there being no English for most of it, the reams of refutal read very learnedly indeed. – Miss Pym Disposes, Josephine Tey

Tey’s novel is set at Leys – a women’s training college for P.E. teachers. And that brings me to Agatha Christie’s Cat Among the Pigeons.

The setting here is Meadowbank School, a prestigious girls’ school where Grace Springer (!) the new gym teacher (I wonder if she was a Leys’ graduate?) is found shot dead in the Sports Pavilion. I haven’t read this one since I was 10 so time for a re-read. 

A cat set amid a flock of birds causes a flutter so does the appearance of two very eligible bachelors in the neighborhood. They are of course Bingley and Darcy whose arrival set hearts aflutter in Pride and Prejudice. 

But rather than Jane Austen I’m going with the literal cat and that indispensable home help manual How to Live with a Neurotic Cat by Stephen Baker. 

Example:

Chapter 4 – Sleeping Habits of the Neurotic Cat – Here are some helpful hints for your cat:
-Don’t waste your time shoving your cat off the bed. He will return anyway.
-Most beds sleep up to six cats. Ten cats without the owner.
-Try not to snore and disturb the cat.
-Beds designed for pets are alright for dogs or human infants. Cats require real beds.
And finally, on the average, cats need 24 hours of sleep a day. Some need more than that.

And then the depressing (or comforting depending on your own neuroses) conclusion:

Chapter 9 – Can the Neurotic Cat Be Cured? – No.

Neuroses with a somewhat better outcome are those treated by the W.H.R. Rivers. He was a psychiatrist with shell-shocked officers at Craiglockhart Hospital, Edinburgh from 1916–1917.  In Pat Barker’s Booker award-winning novel Regeneration, Rivers is the benign doctor and among his patients are the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Sassoon called it Dottyville.

But if you think about it, how crazy it is to think to death and devastation – killing people and risking getting killed –  are normal? Isn’t it a sign of sanity to want to live and to be disturbed by the presence and threat of mutilation and death? 

Perhaps no author captured this total madness of war better than Joseph Heller in Catch-22 who described the bureaucratic insanity of the US.Army Air Force  

On their base on the Italian island of Pianosa, Doc Daneeka explains the conundrum of Catch-22 to Yossarian: Any pilot requesting mental evaluation for insanity—hoping to be found not sane enough to fly and thereby escape dangerous missions—demonstrates his own sanity in creating the request and thus cannot be declared insane. In other words, it is a deadly circumstance or dilemma from which there is no escape.

“You mean there’s a catch?”

“Sure there’s a catch,” Doc Daneeka replied. “Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.”

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to, he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. – Catch-22, Joseph Heller

Come to think of it perhaps Jonathan Swift had already given us gave us the quintessential insanity of war in Gulliver’s Travels. The sectarian divide between the Big-Endians (who broke their eggs at the larger end) and Little-Endians (at the smaller end) had led to six rebellions in Lilliput 

But that would be a degree too far. And, hold on – aargh! – I was already at seven! But who’s counting?