JAMES AITCHISON

Holmes And I

Watching an episode of Sherlock Holmes one evening in a summer thunderstorm I heard-and-saw the heart-leap two-in-one: a crashing whump and a flash of cobalt blue as lightning struck the rooftop aerial.

Holmes, played by Jeremy Brett, died instantly, killed by darting particles of light and an electronic sizzling hiss, a blizzard of white noise on the tv screen.

Off! The remote. Switch off! And the set. Switch off!

When intervals between the speeds of sound and light grew longer, I thought it safe enough to switch the television on again.

Holmes was sitting in an armchair: his eyes were closed, his lips curved in a smile and on a table beside the chair – a pipe, empty syringe and rubber ligature.

The problem’s solved and the craving’s satisfied. I know these states of mind but I don’t know how Holmes and I survived the lightning strike.

JAMES AITCHESON

Raiding The Inarticulate

‘And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate’.

(T. S. Eliot, ‘East Coker V’, Four Quartets)

The inarticulate is the intimately vast prelinguistic simmering neural broth of brain before it grew whorled enough to speak.

Without the simmering we might never have chanced on the spoken word. Without words the species would be extinct or unborn.

The inarticulate is billions of neurons mute until a microcalorimetric spark fires the contingent networks of the word.

Every venture must be like a first, going beyond the charted boundary of my latest − the latest could be the last –into an unknown that doesn’t exist until I find it. And what I find is what I alone, and you alone, create: words to map the inarticulate.