The Lantern-slide Girl

Part 2: The Primary Circuit

But Lucy the tea-tray girl was a fast breeder, although not very fast at all by later standards.  But she was sufficient a resonant frequency to induce image-flow in the score or so secondary circuits seated on benches on either side of John. These great slabs of oak were made from the same ancestral trees that had given birth to the ships of Samuel Pepys’ Royal Navy of the Restoration. And the lovely Lucy as a new form of time and experience was the primary circuit. From hereon, after her primal moments of induced suggestion by light and shade alone, her countless ghost-children would be in charge.

John caught Mannequin’s face in the smoky half-shadow. She was looking at him intently. His mates giggled and gave him amused nudges of the unlettered serfs they were indeed. He looked again. There certainly was the Gioconda smile and the arch glance. She had a snake-like glint in her green eyes, and his loins were stirred mightily. But he was afraid.  In the half-light she was hardly human. He had a feeling that she would eat him alive, spit out what was left, and move on. He was himself surprised to realize that he was more interested in Lucy than Mannequin, who was indeed more beautiful and had the advantage of being flesh and blood. But with Lucy he was in command. Lucy was an escape to the future. He could model and plan, and unlike Mannequin, Lucy would never leave him, never betray him. Mannequin would be costly and troublesome, and with her goddess looks, she would the object of many powerful affections against which he could hardly protect her or indeed himself. She would succumb to power. Flesh was always betrayal, sorrow, loss; already, John knew he was nothing much in the world’s measure, and Mannequin would wipe him out.

He felt of as much value and substance in the world as the pig muck that still stuck to his boots and added to the mix of aromas in the tent.

Mannequin looked more intensely at him. Something burst in his brain like the instant blossoming of a flower. He was a pig farmer’s son who could hardly read or write, but he was thinking impossible thoughts. Just one impossibility he considered was that perhaps the whole and entire show was for him alone. Of a sudden, his oaf-like friends, sniggering either side of him, didn’t matter. They were not special. Bless them, they were storage units: they would fart and burp and gossip and think simple-minded peasant thoughts throughout all their simple-minded peasant life. A great 19^th century philosopher on his death bed some forty miles to the south of John  might have said that as distinct from John, the serfs either side of him were not mutating. Perhaps evolution has to start with an individual rather than a species. In the terms of one hundred and fifty years ago, what John was seeing on the screen wasn’t a show so much as a means by which the odd pair seeded the village with carefully constructed impossibilities.

The show continued. All Lucy did in this slow-pulsing image world was buy a hat, give her mother a Christmas present, and play with children. But as the warming sun of an accelerating time shone on these newborn sea shallows of the image world, strange energies began to form and gather. Many males other than John had noticed that Lucy had a trim ankle, a visible bust, and wore make-up. The salt-shallows swarmed with cloned life ready to run for the beach of almost-creation. Lucy was unlike anything the ploughmen and butchers and bakers and apprentice blacksmiths had ever seen. Even as she played bat and ball, her movements later caused the vicar to give subtle warnings about such images being a threat to worship.

By this time, John knew that something had happened to him. Just like the images before him, his reasoning was now staccato, pulsing like the episodes of the “show” (a new word to the village at the time). Now he felt that what he thought was only partly his own - another impossibility. His thoughts came certainly from the brain he was born with, but he was frank with himself. He could not have formed them himself given his mental resources and his extremely limited education. There were voices inside his head. Many voices. They came over in fragments during moments of intense mental clarity, flashing through him like the light he had seen coming from the rods on the outskirts of the Copse. The voices did not use his vocabulary; when he tried to imitate the voices, his very jaw and lips protested, as if not designed for the fast verbal exchanges he heard. Whatever it was, it reasoned in metaphors. Seeds, hatching eggs, the birth and death of animals and seasons; natural enough images for a farmer’s boy. Except that this voice was not his own. Or rather was it a fragmentary part of him that as yet hardly existed. Other voices were near, voices ancient, foreign, and voices not of the past, carried by clicks, sparks, and echoes.

We might ask ourselves what did this new John now want? Was it sex, money, was it power?

It was none of these things.

What John wanted was nothing to do with social class, or economics, or the adventures of the Id and Ego to be written up later in the century by a Viennese Jew who had only just left the University of Vienna medical school.

No, John wanted something back that had had lost a long time before he was born.

John wanted his ancient birthright.

To this end, a new John was emerging as sure as a chicken’s blinking eye sees through a fissure in a cracked egg. In our own time we talk of viruses and programmes, of re-invention of the self, and deconstruction of experience. One thing was certain: as pieces of pure disembodied information, these images and voices had travelled a long way in time and technology to get to John in response to his call.

The chattering in his head became incessant as the images of Lucy continued their development. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling. He was with friends. A lost bushman scans the hills for smoke rings. In a similar way, John had rediscovered his community. They protected him. In modern terms, we might say that John had a kind of B-feature subtext bursting through his conscious processes. The voices were really no more than live forms of organization broadcast and caught momentarily through a very noisy channel, even when such things as channels or broadcasts were impossibilities of the far future. His village in such terms was become momentarily an experimental farm, induced by new technology in action before him on the screen. A live process was searching for a suitable host, a receptor ready for the images and themes as presented here in this crazy stinking tent and its magic lantern slide show.

A host? John muttered to himself. What was that? The only thing he knew about the word was that the Rev. Mr. Pratt didn’t like it. He half-spoke out loud again as the fragmented thought came out of the mental dark. People nudged each other. John was talking to himself again. It was that Mannequin’s smile, that’s what it was. Seeding? Laying eggs, more like, said John to himself. Some rare form of a kind of mental egg he conceived, some kind of information-animal that he alone would someday hatch out. Like a Chinese flower dropped into a glass, this new creature would live in a world vastly extended, and elaborately developed in history and time as compared with his own.

John didn’t know it, but he was being carefully prepared for his escape from the pigs by friends he did not know he had. He had certainly the eerie impression that somehow he was one of the first chosen to see and absorb images which not religious in any sense. In the village there were very pictorial representations of anything at all. A few paintings he had glimpsed at the squire’s mansion, and some gargoyles on the church so decayed that the faces could hardly be made out. Other than that, he had seen a few children’s illustrated books kept by a teacher in a locked cupboard. Of illustrations, newspapers, sketches of things, photographs, he had seen almost nothing that was no some raw version of itself. There were still very few photographs around. He knew therefore hardly anything that could not be touched, eaten, stroked, or kicked, or fed. This early image-time of evolving consciousness was so slow that it was possible to reason from image to image one frame at a time, possible to see the connections between image development and the development of those image-clusters called products. This kept visual impressions at a distance, and therefore some kind of control over them was just possible.

But the rapid sequence of the Lucy pictures was designed to break out of any such control. The vicar said that this was the reason he didn’t like such things. He didn’t like depictions; he was suspicious of endless versions of things that suggested yet further things beyond themselves. This was a new kind of evil to him. There was no end, said he over dinner with the squire, to the imagining they brought about. That was the devilish maze-like dimension he called the unreal. This clever construction consisted of a mass of suggestions inherent in the crude Lucy drama. And, said the Reverend Pratt, none of this could be controlled. This made the making of images still somewhat idolatrous. Lucy (as what we in our own day would call the very first film star) was not evil in herself, but imagining that you could go on adventures with her in the mind was evil. Already Lucy and her image-kind were spreading. Other villagers and other vicars reported the arrival of Signor Brahmin and Mannequin, and the spreading of countless Lucy clones in cloned adventures. Short and tall, blond and brunette, the warm and friendly dolls and their colourful doll adventures were taking over lives used only to gales and rain, snow and animals; lives coarse and brutal and simple-minded and impoverished were not only thinking (a dangerous thing to the vicar’s mind) but imagining, which was a much more dangerous thing altogether.

This was born a new moral dilemma; the vicar over roast turkey, plumb pudding and mulled wine, saw Satan, Temptation and the Fall. This new immorality involved Satan’s latest clever device: virtual (the vicar used that word) sin.

The squire agreed, broke wind, and ordered more wine.

All which together caused the vicar to create an idea of a new form of matter and spirit which he called, on the spur of the moment, controlled hallucinatory substance.

Pleased with that description of Lucy, and with the squire snoring in his sleep, he decided to write to take his leave and go home to write to the newly formed Society of Psychical Research in London.

But Victorian mechanisms were only part of the story. Technology launches a state of mind. Its finite self falls away like the blocks underneath a launched ship. Just outside London, over one hundred miles away from John, Charles Darwin was thinking of random mutations as cause and effect. In Paris, Karl Marx was thinking about economics as causation. Both were wrong. John was being reconstructed by a carefully crafted ideology of light and shade. This was the future. In the burgeoning politics of the imagination, in media as Entertainment State, there was to be no OFF switch for escapes of all kinds.

The film-like progression of images continued. It kept the raffish audience interested, but they were getting near the point of complete exhaustion. Never before had they had to support such a concentration span brought about by a mere play of light. It was an experience that confounded both the night and day they knew. It interfered with natural rhythms and patterns of time as toil and trouble. But the problem was that they were enjoying themselves. That had not happened before. The man nailed to the cross saw to that.

But if what they were seeing was the future, then they welcomed it. Yes, they were pleased no end. History (or some such thing) had had the wit to invent pleasure and relaxation. Usually peasants only sat on benches for any considerable length of time in a police station or in a church, and neither were enjoyable situations. The only other benches they had known in the past were the whipping bench, the stocks, or the benches in the public house. On the latter they drugged themselves to get ready for another day of backbreaking toil, usually so hard they died young, if they were not killed or injured on the job.

By contrast the slide show was an experience that offered no threat at all. And it was more subtle then the circus, vastly more interesting than the boxing and wrestling they saw on the village green. Such things as the two-dimensional Lucy were new in history. She was the very first light-driven Lara Croft of history. As such, she penetrated the thickest skull. And if the truth were told, the slide show was fresh and new, clever and sexy, though nobody dare say such things, even if they knew the latter word, which was in the process of being coined. It was magic and intrigue, it was thrilling and exciting. No cloddish pantomime could match this. The crudely tinted show in the darkness rediscovered a long dormant sense of mystery. It raised also unprecedented emotional excitements, most of them illicit and some certainly morally questionable within any terms they knew. Lucy was seen against the glamour and sophistication of town and city life. They saw quite independent women, smart looking fellow-me-lads with a twinkle in their eye, wearing some real sharp clothes that that were cut by no shears in the village. But they were passive viewers. They were not like John. They merely received, they didn’t analyse.

John was now was the very first confirmed viewer-addict and channel surfer of all history. Already he was matching, collating, and absorbing images and themes. Most important of all, he was assessing possibilities. Only ten minutes into lantern slide time, and the coming new century had arrived well before its scheduled appearance. One hundred and fifty years later we might say that John the Pigman had entered the Matrix.

One thing was certain: like most of the village, within a week John would be buying the new technology.

His concentration was now briefly interrupted. Peter the Painter lurched from the tent to spew out nine pints of Old Brinley’s Home Brew Stout on the celebrated village milestone, on which was carved “Canterbury, 100 miles.”

But John hardly noticed. The flicker-process was talking to him. That was far more interesting. Flicker, flicker. He had been selected. It was done. John was the One. He was now alien to the village as some little green man from a fairy mound. Flicker again. Lucy has entered him like a cuckoo enters a nest. Now he certainly had an aerial on his head as drawn by cartoonists or at least one inside his skull, as drawn by scientists. Now he would begin a life in time, which like the railways being built all around him would lead him to adventures in spirit and gut beyond the sun and moon

With a little help from friends he never knew he had, John was being reconstructed. Within him, Lucy was now pure radiation on the shallow beach pools of a primal sea.

What would struggle out from the pool and make a break for the shore was yet to be seen.

John came home as one of the first citizens of a new time his mind reeling with countless images of skies filled with sketches of guesses at possible flying machines, beautiful women, imperial adventures, fairy tales. Moreover these images could be bought, stored and brought out for further repeats. In the years to come they were to enter even the poorest of homes la plague of mind-locusts who controlled almost everything. They were swapped, re-sold, repaired here...Indeed there were whole series of slides made of episodes with the life of ordinary families: their births, marriages and death, with added episodes each month...repeatability and storage, repeatability and storage, it was the rhythm of the dragons he had heard were coming along the steel rails he had seen

Within a very short time, John realized that something strange had happened to the village. The most unlikely folk (dour, humourless, silent) now talked of non-existent things; they laughed and smiled at things they had no touched or seen. They bought lanterns, projectors and batteries, and most, like John began to live his life in the lantern-world. Whilst he was chopping wood, feeding the pigs, the doll-folk were now ever-present in his head, like a plague of elves he had once heard his great-grandmother speak of. He would laugh and cry with these phantoms in a way that he had never laughed or cried with the things of his previous world. He imagined them talking back to him, helping him with his daily round, commenting and suggesting until alone in the field he was surrounded by a thousand and one voices and presences as if he were surrounded by dozens of helpers from a huge common family, members he could summon up at any one time if he was uncertain or afraid.

The village looked the same, but now, as night fell, it had a thousand other villages imposed up on it, both inside the head and out.

Eventually, within a few months the steaming dragons came as predicted, speeding along the laid rails, raising further wonders in the minds of the villagers. The engines drew carriages with people in them now, but the passengers did yet stop. Hands all waved to the men working in the fields, and the children screamed with delight from the carriage windows at John’s fat pigs.

But nothing had changed much, not even the chattering abstractions that haunted John’s head, until one morning builders and carpenters started constructing what they called a Waiting Room.

When the Waiting Room was complete, with its warm fire, its cakes and sandwiches, its hot tea and coffee, the trains stopped by John’s pigsty for the first time. The doors opened, and John saw women the like of which he had not seen before. He saw women and girls with delicate arms, red lips and powdered faces, in clothes that made them look like things from fairyland. The impression of the ethereal was strengthened by the quickness of their arrival and departure, which made them appear almost like the lanternslides of Signor Brahmin. One minute the fairies were on the screen, the next minute they were gone. Many spoke with quicksilver educated voices in accents he had never heard and they used long words just like the vicar. What impressed him most was the quickness of their chatter, their bird-like movement of their lips. John knew that come night, he would return to the slow-witted carcasses around him who ate like beasts and whose massive frames and slow minds were built, he imagined, to protect the hunter-gather kings buried deep in the mounds and tumuli that surrounded his village.

The women caught other trains from other intersecting tracks. They disappeared under hills and over mountains; they shot at great speed in almost straight lines over fields and rivers to be vanished by towns and cities John could imagine only in the country of his mind. They were gone like Lucy herself, flashed on a screen to be a remembered part of a momentary doll-show. He wanted to climb into the images as others climbed into the trains and escape to another world, like the men in a balloon he had once seen.

It was with such thoughts in mind that one day, whilst feeding his pigs immediately by the Waiting Room that he saw Lucy herself stepping off a newly arrived train aided by a porter.  She’d just got off the first train from Bartley, 30 miles east of the village.

Though he was covered in mud and mire from top to toe, John was a fine looking man, and despite herself, the girl looked hard at him. She then lowered her eyes to the pig muck that rose up from his boots to his neck, gave him a Mannequin smile and disappeared into the Waiting Room. Ten minutes later, John watched as she caught quite another train, and disappeared under Stroud hill like a goddess of the old landscape.

Light grey smoke followed her like the fumes of an old sacrifice.

The smoke vanished the church, the magistrate and the vicar. John’s pigs, his family, future wife were gone forever summoned out of time by the horns of elfland. The images John had seen were the first stages of a miraculous escape, and for the first time since the blessed Conquest, John would leave his village Starvation, illness, death and nameless suffering no doubt to come would never erase the image quest in his head. He was in love with Lucy forever; using all strength of body, mind and soul, he would find her somewhere in the mystery of the new cities whose smoke rings he had seen on the new industrial horizon. He would meet some version of her, some adulteration of her form and shape.

He would call her his lanternslide girl.

As for the villagers, they were left with a curious memory. After Mannequin and Signor Brahmin had departed from the village with their carts and horses, it was reported that they stopped for a while outside the Poor House. There was also a rumour that they handed over all the money they had taken to the astonished Beadle.

After that, they vanished into the infinity of the coming day, never to be seen or heard of again.

       In a later age that was separate from John as Rome was from Babylon, Morris Farmer, a handsome young man and Estelle, his pretty new wife stepped out of a taxi in old New York. Morris was John’s great grandson. As the multi-millionaire owner of a major film corporation, Morris was responsible for giving the world countless images every fraction of a second.

The newly wed couple were on a merry hunt for curiosa to help give some interest and character to their as yet unfurnished town apartment. In a shop owned by a Mr. Kee, who appeared to be the oldest Chinese man in the world, they found a box of lanternslides. Some of the slides were cracked, and all were obscured by the dust and grease of nearly one-hundred-and-fifty years.

Full of themselves on honeymoon, prosperous and happy and successful, neither were in a mood to notice that the young girl in the long dress whose adventures were featured in the cracked blurred slides resembled completely the new wife on the arm of Morris Farmer.

Full of countless excitements in a world that changed every minute, they could not make up their minds, and promising to return the next day, they left the shop.

Morris and Estelle did return a week later, but a disappointment was waiting for them. Mr. Kee said an Italian man and his younger companion, a tall slim woman with long black hair who might have been the Italian’s daughter, had bought the slides.

 He added that this odd couple appeared not to understand money or prices at all. Mr. Kee said that to his astonishment, they had handed him a great deal of money for the slides.

Before he could protest, the pair vanished into the infinity of the coming day.

Colin Bennett March 2004