Where one sees that words, through having been repeated so often, eventually cease merely to designate a quality… and overflow into the very way of looking…
It had been called unsinkable, and the word, through having been repeated so often, had eventually ceased merely to designate a quality of its construction and had become a way of looking at the sea—or rather, of no longer having quite to look at it—as though steel, calculations, watertight compartments and the power of the engines had gradually pushed beyond the field of thought what had always silently accompanied every ocean voyage… the possibility of never arriving.
Yet it carried lifeboats, exactly twenty-four, not one more than the law required, carefully covered and firmly secured in their cradles on the upper deck, and their very presence had something strange about it, since by their mere existence they seemed to acknowledge a possibility that everything else about the liner had been designed precisely to make almost inconceivable. Together they could have held five hundred people, while several thousand could be accommodated on board… but why would more have been needed, since the ship was not supposed to sink, and rafts, as useless as they were cumbersome, would merely have served as a reminder, by their awkward bulk and their all too obvious purpose, that beneath the decks, the saloons, the cabins, the lights and the passageways there still stretched that ungraspable water in which no human being could remain for long?
The law, perhaps older than this newfound confidence, had nevertheless preserved some of its precautions… every berth had its cork lifejacket, some twenty lifebuoys remained suspended along the bulwarks, and everything had been counted, checked, distributed according to regulation, so that danger itself seemed to have found its place within the general organization of the ship, no longer as a force capable of appearing wherever and whenever it chose, but as a possibility already measured, folded, fastened beneath a cover, assigned to a precise number of objects whose very presence was enough to declare that everything had been foreseen.
There was something in this construction that might have recalled another architecture, far older and infinitely smaller, itself enclosed within a protective shell, traversed by pathways, relays, passages, regions variously devoted to perception, movement, memory and language, yet whose power came less from any one of these parts than from the incalculable multitude of paths they could open between them; a world folded into a few handfuls of matter, capable of receiving the light of a star, the crash of a wave, the face of someone absent, a word spoken thirty years before, and then suddenly bringing them together without any engineer ever having been able to draw in advance the exact plan of the route by which they would meet.
It too possessed its protections, its envelopes, its carefully maintained circulations, its reserves and redundancies, and above all that prodigious ability to continue its work when something failed, to alter one pathway, reinforce another, to learn through repetition and sometimes even through accident what no initial plan seemed expressly to have intended for it; and the more one considered this architecture, the less it became possible to know whether its greatness lay in what it already contained or in the almost unimaginable number of relations still capable of forming within it, as though its true wealth had never been stored somewhere like cargo, but remained in potential in the passages that might yet open.
The liner, too, gave this impression of a potential far exceeding the immediate use made of it. It was not merely a hull containing cabins and engines, but an interlacing of decks, passageways, pipes, cables, valves, doors, stairways and mechanisms, many of which could continue to function if others failed, and whose very multiplicity seemed to guarantee that no single failure could ever be enough to reach the whole. Spaces had been separated so that, should water find its way in, it would encounter limits; certain systems had been duplicated so that a breakdown would not become an immobilization; functions had been distributed in such a way that damage might remain local, contained, almost forgotten by everything around it that continued to live normally.
Thus perhaps its strength lay not so much in the idea that no wound could ever occur as in the certainty that a wound would remain a wound—that is, something circumscribed, whose consequences would not cross the boundaries prepared for them. A compartment could be flooded without the ship ceasing to be a ship, just as one pathway can sometimes close without thought ceasing to find another way through; one part could temporarily fail the whole without the whole disappearing with it, and this capacity to continue despite injury added to power a quality perhaps more troubling still than strength: the ability to compensate.
But this comparison, had anyone thought to pursue it, might very quickly have encountered its own limit, for what made one of these architectures so extraordinarily fertile was precisely what made it impossible to contain entirely within a plan. A brain did not merely travel along its pathways… it transformed them by travelling along them. What it perceived changed the way it might perceive thereafter; what it learned altered the routes by which future learning might take place; and even in memory, which seemed to preserve what had been, something was recomposed each time the past returned to the present, so that one could never be absolutely certain that the map drawn yesterday still corresponded exactly to the territory of today.
The liner, by contrast, drew its confidence from the fact that its plan was not supposed to change.
Everything had been assigned its place, every bulkhead its resistance, every possible ingress of water its foreseeable consequence, every means of rescue the number of men which regulations had decided it should accommodate… and if one could have opened some immense atlas of this construction and followed its pipes, its circuits, its superimposed decks and the depths in which the engines laboured, one might perhaps have felt before such complexity the same astonishment as before the ramifications of a brain, with this difference: here, everything had been conceived so that the unforeseen, should it occur, would be forced to take one of the routes prepared for it.
Perhaps it was there that, almost imperceptibly, something began to turn itself inside out.
For a protection whose existence we know can increase our caution, but it can also eventually alter the way we look at that from which it protects us. Knowing how many compartments could be flooded without decisive consequence, one risked seeing water no longer as something capable of finding its own path, but as something necessarily bound to follow those assigned to it by calculation… knowing that a hull would withstand a certain violence, that a pump would absorb a certain flow, that a bulkhead would hold back a certain mass, the sea itself could become, in the mind, a succession of admissible quantities, as though measuring what it was capable of doing were already enough to determine what it would do.
Yet nothing announced a catastrophe, and perhaps that was precisely why the first signs would have been so difficult to recognize as such. There was no rupture, no crash, no event considerable enough to force attention to change direction; only, here and there, small differences, each of which, taken separately, still belonged perfectly to the ordinary world of the voyage: a vibration passing through the steel a little differently, a swell whose rhythm obliged the body to correct its balance, a mist that erased the line of the horizon sooner than usual, a new chill in the wind, something, in short, that did not yet constitute a danger but might, to a sufficiently attentive eye, begin to disturb that boundary so carefully established between what had been foreseen and what had not.
And perhaps it was there that the other architecture, the one no one could see and which no one would have thought to compare with the steel giant, possessed a singular advantage over it: it could make something of an almost insignificant detail and then, without yet knowing why it had retained it, bring it close to another, allow a sensation to awaken an image, the inclination of the deck to recall some former movement, a whiteness glimpsed far away to join with something whose name had not yet come, until the whole suddenly formed a figure that had existed nowhere before.
The brain did not necessarily foresee what was going to happen; it could simply become other through contact with what was happening.
The liner, on the other hand, had been built so that whatever happened would never force it to become other.
And while its lifeboats remained beneath their covers, while the lifejackets waited beside the berths and the lifebuoys punctuated the bulwarks at regular intervals, everything therefore continued with that reassuring perfection of things in which every precaution seems to confirm that no further precaution is necessary; but below, against the steel, the sea was already doing what it had always done, knowing neither plans, nor laws, nor numbers, touching the hull in a thousand places at once and immediately withdrawing its hand before returning, as though it were seeking, without intention and without haste, not yet a weakness, but simply every path that lay open to it.
Very freely inspired… from
Morgan Robertson, The Wreck of the Titan
(Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, 1898).
(Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, 1898).
