The Moors Last Sigh

Camoens, that Francisco found his ally, inculcating in him the virtues of nationalism, reason, art, innovation, and above all, in those days, of protest. Francisco shared Nehru’s early contempt for the Indian National Congress – ‘just a talk-shop for wogs’ – and Camoens gave his grave assent. ‘Annie this and Gandhi that,’ Epifania scolded him. ‘Nehru, Tilak, all these rogue gangsters from the North. Ignore your mother! Keep it up! Then it’ll be the jailhouse for you, chop-chop.’
    In 1916 Francisco da Gama joined the Home Rule campaign of Annie Besant and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, hitching his star to the demand for an independent Indian parliament which would determine the country’s future. When Mrs Besant asked him to found a Home Rule League in Cochin and he had the nerve to invite dock-labourers, tea-pickers, bazaar coolies and his own workers to join as well as the local bourgeoisie, Epifania was quite overcome. ‘Masses and classes in same club! Shame and scandal! Sense is gone from the man,’ she expostulated faintly, fanning herself, and then lapsed into sullen silence.
    A few days after the League was founded, there was a clash in the streets of the dockside Ernakulam district; a few dozen militant Leaguers managed to overpower a small detachment of lightly armed troops and sent them packing without their weapons. The next day the League was formally banned, and a motor-launch arrived at Cabral Island to place Francisco da Gama under arrest.
    He was in and out of prison during the next six months, earning his elder son’s contempt and the younger boy’s undying admiration. Yes, a hero, absolutely. In those prison spells, and in his furious political activism between jail terms, when in accord with Tilak’s instructions he deliberately courted arrest on many occasions, he acquired the credentials that made him a coming man, worth keeping an eye on, a fellow with a following: a star.
    Stars can fall; heroes can fail; Francisco da Gama did not fulfil his destiny.

    In prison he found time for the work that undid him. Nobody ever worked out where, in what reject-goods discount-store of the mind, Great-Grandfather Francisco got hold of the scientific theory that turned him from emerging hero into national laughing-stock, but in those years it came to preoccupy him more and more, eventually rivalling even the nationalist movement in his affections. Perhaps his old interest in theoretical physics had become confused with his newer passions, Mrs Besant’s Theosophy, the Mahatma’s insistence on the oneness of all India’s widely differing millions, the search among modernising Indian intellectuals of the period for some secularist definition of the spiritual life, of that worn-out word, the soul; anyhow, towards the end of 1916 Francisco had privately printed a paper, which he then sent to all the leading journals of the time for their kind attention, entitled Towards a Provisional Theory of the Transformational Fields of Conscience , in which he proposed the existence, all around us, of invisible ‘dynamic networks of spiritual energy similar to electromagnetic fields’, arguing that these ‘fields of conscience’ were nothing less than the repositories of the memory – both practical and moral – of the human species, that they were in fact what Joyce’s Stephen had recently spoken (in the Egoist magazine) of wishing to forge in his soul’s smithy: viz., the uncreated conscience of our race.
    At their lowest level of operation, the so-called TFCs apparently facilitated education, so that what was learned anywhere on earth, by anyone, at once became more easily learnable by anyone else, anywhere else; but it was also suggested that on their most exalted plane, the plane that was admittedly hardest to observe, the fields acted ethically, both defining and being defined by our moral alternatives, being strengthened by each moral choice taken on the planet, and, conversely, weakened by base deeds, so that, in theory, too many evil acts would damage the Fields of Conscience beyond repair and ‘humanity would then face the unspeakable reality of a universe made amoral, and therefore meaningless, by the destruction of the ethical nexus, the safety-net, one might even say, within which we have always lived’.
    In fact, Francisco’s paper propounded no more than the lower, educative functions of the fields with any degree of conviction, extrapolating the moral dimensions in one relatively