Oslo, Winter 2011

 

    Possession is nine tenths of a mother. I began to suspect this even then in those early years when I was the one boy in the Asylum for Lost Children who could not sleep. It was postulated that my mother had been in typical fashion “seduced and abandoned” as a young woman and laboured in a neo-Victorian brothel but one town away from the narrow bed where, after being passed like a pail of water through a sequence of hands at a house fire, I had finally come to rest. I would lie there awake on my twin mattress waiting in a state of suspended animation, as if about to be x-rayed, and when the nuns on their rounds leaned over in the dark I could detect an odour of fermentation under their curls and was sure they were to my ill-begotten mind from another world. An odd assortment of groans and hums reverberated through the shuttered rooms, as if a pipe organ had been submerged underwater, and I would in the depths of my insomniatic childhood when sleep was nowhere in sight, through the sheer force of will teleport myself to what I later learned was the primal scene of trauma, the child’s witness to the violence visited upon the mother by the father’s crumpling intercourse and once there I would begin dreaming. For obvious reasons, this moment of coupling was impossible for me to observe, but I feel I have not been immune from its effects, and when as an adult, perhaps it was out of compensation as much as interest that I read of Little Hans’s cautionary tale, the toddler cocooned in a doublet and lederhosen standing in the muted door watching in horrified wonder what would one day morph before the eyes of Freud into a fear of horses. The scene I confess was the wrong one but a lure nevertheless, for my mother at the instant of my conception was, I sensed, actually alone, sitting at her escritoire in a robe, like a mildly dishevelled stage actress, a vulcanite hair comb holding a small spray of asters above her ear, and in her hand an oyster-shell pen perched over a letter as she waited for the proper word to form in the drop at the nib. Orange hydrangeas in the halogen light of a gathering dusk. I think two thoughts at once and the impossibility of expressing them as one is where anxiety and later eros originate. My mother was, I am certain, always like this: on the precipice of writing, and yet waiting for a knock on the door, perhaps for once a suitor with roses to announce himself and mercifully interrupt her. She must have those many months later when the disturbances inside her marked an unavoidable transition, turned to the complexly brocaded wallpaper and upholstery that darkened her room and looked in speculation and pain when my legs breached from her like a wish: the letter Y. This peculiar detail has never been adequately explained to me though I have poured for hours over the few anonymous letters I received through the years — matted to my left heel was a small, partially decayed leaf and under my newborn fingernails the slightest evidence of soil. I was pulled backward into the world, a sensation that still grips me when I sleep, as if drawn by some inhuman, magnetic force down the mattress toward what I do not know. At some point the past and the present departed — Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today. . . . The slow blotting of faces and words. If you could dream another time, then perhaps you could live in it, the voice in my head, which I facetiously called the Narrator, said to me. I did not know then nor now who or what to trust because the thoughts in my head often seemed unoriginal and would enter without permission, where once implanted formed colonies of association the way bacteria assemble and mutate. By the time I was approximately twenty, my memory of my childhood was thoroughly corrupted as to be quite useless, and yet the little I remember of my earliest days in the Asylum remains remarkably clear as a delicate insect perfectly preserved in amber. I recall a sheepdog as tall as my shoulder that took a liking to me for some reason and we would walk together among the elderberry bushes as another dog unseen to us walked barking occasionally along the outside of the stone wall. I like to think the dog was from the neighbouring houses whose weather-stained wooden roofs I could glimpse from the top step, barely making out the mushroom satellite dishes that sprouted under the wet sky. I like to think now if I were to rest in a field of rococo grasses, pollen and dandelion seeds of late spring, all this life and allergy . . . that if I were to stay in one place long enough . . . a soft cough from the small crawling things of this world. I like to think when I close my eyes I am able to see Caspar David Friedrich’s explorer on a craggy outcropping over the roiling somnolent clouds, with his back turned to his creator (Herr Friedrich himself), captured a second before he leaps. Or perhaps he remains paused in the ghostly fulgent light of his survey, the atmosphere suffused with ripe lilies, soft summer mouldering of leaf and meal, the corpse of a deer biodegrading under a disinterested, camera stare into a rope of purples and cobalt blues as the intricate scarab beetle for whom the universe is death goes about its work. Moon, dark spoor. A thousand decays. Out of a mother’s mouth emerges art like a worm, which is also life.