41. Phantom rhapsody

A colleague suffered a heart attack during one of his classes this week. He was terribly scared, a Muslim prayer rising from his lips as we fanned his sweat away with sheets of paper to help him breathe, waiting for the ambulance on that hot, sticky polluted afternoon.

I talked, tried to reassure him during the long minutes leading to the paramedics’ arrival. I said that everything was ok, under control. Relax. Your skin color is fine, your face looks good. Breathe, don’t be afraid. We’re here. You look fine, no need to cry. Everything’s taken care of. Don’t try to move. We’re here.

He felt paralysis on his left side, the arm and the leg, his right hand violently grabbing his shirt where his heart struggled. The medics arrived, confirmed he had had a mild attack, but as they were reaching the hospital it worsened, and he had a big one, fortunately for him with doctors nearby.

The following day, he called me from the hospital, giggling. A touch of euphoria in his voice, telling me he felt great, and that he would probably take Monday and Tuesday off to rest, hoping he would be fit enough to resume his duties next Wednesday…

Denial? Fear?

And then, I caught a cold, fever shooting up. My nose dripping. A reaction to my own fears? The ganmao attacking my lungs and sinuses. My brain stuffed with slow, porous thoughts, unmanageable. My way out of this eventful reality? Could very well be.

On my way to recovery, I got to ponder over the role of pain and how we remember it. Or simply don’t or won't. As was the case for my colleague.

As an example, it’s not possible, as such, to relive the pain associated with giving birth. Women, I think, haven’t forgotten, but somehow the sharpness of the pain sinks below recognition levels. I use peripheral souvenirs to reconstruct how I felt. I see the round mirror that enabled me to see my child appear. Through this image, I can recall that I ached. But it’s a ‘cold’ memory, disincarnated. I no longer feel that specific hurt, although I’m sure it once existed, intense and dominating.

On the other hand, I have a clear, emotional recollection of my daughter as I first laid eyes upon her. She was so pretty, I thought. And I can recall, word for word, the silent conversation that went on in my mind as I held her. I said, “Hello you. Who are you, pretty baby? I don’t know you. You’re different from me. I’ll have to get to know you. We have time.”

I can still hear myself thinking this, as my daughter, eyes wide open, seemed to look at me wondering about the same thing. I had a strong sense of holding a person, a real complete person, detached from me. Another being. I don’t quite know what I had expected, but I was surprised at her fullness, at her entity, so compact, so comprehensive. Somebody I would have to get to know and understand. And this would only happen with time. I had no privileged insight into her being because I was the mother. I would have to learn, little by little, who she was.

I also recall the bus ride I took, with my suitcase, to go to the hospital when my contractions started to get regular and closer to one another. There was a sense of loneliness I worked at pushing away, deciding I wouldn’t let it spoil the last hours of my pregnancy.

For my son, it was different. My waters broke as I was waiting to be examined by the obstetrician. I was already at the hospital for my weekly appointment. No contractions. I started pushing right away and within minutes, my son was born. The doctor arrived too late. The baby was born with the help of two nurses. He went “flop,” like an excited bar of soap squeezed between hands. Hardly any pain. Just a nice, pink, chubby boy showing up. There he was, in my arms, and I thought it strange that my female body could produce a male one. It defied an unusual kind of logic I didn’t know, up to that instant, I had. It was therefore a revelation about myself that my son triggered, there, calmly sleeping next to me.

My most vivid memories of pain have nothing to do with bodily harm. They are mostly linked to emotional experiences such as financial anguish, trying desperately to make ends meet with two young children. The anxiety, staring at unpaid bills. Panic when the phone rang, debt collectors hunting me down. Arduously unfolding unbelievable length of creativity to invent the money we needed. Not next week, not tomorrow, but now. Right now. Before dinner time. Digging profoundly, furiously into myself for solutions. All the strength I could invoke to win an extra day of survival. Inching our way out of the corners where we always seemed to end up, the three of us.

That overwhelming suffering, I remember all of it. Indelible imprints on my cerebral cortex. Distress vibrating throughout my nervous system.

That’s the way it is: I don’t truly remember the pain when I broke my foot. I can’t describe today what my body underwent when I had pneumonia. I know these events occurred, but the memory of the pain with time has transformed itself into an intellectual recollection, devoid of sensory affect. But I remember, with extreme precision, anguish. I can make it resurface and connect to it, measuring the damages to my personality, to my daily activities, my social interactions. I can still gauge today the dimensions of my hopelessness back then, how it slashed through my energy, disjointing my thoughts. My sensitivity exacerbated, stretched to unsustainable limits. Implosive grief, poisoning how I viewed myself.

In other words, I wouldn’t remember later, in any poignant way, the pain caused by a well-applied punch in the face, but wouldn't forget winds of emotions brushing by, accompanying a fear, or the intense realization of standing at a major crossroad.

So, there you were, my children, my grand-children, being born. Not the thought of labor, but a welcoming motion into this world.

I feel again and again the shivers of admiration at meeting you. Your presence suddenly added to this world. Your voices, your gestures, the space that your bodies started to occupy. I still have it in me to recreate the very seconds of your arrivals. Not in a romantic or idealistic way. But through the awareness that we all made it, all of us, all the way up to your entrance alongside my life. You, my children, my grand-children, sound and intact. Pulses. An absolute materialization of vitality. Resilient. Continuant. Diligent.

Memory retained as a form of everlasting externality. To do some good. Responsive to the reminiscence that exists all around us as scars, days of disorders, pleas for shelter, and the many byproducts of bitterness are being counted.

As far as our nature is concerned, despite the bloody red color of balance sheets drawn in the past, we have finally morphed into reproductive success; evolutionarily speaking, supporting the advances of human warmth, touch and sentiments. Our emotional history dedicated to the embodiment of air, fire, earth, and water. The quintessence of substances safely lodged in our ultimate lightness of spirit. Views of inner pain as well as of liberation. The body always hurting a bit, but in a way that can be forgiven.

Your Laolao

40. Apogee

Haven’t written in the past few days. Yes, there’s work, but you’ve also been back, your voices full of fun filling the Skype network up to my ears and eyes, stellar bodies remaking the sea and the sky, re-curving the world, your laughter sounding like the exuberant chuckles of humanity’s ancient gods celebrating a panoply of paradises gravity can no longer capture. Smiles acting as air purifiers, the glow in your eyes as signals, shining points in the deep cosmic pond. Babbling, the cherubic faces of time travelers defying the dangers of paradoxes, compiling past and future existences into a single brilliant outcome. Predestination permanently written as means of triggering biographical divergence. My body particles allowing alternate selves to usurp power in a masterful performance, beyond expression, super glossy echoes solving all puzzles. Masses of joy converted into striking energy. Pulsing, sailing past iridescent planets, jolts of delight bouncing along an unchartered course. Your hands on the screen, flowerlike. Virtual shores reserved for the primordial imagery of your return, my proverbial source of illumination metamorphosed into inner fireworks. Petals in a revolution around my personal folklore, flashing with genealogical speed while, at a deep organic level, I savor the moment of a chain reaction, globular destructuring. A direct broadcast on the grandest of scale animating my grey cells way past ultimate frontiers. Your baby voices, a journey of exploration through the admirable new phases of matter. And by extension, space and time interchanging their nature under bright solar heat. Audible optical transitions, gleaming like chrome, blaring decibels of pure sonic dazzle, in the universal story of how oxygen and wilderness came to be.

Welcoming back my grand-children.

Loving you,
Laolao

39. Collage

The Games end today, I’m going back to work tomorrow. I have enjoyed the two-week break. I’ve kept myself busy, floating at home between my canvases and the laptop. On one side of my flat, cutting magazines for my collages, arranging colors for future large pieces, and in the other room, doing the same, but with words on the screen as I slice souvenirs edited by memory.

I’m quite fond of the principle of re-assemblage in all aspects of life. Interested in how parts can be refitted differently. Take a landscape from the National Geographic and shred it to pieces each not larger than one centimeter. Nothing recognizable from the original, except for the hues. Then recombine these into a face. Little dots piled up to create an eye, a shadow next to the nose, a double-chin, wrinkles running down the mouth.

Now take hundreds of pages from the National Geographic and build a huge rendition of an imagined city by night, flakes of printed paper glued to imitate the strokes of a brush by an anonymous painter, the representation of a non-existing representation.

Details, precision, small patches of colors conjugated into new sequences. A careful pause at each shade to contemplate distribution’s infinite possibilities. Having to reach a decision. Testing, often a mad undertaking, combinations and effects, how far gradations go, how to feign them, how to interrupt them. To survey light, altering the spectrum because it’s early the morning or late the afternoon. Light bulbs the evening causing a mutation, halogen another. Examining how the work changes according to the hours or the climate, what happens on cloudy days as opposed to sunny ones. How distance influences, what’s to be seen up close, the fine line that appears from far away. Regrets at having to choose and immobilize with glue the rotation of the wheels seen in my eye as bits of ink pigments try each other out. If I can, I'll work on a project for a year, two when I cut the paper smaller.

This is what I like to do. This is what I would be doing all day if I didn’t have to make a living and pay monthly bills. This is what I’ve enjoyed doing since childhood. Re-indexing colors, re-establishing forms, re-cataloguing reds into browns, grays into blues, blacks into greens, pastels, vivid tints, finding a wide range of whites that aren’t. Playing, bluffing, disguising yellow into a bright purple, fabricating certainties that rest on simulations. Over and over again, lured by limitless visual scenarios.

Surprised at my ability to endure pain whenever I complete a piece, no room left to add a combination, no space available to extend ramifications, no more odds, probabilities. No sequel to the red or green. Finished. Always difficult, unacceptable. Because I wasn’t myself quite finished. There were still undeveloped, feasible assortments dangling at the edge of my iris. More selections awaiting consideration. Frustrated at the size of the canvas, never large enough to expose all the angles we can use substituting this for that, confronting distant ploys, curious as to how they’ll get along.

Surfaces with an autonomy of their own. Escapades out of my control. Acts of independence, a spirit of mutiny, textures always prone to insurrection, fashioning results all my efforts at technique and discipline won’t foresee, won’t harness. And it is to reach that unique moment that I work for, when the structure carefully tested and ordered unleashes itself, slips away, and detonates in total insubordination.

My hands by then full of blisters from scratching glues, varnishes and rivers of hardened transparent acrylic. Every bone in my body wrapped in over-heated waves of soreness. An attestation I was there all along. My signature within the anatomy.

Laolao

38. Horace

I’ve been wanting to spend some time to think about love. I believe I was the ideal candidate for its obsessive kind. You know, the type of love that’s like an addiction, that eats you up, all-consuming, throwing you in a state of utter dependency.

It happened once, my first boyfriend, Richard. He was an ideal man for the times, 18 years old, already attending university. A prodigy. A future Nobel Prize in literature his entourage would say. The beatnik look having been conceived for him, a charcoal worn-out wool sweater with holes, the long sleeves hiding half the hands, the thin scarf loosely thrown around the neck, one side over the shoulder, the dark trench-coat, the feminine fingers yellowed by nicotine, the hair slightly curled and cut unevenly. High cheekbones on a pale face, delicate lips, and piercing eyes behind glasses with a minimalist steel frame.

I met him I was 13, dated him for about a year. Like a debutante entering paradise.

He would call on Thursday evenings to fix a time when we would meet the next day for a synchronized laser-light concert on the music of Schoenberg, the latest Arrabal movie, or a play by Ionesco.

It’s not like today, honey, where with one click on Google I can find the info I need to make a good impression. We’re talking here of a truck load of books borrowed from more than one library, because I could only take out five at a time from each.

In two short sentences, even less sometimes, Richard on the phone would also plug in the names of Arthur Koestler, Sartre, Camus and Gertrude Stein. It left me exactly 24 hours to read these authors’ entire works before I would see Richard again, and start a conversation with “Your assertion, yesterday, about Koestler’s analysis on the maturity of crowds…” And be loved in return. His passion exemplified, proved beyond any doubt with a reply he found me worthy of, quoting German philosophers as an example. Can you imagine the honor? So touched I thought my heart would explode.

Oh, how I loved Richard. Our parties, the air perfumed by hasch, fighting numbness, our bodies stretched on big pillows with Indian motifs, while he would stand like a giant among us reciting his latest poetry, dodecaphonic notes in the background.

Richard had read everything, I mean everything, at least twice.

And he changed me. I was no longer a girl, but myself a walking encyclopedia.

I started to skip school to read, hidden in a park. Trying to assimilate the Greek classics, the surrealists, and Russian literature in the same afternoon. And when I thought I had attained a decent level of knowledge in a field, he would glide into another, and I would rush to learn from scratch all there was on impressionism or cubism. If I breathed, relieved to be able at last to speak a bit about 20th century European writers, he would surprise me with a comment on South-American ones. Loving Richard was eternal. A constant fear my ignorance would be discovered. Preparing myself to attend a Becket’s play, I would dread our discussion afterward. What if he linked Godot to a quote from Russel’s Principia Mathematica? I’d really be fucked.

A full time job to love Richard, sweet one. Every minute so intense, thousands of years of art history condensed over a beer at a jazz club where I had also to tell apart genuine bebop from what’s not, without being caught as an under-aged.

One day, he left me.

Absolute abandonship.

He dumped me for his teacher, a remarkable beautiful blonde, 28 years old, with legs like you wouldn’t believe, herself an aspiring poet. A woman with experience, he told me, twisting the blade deeper to kill me more.

I never got over that disaster. I couldn’t understand. I had read all the right books, at a phenomenal speed. Couldn’t have gone any faster. That was the best I could do, and it hadn’t been enough. My beatnik costume was as good as it could get. My political discourse was in the right direction. I could, from memory, chant as many poems from Rimbaud as she could, maybe even more. I religiously listened everyday to Leonard Cohen, Nina Simone, taking a break only to go with serial music. But I wasn’t as sexy as she was. Still with chubby baby fat. Nothing of a woman yet. I only smelled of patchouli. She had a salary and real bottles of French flowery fragrances.

I was totally outclassed. Devastated. Destroyed.

Oh yes, I obsessed. Calling his friends a dozen times a day to ask what I had done wrong. Unable to let go. To abdicate. To move on.

I just couldn’t understand, honey. A deep mystery over my eyes, making it impossible to consider anything else. A pain I would be incapable of reliving. A distress beyond imagination. My young life wrecked, no recovery possible. Smashed to pieces.

It goes without saying that I would never take any chances after that. Rejection was not an option I could deal with. For years, I stayed alone. No more boyfriends for me I thought.

I embraced the books, the rhymes, the pentameters, the alexandrines, counting the syllables, poetic meters, verses, iambic hexameters, pausing sometimes at caesuras in the lines, thinking I did recognize something in there.

With debilitating obstinacy, I learned by heart that summer the part of Camille in Corneille's Horace. Howling it at night in deserted parks. How did it go, just before Horace kills her? Something like (unsure though of the punctuation):

Rome ! l'unique objet de mon ressentiment
Rome, à qui vient ton bras d'immoler mon amant
Rome qui t'as vu naître, et que ton cœur adore
Rome enfin que je hais parce qu'elle t'honore
Puissent tous ses voisins…

See how your old grandma has today, on account of a lost boyfriend, both a fine classical culture, and the rhythmic metrical memory of a pristine tragedian.

Laolao

37. Boredom

Fake. So much of it around. Answers made of neon and plastic. Flashing the emptiness inside the conduit with pride and fluorescence. Becoming the norm and the boredom.

I’ve lived in China for more than a decade, surprised everyday until recently at finding myself here, ready each morning to discover surroundings so distant from those of my youth. Cutting the smog on my way to work with knifelike astonishment; absorbing the frantic sounds from the streets, a dozen times per hour the gross, yucky scraping of the throats before dispersion of all conceivable germs through adept spitting; the systematic and transparent lies of the merchants as they see the laowai approaching; the madness of the car drivers who think mastery of the horn equates that of the road code. Lawlessness as a way of life, one’s brother’s neighbor’s best friend’s colleague with sufficient connections in high places to fix whatever problem may come by. The lazy way around tough situations as the most favored course of action, patiently pretending problems don’t exist, long enough until by themselves they might make an exit. Or the dominant thought that others, usually from an abstract higher ethereal entity like the State, will fix everything, making knowledge and autonomy the least useful things to desire for oneself.

And yet, I have stayed. Because of the laughter, child-like and widespread, the giggles to nicely veil ignorance, embarrassment, fright, puzzlement, mistakes. Laughing as a musical subterfuge. A way to elegantly dress bonds, alliances, to mark the most trivial encounters as memorable events. Laughter replacing words, angelic and trustworthy, devoid of security threats, nothing being held against you. Chuckles as a way to say nothing and everything. The joviality understood as a moment of peace and of absence, an admitted cope-out, no vacant space for arithmetic or spelling errors, a sense of liberation from duty and responsibility. Pretty, crystalline. Artificial sunshine to keep appearances healthy. Laughter to add noise to the already loud city, an attempt against the menace of silence, the stillness where one would notice his or her personality reduced to the size of a bagatelle.

But then again, a much more pleasant sound than tears.

Although tears come in handy when one is confronted to an unfulfilled obligation. When after laughter all is not forgiven. When, despite the enchanting sparks of a good belly laugh, traces of one’s inaptitude still show. Tears to soften hearts, to bring others to their knees. A theater of tragicomic pantomime to break resolve. To become an exception to rules no one even wanted to acknowledge a second before. Tears for a fast escape. To avoid being named, fingered, called up front. Sobbing to remain undetected as an accountable person, evoking pity, compassion, a maneuver to bypass judgment, to remain unchallenged. To be granted undeserved benefits, some kind of birth right, to get one's way with a well-placed well-heard movement of the vocal chords, the belief in the instantaneity of magic tricks to erase personal shortcomings. Crying to prevent thinking, the advent of a why or a how. Sometimes the sounds corresponding to sadness undifferentiated from those meant to express joy, both like chunks of undefined vocalization aware there’s an advantage at playing the two sides.

Laughing and crying, parts of the same stratagem. The ruse to suppress any other type of intervention than the one that’s been planned all along. A way to impose. To force. To eradicate choices.

Laughing and crying, the devices of frankly nice people. The ones who do nothing wrong. Who cannot be accused of anything. The innocents. The blameless. The passive personalities melted in the crowd, who will either laugh or cry when you catch up with them with a question in mind. The ones who wouldn’t hurt a fly, ignorant they have an environment. Those gifted with charming, gentle insignificance in lieu of an idiosyncratic voice, no false notes, never a fault of their own, no gestures thus no transgressions. Soft temperaments you can’t get upset at, manipulating you into carrying them around. Into advancing their cause while they extend their break into uninvolvement.

I’m tired, honey, wondering whether it is truly necessary that I remain so helpful.

No longer impressed at my tenacity, I also find the sense of purpose I was graciously given here too predictable and, to be honest, now boring in its echoic nature. Because after many thousands of days spent here, I still don't laugh, I still don't cry. Always asked to talk and talk while being recorded. A mere stand-in for virtuous actors who don't have a text.

Why is it that I am constantly angry? And hard-working.

Laolao

36. The compass

My mother believed what she said.
Therefore, she wasn’t lying.

Mother (M) implies she believed (B) what she said: M implies B
Let’s suppose, one instant, Mother: Suppose M
She isn’t lying, right? Therefore, B

My father had a hobby, he wrote complex syllogisms with mistakes introduced on purpose to verify one’s ability to spot perhaps a tautology (like the one above), an undistributed middle, a lack of consistency following a negative premise, or any other type of irregularities in logical argumentation.

He also constructed Venn diagrams that would include a high number of sets. He did so using extraordinary ultra-precise compasses that were kept in a wooden box covered by a layer of padded black velvet. Each compass, all the parts, neatly stashed in their respective hollow shape that had been, with exactness, carved in, then lined with a soft red fabric. A beauty. The compasses made of full, heavy metal that had a steady weight when handled.

I dearly wanted that box and those compasses for myself, but my father wouldn’t let me have them.

In the middle of the night, I would clean the kitchen table, lay a white sheet of paper on it, and test all the compasses, their fine sharp tips, how well the little wheels on the side would make the legs of the compass widen or close. The dark sticks of graphite creating clear, flawless lines left behind as the compass would turn and turn in impeccable circles stubbornly clutching to their own center.

Much better that the cheap geometry set I had for school, the protractor quickly losing its smooth edge, chips of plastic forcing the pencil to zigzag, the printed measurements on the set square worn out by time, with no sense of precision.

I had a need to cause pain, I guess. My initial instinct, since I couldn’t claim ownership of the much admired geometry box, was that no one should have it either. I first intended to destroy it, ready to let it go, to deprive myself of its existence for the satisfaction of revenge. But then I thought of a more Machiavellian fate. I broke the perfection of the set. I got rid of just one of the compasses, the cavity left in the box like an appalling deadly sin.

He must have known it was I, but he never said a word. And I never looked again at the box since it no longer met my criteria for excellence.

But I kept, though, looking at the drafts of syllogisms I found in my father’s drawers. He had a desk in the dining room. He didn’t care about these copies. They were thrown in there, disorganized, coffee stains, doodles on the yellow paper pads like seals stamped by indifference itself.

I read them, stories starring unusual characters. They had a plot, suspense, a punch line.

Or they would lead the reader in all sorts of directions, like a good detective or spy novel, they played tricks, guessing games, would bounce, almost making us believe the impossible.

Some others were logically impeccable, like elaborately chiseled precious stones, but conclusions were missing, the task at hand being to complete these stories with valid endings.

During my father’s frequent absences, I would truly allow myself to love him, meticulously reading what he had written.

It was a beautiful kind of love for it contained no danger other than committing an existential fallacy.

Laolao

35. Holism

How reliable are memories, particularly those from distant childhood? Phonological signs inscribed in myriad loops made of fragile neural connections. How authoritative can that be? Our actual narratives said to be filling gaps, rearranging data so as to allow us to recognize, today, all the human knowledge we may have held in the past. Transient patterns of what we have experienced for ourselves, jumping over discrepancies, passages that time has perhaps wisely chosen to negate.

Vivid scenes that no one else remembers, but me. And why? Moments where I think I had a real, frontal relationship to the world, getting stuck decades later in factual inconsistencies ravines inside the skull, only rare, thin threads to lead me out of constructed myths.

Or have I found, now shedding doubt on how I consolidate information, a new way to discredit mnemonic accuracy so to speed up and justify deletion?

That’s the story of how I began to write.

Tracing within the limits of short-term memory what the long-term one had to store. Making sure it would do so.

The instant I was able to, I constantly wrote, creating visual alphabets for events, images, forcing, cramming spatial entities, the letters - memorization guaranteed by ink on paper. Verbatim.

My agony: Whenever people would swear not having said this or that.

It would go back. I would check. Black on white. Written. Not going crazy.

I had this fantasy that I wasn’t my parents’ daughter, that I had been adopted.

Unfortunately, on each of my birthdays, my mother served the same story. By the time the cake had its candles ready to be blown, she had already drank too much, I could have counted the number of sips needed to trigger the moment where, again, she would rant: The night the contractions had started, my father refusing to get up to drive her to the hospital. I had been born in the midst of marital discord. Birth as an expression of polarities, male egotism versus female sacrifice, consecrated by the uterine cramps I inflicted as I made my way to cheerless family reunions.

As my mother ripped her blouse at the dining table to better highlight the suffering that had been hers an “x” number of years ago, concurring with my age, my father would get up and silently walk away, a disgusted look on his face.

December 6, every year. Ruining my fantasy that genetically I had nothing to do with these people.

But later, honey, between the December 6 of one year and the December 6 of the following year, my mother would deny having made a scene. With Herculean strength, ripping if necessary her clothes again to guarantee the authenticity of her amnesia.

I would retreat to my written accounts as a consolation, relieved the year after to hear her one more time put into place the framework that would hold the details of how I was born. Showing me with stable periodicity that I wasn’t completely mad, lending support to my juvenile literary efforts at ascertaining that fact.

The system worked marvelously well as a whole, each component’s behavior determined by a set of unequivocal repetitions, rendering memory, after all, not so indispensable. As a plenitude, or as a fragment.

Laolao

34. Maroussia

I’m at my piano lesson, after class. All the children have gone home. I feel so fine.

I’ve already been withdrawn from ballet classes offered on weekends because my mother one day arrived early, saw me stretch an arm behind my back, grab my foot, bringing it way over my head so to touch my nose with my big toe. She freaked. Hysterically accused the ballet teacher of imposing torturous moves on poor helpless children. They showed her the door; I had no choice but to follow.

I’m at my piano lesson now, not so much trying to learn how to play, but hoping the required discipline will sink in. Sure, I can already play by ear simple melodies heard on the radio, but I can’t position my hands properly. I'm being taught here to imagine an apple under my palm, but after a while, my hands inevitably flatten as I play.

To remind me of the correct position, the teacher has a long thin stick with which she slightly taps my hands whenever they lose their tonus. I'm applying myself with great care.

And my mother again comes in early, sees a whip, and goes ballistic. This time, I was not only withdrawn from the lessons, I was instantly extracted from the entire school itself.

So here I am at home, no school to go to for a while. My mother drunk-asleep at 11 in the morning. And I’m terribly depressed, the certainty I’ll never be allowed to learn anything.

I had a paranoid habit back then. If I deeply liked an object, or if I considered something to be of great importance, exemplary, commendable to posterity, the only way to keep it, did I honestly believe, was to feign indifference towards it. I had convinced myself that every thing I cared for, be it a book, or a pretty scarf, it would mysteriously disappear the minute I would show any form of attachment.

I could only protect whatever I needed by putting a considerable distance between the object and myself, watching it from afar.

To confuse and trick fate, I would pay attention to things that left me indifferent, giving them away, sacrificing them as a way to shield, under this clever pretense, what I cared for the most.

Such a tactic was extremely hard to maintain on a steady basis. It required tremendous strength of character. A will beyond what a child would normally want to handle. A powerful determination, a focus unauthorized to falter.

Every iota of a second involved in a match against destiny, obsessed with the idea of winning for the sake of what was worthy of my loyalty.

Thus, I was the hero of my favorite sweater because I never wore it, of a passionate novel because I would never be seen reading it, of a dozen pictures cut from magazines because I would never look at them. Everyday they all survived on account of my well-hidden, secret devotion.

I would read in bed the evening, putting on my night table before I fell asleep some work I had no feelings for (“The Blue Bird” by Maeterlinck, as an example), sure that soon the book would vanish from our house, no where to be found. And when it happened, I felt so overwhelmingly happy, having ingeniously mislead, defrauded fatality.

I felt I was a genius, my favorite story, “Maroussia, a maid in Ukraine,” safely tuck away as if no one had any interest in it.

You probably think I was obsessed with dispossession. You’re absolutely right. I was maniacally worried.

It’s in that state of mind that I was sent, eventually, to a new school located in a beautiful old building facing the river. The playground had apple trees on which to climb, rows of tall poplars shining on breezy sunny days, intense lilac in the spring.

It was a primary school conceived around the new pedagogical approaches devised in the footsteps of the Summerhill experiment. Everything about freedom, creativity, self-expression.

Many teachers, most of them Europeans. Nourishing my imagination with stories from the war. Building us into the fighters of the future so that never fascism would rise again.

Only one Canadian teacher. He befriended my parents. Came for coffee a few times, impressed by our very own in-house psychologist; my father and the teacher both loudly lauding their modern openness to revolutionary methods in education, their pioneer intellectual stance, their undiluted belief in the spontaneous happiness of the Child.

I did say it. That the creepy local teacher kept me after school to put his hands in my panties. He did so to other girls too.

What happened when I spoke? I remember being so scared of doing so. I had practiced in my mind every word I had to pronounce, afraid to become confused, afraid my mind would go blank as it often did under pressure. I had carefully rehearsed, wanting to do things right.

I recall my preparation, the courage I had gathered, repeating to myself it had to be done. Boosting my resolve thinking I would be the one to denounce him. Walking into the living room, terrified at what I was about to do. Stunned, as I see them oddly perched on ridiculously uncomfortable seats, the two men involved in their self-congratulatory monologues. My mother, an Nth glass of wine in her hand, the smile of beatitude on her face, acquiescing to everything they said.

I'm first staring at the tableau, the feeling of familiar unreality back again. The images are standing at the end of a long optical tube. Before I can reach this portrait of pedantic mannerism that's hanging in the living room, there's a tunnel of dark coldness awaiting to be crossed. A zone of black ice, where dematerialization proceeds, sharp crystals in lieu of warm blood, frozen ash floating away from me.

Then, like an automaton, I opened my mouth, a miracle and the sound came out. I spoke. I said it. And then, the memory ends. I don’t know what happened after that. Except for a lingering: the vertiginous stench of shame.

I was kept in that school for six more years, as was the pervert. To distract my mind, I entertained myself climbing trees to catch a glimpse of the horizon, sharpening my skills at spotting fascists. Safe from piano and ballet.

With time, I came to dementedly despise the posh, aerodynamic Scandinavian-style teak furniture typical of the suburban sixties my parents had bought for the living room. Because they gloated about it the same way, with the same kind of shallow pride they used when talking about their sophisticated far advanced avant-garde views on how to raise children.

On the last page of the book, Maroussia, in the prime of her youth is shot to death while running through a bright yellow field of undulating wheat florets.

A red flower springs to life where her head, a crimson-colored scarf to hold her golden hair, hits the ground.

Written in the 19th century by Marko Vovchok, a pseudonym for the well-hidden name of Mariia Vilinska, the tale belongs to Ukrainian folk stories where the predicaments of young women find their way into the traits of brave, but ill-fated romantic heroines. Peasant girls crushed by serfdom or victims of intestine wars, unable to escape their plight like the one epitomized, in my own personal legend, by the stylish pieces of Scandinavian furniture that polluted my childhood's decor.

My triumph perfectly concealed, the story I've just told you never taken away from me, as no one would ever see me, would ever catch me turning the page.

Laolao

33. Butterflies

A wee itsy-bitsy crisis, darling.

I ache as if I had plunged head first, and from the highest summit, to hit the bed of a dried-up river. I can’t see you on any cosmographic map. I’m blind, deprived of prodigious, timely observations, grating my body against the charred areas of the moon. Lunar mountains, lunar rocks harassing me with insufferable geological questions I’ll never be able to answer. The nightmare.

Where are you? My son? My daughter? My grand-daughter? My grand-son? Centuries of separation. Anxiety descending in a compact, ovoid punch, but not a single raindrop falling to cool my quavering hands. The rustling of leaves, though, having come to an inexplicable halt.

A primal urge to make a phone call. It’s forbidden. No help. Static electricity crippling my gland secretions. Evading weapons fire, or are these thunderclaps? Millions of suns, the cosmos blowing apart, a hundred million years about to fall grotesquely into black holes. Red-shifted projections of a worldwide microscopic revolt. Hypersonic alerts leaving dense signatures on relic matter collapsing onto itself. Collisions of heavy ions. The super-symmetry of my habits suddenly deranged by cataclysmic satellite explosions. My balance catapulted right in the aftermath of the Big Bang, the departure of speedy projectiles hailed in a mad, deafening applaud. Generations of quarks, and all their possible timelines, branching into historical divergence, a tangent universe, multiple world interpretations, anachronistic life-forms angrily tampering with improbabilities. Nanoseconds making a huge, terrible difference. Mirror-universes chattered, a prelude to wide combinations of bad luck. Compulsive memory like water impossible to track. On impulse, remotely detonated monosyllables cracking my brain like a peanut. Wordlessly, registering dislocation. Ruthlessly, without a cocoon. Excruciating pain, right here, bracketed by sharp, mercurial fangs biting my disguise.

How far away yet to nightfall? To harmless homelessness?

Behind sunglasses, I wait, impenetrable.

I’m good. Now brushing away with a finger the puff of leftover dust from my shoulder.

Just a wee itsy-bitsy tipsy, hanging in there since 1953. So tired. The thumb still twitching a bit. Maybe a butterfly flapping its wings, an imperceptible change, a movement in a dynamic system prone to chaotic events. A butterfly thereupon flapping its wings, because the last tornado didn’t vaporize it.

Make a note: The butterfly, it’s after, not before. Gee whiz, they're hard of understanding when trying to explain life's ripples.

Laolao

32. The 11th dimension

They mentioned it on Discovery News, in theory “it is possible to travel faster than light.” Except, we wouldn’t move.

Using the principle of the Alcubierre drive, we expand the fabric of space behind our ship and shrink it at the front, letting the ship rest on the bubble we’ve created, space itself rolling, moving beneath us.

Don’t think your Laolao will accomplish this anytime soon. It would require way too much energy, much more than I have at my disposal. I’m very tired, remember.

And I would need to perfect my understanding of superstring theory, enough to expertly manipulate an hypothetical 11th dimension.

But I still can find interesting the project of letting the universe do the hard work, inflating, deflating itself while, aghast, we watch.

The swollen bubble, they say, would be made of dark energy, the very energy that speeds up the universe as time flies.

Once in a while, I enjoy classifying galaxies and spotting stars. You should try it. I do it online, at Galaxy Zoo. But I find it’s the intergalactic void that’s fascinating. It is believed that around two-thirds of the space seen in those incredible pictures sent by the Hubble telescope represent dark energy; less than a third would be dark matter; while stars occupy no more than a few percent of space. The invisible more significant than the visible.

This negative pressure, this cosmological dark energy permeates the entire universe, accelerating its expansion. Instead of the collapse gravity would otherwise guarantee.

You see, energy - depending on which one we’re referring to - either decreases or increases the amount of space found between things. And the “things” - stars, clusters, all the way to the molecule - trace the boundaries of the void, like the membranes circling the holes of a sponge (the simplest of all multi-cellular animals, the Porifera, which resides at the bottom of the sea).

Oh, so deep regrets, why didn’t I become an astrophysicist? Or a marine biologist?

I was once good in science, does it surprise you? Always a perfect score in chemistry before they kicked me out of high-school for displaying the wrong behavioral attitudes. And when I managed to get back, enrolled in a small school for misfits after my release from the psychiatric hospital, I naturally qualified for the Canadian national contest in mathematics. Did very well in geometry, not so well in algebra, sorry.

I didn’t know one had to study before the big day. No one coached me. No one told me what to look at, what to prepare. You see, I had qualified without knowing I was qualifying.

I never made any mistakes in chemistry or geometry due mainly to an absolute lack of imagination, because I didn’t know mistakes were possible.

I wasn’t studying. I just loved the rules, the nomenclature, the perfect set of beautiful, infallible recipes. It was a game where nothing could go wrong. There were known parameters. The motions of the mind step-by-step evolving with clarity. Impossible to get lost.

My father was a special kind of psychologist, he was into organizational behavior with an edge on the study of higher intelligence. Even more specific than that: he cared about the interaction between personality and intelligence with the goal of explaining and improving efficiency at the organization’s executive level. That was his exact field of research.

Elitist?

No. He was too much of an ass-hole for that appellation. Look, when I went all the way to his office to proudly announce to him I had been selected for a fancy math contest to be given nation-wide to top students, he went “Heeuu…” and didn’t even look at me, mismanaging, fumbling some papers on his desk. He didn’t reply, barely mumbling something about being late for dinner.

I mean, if at a respected university the guy in charge of superior IQs is not impressed, why should I be?

So, you see, sweet one, I was an idiot and so was he. I can’t help thinking that one word of support, something kind, a tiny smile of pride, a look of praise even, would have perhaps suffice to change my life.

Consider the facts: One minute I'm good for the nut house, the next I'm invited to check my abilities in a club for smart kids. If that isn't perfectly in line with his professional concerns, then what is? Let's forget him as a father for an instant. Let's just look at the situation from the point-of-view of an excellent case study

He missed out on that one. Thoroughly.

So unconcerned was he, that the day of the competition came and went, and he never inquired about what had happened.

I still find it sad, honey.

I had changed my mind about attending the test, but at the last minute decided to show up, not a clue about what to expect. I finished somewhere in the middle, result-wise, nothing to brag about. Got screwed, I know, by algebra, which would have required beforehand some serious reviewing.

To this day, I’m proud of one thing only. That morning, I got up early and made it to the test venue without being late. True, hadn’t brought any pencils with me, had to borrow some, and had no ruler either. Hadn’t planned anything.

I kept thinking instead that nobody at home when I left had asked me where I was going. Had my priorities wrong, see. And I didn’t know it.

Here’s a revelation: I never finished high-school, baby. Your Laolao dropped-out. I eventually registered for the final exams. Passed. That was it. Kind of plain and depressing.

Instead of going to class, I spent entire days bumming around downtown in coffee shops and hang-out places where they played Bob Dylan. Do not think I was serene and popular because I knew all the lyrics. Remember what I told you, much void before we bump into a single reliable molecule. On a cosmological scale, matter is rare. As said, scientists these days joggle with the idea that immense oceans of antiparticles are gradually leaving the small islands of matter that exist in the universe. Antiparticles that are simultaneously self-repulsive and matter repulsers. I used to function in a similar way, through my own personal version of space-time, floating on the curvature of the universe, going away, pushing others away, wondering whether my life would eventually reveal itself as nothing more than a mathematical figment.

This mysterious 11th dimension? The quest to unify all matter, all forces? A theory of everything? One idea able to contain all possible representations of the same thing? They say the key is with M-Theory. Answer me, please, anyone, is that M for mother?

Laolao

31. Empedocles

( … ) this is the place where is found for the most part what men call Thought; for the blood round the heart is Thought in mankind.
Empedocles, (490 BC - 430 BC)

I’ve had a tragic problem with Empedocles’ ideas since my first menstruation. Do you see why?

Are they important thoughts those being lost on a monthly basis? Is it knowledge flowing out, unstoppable? Is this Reason, the red viscosity dripping between my legs?

When I suffered from purpura, my skin was covered by thousands of little red dots. Bleeding under the skin, an ugly ecchymosed body. To check my level of platelets, they would draw blood everyday at the hospital, mostly pricking my finger to get a drop on a small glass plate. As they topped it with a second plate, the blood would spread into a flat shape with irregular contours, never the same design. I watched the new pattern made by my blood every time, to read its meaning.

When later, in high school, I became acquainted with Empedocles’ writing, I was ready to relate to it.

Unsurprisingly, I had extremely painful periods, enough to keep me curled up in bed, moaning for a day or two. A sword I would have heroically planted in my abdomen to perform hara-kiri wouldn’t have hurt less. But the danger didn’t lay in the physical punishment. It was the emotional turmoil that posed the trickiest challenge.

It’s a smart nurse who helped me out. She noticed this teenage girl being brought in by ambulance at relatively regular intervals with her stomach full of pills, or her wrists slashed. She brilliantly thought of correlating these visits to the emergency room with the dates of the girl’s menstrual cycle. It was a perfect match.

Her theory was that on those days, I exercised less control on my mental state, barriers fell, I was exposed, my endurance indisposed, energy swallowed by some punctual stress.

It didn’t contradict at all Empedocles’ view. Short of thoughts when blood oozed out, I became indeed vulnerable, precariously dumber, lacking the quixotic whirls of my intelligence. My reason absorbed by a sanitary napkin.

Empedocles did write: “The intelligence of Man grows towards the material that is present.” A truly awful verdict.

I discuss this now because I want you to know that menopause has been the most liberating event of my life.

I can now retain the entirety of my intellectual resources.

If I’m to bleed today, I can see the wound and watch it heal. It’s no longer an ontological one promising me the fate of a brain-dead. The mind metabolized by porous tampons.

You see, I was never able to pretend, like many well-educated people, that faith in Reason is enough to keep one afloat. For I know that faith has nothing to do with Reason. Carried by strict ethics, I can’t, in all honesty, use what contradicts rationality to lay my claim onto it.

As a teenager, I therefore had no faith whatsoever in Reason. I just stood alone by my peculiar rigor, watching to see if Reason would choose once again to defect or not. And when ineluctably it did, the hopelessness that rose was of a mad, reckless kind, churning its violence against faith - a separate, independent, completely different issue. With thoughts long gone.

Happily I've discovered a few years ago that I'm built to be old, although, true, I often came close to not making it.

And I'll tell you a real thought: These monthly battles were never won by the intervention of pure Reason. So many strangers like that nurse had, by its very definition, an unexplainable faith leading them to come forward and speak to me. So often. So many times. Always there. To gently pull me up.

Let’s wonder then how our philosopher, this un-bleeder, felt when he jumped into the crater of Mount Etna to prove his immortality. Yeah, smile, little one.

He only showed faith to be a more powerful master than Reason, period. Or no period, certainly not making him any wiser.

We play, as a last resort, with the gestures of death never, of course, to live forever, but to stop from doing so all those undesirable people who’ve managed to inhabit us. And when in the process we end up hurting ourselves, it’s really a matter of mistaken identity - if the lights blink, for a fraction of a second (that's all it takes), it can really get dark down there, and we do run the risk of zeroing the wrong target.

Your Laolao

30. Cardinal fallacy

Now, lets go for a very short story. This thing about me not recognizing my father, it wasn’t true all the time. There were precise moments when I knew exactly who he was, I was just mistaken about the directions he took in terms of cardinal points.

Take this instance in the suburb. I’m sitting on the floor, playing. It’s almost noon. My mother is cooking lunch. I see her legs in front of the stove a few inches away from me (we weren’t yet using the metric system). When I turn my head to the left I have a full view of the front door.

My father’s there, stoic, like a statue, a brown suitcase next to him. He’s not doing anything. Staring in the distance, but not seeing us it seems. After a while, I look at my mother and, meaning to be of service, since she's busy and doesn't appear to have noticed him either, I tell her: “Mom, dad’s leaving. He’s waiting to say goodbye.”

It was quite logical. There’s a man there, wearing a coat, a suitcase at his feet. The door’s wide open, and he’s not moving.

“You’re an idiot,” she replied rather dryly.

“He’s coming back.”

I always disliked the way my mother found fault with my logic.

Much love,
Laolao

29. Delirium tremens

I haven’t told you yet about my paternal grand-father, your great-great-grand-father.

He had been a barber before becoming destitute. By this I mean he tried to work a little bit at one point in his life, between episodes of absolute ethylic delirium.

My grand-father was famous in the village he came from. When I was a child, I would hear the women, while they had some tea on the balcony or prepared vegetables in a kitchen, repeat and repeat incredible stories about him.

It’s not that he drank non-stop for an entire week until collapsing that people found astonishing. It’s that he didn’t sober up after that. He would stay drunk day after day after day, too drunk to drink a single additional drop, passed out or hallucinating, unable to care for himself, shaken by tremors, scratching his skin to blood, screaming at imaginary perils. In his younger time, often up to 10 consecutive days would he stay delirious. He held the delirium tremens record in a region where men, when they weren’t in the woods logging trees for weeks in a row, were known for drinking their pay while wives and mothers despaired.

Whenever a charitable person brought my grand-father back, half unconscious, my grand-mother would lock him up in the basement and leave him there “in his own vomit, shit and piss” to quote relatives, without water, without food, disappointed a week later that he was still breathing, rambling on nonsense.

“He was a real force of nature” would say for a hundredth time an aunt or a neighbor.

I never heard them add that my grand-mother was cruel for treating her husband so harshly.

But then, it is true that she had owned a small hotel. My grand-father “drank” it, as they say, in a flash sending the business into bankruptcy. She had often tried to hide whatever money was in the cash register, the ladies would go on, but my grand-father would beat her up and get hold of the family's income.

I remember the hotel, the only one in those days servicing two or three villages, the clientele mainly made up of traveling salesmen. It had a big hall with lots of chairs and tables. Not much light, a dark place with too few lamps all in the shape of candles hanging from the ceiling. At the back, wide swinging wooden doors opening unto the kitchen, each with a round glass plate like the portholes on the side of a ship.

In there, on a counter, there’s a huge wedding cake. I see it. It’s white and pink with dashes of yellow. I can’t see the top of the cake, it’s too high, just it’s base. A marvelous frosting, so inviting, so available, with waves, curls, ridges, flowers and leaves. It’s so nicely done. I’ll just have a tiny bit, my finger poking at the creamy sides, a quick taste, the white, the pink, the yellow, a little bit everywhere so it won’t show, it will be the same all around.

I miscalculated, carried away by my greediness. I did in the end destroy the looks of that cake. At the last minute, they had to redo the frosting. But my grand-mother laughed good-heartedly at the incident.

So I knew for sure, when they talked about the mistreatments she had in place for my grand-father, that she couldn’t be an entirely mean person.

Years later, my grand-father’s health considerably declined. Only skin and bones, his back like a half-moon, never straight. He would walk, but so slowly. He slept in a separate room, away from my grand-mother. She stressed the fact so often to me. I think it had great meaning to her.

My grand-father by then had his own spoon, as well as a fork, a knife, a bowl, a plate and a glass all to himself, stashed away in a distinct cupboard. He wasn’t allowed to use any of the kitchen’s regular utensils or dishes. “Not to dirty them, irremediably” would whisper to my ear my grand-mother as I sat on her lap, both of us swinging in her rocking-chair, her shawl nicely wrapped around me.

My grand-father also had a bench on which he was allowed to sit always at the same spot, at the right end of the table. I wasn’t allowed to use that bench. It was only for him.

He would prepare his own food. Often, a tomato that he would carefully peel. And a boiled egg.

I was mesmerized by his gestures. An eternity it took. In silence, his head bent almost touching his plate, fine, long fingers slowly lifting the skin off the fruit piece by piece. Then, delicately he would slice the red flesh, minuscule lumps to make almost a puree. So much time invested in that tomato, it felt like a feast.

There were three things I was permitted to do with my grand-father: Fetch wood at sunrise for the stove, roll hand-made cigarettes with him, and go fishing in the afternoon, not far away, on the quay – old gray planks without a ramp next to the dock.

My grand-father would drag his feet down the hill leading to the sea as I slowed my pace to keep at his level, the fishing rods expertly leaning back against my shoulder.

We never caught a fish, but it felt good to stand in the fog, the loud rhythmic phonetics of the waves, the smell of wet salt everywhere. Only one color as far as the eye could see, a deep grayish tone transforming the world into a single, uniform place. Without alterations, not one blemish in that immense watery page. Nothing in the vast standardized expanse, except the depth and quality of the acoustic.

I think my grand-father liked it too. Perhaps, I venture, for the same reasons. Nobody but us fishing there in the cold.

He died a few months before my grand-mother. I was 14 by then. My dad received the call one evening that his father would not recover from pneumonia. I waited.

Not a single plan seemed to follow. So the next morning, I asked my father to pay for the train ticket, I would go.

It was not hard at all, baby, to help my grand-mother wash and feed my grand-father. She showed me how to, in a steady way, without flinching, doing everything in the right order, precise in her gestures, applied and focused, never giving up. She made it natural and easy, sitting at his bedside, watching over his needs.

But who would know? Not a single soul showed up at my grand-parents' place all the the time I was there.

Everybody likes to say how much they despised each other. I never believed it. They were too anchored in a shared set of manners. They may have had, it's true, a unique kind of relationship, mainly based on time and unifying routines, surpassing far and clear the transience of feelings.

On January first, a tradition: Kneeling in front of my grand-father to receive his blessing. I asked my grand-mother one day why the task fell upon a man so brittle, devitalized, hardly able to speak. I had wanted to say that she was much more competent and alert than he was. She replied, stretching her neck with pride, her face stern and decisive-looking: “Of course, because he is the patriarch of the family.”

Not long after my grand-father passed away, my grand-mother, who had never been sick, died in her rocking chair, as if falling asleep.

And I was happy for her. For that unadorned, effortless, limpid act of disappearance. "To go and join your grand-father," had she once mentioned to me, as if an item on a list, the same way one would simply state the most obvious thing to do.

I might be the only person alive not just remembering them, but idealizing them. Do not forget their names: She was called Elmire. He was called Amédée.

They mostly lived in a world with hardly any cars, and no TV. Strawberry jam had to be made at home, kept in jars sealed with wax. Yes, you've guessed it right. I used to pour the hot, whitish liquid wax, and wait for it to cool off before tightening the lid on dozens of jars. And I'm the one who would also cut the floury dough in all sorts of weird animal shapes before it was deep fried. I have a strange intuition that, back then, I had a name too.

That name has totally been forgotten. It's not the one written on my birth certificate. I feel it's a name that came before the name of Bruno, the boy who died at birth, my mother's first pregnancy. But I was told I replaced Bruno.

Do you see the baseball glove on the fridge, near the window with a milky green frame in my mother's kitchen in Montreal? It's meant for Bruno. Or am I confused?

There's a box on my grand-mother's table, a sort of time-warp effect, and hundreds of kilometers away, wrapped in colorful printed paper. It's for Bruno too. But he died. It's been explained to me. I will never see who he is. And that very tall man dressed in a dark suit walking away towards the door, - my grand-mother says he's my father - he won't give me the box. My grand-mother pats my head and tells me not to speak. I remember it because her voice was simultaneously so firm and calm, a reassuring imperative. I am at an age when, standing on the tip of my toes, I can barely see the surface of the table. It's such an endless, shiny table, with a gift on it, out of reach. I guess I'm mixed up.

Taking into account the nine months needed to have a baby, I don't understand how I can be witnessing this in Rimouski at an age approximately the same as the one I had when my sister was born in Cleveland. Something's wrong, sweetheart, with chronology, and with my sense of geography. And perhaps a bit more.

Laolao

28. Rock-paper-scissors

Of course, souvenirs play tricks on us. We remember tensed moments much better than casual ones. Just to name a few, we certainly wouldn’t forget a self-declared martyr posing in front of our eyes, the agony of self-reproach, or any of our psychological needs when they’re thrown off-balance. But when we try to recall being satisfied, the presence of a benevolent mind by our side, the subtle essence of pure understanding, we seem to set the unreal into motion, and fall victims to metaphysical skepticism.

I wish I could tell you I was a happy child. I wish I could describe some fun events without suspicion having to invade the entire domain of my experiences.

Since she was a fashion designer, my mother was entitled to carry around the largest, sharpest scissors you can imagine. They were made of long, heavy blades. Their black handles so large, my hands could almost go through the holes.

She did try a couple of times to stab my father with them. I would be in bed downstairs, listening to my mother’s shouts, the accusations: A mistress here, a venereal disease there, money running out, spent on seduction masquerades. Never heard my father reply. He wept, feeling sorry for himself, working at staying out of reach of the scissors.

I disliked my mother’s outbursts, but I thought she was basically in her right to be pissed. I wished though she would have dropped the scissors. And perhaps my father, on his side, could have helped appease the scene by uttering something like “stop” or "sorry."

The scissors terrified me. They were my mother’s weapon of predilection whenever she ran out of insults. She actually didn’t know that many. Her vocabulary was modest. A thing rather than a flux. So the scissors often came in handy.

Conveniently, I can’t remember how our fight had started: I see my mother’s strong hands tightly squeezing mine around the handles of the scissors. I’m trying to free my fingers without making the scissors jerk. You see, my mother is pulling the scissors towards her stomach. She has the blades against her own body. She yells that I should kill her. As I pull in the opposite direction with all my might, I’m crying ‘Please, stop. Stop this.’

A proof by the way that I was much more articulate than my father.

A million thoughts go through a kid’s mind at such a moment. I can’t free my hands. She’s trying to puncture herself using me as an assassin. And I am so tired, baby, I am hoping that these melodramatic clashes can end right now. What if, for a fraction of a second, I stop pulling the scissors away from her? What if I simply relax my muscles?

Yes, the plan did germinate in my mind. And it’s not love or caring that prevented me from letting my mother fall into her own trap. No. It was a selfish move. I wasn’t sure at which age people could go to jail. At 10, I felt I was already a grown-up person. Who would have believed that my hands on the scissors had been forced?

So I pulled and pulled the scissors away from my mother, saving myself, not her.

My mother would always remind the world that she didn’t have a mother, therefore no role-model for her. She claimed to have done her best under the circumstances. I sort of believe her.

I taught myself to be a mother watching her, and I raised my children equipped with that oblique hint. In turn, they are now educating you, my grand-children, also readied by that history. There’s little I can do to change that, except through theoretical attitudes, unmasking the underground constructions that marked our family’s sub-culture, the dominance-submission rites we savagely danced to.

My memories, as you may have noticed, always seem to rise from such manipulative, reified debris.

They’re totally indoctrinated by a sense of ethics born from ancient reaction patterns. Redefined by a world essentially made of testimonials sentenced to destruction.

Sacred dreams of fairness, justice, equality vacillating between denied potentialities and self-proclaimed repression.

There’s no beam of truth highlighting my childhood souvenirs, no exoskeleton to protect them. Instead, it’s a sort of dissipated, undisciplined holographic light blurring all the way to non-existence formless fears, beyond rescue, sometimes diluting them in a vein of raw senseless insanity.

Cavernous expressions molded to fit the wretchedness typical of missed chances, but - bravo! - instantly canceled by honorable oblivion.

Understand what you can, dear.

Don't worry, it will be fine.

Love, Laolao

27. Taedium vitae

I won’t be working for the next two weeks. I’ve counted the days, the hours up to this break. I need it so much. I find it hard to describe how tired I feel, it’s beyond words. A deep feeling of lassitude getting hold of me the minute I open my eyes the morning. It’s the first thought as I get up, an awful awareness that sleep hasn’t done its job, hasn't repaired me, hasn’t made me better. A dull, constant pain – not acute – more of a general nature, spread evenly throughout my body.

I’ve always had it, a tired child with legs, arms, a back, a neck, feet, hands, fingers hurting. Nothing like a blow or a cut. No, more like an intrinsic part of everything that I am, a diffuse unpleasant pressure draining energy, an ache painted all over my bones, my muscles, my nerves, not a single part escaping the discomfort.

Soreness would be the best way to call it. Not a disease. I would say a sad affliction, an insidious permanent condition.

I first used the word ‘tired’ to talk about myself when I was three. I’ve never forgotten the scene. We’re in Cleveland. Our apartment resembles a dark, long tunnel, the rooms at the front and at the back linked by a narrow corridor where freshly washed clothes are hung, dripping on the floor. There’s a big blue metallic chest, a trunk, against the wall, half way through, blocking the way, making it hard to navigate that corridor. White bed sheets are drying, hiding the chest on which I’m sitting, my legs crossed.

I feel I’m at the right place, at the right time. No one can see me. I have disappeared. I no longer exist. I hear, so far away, the voice of an adult calling me, but I am gone. The voice gets lost in the infinite distance, I can't tell whose it is. I’m no longer here. My hideaway place has disconnected itself from the world. I close my eyes to make sure I fully extirpate myself from the universe I know. This little corner made by the chest and the bed sheets forming a curtain have eliminated everything outside their boundaries. I am absolutely certain that I will be here forever, and I know I can do it. That I don’t need anything. That I will never feel any regrets nor desires. That I will never, never feel lonely or miss anything. I have the power to erase, nothing else matters. I am simply so fine, so comfortable. A perfect existence.

Of course, eventually I was found. I don't remember by whom. When the bed sheet was lifted, an incredible weight instantly crashed upon me. Something reached for me, - was it a shout, a slap? - my eyes were hurting while every part of me became immensely old. I felt it, a distressing sensation suddenly running through my veins, attacking every fiber of my being, forbidding escape. In a second, I reached an incalculable age.

I recall an all-powerful surge of feeling before the memory goes blank: Hatred.

Directed at myself, I think. I had truly been meant to become an invisible being. My anatomy was therefore defective. I couldn't understand why.

Ever since, sadly enough, there hasn’t been a moment untouched by this pernicious agony running under my skin.

Every step I take, every letter I type on the keyboard, every time I turn or bend my head - the tiniest movement is undermined by pain. A wave malevolently echoed deep inside.

Back then, my abrupt re-entry into this world must have damaged me. That’s how I see it.

More than 50 years later, my state hasn’t improved. On the contrary. It has worsened.

Doesn’t matter how long or how little I sleep, a slight stretching of my ankles, my shoulder twisting to get up, my wrists pushing on the mattress to lift my back, all of these cry from the knowledge that once again, I’m not rested. Still deliriously depleted. Endlessly fatigued from the effort and the struggle.

Younger, I drank a lot, took dope, danced, spinning my fright like mad. A sublime negation of my physical limitations. An ability to transcend hardship. To command analgesia. Winning for a few hours.

Today, when I don’t need to work, I let go, sinking into the pain as a way to recognize where my existence stands. Every part of my body delineating its shape and consistence using the heat traces left by exhaustion.

I’ve never tried to position myself on a pain scale. It is believed in some circles that when suffering reaches a certain pathological threshold, it does so as a way to distract the mind, diverting it from repressed emotions. A form of protection, would say a shrink.

I wouldn’t know for sure. Lets leave to those wealthier than us the care of articulating the philosophies of pain.

I am sharing all of this now because I want you to know me. My somatic experiences, their duration, their chronic intensity, their throbbing patterns, as well as their demoralizing effect. Whatever unconscious survival benefits they may be said to hold.

I will stay home for the next two weeks. Not to rest. But to be silent, in closer contact with my debilitating joints. Too many cells in my body having a conversation of their own, every syllable deeply accentuated, hammering a meaning that has always kept me so busy: Listening, deciphering all the way to weariness the cryptic connotations of sensory perceptions.

Laolao