49. One’s marbles

I bought you marbles. I will fly soon, in 10 days, and we’ll be able to play together. I’ll show you. We’ll draw a circle on the ground (I’ll bring the chalk or we can use a stick) and each our turn we’ll throw our glass balls to knock those we’ve already rolled inside the circle.

It’s not that fun really. After a few minutes, you’ll get bored.

I suspect you’ll quickly take the marbles and pretend they’re something else. You’ll put them in some plastic pots and pans to cook for a teddy bear. Or in your pocket as if they were coins to use when shopping at an imaginary grocery store. Maybe you’ll bury them in the yard to see if plants can grow out of them. You might even let them sink in the fish tank and watch them add forms and colors to the coral bed.

You’ve always diverted, rerouted your toys.

I like that about you.

I do not recall games in my childhood. Life was way too serious, and I couldn’t distract my focus, even for an instant, from the need to hold together all the parts I was made of, worried they would drift away if I was to let go.

But I did transfer my preoccupation, diligently surveying the outcomes of disembodiment. I cut a lot. To start with, the Sears catalogue. As soon as I had sufficient hand coordination to manage scissors, I felt compelled to try out new faces on the bodies printed on the pages, test the effects of different pairs of legs on the models. I would cut out the clothes and superpose them on the pictures of people there to show accessories, dresses, washing machines or cosmetics. Mix and match. I did that for hours. Reorganizing the looks of that multitude, hundreds of individuals all static in their poses, wanting them able to become other beings, stranger than they already were as strangers to me.

Day after day, I went on cutting and reassembling. You can view, it’s alright dear, I don't mind, such an obsessive activity as a kind of exorcism. Hourly rituals to keep harm at bay. Repetitions of the same to eventually make a big difference.

A mild form of self-inflicted autism, perhaps.

I knew very early on something was wrong. Because I was the only one capable of hearing my voice when I said so, I’m not well. My father-the-eminent-psychologist would not be acknowledging any time soon that his offspring was somewhat impaired. My mother-the-elegant-fashion-designer on her side would be doing the exact opposite, an exaggerated use of my peculiarities to explain and justify her own misery in the midst of suburban solitude.

Very little, in fact, was to be said about me as a young child. So I kept on cutting as an odd approach to society and its members. Narrowing my interests on new arrangements for Sears, the microcosm of the universe I knew I had to familiarize myself with, fragments isolated and handled one at a time so to, one day, be qualified to intermingle with the general population.

It was all about a recirculation of components. Tautologies to slowly form the habit of existing. Taming ideas by displacing them. Again and again and again. Making tiny portions, easier to embrace. Separating fractions, little lumps of two-dimensional people less aloof than those tall ones walking around with their unsettling noises and personal dramas.

As I was cutting and pasting, I medicated myself by not truly responding to my own name, convinced deep down I must have had other names that had been broken, splintered, in very ancient times impossible to recollect, scraps of names like the pieces of papers scattered around me on the floor, countless segments and their fathomless combinations. Cut, cut, cut, I would go. Slashing my way through childhood. Codifying small amounts, unfit to take it all in one shot, in one panoramic view. Cataloguing the catalogue. Tabulating humanity’s visual data, clouding the boundaries between organic and inorganic.

It was not therefore a game that I played, carefully ripping pages apart, not something to pass the time, or to entertain myself or others. When I was busy cutting and pasting, there were no others. Only the mechanical gestures required to hermetically shut down emotions, raising high up the skills to recognize and systemize the elements embroiled in life’s pandemonium, countering entropy, studying disarray to sort it all out, the facets, the details, every item urgently calling to be delineated and re-denominated. A big job. A mandate, duty to myself through restriction of behavior to make sure terra firma would stay intact under me despite new constructions and the elaboration of countless trial and non-permanent displays.

Not a hobby. Not a distraction. I had no sense of amusement back then.

I sternly zoomed in all my subject matters, a degree of concentration eclipsing everything else. An absolute generosity of time and energy, all devoted to the grouping and the new alignments of specks and shreds, their significance reconstituted along experimental grids. Searching for a benign way to be. An unfailing surface for things to be switched around and reconvened.

Your Laolao comes from far away, my darlings. Lots had to be undone, chiseled, truncated, before relationships became possible under the new management of shapes and measurements. Before I could grow, learn. Before I could be a person, creating other persons.

Like Lucky, this character in Waiting for Godot, I too have traveled a long time dragging a burdensome suitcase never thinking of simply leaving it behind. Though instead of rocks, mine’s filled with paper cut-outs. It’s a definite improvement, weight-wise.

So, for the game, please understand. I’ve checked the rules in Wikipedia. It will be my first time. I just look forward to being silly and not losing the marbles.

Ciao, Laolao

48. La maladie de l'emmurée vivante

It’s all about memes. Propagation. Contagion. Exposure. Inheritance. Transmission. Mutation. It’s all about us, the replicators. The carriers and explicators. It’s the story of traditions. Of our collective slogans. How we accept them, use them, and then spread them around.

Myths and intertextuality do they say (Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco). How it’s all shaped by others before we pretend it's ours. Borrowing. Stealing. Transforming even the disguise.

It's more than an influence. It is a mediation happening from the moment the perceiver establishes contact with the eidos – existence of the thing, an idea of its nature, since there is a viewer, hearer, smeller, toucher, taster as a gateway to welcome this thing into our world. And we make it ours, understanding it as imitation and reproduction of itself. An entire life in the shape of hypertext. Filled with echoes, allusions, references, boomerang thoughts. The beholders themselves encoded with the portraits they’ve witnessed: The fictional reality that was proposed to them, and said to be based on their image, and toward which they’re always marching.

From the principle of collage, of mosaic to that of fabric. Creating authentic, unrecognizable copies. Different from the originals they contain. Creating divergence by copying the same. Juxtaposing. Confusing the genuine. A bona fide result made of unpunctuated appropriations.

I have painted, I wrote, and, yes, made children within a nihilistic mind-frame. Thematic developments reinterpreting origins. Vocalizations in various formats, intimate public experiences. Physical drives encompassing impulses and thoughts erupting as confetti.

When it was announced to the-young-girl-I-once-was that I was going nowhere. Because they really did that at one point. Tell me I wouldn’t move. A predilection for fixity. A place where my narrating voice would never thrive. I considered the possibilities: They were either right or wrong. And I was going to make those two come true. Dissemination.

I have grown into a grand-mother. Incongruous. A bizarre, unforeseen fate. The-young-girl-I-once-was having had no splendor to offer. Just orchestrations. Translations and coordinations of metaphysical rhythms. Solidly plastered onto reinterpretations.

In the realm of catatonic disappearance, of vanishing acts, the psychologically disabled child immolates the body, a paralysis of everything from the skin to the bones, sick with fear, total stoppage: The same as playing dead at the front. In the gutter, hiding at the bottom of the communal burial ground.

Pathological density, the self surrounded by incapacitated flesh.

Along the lines of the locked-in syndrome. A walled-in alive experience. Disconnection without loss of cognitive functions. The intermittent vegetative state. Aware, awake, an entombed consciousness, all voluntary muscles in the body unresponsive. Hysteria. Somatization. No organic cause. Just terror as a unifying emotion.

In my late teens, they all thought I was done for.

Say the prayer for me, darling: It’s all about memes. Propagation. Contagion. Exposure. Inheritance. Transmission. Mutation. It’s all about us, the replicators. The carriers and explicators. It’s the story of traditions. Of our collective slogans. How we accept them, use them, and then spread them around.

I have loved you, my future, from day one, and have entered you walking the great distance from a doomed past to its departure. And by never finding myself, I did manage to leave that lost self behind, next to a psychiatric diagnosis I could not fully understand. When they said I would not go further, I would not communicate.

The only part that has remained true is that I've never figured out why it happened. Pseudo comas, an innate silent symphony constantly reflecting on frivolous, cavernous imitations of death. Solos for an orchestra without a musical score, no written instrumental parts.

I mean it. I almost didn’t make it, and by extension, by the meme, neither did you, my children and grandchildren. So we are left now, that's it, with a possibility of being happy. The minute we're over our tremendous anger at whoever, whatever screwed us up. For there had to be a reason, ascertains the intellectually curious.

Your Laolao

47. Let's imagine

WOW, dear kids, did you see that? The Large Hadron Collider was fired up today. At exactly 07:32 GMT. Where was I at that time? What was I doing?

I was teaching (logic, of course) to Chinese teenagers in a course about academic writing, explaining the qualities of argumentation. All men are mortal / Mr. Wang is a man / Therefore, Mr. Wang is mortal. That made everybody laugh. I was drawing sets on the white board. All cats are mortal. Mr. Wang is mortal. Does that make Mr. Wang a cat? We had fun. All that is yellow is a banana. What a coincidence, Miss Li’s shoes happened to be yellow today, bright sunny yellow. Is Miss Li wearing bananas? She was slightly embarrassed as we gladly pondered the logic.

That was my tiny contribution to the world of rigor today, parallel time-wise to this gigantic experiment happening in Europe. My minuscule drop for the betterment of knowledge and understanding. You see, baby, that’s why I get up the morning to go to work. I really intend, on my good days, to lessen the influence of stupidity. I'm a sort of missionary probably, meaning someone who likes to believe he or she can have a mission. Sounds tacky? I want these young people to be independent in their thinking. To be able to express their thoughts, and argue decently. They may not care right now. They probably don’t. But later, who knows? What we discussed today may resurface.

Often, I get desperate. My students are very withdrawn, quiet. Drifting. When they start in our school, they have already failed at so many things. The only child of well-to-do families with the means to pay tuition in a private institution, the public ones having rejected them. No interests. No desires, no vision of a future. Kids just floating. Passivity, indifference. Hardly any sense of pleasure. Few opinions, only the overwhelming effect of group-think on banal issues. But a lot of money to buy expensive clothes, gadgets, and cars.

The elite… We get them by the hundreds. And to keep them alert, their eyes opened, I must hide teaching under the guise of entertainment. Be funny. Gesticulate. Be very concrete in the way I introduce concepts. Work with examples, not openly with theories. Like today. It worked.

This morning, before class, I was correcting graphs, tables, charts made by the students. Not a single axis making sense. Absolute carelessness. Percentages not adding up. Elements thrown together not belonging to the same classes, categories. No purpose to the visual representation of data. What is it that you want to show? do I keep asking. Why this bar chart, why these lines or these points on the graph? What did you try to say? Explain it to me, try. Please. Why do you divide your information like this? What was your intention? They don't know. They're even surprised such questions can be asked.

It seems my mission is to save the wealthy from themselves. More precisely, to save us from people with the financial capabilities to do a lot of harm if they choose to remain that ignorant. I worry about such a future, you see. Not that the problem doesn't already exist. But in that future, I won't be there, you will. Who will look after you?

Do you think I ask too many questions? Perhaps it's scaring them away, pushing them further into their silence and apathy. But I want them to understand it's a language. It has a message. It's the same as using words. Don't be afraid because these are digits. You can do lots of things with data. Depending on the goals, the same data can be drawn differently, and used to express different ideas. That's called manipulation. It's important to understand this. How will these students function later unable to have a critical view at what surrounds them? What kind of decisions will they make later? And the consequences?

My students tend to think that doing something, anything, is sufficient. They’re taken aback when I tell them no, it’s not sufficient. It’s got to be good too. And "good" must be understood in the sense of "meaning." Do we have something here? Even the shadow of meaning would be a start.

I get a little reaction then. They straighten their shoulders, and stare, astonished, at me. As if it was news. Sometimes, I think it’s simply the word “no” that they’ve never heard before, and they wonder, honestly, what it means when applied to their world of spoiled kids. If I can teach them that, I will have done something perhaps useful.

So, the LHC. Lets come back to the topic. My mind is blown away by the magnitude of the enterprise, its goals, what it can teach us. Imagine. Working at re-creating the conditions just after the Big Bang, looking to explain the physical universe. It will take years before the analysis of the data leads to any conclusive evidence, I guess. Maybe not even during my lifetime. But in yours, probably. Imagine. Repeating trillions of times what is believed to have happened about 15 billion years ago. What made the galaxies, the stars, the planets. Us. Yes, all of us.

Sorry if I sound like I’m teaching again. Preachy. I'm just so impressed. And it's a feeling I enjoy. Rare.

The computer programs needed to process such quantities of information. Imagine. The staggering amount of data that will, of course, need to be handled by hundreds, maybe thousands of facilities around the world, data filtered, organized, flagged, decorticated, analyzed, evaluated, verified by so many people. A sustained collaborative effort, worldwide. Oh, imagine. Imagine.

Will the scientists find it, the "god particle," the Higgs boson? What has made the universe possible, what is thought to give matter its mass. The particle named after Peter Higgs, a Scottish scientist, in 1964. How old was I? 11. Imagine, dear. When I was 11 learning to multiply, to subtract, to properly count and draw simple geometrical shapes. And that man pointing to a particle that has never been observed. All in the mind. All from reasoning. Imagine. Making predictions about the existence of a sub-atomic particle no one can see. Postulate. Deduct. Think. Calculate. Wow. Try to imagine.

Do you understand why it’s so important? Imagine an instant that, eons ago, there was no mass. Nothing would have ever taken shape. Without mass, life would have never begun.

What will the protons do, smashed together at incredibly high energy levels inside the LHC tunnel? Will they generate these theoretical particles? Trillions of protons racing. The engineering of millions of collisions per second. The engineering of equipment capable of measuring the time needed for a particle to pass, a billionth of a second. I don’t think we can even start to imagine the applications that will rise one day from such technologies.

Oh yes, and the 11 dimensions, a chimera? Will the LHC enlighten us? Will the mathematical constructs of the past century hold? Who knows? Who knows? Oh, my darlings. The birth of our universe...

Even though I’m a layperson, I imagine. It teaches me something. About thinking and about doing, getting a better grasp of Gestalt, of what the parts can do, of their relationship to the whole. Of what many people working together can achieve that they cannot do alone, separately. Yes, imagine that.

Ok, my students were not as impressed as I was when I tried to interest them to the experience. And I don’t think colleagues were either. It’s alright. My amazement didn’t falter for that. I keep it within, focusing on Mr. Wang who’s mortal and who’s not a cat.

I asked the students to tell me if the following sentence was adequate from a logical perspective: Young Mr. Ma will fail his test because he didn’t study.

My students, who never study, knew this to be quite true from their personal experience. That’s inference, baby. And that was not my question. We should first start by saying Only those who study will pass the exam. Right?

Oh well. I’ll continue to explain this next time. It was a bit too much for a single class. And until then, they’ll keep on writing at college and university levels: I love Beijing because it’s the capital of China. Or: I prefer this brand of bottled water to other brands because water is the source of life.

Every time my blood pressure goes up. But I hang on. Somewhere in Switzerland protons are going faster and faster. And I imagine. The continuity, from me to you, from you to your own children, and their children. As particles appear, hopefully some that have not been seen since the beginning of times. A glance at how the building blocks of matter are made. It's for all of us, my sleepy students included. Generations to come.

Do not think I’m exalted, refusing to consider the dangers skeptics and doomsday-fortune-tellers have been announcing. Critics warning the LHC could create wormholes capable of swallowing the Earth. Alarms. Panic. Of course, I do not have the expertise to gauge the details of the experiment, nor, even if I had access to comprehensive data, could I study it to arrive at an absolutely well-informed evaluation of the risks. That's impossible.

So I am not telling you there are no risks. It’s reasonable to think there are probably some. But it’s also reasonable to think they've been addressed to the best of our current knowledge in the field of physics. Or not. We’ll therefore called these “(un)calculated risks.”

Understand me well. I don’t prescribe to the attitude we should blindly trust “experts.” Indeed, we must question them, but we must also remain aware that we can never know for sure what “safe” is. It is a relative concept. We look at probabilities.

What odds should we consider acceptable, do we only know? And who should answer such a question?

Danger being inevitable, how much of it can we endure and for the sake of what kind of gains?

Tomorrow, honey, it’s September 11th. In 1822, the Church admitted that it wasn’t necessarily heresy to claim, as Galileo had done almost two centuries earlier, that the Earth turns around the Sun. But do you know it’s only in 1992 that a pope officially admitted that the Earth wasn’t a stationary body?

You will always find people who resist ideas and progress. Even when the evidence and the facts are laid clearly before their eyes. When this happens, you must ask this: What will the cost be if you turn your back on an experience?

As I told you, dear ones, I happen often to teach the word “no,” because it is vital that we understand its meaning and its power, so to always use it appropriately.

Laolao

46. A critique of dialectic

I want to discuss the difference between contradiction and inconsistency. I’m ok with the meaning of incoherence. I can easily spot it. Nonsense, unintelligibility being the synonyms I would use to describe what's incoherent.

Fortunately for us, at home, nobody was incoherent. Even when my mother would share her theories about extraterrestrials to explain why Hasidic women cut their hair so short, she remained intelligible. She frequently made farfetched assumptions and wouldn’t base her judgment on any valid evidence, but her speech was for the most part grammatically correct. She suffered from a lack of critical thinking that allowed superstitions and a strong propensity for new-age gibberish to get the best of her. But she was not incoherent.

Where I’m not so clear, it’s how to call certain clashes between statements. The line can be blurry.

Lets pretend a mother first says “My daughter has emotional issues that were caused by her father’s behavior.” Then adds as an argument to support the claim, “Her father is a womanizer who has been unfaithful to me, hurting me, making my life miserable.”

What’s that? It’s not a contradiction as such. It’s an inconsistency due to the lack of correspondence between the two sentences, content-wise. They share a similar topic, the father’s behavior, that’s all. They do not address the same point.

Now, lets say instead, after the first claim, that the mother continues with “I’ve been alone dealing with that problem, her father absent, offering no help; I’ve done so much for my daughter, and she simply refuses to appreciate all those sacrifices I’ve made.” Is that a contradiction?

I mean, if the claim is that the father should bear responsibility for the problems as stated in the first sentence, how can the argument to support that very claim emphasize his non-involvement? Plus, the second part of the argument seems to imply the responsibility is with the daughter via her refusal. In short, the statements lead to different conclusions. They cannot belong to the same logical flow.

Very difficult.

My father one day visited me at the hospital. Actually, it was not a real visit. He didn’t enter the building. He stayed in his car, in the parking lot. I was given permission to go out and join him. He’s in his car, crying. I’m sitting in the passenger seat, waiting for him to tell me why he’s sad. And he says, sobbing “I’m sorry, I can’t help you. I can barely help myself. You’ll have to manage on your own.”

I’m 15 years old at the time, and this is what I’m thinking as I’m hearing my father’s words: “I’m in a dormitory, night after night, with people regularly put in straitjacket, when they’re not pulling their pants down in the corridors to shit on the floor, people with saliva running down their chin, who are indeed incoherent if they speak at all. And to top that, I’m not crying, my father is.”

What’s that? What am I experiencing there? An inconsistency? A contradiction? An incongruity? An incompatibility? An inversion? A paradox?

How did dialectical materialism explain life’s absurdities? Is it by stating that people have conflicting goals and preoccupations? What about Hegel, seeing in contradictions and negations the dynamic quality underlying progress?

All in all, that must explain why I was the least evolved of the creatures back home, the only one needing the protection and care of the medical profession. I was the non-dialectician. My system of beliefs rejecting controversies, not wanting to have anything to do with opposing forces and assertions, unable to resolve disagreements through discussions with people characterized by constant inner strife.

Deep down, I couldn’t tolerate the principle of synthesis, the fusion, the combination of positions that basically denied the search for truth. I could not accept polemic, multiple negations, endless contradictions as a methodology, as a way to carry on one’s existence. This non-idealist manner, I hated it. I couldn’t understand it. That place, in the mind, where no one’s troubled by the inherent tensions among thoughts, I didn’t want to go there. It scared me. Such spaces felt fascist to me, grounds encouraging bad faith and dishonesty.

Once a thesis eloquently established, I know the step for its antithesis to be an entire matter of subjectivity. It can arise from any fiction the mind fancies as serving its own interest. There are no rules to dictate the selection of the contradiction. It ends up being anything. Being simply rhetorical. Not logical.

So I answered my father, not so much out of pity, but mostly to cut that conversation short, that I understood, and I told him not to worry.

That was not a synthesis, darling. That was a blatant lie. And no solution, no revolution were awaiting me on the horizon.

But I got out of the car and walked back into the hospital a bit improved, I must admit, Hegel and his idea of evolution slightly redeemed in my eyes. The other patients, from a comparative point-of-view, seeming not so bad after all.

So you can see, honey, why your Laolao’s search for a philosophy that would help make sense of her world led to so much confusion. And why that contradiction felt totally abject, impossible to apprehend.

Only the delirium I heard in my dorm at that point was soothing, because it was nonsensical, therefore irreproachable, never disaffirming itself.

Laolao

45. Boolean Logic

Whenever I skid on the slopes of emotions, or when, like now, my physical resistance is on the low side, I turn to aspects of life I find reliable, and which, as a result of their dependable character, I can easily understand.

In the first years of the Internet, as Web pages multiplied, I didn’t feel that much enthralled by the phenomenon. I was slow to become impressed. What was the use of so much information if it stayed fragmented, disorganized? I disliked this project of a network aimed simultaneously at all directions, sprouting like wild plants in an unruly, unkept field. It was not until I got acquainted with search engines based on Boolean logic that I accepted to seriously peek at the World Wide Web.

I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, I simply enjoyed creating a universe, spotting its elements, spelling a specific scope, the chaining of operations, shoveling my way through sub-sets, including, excluding, unions and intersections, AND, OR, and the NOTs, the use of parentheses, and the symbols, their properties. All of these bringing an arithmetical clarity to the digital world. Tracing directions within a disoriented practice. Neat signs, like degrees on a sextant, to navigate through the layers of piled up data. A grammar to rank, divide, group; to identify species among thoughts; to name constellations of knowledge; to classify efforts, and find the proper lexicon for their titles.

I miss that. I realize that the “Advanced Search” feature of Google, with its form to be filled out, reproduces the Boolean system in a user-friendly way, but it neither has the poetry nor the flexibility the long coded sentences had for me.

It was very much like architecture, this building of intentions, of commands, designing gates for selected elements to pass through, defining one’s will with a sense of formalness which cleaned the air, getting rid of the agitation irritating my synapses, the muddy zones of affectivity that swallowed me. Rectifying hunches, articulating them around a syntax that made them intelligible, functional, useful. Writing to query one’s existential domain, systematizing questions so not to go astray, lost in irrelevant answers and meaningless statements.

So what do I do today? Searching remains an activity at which, I think, I still excel, colleagues looking up to me to find the information they need. If I can no longer take pride in the complexity of the quest, I now find some of it in the speed at which I find what’s required. But it’s no longer a therapy for my anxiety. It does not reverse my net tendency to make mistakes and misunderstand what's out there. It has become a repetitive exercise, a recipe producing slightly different variations of the same sauce. Or have I just become blasé?

The only efficient balm now rests with you. You remain the unexpected, the surprise, the wealth of possibilities impossible to narrow. Each one of you an infinite universe I will never encircle, for you are all in perpetual reconfiguration. So I quiet down, and shift the paradigms. I make lists. Things I could do for you. Lists of things I could buy for you. Things I can put away for you. Things I should bring you. And also lists of lists like maps to locate the roads, the lines, that lead to you.

Then, I feel better. I can burn the lists and start creating new ones. Different ones, for different times and moods, for different goals and results, for different ages and languages. With different pen colors and paper sizes. Selecting different order principles, by priorities, chronological, alphabetical, geographical. Sub-dividing the lists, inserting new sets of labels, sub-headings, and ideas for categorization, criteria unheard of for the exceptional situations you trigger. An unlimited text because you are complex, versatile, constantly changing and challenging. Beings with a true address, your own personal way to distribute potential through links, pathways and references, holding my hand every time to visit the new portals you've developed as you grow. Unthinkable for my lists to be comprehensive and up-to-date.

So you see, I’m fine.

Laolao

44. Camellias

My cold isn’t going away. It’s my Nth day of fever. It doesn’t climb very high, but it’s always there, a narrow fluctuation constantly nagging me. I’ve never had a good immune system.

When I was about 18, during one of my stay at the psychiatric hospital, a member of the medical staff, an intern I think, told me half-jokingly that my problem was much similar to the one La Dame aux camélias had.

A few nights ago, I looked again at Camille, the role of Marguerite Gautier played by a pale and gracious Greta Garbo, and wondered what I could have in common with such a character. I never was mundane nor enjoyed courtship like Marguerite did. I have never expected men to provide financially for my needs. And never sought a life of idleness.

What is it then that I shared with Marguerite?

The melancholia, of course. That, and perhaps the way the body translates the sadness into symptoms and illnesses. Marguerite’s willingness to abandon the fight. Her quick admission to unworthiness. Physical frailness leading to self-annihilation.

This is of course very subjective. We’ll never know how things really were. My version of events certainly clashing with what my sisters remember of our time spent together.

I haven’t talked, it’s true, about my two sisters. We haven’t been in touch since I’ve been in China. More than a decade, in fact. One is almost three years younger than I am, the other, about nine years. Although there were periods when we regularly saw each other, we were never close in the sense of friendship, of what the word implies of generosity and loyalty.

We were raised to be competitive and have been unable to outgrow this posture. I think we did try, though. But terribly failed. We ended up reproducing the same type of relationship my parents had to their own siblings. A rapport mainly made of contempt, jealousy, suspicion.

Because of the greater age difference, I always felt my youngest sister belonged to a different generation than mine. I’ve therefore been better acquainted with my other sister that I will call here, Louise.

As kids, Louise and I never played much together. In my souvenirs, I don’t really know where she was, and she probably doesn’t remember much about me neither. My mother had an expert way of separating us. I don’t think she even did that consciously. She just did it. For as deep as I can dig into the past, I see myself in a bubble filled with my mother’s presence. There’s no one else. And I am sure my sister feels the same way, a bubble for her too where she relates to our mother on an exclusive basis as I did in mine. In other words, my mother could only deal with us one at a time, isolating that link from everything else. In that bubble, we became my mother’s mirror, the recipient of her worries, the audience, what she used to confirm her own existence.

If my mother’s technique was the same for Louise and I, we nevertheless reacted to it quite differently.

Where I was weak, Louise was strong. Where I would fall, she would stand.

In my earliest souvenir of Louise, my mother is trying to force her to eat some seafood. We’re sitting at the kitchen table, and my mother is immensely angry at her, because she is refusing every bite, indifferent to threats of punishment, keeping her lips sealed. My mother becomes exasperated and forces the spoon into my sister’s mouth. A battle follows and my mother, fed up, sends her into the bedroom. As soon as my sister is on the other side of the door, she throws up all over the floor. I mean, not just a bit, but a geyser of puking. Vomit like I’ve never seen before. My sister is standing there, her feet in that disgusting pond, a look of pride in her eyes.

As I’m analyzing the scene, my mother on her knees having to clean the mess in the room, I’m understanding something fundamental about Louise. She knows how to punish our mother, she can stand up to her. She’s unafraid. She makes her pay. I can’t do that. I don’t know how to. My style is not to punish, it is to get punished.

I don’t know how Louise does what she does, but she does it well.

As said, we were kept apart during our childhood and only connected when we reached adulthood.

In more ways than one, the role I’ve played in my mother’s life resembles very much the one I later assumed in my sister’s life, that of the sufferer, the underdog, the one with the victim syndrome.

Louise used my mother’s strength like a boomerang, throwing it back at her; Me, I was hammered by it. My sister's self-centeredness was compact enough to oppose that of our mother. But since both of them needed someone lesser than they were, someone to boss around, to feel superior to, thus reinforcing their image, I guess for the two women I represented the ideal public, a sort of negative reflection of the narcissism that gave them so much power, stubbornness, stance and influence.

In that very sense, I used to resemble Marguerite, the indisposed, chagrined, the ailing creature, the one it’s safe to reject, to point a finger at, who protects herself with a fainting spell, a romantic tear at the corner of her eye, who easily feels guilty for other people’s misery, who becomes the care giver. The one with a body that can concretize the shapeless harm floating around, giving it a name, enabling diagnosis, attracting responsibility, a palpable propensity to accept blame and wrongdoing as the pillar supporting relationships. The one who gets into trouble to indicate how right others were. The one who gets sick so that others can live healthily ever after.

Such a dynamic is complex. Like in the case of the slave and the master, we’re never really sure who has the real power, for what is a master without a slave? The tension therefore builds up. The slave is not that innocent, you know, making the master look pretty nasty… All it takes to shake someone's self-declared reputation of nobility and grandeur is a soft melancholic sigh whispered by the heart, or rings under the eyes like the scars of mistreatment.

Ultimately, Marguerite is the only heroine that matters. She’s dead, yes, but her sad end is what reveals the nature of all the other characters in the story. She’s the altruist. They’re the egotistic fucks. Marguerite has gone to extreme length, putting her life on the line, to prove and win her point. She’s as manipulative as the others are, and from a certain perspective perhaps even more.

I admit it. I have always suspected as much about myself. But it doesn’t mean I could stop it. Only by leaving at the other end of the world, and staying away, far away, could I break the mold and stop my chronic subscription to the mannerism of affliction, privation and loss, and where it has always led, a symbolic kind of death in asylums, thus exposing the idiosyncrasies of family members. Hurting myself thinking it would unmask them.

But contrary to Marguerite, I did realize eventually there were other options. Crueler ones maybe. What if the slave does not die, but finds a happy way out and abandons the master? What if the only audience the narcissist knows suddenly moves to other shows on Earth? That's a bigger win. And a fundamentally vicious one.

I'm much aware of it, trying hard not to rejoice myself too much... After all, dear ones, I have you, my children, my grand-children. Whereas Narcissus, the self-admirer, ends up being nibbled by the seafood.

So the novel has been rewritten, adapted, with a new conclusion, the white camellias of early spring forgotten once the summer offers merrier, flashier bouquets. Then why, tell me, do I still cough, my psyche friable, a constant touch of fever to remind me that I've once loved myself breakable and damaged, bearer of a scent so weak it's almost unrecognizable? Why?

Laolao

43. Sleep terrors

We say a sleepwalker behaves while asleep as if he or she was awake. The sleeper gets up, walks around, opens a door, performs some action that would be considered normal in a state of wakefulness.

But what about abnormal behavior?

What about a fairly normal person becoming psychotic once dozing off?

My father who cherished his intellect above anything else had taught himself refined manners, those of an educated man, a posture befitting a distinguished professor and researcher.

Appearance-wise, he was very particular about the suits he wore, all custom fit, with expensive designer ties and the best of shoes. Elegant shirts that were a headache to clean and press, my father never satisfied of the way the collar or the cuffs had been treated. His tiepins and cufflinks made of gold. A very meticulous man, concerned about impeccability and sophistication.

He appreciated great wines and would taste them according to the strictest protocol, deeply involved in the sensory assessment of aromas, color, flavor, snobbishly discussing the bouquet, swirling the glass with dexterity, keeping the wine in his mouth to fully feel its attributes, smacking the tongue, gargling, caring for the perfect serving temperature, in details comparing fragrances, geographic origins, the years, the types of grapes, the climate.

He could also talk brilliantly of his cheeses, and of the precise characteristics of the perfectly baked baguette.

He had poise, a tall, handsome man who knew how to enter a room and get noticed without people noticing he had meant to. Never laughing too loud, impeccable speech, a gentleman. Men admiring him, women melting next to him, my father warmly attentive to the confidences made to him. Guests with an emotional issue at hand lining up during parties to obtain his wise word of advice.

But frequently at night, he would transform himself into a shocking monster, terrifying us all. How we dreaded the moment he would fall asleep...

It usually started with loud screams. Someone beaten to death would not shout any less. Vocalizations perhaps like those of a man screaming for the last time of his life when falling down a precipice, then the shrieks of an animal being butchered. Piercing cries ripping the night. Full blast, my father's lungs and vocal chords at their maximum.

He would then get up and start pushing furniture around, carrying his bed across the room. On his knees, with all his strength, moving whatever was in his way, the screams unstoppable.

Impossible to wake him, his own shouting covering my mother’s voice as she would try to calm him down. If she touched him, he would violently hit back, possessed, uncontrollable, in the midst of an aggressive trance that seemed to know no limits.

These nights were profoundly frightful. My sisters and I, each of us in our own bedroom, too scared to help, rescue my mother, afraid my father would break down our door and murder us, uselessly covering our ears with our hands, praying for that hell to stop. Reviewing in our mind escape routes in case he would get too close to us.

Even after he would grow quieter, sleepless nights, not daring close an eye. A profound sense of danger keeping us alert, watching for the next episode of nocturnal madness.

The next morning, he would not remember a thing. He would go through his methodical ritual of selecting his clothes, getting ready for work, pressing his fresh orange juice, complaining about a marmalade jar improperly closed, unaware, it appears, of the fit he had had the night before.

I do not think he suffered from somnambulism as such. The actions he perpetrated were too distant from his usual self. I see it today more like the rise of a hidden dark personality. Our very own private case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The duality of good and evil having reached a compromise, one side for the day, the other for the night, alternating their extremes according to the calendar of sunlight and darkness, the behavioral split, the dichotomy remaining up to now a family secret. Both my parents never discussing these horrendous scenes. Silence consecrating my mother - now entirely justified to proceed with her own vodka tasting experience - as an eternal victim, in case we had not guessed.

The crises were not nightmares either, because he didn’t wake up, an intense feeling of fear or danger pulling him out of a bad dream. He would just keep on screaming, pushing, hitting, until the energy ran out, resuming eventually his initial horizontal position on the bed as if nothing had happened.

Even today, dear ones, I do not understand what people meant when telling us how lucky we were as children to have an eminent psychologist as a father. We heard that inanity so often. And never knew, not even once, how to reply. Unable to describe our nights to anyone. An insane territory belonging to the unspoken/unspeakable part of our family history.

You can never say the nice-looking successful shrink is highly tormented and acts crazy. And if you do, they’ll lock you up, believe me. Oh please, believe me. And you gradually start, as a proxy, to accept treatment on behalf of others, begging for the number of pills to increase just to keep up with your world getting sicker all the time.

Laolao

42. Blitzkrieg

I was reading this morning about tanks. It’s September first and in 1939, on this day, the Germans invaded Poland: Blitzkrieg, or a warfare strategy based on speed and mobility. The merger of three 20th century technologies: tanks, airplanes and the radio, with tanks being the key asset. That, and of course the element of surprise: A full armored attack without having declared war.

I have never known war. I’m part of the lucky few throughout history who were not subjected to the atrocities humans inflict upon each other.

Nevertheless, the first texts I memorized in primary school were Napoleon’s speeches to his troops. These motivational tirades fascinated me. I would stand on a chair to address my infantrymen and cavaliers, my voice resounding with assurance. I also had a clear preference for war movies over everything else shown on TV. I watched them all, a world of men, fearless, ready to give their life for a cause, advancing through chaos, impervious to the whistling of bullets, the crashing of bombs, immune to the sight of blood and dismembered bodies. Commanding officers shouting orders obedient soldiers followed to the letter, throwing themselves into battle at the precise moment they were told to.

I used to wake up very early as a kid, at around 4:30 or 5 in the morning, much before the sun. I loved our house then, quiet, a feeling of emptiness, of immobility that made me like it. I never turned on the lights, keeping the darkness as it was. I would slightly open the drapes in the living room and stare at our street.

There was a story that would constantly pop in my mind. Our street was elbow-shaped, our house the fourth one, right in the curve. The first three houses were close to one another. Then there was a small field bordered by our house. Our street led to a road mostly used by farmers. Lost cows, in those early years, would sometimes cross it and end up on our lawn.

Looking at our street, I would imagine a fire engulfing the first house, strong winds pushing the flames eastward, quickly consuming the second house, the third one soon ready to burn, the field separating our house from the blaze giving me just enough time to be the hero of the day and save my family.

But at this point, my story always went wrong. I would imagine myself climbing the steps to the top floor to wake my parents up. Desperately shaking them, telling them to get up, to run, a deadly fire was coming. Quick, hardly time to escape. I would cry, stomp, swear to them I was saying the truth. Plead. Make a racket. But to no avail.

No one would believe me. My parents wouldn’t budge. They stayed in bed telling me to go away, to leave them alone. In my story, I would run back and forth, from the living room window to their bedroom, screaming the fire was fast approaching.

And then, the big, awful moment comes where I have to decide. The hideous, outrageous, decision. As our house is starting to burn, smoke hurting the eyes, I ask myself what to do. Do I stay? Do I run away and leave them behind? If I wait too long, I’ll die. If I leave, they die. Am I a hero?

Because smoke moves up, the bedrooms upstairs are already filled with thick, unbreathable air, do I tell myself. I am too small to drag everyone’s body downstairs. There’s only my youngest sister that I can save. And I end my story this way. Running out the front door with the baby in my arms, in my pajamas, barefoot in the snow.

I truly felt bad about this story. I tried many times to change it. It was my story after all. I should have been able to modify its content. To get the characters to behave differently. To listen to me. But the story would unfold by itself, take over, always caught in the same modus operandi.

The only person I could save with the heroic efforts displayed in my fantasy was the one who could not exercise any free will. A baby, unable to make a decision, who didn’t know yet the words for refusal. Who had no ability to reject me.

This meant I was powerless over the world. To be right or wrong had no importance, for even when I was right, I had no influence. My actions had no impact. Nobody trusted me. My story showed people would choose to die instead of believing in me.

One of my teachers who had known the war in Europe had told us how she had lost her mother. They were fleeing their town, a long procession of people carrying a few belongings along a dirt road. Airplanes came down, a piece of shrapnel hitting her mother at the waist. My teacher, who was then a little girl, had to keep on walking, letting go of her mother’s hand, leaving her body behind.

Every time I went over her story in my mind, the dirt road took invariably the shape of ours, the planes dropping their bombs exactly when the little girl and her mother entered the curve where our house was located.

As you see, I had dreams, but I had them fully awake. I have never remembered a single dream made while asleep. Not once. I only have nightmares my eyes opened.

There was another story that used to monopolize my mind in the early hours of the day. I kept it for last because it was the most frequent one. Leaving the strongest impression because of its repetitive nature.

It had either tanks or a train in it. It’s like a scene from a silent movie. My vision is similar to that of a large screen in a theater. From the left side of the image, a long line of tanks appears. At other times, these look more like massive black wagons. At first, I feel relieved, they are moving away from me, going where the cows come from. But then, that damned curve on our street appears and the tanks turn, heading in my direction. I cannot move. I still have time to get out of their way, but my body won’t listen. It’s not responding. It stays there, heavy, paralyzed. Not by fear. I’m lucid. I know what to do. I can still save myself, just a few steps and I’ll be fine, uncrushed. I see the tanks getting closer. I can make it. If I could just throw myself out of their path, roll over. Not much, just enough. But nothing happens. I have no control over my limbs. I seem to be made of rocks, an amazing weight I can’t lift. I focus, a desperate effort at concentration, as the tanks keep getting closer. No sound. No noise. I can’t hear the engines. There’s only the sight of these huge machines bigger and bigger, an entire panzer division on the move, swift, speedy, agile, while I’m there, incapable of helping myself. My own body refusing to understand, to listen. Disregarding my orders. Ignoring me.

The variation with the train is not much different. I realize that the tracks have the same elbow shape as our street, leading the train straight through where I’m helplessly standing, inept, no power over my movements, totally enraged at my supreme incompetence. Defenseless. Worthless. The most impotent person one can imagine.

That was me. Daydreaming, my face peeking through the living-room curtains, observing the empty street as if it was a long virgin sheet of paper offering itself to fiction. Hours before it was time to get dressed and head for school. Having already lost everything to a full caravan of panzers roaming through a Quebec suburb.

War movies, indeed, fed my imagination. They taught me, among other things, how babies were made: This soldier at the front finally gets a letter from his wife announcing she’s pregnant. Since the young man has been fighting for a while, I gathered he had sent one of his spermatozoids in an envelope back home.

From then on, the postman, going from house to house everyday, had a new role. And I was careful never to touch the mail he would put in our box.

When I explained at school the efficient way society (via the Post Office) and nature were enmeshed to produce babies, I found it of course completely normal that no one expressed much faith in my theory.

(...) Soldats, lorsque tout ce qui est nécessaire pour assurer le bonheur et la prospérité de notre patrie sera accomplie, je vous renverrai en France ; là, vous serez l’objet de ma plus tendre sollicitude. Mon peuple vous reverra avec des transports de joie, et il vous suffira de dire : j’étais à la bataille d’Austerlitz pour que l’on réponde : voilà un brave.

Laolao