16. The White Queen

The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon: It happens when you learn something, like a new word or expression, and shortly after, you encounter, often many times, this same word or expression. It suddenly seems to be all over the place.

You discover a new item, perhaps a pair of shoes you’ve never seen the like before, and you buy it, so proud to have something unique, but almost right away you start to notice that many other girls have the same too! You hadn’t been aware of that.

In a store selling used CDs you find John Lennon’s acoustic album. You had forgotten he had made one. You’re so excited because it’s rare, so special. And then, you start hearing the songs on the radio or as background music in the places you stop by.

And you think, what a coincidence…

From the perspective of the future, it’s what deja-vu experiences are to the past, I guess. Tricks your mind plays. Time displacements having to do with how well or badly your brain functions, the information it retains, the one it rejects, what it notices, what it remembers and how it does so.

And it has to do with probabilities. In a day, we’re bombarded with so much input. We eliminate from our mind most of it. But statistically, one I think could calculate the chances that we come across a word, a song, an object within a specific time period. If there’s a point of reference already there, in our thoughts, the word, song or the image of the object gets imprinted in our brain because now there’s a chain, a category to plug it in. If not, there’s no trace left. We don’t record the information. We let it go, not having ‘noticed’ it.

Try to explain that to my mother.

She never believed me.

She thought she had spiritual powers. Some privileged access to divine insights. A connection to higher levels of life forms trying to communicate with her.

With Tarot cards, crystals, yin and yang, she kept recalling everyone’s future.

Oh baby, it's so embarrassing to have a mother like that. You don’t know where to hide her when guests show up. You quickly run out of stories to explain to the neighbors some of the stuff she says. You get confused in the many lies and excuses you’ve made up to tame people’s reaction to her ethereal outbursts of celestial superiority.

And she was so drunk.

I found her one afternoon passed out on the floor, between the candles and the incense. You see, I was too small, too young. It was too early in my life. I knew I would never be able to bury her by myself. I understood her body was too heavy for me to carry all the way to the garden. These were my main concerns. There was no one to help. I was alone. Well almost, next to what I believed to be a corpse.

So I went for the only thing at my disposal. I let out a long scream. A powerful, profound one, which immediately plunged me into darkness. A variation on the theme of my seizures.

I think it woke her up, because I felt her slapping me out of that cozy void I had found for myself. And she was giving me a ton of shit for having alerted the entire neighborhood. She hadn’t foreseen that one.

Do you know what the White Queen said to Alice?

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."

I never wanted to read Lewis Carroll. I read Jung instead who had read Through the Looking-Glass. And I didn’t flip when I realized Jung’s name was often spoken where I was, even though I hadn’t noticed it before having picked one of his books.

I read him at the psychiatric hospital where I was a patient in 1967. It's the place where I was told I wasn’t crazy. And perhaps because I needed to hear that often, I cumulated more than three years in such institutions.

Every time the White Queen attempted a visit and made a voodoo scene, the head nurses kicked her out.

Do you feel, baby, something’s absurd here?

Don’t answer. Just love me.

Laolao