Because: Nothing is ever so hard to recover from as the things that haven’t happened yet…
So much of life is holding one’s breath for the brief hour we are given to breathe and shine. So comparatively brief. What else then is art but an attempt to shout out over the distances between those moments? To say: here I am still! This is what I felt! This is what I loved. This is what I lost… Knowing that Arthur’s tendency to collect things was his art-form made me approach with reverence. I wanted to make sure I paid adequate attention to detail.
The Allport Collection being just down there at the library made me afraid to break the seal on the moment. To let out all that old dust that had been holding it’s breath for a century. After all, it was possibly the last of his living communications with me, whatever hidden message had been left encoded for me alone to hear speaking, among those mute objects.
His riddle walked with me everywhere. I wanted the answer to it the way I’d always wanted him. This riddle means something beyond finding the answer and getting to the destination of his message. It means congruence of affection and it means story collison. It means his mind rising to meet mine against the backdrop of eternity. I had not expected to be met so completely in this manner, life as I had learned it, was not kind, and the most I had hoped for was his affection. Why should I be the recipient of such an extravagant act of memory and devotion, whilst others died at the end of a rope or froze huddled and forgotten in someone’s doorstep?
Yet now here it was, offered to me… What if I failed it? To be worthy of it? When so few are ever given half so much regard? What if I couldn’t answer his question and proved that we didn’t really understand each other at all? After all this time it would hardly be surprising… My mind is still young and his grew and deepened to the age of almost seventy in my absence. Young as we still were in those days… Such things as unexplored love affairs are a great breeding ground for Romanticised notions and illusions…That’s what older people usually say anyway. And one is given to believe they’ve learned something in their extra time in this world, beyond how to be bitter.
In short, during this time, doubts crowded in around me in hyena skin, snapping and slavering at the blood trail I was still leaving behind me on the oyster shells. I knew it, I smelt them on my trail, but I couldn’t will myself to stop bleeding.
So I’m writing again… See? Happy? I thought it would have been best for Henry to tell it. I can imagine his atmospheric description of the streets at this time of year. Through the eyes of someone so alien to our way of life, it would fascinate me, plus he’s the real storyteller. Not me. Isn’t that what writers are for? They carry the burden of telling all our stories like a goat with a ribbon tied around it's neck?
It was Dark MOFO when I found her. I thought maybe she wasn’t for real at first, just another tourist trap. [Carmen’s edit: that’s the Museum of Old and New Art’s, MONA’s, midwinter festival, for our international readers. If you want to understand what MONA is you just have to imagine that Willy Wonka was real, lived in Hobart, and was more interested in dark, twisted artworks than chocolate] There were fires burning in forty-four gallon drums around the streets and the whole city had started to feel like a giant art installation.
A beacon light reaches up into the night as if to send a signal from our strange little city to get the attention of the darkness. There is a huge hand-fish where people stuff paper with their hidden fears inside before it is burned and sent out into the sea. I tried to get Henry to participate in the ceremony, but he was unsettled by the idea of any fish that contained Hobart’s collective fears.
He spoke of a hanging he’d witnessed as a child, one of the last public hangings in Hobart. His father told him that ‘such were the wages of sin in this world’ while the man’s body (to quote him): ‘jerked like a marionette whose strings are in the hands of a brutal child.’ That was his first shock of what he called man’s inhumanity to man. To know that men kill other men in violence was one thing, but to see the way the crowd jeered the dying man’s fear was another.
I told him that in our era if a child witnessed people hang a man by the neck until he was dead we’d put them in post-traumatic counselling! He just shrugged and said that he’d had nightmares about it all his life. Of course I pointed out that is indeed a sign of posttraumatic stress. He laughed. “If that is a disease, Madeleine, then everyone in my world must have been suffering from it.”
“Why don’t you write down the nightmare and put it inside the hand fish?” I suggested.
“Oh I’m not afraid of it anymore so I don't have it,” he replied with little sign of emotion. “Fear is a reflex response to hope.”
I didn’t poke anymore, as it seemed a tender point. The feeling I couldn’t do anything else to help him without guidance from someone of greater experience led me on to find someone who was more knowledgable in these areas.
When I found the fortuneteller she was sitting on red velvet cushions and animal skins, behind colourful curtains. I noticed her dark eyes, the tattoos on her hands, and the cut of her clothing. I always see the quality of stitching, fabric and the lining in clothing. In this case it was odd, as you don’t often see people wearing designer clothing who also have tattoos on their hands and beads in their hair. I remember trying to work out how old she was for some reason, -like it really matters but what society trains into us can become knee jerk… My guess was she was in her thirties, but I wasn’t fully sure. Sometimes in different lights or with different expressions she appeared much older or younger.
“Hi, my name’s Madeleine, -Madeleine Allport.” I’m not sure why I lied about my last name, beyond a general pride in being descended from Cecil, because of course his daughter Eileen hadn’t passed us his name. It felt important to do it though.
“I’m Sophia. Can I see your palms?” she asked me. I was pretty sure she was English from her accent but I’d be guessing if I tried to pick which county. When she touched my hand I felt a charge of electricity from her hot skin. I was really awake in the human contact all of a sudden and it felt weirdly intimate, as if by some magic in her touch she had drawn me down into my womanhood.
“Hello there,” she said, acknowledging the fact I was only just settling into my body. I saw the deep old wisdom in her eyes and the warmth in her smile. She was in no hurry with anything and suddenly neither was I.
“Hi,” I muttered nervously. I had the feeling I was sitting in the presence of some ancient temple priestess whose warm self possession alone made me feel like she must be judging me infinitely inferior.
“You’re here about this aren’t you?” she asked, turning over a card with a heart on a rose bush on it. “There’s an important matter you’re caught up in the middle of, something to do with an interrupted love affair.” Even though she consulted my hands and the cards it seemed more like she was listening to something I couldn’t hear than really looking, much the way Henry appears to sometimes when he sits and rocks back and forth.
“What else do you see?”
She closed her eyes, which didn’t seem to suggest she was considering the lines on my hand at all. “Love that was interrupted by untimely death, possibly a suicide or even… even a murder… Suicide, accident, murder, all… It’s weird, twisted threads,” she looked up at me. “There’s multiple repetitions of the same story, all in slightly different ways, rippling out from a sleeper murmuring code, vomiting amanitas… Always close but not quite… The Tower is coming down, apocalyptic change rides in on four coloured horses, brewing storms, a great fire... You’re here on someone else’s behalf but this is about you too… You don't see that yet.”
“How can you see all that?” I whispered in awe, because I was already convinced. In any other context ‘accident, murder, suicide’ could sound like psychic arse-covering and guesswork but in this one it was a perfect description of Henry’s three-fold demise.
“The heart and the hand have their own archeology, leaving traces and echoes... Someone I used to know told me it’s a rag and bone shop, -the heart…”
I jumped at this reference because I was sure that I’d heard it in a poem Henry had read us only recently, or that perhaps he had compared himself to a rag and bone man in some way? Either way it further convinced me of her power.
“You’re good,” I said leaning forward and speaking more quietly. “This is going to sound crazy…”
“Ha! Oh honey… You don’t know who you’re talking to!” she laughed with gusto suddenly, slapping her knee. She reached out and touched me. “Trust me, I’ve seen some shit.” Looking into her eyes at that moment I believed her.
So I took the leap and just said it. “Is it possible for the dead to come back?”
“It happens all the time. People just don’t notice.”
I felt like I’d heard Henry say something very similar and I was becoming increasingly spooked but the fierce lady crush I was developing on her kept me staring at her. “But I mean… actually come back. Like the kind of end days resurrection stuff Catholics believe in kind of ‘come back’?”
She put the cards down then, ordering the cardboard to line up in the deck before sighing as if getting involved in something like this was way against her better judgment. Looking up at me she wore the expression of one world weary of miracles. “You don’t happen to have a cigarette on you, do you? Because I have a feeling I'm going to need one. when I hear what you’re going to tell me."
I like what you’ve written about the meeting with Sophia. Take it from one of the dead: what you don’t say in life will haunt you in death. It is not the dead who haunt the living so much as the life unlived haunts us. It itches under our illusion of skin until we have to dive back into one to unravel the knots we're choking on. For what else am I here again, I wonder? With all that I loved dead and gone and a new world before me? If not to tell from the other side of the cold, to speak of the urgent life in me, in all of us, that chases the sun and only shows its power on the edge of the dark?
The fact I am good at this, this ordering of signs, this pleasing of the inner ear, needs have no bearing on the matter of who writes what. You and I, Madeleine, are not a competition, not a jostling for space, if we but breathe from the still point of grace inside us, -we are a dance. We are two parts in a symphony who must both learn to play together at the urges of the conductor. This way of thinking was taught to me by a master in the art of Harmony. Your great great grandfather taught me to think of human interaction as one of the arts. Of all of them it is the one most potentially exquisite, why should we not make it, above all other things, beautiful?
Words are such despots by comparison to music. This is both why they don’t really matter as much as some other things, and why you must master them at all costs. What is silent is what is victimized in this world, it is the same today as it was in my time. In this world silence equals death. When I made music nobody on the street could refuse me, even if they wanted to. It spilled out into the road, infesting the gutters and the alleyways with a guerilla act of beauty. Had a mob been organized to purge my perceived immorality from the town. those who liked to listen to me might have spoken against them because of it. My piano and my cello spoke for me when I was silent. My skill provided me with beauty currency. Writing is not like that, it’s quiet and humble seeming by comparison and people have to work harder to eke its beauty out, but it is a far more tyrannical business under the surface. After all, we are making each other ‘repeat words after me’ in our heads!
I used to think that because I could see and hear the dead I had to carry the responsibility to tell all their lost and forgotten stories. To speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. Now I see that nobody has to carry anything heavier than their own story, which is usually more than enough to shoulder. I am not the sin-eater of Hobart narrative nor do I pretend to be. I am but a confused young man with a gift for shuffling adjectives. Take it from someone whose silence was forced on them by the destruction of their life’s work, you will regret it if you don't fight hard for your voice.
Just as in my day a man like me had no right to his own story, was told by every single tale and parable, in fact, that I didn't exist, could never be the protagonist in my own adventure or morality tale, this used to be the case for women also. At least in conventional literature anyway. When Bronte dared to make Jane Eyre the hero of her own narrative this was a revolutionary act in the nineteenth century. Empathy is engendered through stepping into another’s stream of consciousness. Men of letters of the day were made to become Jane and they all went ahead and married Mr. Rochester with her! At this moment people very unlike myself are reading these words in countries all around the world and for a moment they too are Other.
Without this ability we are all quite self-involved creatures at the bottom of it. Walking around cocooned in our own storylines… Such is the nature of basic survival. What choice do we have? There is no one else we can rely on to fully body us forth on our behalf, to walk our path for us. Yet still I think we have some obligation to enlarge our sense of self. That is what true friendship is, surely? That moment when you realize that someone else’s narrative has collided with one’s own? When the collision is deep and hard enough you can no longer fully distinguish where their tale ends and yours begins. In this way, when my life has intersected with those of women their stories are mine also. Their liberation is my liberation, their oppression is my oppression. If we could extend our story wider, to include cities and mountains, rivers and trees, whose stories are also part of the myth of ourselves, then surely we would be closer to our native human condition?
Such a moment of atavistic surging happened to me when I went to the cafe to meet Sophia. I’ve always known that not everyone you meet wearing human skin is truly what they appear. Mythic beings jostle everywhere with the illusion of mundanity. When I saw her she was sucking down a cigarette like it contained her true love or her salvation or both. She was standing outside a café on Criterion Street preoccupied with her phone. She was dressed in red and purple and upon her forehead was written Mystery.
Brazenly she looked me up and down. The way she exhaled her smoke reminded me of the manner in which Arthur’s ghost had done it in the cemetery. “You remind me of someone I used to know,” she said. No greetings or ‘are you Henry?’, just straight to the point. She had the kind of features and complexion that one might associate with the Mediterranean, or even perhaps Middle Eastern origin, but her accent marked her out as English.
My quizzical eyebrow twitched in response to her words but I don’t think my face showed much more expression than that. “Did you like this person I remind you of?” I asked, because it seemed good information to have.
Her smile was partly wistful but her warm dark eyes glimmered with something of experience and its bitter sweets. Although I couldn’t have pinned her to a numerical age I knew by that look in her eyes she was older than I had ever lived to.
“He and I had our moments.” I could hear a lot more gurgling under the surface of those words and I knew instinctually, the way they say the Tasmanian devil can smell death from mile away that it was a story I was part of. My heart accelerated as it always does during a powerful collision of persons.
She butted out her cigarette and we went inside. When we approached the café table I pulled out her chair for her and she laughed. Realising I’d drawn attention to myself with the antiquated gesture I felt flustered and quickly sat down across from her trying to regain my composure.
“So…” she said, still looking me over, scrutinizing my body language and my clothing. “You’re the boy who came back from the dead then?”