Posted by Alanna Horgan January 6th, 2010 |
 

Memories, like dreams, are fragmented.  We are always looking for a way to pin them down, to plot them, so that we might make sense of them.  Some capture them in the four square walls of a polaroid.  Others find them bound up in the sonic cords of melody.

Cora had always found hers in words: trapped on well-thumbed pages, or mapped in her own ink.

Her father had read aloud to her from a book with golden edges.  He had let her trace the patterns of words even when her fingers were sticky. 

‘Logos,’ he said to her once ‘is the language at the heart of the world.  It animates, orders, creates.  It is the vessel of the divine – the translation of the soul.’

Curled up under her covers, in the glow of the star-shaped reading lamp she had listened to him speak the ancient words of myths and fairytales.  The corners of his eyes would wrinkle into a smile as he glanced at her over the top of the old book, watching her grow increasingly drowsy.

‘Are they true?’ she asked, sleepily, when he bent to kiss her on the forehead. ‘Did they all really happen?’

‘They are the blueprint for truth,’ he replied, cocooning her in the covers. ‘They happen every day.’

He would watch as she burrowed down under the duvet, then tug the light cord to extinguish the stars.

Sometimes he would watch her from the door, as she nested inside her bed like a tiny animal.

He would smile.

And whisper, ‘Goodnight.’

And shut the door.

 

ABDUCTION

Cora watched the coffin lowered into the dirty mouth of the earth with a curious detachment.  The ceremony played out before her just like every funeral she’d ever seen on T.V.  The priest repeated the same tired lines.  Friends and family shed Hollywood tears behind trembling hands.  She dropped a dusty, gilt-edged book into the polished wooden box…

And then it was over.

The absolute predictability of it all – the scripted sorrow, the stale sympathy of distant relatives – made it seem unreal.  The grieving was cold, clinical: polite.  The ritual had divorced her from the reality, distanced her so much from the gravity of the loss that she did not notice a part of her steal away.  It slipped out of her like a sigh, drifting down into the earth with the body and the book.  It penetrated the pages, bled between the lines of prose…

‘Ashes to ashes.’

 And was at once covered up and concealed.

 

WITHERING

Afterwards, Cora climbed into the ramshackle house in the trees.  She was too big for it, now.  Her limbs stuck awkwardly out of the door and windows.  From her perch, she surveyed the dark tide of mourners drifting through the garden.

She wanted to be small again.

In the following weeks, ’sorry for your loss’ seemed to become a mantra uttered by friends and acquaintances to keep away the awkward, uneasy silence. 

Cora wondered if they realised that she, too, was lost.

Her father’s death had been standard issue: mercifully brief – a cooperation of mind and body.  Her own was slow and disorienting: a grey storm fading the blue of the sky.

Her mother spent time hunched like a wounded animal on the sofa, her ribs heaving with the strain of sobs.  Cora wondered if she mourned only the death of the body, or if she understood, in her grief, the devastating loss of the spirit.

In between the sobbing, her mother would talk about her father.  Cora, unable to speak, would listen. 

One afternoon, as the rain wept against the blank windows, her mother shared a dream.

‘He came to the window,’ she said.  ‘Yyou were in the room with me.  He came to the window and he looked the same, but whiter.  The edges of his clothes were whispy like smoke.  He was wearing that old hat he used to wear, when he went out walking.  We were not afraid of him.  He was different, but we weren’t afraid.  He opened the window, and you ran up to him.  Your face was serene, as you ran.  He held out his hand – it was so white, it seemed insubstantial – and beckoned you closer.  And you looked back at me, for a moment.  You were framed in the window, like a family portrait.  You looked back and I reached out my arms to you, but you wouldn’t come.  You wouldn’t come.  You and he stepped through.  And then the window shut.  The window shut, and became a mirror.  And all I could see was my own reflection.’

Cora knew at once what it meant.  Her father had been right.  Myths and fairytales were the heartbeat at the centre of the subconscious.  Every story was an archetypal form waiting to be brought to life.

Her life had never seemed more estranged from reality – more like a story.  She was split: part Persephone, part withered winter body.  Whilst her husk stayed stranded in the overworld, her soul had followed her father down into the dark.

‘“Why don’t you cry?’ her mother demanded, through her tears. ‘What’s wrong with you!?’

Cora did not have the words to explain. 

Nothing remained in her but the rhythms of biology and patterns of behaviour.  She moved in accordance with remembered maps from a time when the journey was as important as the destination. 

Time became grey and indistinct, without definition – one moment much like all the rest.

She sat at the desk, fingers white-fisted around a pen.  She had thought she might craft what she had lost – build anew the vanished soul in an intricate web of ink and paper.  But the sheet remained blank.  Her body was an empty hallway.  The pen dropped from her rigid hand.

Cora stared dry-eyed at the vacant paper, resenting her father for abandoning her, for the stealing her soul, for the banishing her words.

Robbed of tears and ink, she went to bed.

She no longer dreamed.  Empty unconsciousness reigned, where once rest has been – a black space between one blank day and the next.  The pattern sprawled on endlessly, like an infinite chessboard.

 

PLEA

Cora’s mother insisted she see a therapist.

Without words to describe her self – without a self to describe – Cora doubted it would be beneficial.

‘Make sure you talk,’ her mother’s voice jerked like a stalling car.  ‘It costs a fortune.’

His office resembled a storage room for orphaned curios.  Cora sat on the tweed couch.  Head bowed as if in prayer, she contemplated patterns in the Persian rug.

‘Are you unhappy?’ he asked her.

She could not speak.

‘Depressed?’

The weave of the rug reminded her of a labyrinth.

‘Suicidal?’

Lost, she thought.

He asked her questions about her childhood, urging her to open up with unfounded compliments (’You’re obviously very intelligent.’) and ‘amusing’ anecdotes.

An egg-timer heralded the end of the session.

‘Did you get a prescription?’ her mother demanded, on the way home.

Cora nodded.

Her mother smiled triumphantly, as if an insurmountable obstacle had finally been overcome.

 

EAT ME

In the bathroom, Cora examined the dark orange plastic of the pill bottle.  The label had been misprinted: someone else’s name.  Somehow appropriate.

She looked up to meet my eyes in the mirror, staring blankly past me as if I wasn’t there.

‘…and all I could see was my own reflection…’

One pill per night as required.  She stared a long time at the bottle before deliberately removing the prescribed single capsule.  She brought her hand to her lips.  I felt it stick in my throat as she swallowed.

She rested her forehead against mine, on the mirror.  Her fingertips, delicate as spider’s limbs, pressed forcefully against the cool of the glass.  I pushed against it, but the wall was immutable.

We rested together a moment, like that – taking a small comfort in the illusion of unity.

At length she moved away.

 

MESSENGER

That night, as Cora lay corpse-like and cold in bed, she felt a presence.  She would have been afraid had her vacant body allowed it.  The ghost of touch trilled over her face and coaxed her blind eyes shut, like a paramedic lending dignity to the dead.  Her body became heavy, sinking into the mattress like a stone sinks in mud.  Dimly, she became aware of a she sound of distant waves.  In the ebb and flow, she could almost make out a voice soothing her with the hypnotic commandment: sleep.

And for the first time in months, she drifted away from the barren shoreline of her flesh.

 

DESCENT

She followed the voice through the darkness, chasing the whispers that dripped and echoed like well-water. 

At length, she found herself in a copse of dense trees.  At the centre of the clearing was a pool of dark water – the surface as smooth as a window pane. 

Her guide stood on the opposite bank. He was engulfed in shadow, his features masked by the absence of light.

Cora knew his name already – had seen it written many times in the pages of the long since buried book.  In the labyrinths of words on gilt edged paper, his name always stood out.

Morpheus

This is the between. He spoke without moving his lips, the words carried by the rumble of distant thunder.  The boundary that separates dualities.  You are in the gray between light and dark, the semi-conscious between sleep and wakefulness.  You have been here for some time, a wraith moving listlessly through the world, neither alive nor dead.  But you can recover what has been lost.

He gestured towards the pool.

She knew her role well, felt it resonate inside her like a single clear note.  She carried in her the archetypal spark of every soul that had ever made its way into the heart of hell, fallen down rabbit holes and stepped through mirrors.

Cora stepped out over the smooth, solid surface of the water. 

I looked up from the deep, upside-down, my feet fixed to the glassy ceiling.

She looked down at me.  We stuck together, sole to sole, but still separate.

This is the beginning of Dream.  The voice vibrated, ripples at last distorting our reflected bodies.

Descend.

With one bare foot-step into silent water, we merged together.

Go down, down, down…

We became I.

 

DREAM

I see the blackness, first.  The aching, engulfing blackness that no matter how familiar it becomes is never comfortable.

I think, how cruel the whispering voice has been, calling me under the waves with promises he cannot fulfil. 

And then a curious thing happens.  In the darkness, I begin to notice patches of grey emerging from the blackness.  They brighten rapidly,  multiplying faster and faster till soon the space seems almost to be writhing with the birth and growth of mottled shadows.

The movement of light makes me dizzy.  I close my eyes.  When I open them again, I find myself on the edge of a sprawling chessboard.  Each square spans about fifteen meters, about half the size of an average swimming pool.  The white squares seem solid, whilst the surface of the black squares ripple like water.  The board stretches on and on, further into the distance than I am able to see. 

I look over my shoulder.  Behind me there is nothing but the oppressive, suffocating darkness.

I turn back.  The black squares seem to murmur to me as the water stirs. 

I take my first step onto a pure white page. 

 

RECOVERY

 
BINDING

I fade from the board and float once more in limbo.  I can feel my body humming with all the unquiet ink, the thoughts I have been unable to think and the words I have been unable to articulate.

I feel myself in my body.

I float in the womb-like nothing, listening to all the inner voices of my self.

The voice of the God of dreams harmonises with my internal melody:

You are restored: he sings, softly mirror and reflection, substance and shadow.  You have what you came for, Persephone.  You can return.

An icy silence creeps over me.

But you can never leave.

 

RETURN

I woke.  My body felt heavy, as if I had swallowed river water.  It hurt to breathe. 

It took me several moments to realise I was crying.

When I wiped the tears from my cheeks, I noticed that my fingertips were stained with ink.

 

COMPROMISE

Loss was a labyrinth.  I negotiated it with pen and paper, mapping the unfathomable territory with poetry and prose.

Whilst I had recovered myself – whilst I had located my missing logos – Morpheus was right.  Grief was a hollow home, now – an all too familiar landscape, an underworld that I would visit and re-visit for the rest of my life.

When I found myself pulled under the ink-black waves, I rode with the tide.

When I washed up on the banks, words spilled out of me like water.

End