Thanatographies, p.6
Thanatographies, page 6
Next to my bed tower piles of books about women who have drowned, fallen into a well, or caught fire. Miserable women, hormonal, revengeful, anxious, and superstitious, beheaded Medusas on a lamppost. Women born with the power to curse, an intervention in the face of oppression, injustice, and betrayal. A curse can flower into a revolution. Curses are creations, seagulls that have left the sea. The nameless woman reminds me that to be a wrecking ball can still feel as if one is doing what needs to be done or avoid what needs to be avoided. I sense that she has had enough of this tête-à-tête. Her neck fumes smoke, as if holes were pricked all over her skin. I let her smoke out. Inside of the nameless woman’s neck ruins throb and sail. Little dreams, unfertilized, swim along the corridors. She cannot move her head. This ancient house in her forehead. The fog of millennia in her temples. The nameless woman is now a girl lying on her bed nursing a migraine.
In these times of advances on artificial wombs, the girl cannot find rest. Although this is still in her future, her feet drag her there, momentarily, to this inhospitable potential day of artificial wombs and farmed salmon on the loose. Inside of the house, a magnitude. Be a girl and be surrounded by magnitude. The migraine is a letter from the core of the earth. It says nothing legible, but it is hot and damp and quite loving.
If she can let the migraine out into the open, express its oppression fully, she might be free. She might then move through the house without pain, drift over primordial carpets, feet barely touching the ground. The girl is growing up in a world that is vanishing. Right now, the girl is just a girl. A bud on a vine hoping to make a life, to blossom and wilt, perhaps blossom again before falling to the ground. There is pure life force in her, a great heat that has not gone unnoticed. She is a bolt of fire. Everything is maximally excited. Her eyes cannot keep still. She is the greatest potential in this moment and the public square therefore dangerous. The ant colonies are out swarming for their queen, who hides in some shallow damp hole fattening up. They are ready to take the house down. The trajectory is unimaginable. It is a practice for future survival. It sometimes appears while writing these words that the ants have already claimed me. I’ve been carried off. In the distance, the sound of trumpets and gunshots. There are suitors passing by the window. Inquiring. About. The. Girl. Her. Migraine.
Outside, the world appears as if submerged in an ocean or aquarium. Who has given me this drowned world, the girl wonders. She can open her window and let the drowned world into her bedroom, or she can watch the wrecks float by. The planetary realm is a mosaic of forces, who knows if benevolent or malicious or a soup of matter.
The girl has opened her window. She is dressed in rags. Her migraine is almost outside. At her core, she carries a jeweled heart. It might sound morose, but it’s true. The inside chambers of her heart, once thoroughly cleaned and tonified, are jeweled. She is the carrier of a principle yet unknown. As always, there will be obstacles, envious eyes. And yet, let serenity unfold for a moment. The drowned world has just received a sign, an underworld sun. The girl’s time is coming. It is almost here. Her heart, at night, a large vault. Some faceless priests are washing out the caverns in solemn preparation. Orphans who survived earthquakes and floods come by and cry a little. They assure her that not only suffering purifies, but that the reverse is possible as well. An apple tree carries up to three hundred apples per season. When and why certain apples drop is not entirely clear. The girl has opened her window. Let’s just call it as it is. We are all tyrants in a jeweled world. Everything outside of her window appears swollen, intrinsic. The future rolls toward her, like a marble missing its hole. She is glad for the marble future to be so ineffective. She picks it up and looks at its colors before climbing into one of the holes herself, waiting like the ant queen in the shadow. She has no army. She watches the artificial womb future roll toward her, missing the hole. She is awake. She can hear the deer outside of the hole chewing apples. What will you sacrifice, I want to ask her? What will you overthrow? How will you be overthrown?
The smoke dissipates. The unnamed woman’s neck appears intact and closed from view. I want to know, as the ants continue to balance me through the night, how the girl inside of her neck will abstain from the tyranny of her time, and also how she will develop appetites for it. But she is wiser than me. She knows, the moment she speaks the spell is cast and the curse runs long and deep.
“TYRANNY IN WOMEN HAS A FAST FATE,” I once wrote. I didn’t know what I meant. I still don’t know what I mean. It was a loose thought that I caught and wrote down. It made sense. The same sense with which an underground animal, say a mole, might dig itself home, blind and with nothing but its nose and claws to go by. Clammy little paws that pick and scurry. Swallow a worm here and there. The long way home through the mouth of tyranny. The mole makes its way through the private ecstasy of my unsharable ground. Though I really can’t say what animal, if it is dying, if it is defending its day.
The bed again. The window. Shadows. A carousel spinning between childhood and death. Loose thoughts that spring like marigolds appear more truthful than the written sentence. Questing, sorting. Tending to the past before it tends to you. The irresistible urge to wiggle and touch oneself to make sure one is still alive.
The unnamed women comes back into view, pacing. She has energy to dispel. She grows smaller then bigger, as if caught in the lens of a microscope that cannot focus. She begins to recount the tale of Briar’s Rose, while sitting next to me on the side of the bed. In Briar’s Rose, all sharpened objects have been removed from the castle. The spell, cast on the newborn princess, is death upon adulthood, uttered by the last witch, uninvited, who appears anyway. The invited, sanctioned wise women lessen the spell to a sleep that lasts for a hundred years. The souverains are rescued.
Briar Rose reminds me of all the Asmas, Ivankas, and Graces of the world, pretty flowers, daughters, and wives of the tyrants who are flawless at daybreak. Good mothers. Holders of advanced degrees. Nothing can touch them. They are free-spirited Athenas gamboling in the gardens. Shopping in Paris, writing books. They are determined to come out the other end, the right side of history. Flowers in their arms. They believe in the great bold vision of their tyrant, know his secrets, his Achilles’ heel. Will never stab him there. If anything, succeed him, ameliorate his flaws.
But why does tyranny in women have a fast fate? Is it the way disaster swells in a woman’s body? Or the way she can’t help but exorcise herself, then bless the men who will behead her? Is it the absolute lack of foresight for her own calamity? What if women born into tyranny overthrow the tyrant, overthrow themselves, seek out the outcast witch and believe in her spell?
The unnamed woman likes this last question. She enjoys a good riddle in the tomb of night.
The outcast witch may have been a poor peasant whose curses were the only power left to her in the face of exploitation and oppression, I tell her. Like the “last witch of Europe,” Anna Göldi, whose portrait once stared back at me from the wall of a museum in a small quaint mountain village in Switzerland during the second summer of my sleeplessness.
Göldi, who had been forced from her home after bearing illegitimate children, found employment as a maid in the house of a wealthy judge and physician in the small mountain town of Glarus. A year into her employment, Annemiggeli, the youngest daughter of the family, who was in her care, began to spit up pins with her morning milk. What was seen initially as a random incident soon became an incessant ritual. The child reportedly spitting up to eighty pins a day. In addition, she developed gout convulsions with hallucinatory episodes, dissociation, and muteness. Anna Göldi was dismissed by the family.
The museum displayed the warrant of her arrest, which the Tschudi family issued shortly after her dismissal. In the warrant Göldi was described as:
. . . forty years of age, plump and of large build, a full, ruddy face, black hair and eyebrows, gray, slightly unhealthy-looking eyes, which are usually red. Her demeanor is subdued, and she speaks the Sennwald dialect. She wears a fashionably colored skirt, a blue-striped apron, and a laced bodice underneath . . .
In the spring of 1779, shortly after her arrest, she confessed under torture that she had fed Annemiggelli poisonous wormseed handed to her by the evil spirit.
“How did she contact the evil spirit? Did she want it to come?”
“No, it just came, without asking.”
After her confession, the Tschudi’s brought the child to the imprisoned woman and implored her to heal their daughter. The girl produced the last pin a few weeks later. It is said that, during her last interrogation, Göldi asked for mercy.
I remember the painting and only surviving image of her face, a defiant and yet thoroughly present gaze, trapped in a valley of spite, and the sound sleep of barbarian bureaucrats. I suspect her crafts came from living so close to animal’s desolation and walking by night, like a rabbit, creeping or freezing.
The museum, dedicated to her death and exoneration, seemed equally scorned by her gaze, as did the visitors. The bustling museum shop sold a whole canon of books on Göldi’s life. Biographies, psychological studies, and novels considered Annemiggelli’s obsession with her caretaker, climbing into Göldi’s spare attic room and demanding to sleep in her bed; the father’s sexual advances toward the maid and mother’s jealousy of her; the child’s sickliness, which could only be alleviated by Göldi’s presence. An analysis of the family pathology determined that the child suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, primarily rooted in an emotionally abusive pattern between mother and daughter, where the mother fabricates and induces symptoms of illness in the child. The analysis suggested that the fraught relationship between mother and maid, spurned by the mother’s jealousy, induced the illness. Unlike the witch towers in Germany, with which I grew up and that displayed torture chambers and tools, the museum focused on Göldi’s life leading up to her trial. Not part of any narrative was Göldi’s response to her employers’ harassment or the child’s attachment and obsession with Göldi as an extension of that harassment, a possibility for her to exert power over a servant. Or the possibility that the child’s illness was indeed a pact she made with Göldi, an act of defiance against her family’s oppression, spitting back up the sharpened objects carefully hidden from view. Nor was it questioned anywhere why Munchhausen syndrome by proxy is primarily attributed to female caretakers.
What magic did Göldi, a classified peasant and vagabond escaping the workhouse, harness? Her power now, as it may have been then, to look back. To look back at her hostile surroundings.
The unnamed woman is no longer there. She expected a fairy tale not a treatise. A mosquito is circling my head. Tyranny. Fate. The real lack of love, not a reservoir or resource that can be dug up, or that one can develop an appropriate technology for. Was it carved into a large white rock that has fallen to the bottom of the ocean bed? It may be extinct forever. Supposedly, my great-grandmother was a tyrant, that is beautiful, demanding, and perpetually unhappy. But that was in a time when women had only the path of mother or monster available to them.
THE SLEEPLESS EXIST AMONG THE SLEEPING like the only survivors of a massacre, lying on a field at the end of a day, surrounded by dreamy faces turned toward the sky or mud. Nobody can follow their paralysis and rummage. Yes, it is a futile form of resistance, and nothing is reached or repaired. Though some will say that sleeplessness purifies. Like long stares into candlelight. Once I heard all those awake at night singing hymnals. But ultimately, the sleepless are alone. Nobody can stand to stay up with them.
When the unnamed woman returns, I am relieved. The room and its objects begin to turn and move in fast succession until they collide. I am no longer tired. I feel the same, whether I have slept or not. I can no longer tell whether I have slept or not. Or who is asleep and who is awake. I move through rooms, through time, through gelatin, and the nameless woman twirls me around. She demands me to lie down, be smaller than everything else. Recognize your dwelling space, corpses!
There are cloth napkins in silver rings. There are polished forks and knives. There are table sets and a large dreidel-like platter that can be spun equally from all sides of the table to access jam or butter or sugar without needing to ask anyone for anything.
The trees are shaking gust. I see my grandmother rise. The bathroom is at the back of the hall. Cleaning rituals quick, efficient. Showers every few days, the rest of the time washcloth, cold water, some mild soap. Her eyes in deep sockets. She lets the dog out, prepares breakfast. German breakfast is hardy. Lots of cured sausages, rolls, butter, black tea. Sets the table, places the newspaper on the table. The mornings are quiet but focused. Lists are rolled out. The smell of something burnt. An animal already boiling in preparation for lunch.
I know these routines in my own body, which is also the body of my father, who ameliorated the routines and carried their essential formula forward. They appeared natural, even peaceful, while carefully covering the temper that mauls at the threshold.
On the wall, the painting of the young girl leaning against a sofa by a German realist painter. A family heirloom. As a child, I thought the girl was holding her head in agony with both hands. I remember my grandmother saying, she is deaf. Although on closer view, she does not hold her head but playfully rests it against the sofa, her left hand against her ear and cheek, her right holding onto a thread of wool. It always seemed odd that she appeared to pull off her head, as if uprooting it from the madness of noise that she was unable to hear.
In the large wooden armoire of the living room, I find a story I once wrote, called “The Death of Grandmother Sullen.” My grandmother carefully preserved these early writings in a drawer, even though they were indecipherable to her. My handwriting appears pointy and strained. Each page rimmed with golden flowers. Sullen dies, and the girl called “the slow child” wonders who will see and love her now. The slow child, in the story, is not just slow, she is also heartbroken, even before she knows what that means. She does not locate the brokenness in her heart either but somewhere in her throat. A mutation of thought has caused her to believe that she is unformed, a toy to the world, rather than an acute manifestation. She is always in someone’s paws, swayed and trampled upon, obsessively watching and waiting for what will stalk and then attack from behind. A glass-like being, at once searching for companions while inadvertently exhausted by contact. The marmalade fingers on her skin, sticky breath encircles her. Her sleep is different from other children’s, and only her dead grandmother knows this. Everything that has ever happened in the world bleeds from the ceiling. In some way, the slow child is also a kind of baby Jesus.
Sometimes the slow child has a memory of herself thousands of years ago falling asleep laughing and waking up still laughing. But at what? Thousands of years ago she was a glacier whose joints came undone and who lived in a harmony unrecognizable now. Loneliness is a condition of the future, a kind of evolutionary side effect, the cause and consequence of a great many acts of magic. The slow child, in the story, lives in a house that speaks at night. The clock and its mind speak inside a voracious silence. Grandmother Sullen delights in the child. She confesses to her and tells her stories no one else has heard. When grandmother Sullen dies, the slow child knows that another world has died, and with it, some will lose their minds forever, some will fly high in the sky and low with the labor, like bees. Grandmother Sullen, before she dies, tells the child: “A talent for living is a false pretense. Despair is a veil that cloaks the river you must learn to swim in.”
I never finished the story and crammed it, alongside many other exuberant beginnings I wrote in my grandmother’s living room, into the top drawer of the armoire. Here I want to live for a while, in this becoming place, where I don’t know what happens next, what word will drop inadvertently from my sore shoulder into the river. That is, the river of tears, the purest of fluids. The grief of skies, the grief of children, the grief of the future that already knows what is coming toward her and must decide the angle of her embrace.
DURING THE FIRST SUMMER OF SLEEPLESSNESS, I visited my grandmother, who mostly sat at her large dining table, hands moving over the cloth collecting crumbs. From there, sitting hunched over some reading material, she had a good view to the garden, trees framed by the black sliding doors of the balcony where the dead bird lay unnoticed for a whole day.
The dead bird lay perfectly intact on the balcony during the hottest summer on record. I dragged myself from room to room. I had seen the bird as soon as I got up but did not mention it, concerned she would task me with its disposal. My grandmother did not notice the bird and instead sat in the large dining room, arranging her letters. Over breakfast, she changed her opinion frequently, the stories aslant moved across the tablecloth patterned with rowanberries and stains. I awaited a kind of testimony made up from suffocated thoughts. The rooftops were melting. My legs bloated. I wanted to clarify certain statements she had made. Then grew angry at the sense of retreat, of mere survival that governed decisions. She lost her train of thought. Leapt from berry to berry. Announced that this will be our last visit, before adding, “in which we can be calm together.” My legs kept rubbing against each other. She remained shackled to a chain of memories that waxed and waned through the seasons. Life now about defending what was lived.
We looked at old documents with a magnifying glass. She read the newspaper all morning, moving the magnifying glass slowly from left to right, and rarely complained. Broke into joyful laughter at some piece of writing she could decipher. As I grew more fatigued, she enlivened. We walked again and again through the ornament of her past. I almost passed out. Finally pointed out the dead bird on the balcony. Without much hesitation, she shoveled it onto a pile and threw the cadaver over the flower boxes.
