Moth

by Thomas Heise

  Copenhagen, Spring 2010

  What I do not wish to reveal will be discovered anyway, because I will inevitably tell it by leaving it out of the record. Such is how desire works. So consider this: thirty-five kilometres north of Copenhagen, on a morning of washed-out light that is not uncommon to the region in April, I was following at an ever-increasing distance for the space of an hour a Middle-Eastern woman in her thirties through a field of heather stretching for acres, which were full of grouse that rose up in a great clattering confusion as I waded through, as if I had aroused them from a sleep that had lasted all of their lives. She wore a white dress of muslin and intricate lace resembling a sail wrapped about her shoulders, and unlike myself was able to walk noiselessly through the field without a disturbance, leaving no trail behind her as if her feet were floating through the heather. Glancing once over her shoulder, she lifted her veil, and I saw on her face a sense of wonderment, the way a parachutist looks back before leaping into the ether, then she disappeared over the hillside. By the time I reached the crest she was nowhere to be found on the slow undulations of purple and marbled green ending with a collar of fog on a desolate stretch of seacoast that seemed so cheerless and heartbreaking a place as to be all but uninhabitable. The abandoned lighthouse, plywood in the windows, each with an X on it, conveyed as much. Neither the longer odyssey by which I had arrived at the scrub of dirt and brush and wind-swept trees nor the place I first set sight of her — in a vegetable market or at a petrol station or by a bell tower in a town square — had left any residue by which they might be traced backward, recovered, or recalled without fabrication. But this knowledge by itself would not stop me from trying. Without realizing it I had fallen for some months into the practice of following women through Copenhagen, which lent my otherwise aimless walks a purpose apart from passing time before sleep. It was often the case that I would walk the distance of several blocks, sometimes a kilometre or more into entirely different quarters of the city before I became aware I was, as if on autopilot, keeping pace with a woman threading her way through a crowd, late for lunch, or a business meeting, or, as happened once, back to her apartment building where, catching a door of iron roses right before it closed, I followed and turned into an interior courtyard at the last second, as she ascended the stairs to shower or sleep or talk on the phone or wait for her lover, I had no way of knowing. I rested for an hour, while I stared at the crumbling stones and up at a parcel of sky on a soundless day through which, miraculously enough, a zeppelin glided overhead like a mechanical whale, and I was convinced for a moment it was 1901 again and everyone and everything would be okay for a while. I would never speak to these women — maybe a hundred or more in total — and I would take caution to hang back a few metres to feign a casual coincidence but close enough to breathe a trail of perfume, realizing any recognition would prematurely end the spell I was under and wake me to the ruins of the day. I can only speculate upon what drew me to them other than they walked with an assurance and direction that each step carried them into a future self-determined and entirely their own, while I myself felt each year recede into the past, like a broken ice shelf and on its drift the explorer who having found what he wanted refuses to leave. By the time she would enter an elevator or rendezvous with a companion, which I took as a signal my pursuit was over, I would invariably find myself leaning in a doorway hastily transcribing her height, weight, hair colour, son habillement, the shape of her earrings, and then I would invent a name fitting for her, vines scrolling down my pages. Consulting my notebook I can confirm the evening before the woman disappeared through the heather, I had slept in the Inn Bonne Esperance and though I had no appetite despite having not eaten in over thirty hours, had alone taken a dinner of melon, roasted salmon, white tea on a heated patio decorated with holiday lights strung in a few potted begonias, had spoken briefly with the elderly keeper who, so barely animated he seemed to have survived his own death and was now biding his time, proceeded precisely at nine to show me my room. It was strangely adorned with two antique diverging mirrors that were meant to open up the claustrophobic quarters, but which created instead a debilitating sense of disorientation, as if space itself around me were beginning to bend. That night the simplest movements became a trial. Each time I would cross the floor for a glass of water or to retrieve my wallet, multiple versions of myself appeared out of unfathomable recesses in the mirrors, converged in the centre and then dispersed, one turning a corner back into the corridor that now seemed to lead to the basement, two others climbing perpendicular up the walls in different directions, a fourth hanging from the ceiling as I paused. All of this induced a paranoia that I had begun to project onto any surface reflexive of my desire a desire to be seen. I was nauseated, as I always felt when looking at an M.C. Escher lithograph which now I was sure I was in danger of becoming trapped within and so, exiting the room with care, I ventured downstairs to find the owner to request another accommodation, but to judge by all of the open doors he, along with the other two guests, a Jewish couple travelling to Munich, seemed to have departed. It was only later I learnt from reading on the early period of European demonology that convex mirrors were an effective tool for ridding a room prone to unfriendly spirits. It was not a haunting I felt, then or now. Not precisely, unless you can haunt yourself, the former life clawing out of the dead leaves and soil. As I gather my thoughts like the threads of a tapestry, the window I stand in surveys the city’s aquamarine office towers populated with accountants, financial analysts, insurance underwriters whose lives, which make ours possible, I cannot begin to imagine, and a few metres below is a cemetery of mature oaks, a storage house enshrouded in such ivy to remove it would cause the roof to cave, and perhaps a hundred tombstones tilted on a slope that steps down to a small river popular with mallards in summer. I know nearly nothing of those buried in the family plots and sepulchres whose eroded inscriptions I can almost read on a clear, dry day with a pair of opera glasses, lives given in battle, victims of cholera, death by isolation, stillbirths, erased suicides. I was once informed graveyards old as this no longer have bodies in them, only names and sun in the branches and an inkling of the future robins bring. Twice a month in late afternoon, two nuns appear, though I never see their arrival, to repair a broken link in the fence, pruning underbrush around the mossy stones with a pair of small scythes, a bit of dirt on the wrist which gets smudged on her forehead and suddenly it is Ash Wednesday, and the sky is unfolding and they have gathered leaves into a wicker basket in the medieval lanes with the dedication of a gardener poised before the fragility of his orchids: White Moth, Flower of San Sebastian, Mother of Pearl, Apollinaire, Tiger, Hider of the North.

  Copenhagen, Fall 2010

  The town where I had passed my childhood was a favourite subject of my memories about which I could dwell, even luxuriate, for hours while lying on a couch alone in a largely empty house bereft of furniture, or while sharing with my analyst, which I often did with my eyes closed so it seemed to her I was talking in my sleep and the long monologues that streamed out of me without any urging as I reclined on her sofa, imagining it were a raft, flowed from an underground river whose source, I liked to think, was the icy meltwater of Norway’s Austfonna glacier. But over years these memories became more infrequent and my efforts to conjure them by pouring over sepia-toned photographs of bridges or schoolrooms filled at first glance with identical children quiet at their desks, or by holding in my palm a porcelain brooch of a young Victorian couple walking horses beneath two sycamores were to no avail. Then one day I recognized the transports of my wonder had left me behind, and the prospect of remaining forever trapped within the crystal of the here-and-now was enough to usher in the most severe depression. The small cache of talismanic objects I had acquired over time and carefully guarded included, in addition to the photos and brooches, distressed maps of various cities in Europe, elaborate corals, pigeon feathers, a woman’s silk ribbon in purple, two miniature masks worn by monkeys during i
tinerant countryside theatre performances in nineteenth-century China, and a boy’s diary with a cross on its cover secured with a tiny rope. Relics of other pasts, they bore no true connexion to my youth. The items were purchased at estate sales and antique stores during the migratory period of my early thirties. I had chosen them out of the disorderly array of possibilities, the sheer randomness of abandoned objects, as evidence for an invented childhood, plot devices if you will, whose fictional quality assumed a truth I could barely deny. I could recall little of my life before the age of puberty and so to compensate for the honeycombed structure of my brain, I took to assembling a glass and teakwood cabinet where at night displayed items were aglow from spectral electricity emanating out of things torn from their context, a quality witnessed in the oddly bright eyes of tropical birds forced to live indoors. Whenever I moved from one apartment to another, from one city to another, as was my wont as soon as a place had exhausted its spell, I would carry the cabinet by hand, a shroud draped over it like the cage of a sleepless parrot, which only served to elicit the curiosity of each passerby on the street. I would install the box on its own stand and immediately rearrange the items by different taxonomies according the usual order — age, size, colour, organic or manufactured by human labour — but also by systems cutting to the heart of the issue with greater quickness — objects that contained sadness, objects that over time would change shape, objects that should not exist, objects that could not be destroyed. But one day the cabinet, which had been built as a portal for my imagination, quite inexplicably metamorphosed into a museum of dead things. The auratic pulsations emitting a diffuse colour that recalled sea glass were simply inert. The suddenness of the change was baffling, but I feared I had robbed them of their special power by handling each with too great a frequency, like the dials of a shortwave radio. To this day, I still feel deep within me a glittering but inaccessible and lost radiance that grows with its distance from my current life, but the use value of this knowledge is as limited as Vermeer’s sunlight. That afternoon, I sat in a wing-backed chair facing the cabinet feeling the sun’s falling fire on my back, feeling reduced to benumbed speculation, then as the hour reached the mysterious moment when dusk filling the room is exactly balanced by twilight settling over the cobblestoned street, I rose up to walk the eyelid curve of the port in Aker Brygge by the converted shipyards where at night theatre and restaurant patrons departed for the trams as if inside a well-lit belief that could carry them safely beyond the hills. I knew no one within 900 kilometres and as often happens when this terrible realization is visited upon me, I found myself lost in the labyrinth of my own thoughts, watching the small sailboats drifting in the dark harbour like ideas worth admiring. It was then I remembered an elderly man wearing a waistcoat I had once approached on a park bench in London some ten years prior, having just come from Temple Church, where the young choristers draped in their scarlet cassocks had turned into small flames as pollution gathered in the clouds at sunset. In my chiaroscuro’d memory, he looked like Mr. N., the owner of a coop of carrier pigeons from my childhood town. He raised the birds in the attic of his Edwardian mansion as a hobby after his wife had died of inoperable bone cancer because he felt their honing instinct was a perfect metaphor for the human heart. He would drive to the furthest reaches of town, sometimes deep into the Bavarian countryside, always a different route in hopes of confusing the birds to test their fidelity. And then, upon securing an empty scroll to their legs with a ribbon or strands of his own hair if the ribbon had run out, he would release them into the day, only to drive home slowly for he wanted them to wait for him, as if he were the one who had flown away. When I confronted the man to enquire if he were indeed who I thought he was, he replied he had once resided in the same town, but as to being a hobbyist with pigeons, he was clueless what I was speaking about, stating he found the tale odd but charming. Wondering if I myself may not have inadvertently invented the story and not wishing to be dismissed immediately, I asked if he had any recollection of me as a boy from the local orphanage; he said no, but regardless with the wave of his hand invited me to take a seat next to him. The sum of our solitudes, we remained through the evening while the London Eye stared hypnotically from its pupilless centre at the spires of Westminster, at Cleopatra’s Needle, at crows floating in air as if nowhere were worth landing, and at us while we sat there unable to move while a line of snow settled in a hushed circle at our feet. That night back in Copenhagen I hailed a car, a warm glow on the taxidriver and from his metre the knowledge that even in stillness time was passing. Out the back window the narrow canyon began to move again, receding into the night like the ending of a melancholy film. A light rain falling. The car gathering speed on an incline never noticed before, a momentum that pushed me gently against the seat and I could not see the driver in the darkness and I wondered if he were still behind the wheel or if it even mattered as water whipped off the windshield in little rivulets into which the people melted, sidewalks awash in colour and then miraculously petal . . . petal . . . petal . . . in a blur. And I was a blur as well, only I could not see I was hurtling through the world.

  Copenhagen, Winter 2010

  As part of our instruction in the resources of the natural world we were taken without notice to the city aquarium to see the beluga exhibit that was to be crated the next day and transported by boat to America. And I recall as we trekked through the streets in anticipation each of us like dwarves held a long scarf tied at the waist to the Mother Superior marching through the obscure light of morning fog so far in front of us her habit disappeared and those of us near the end of the tether, where I often found myself on our field excursions beyond the orphanage’s wrought-iron gates, felt pulled through the clouds swirling about our legs by a horse we could not see. As I write this now, I recall pausing on the street either to stare at a murky scene unfolding in the small, corner park where a cluster of men, including the neighbour Mr. N., wearing vests and houndstooth trousers as if out of a daguerreotype had scattered seeds for pigeons and were now engulfed in a clutter of wings or perhaps I had paused because a memory from my life prior to the orphanage had surfaced and to fully capture the sensation of its return everything inside me came to an abrupt halt. What I do know was that I was pulled so hard by my wrist I fell. The scene was to be the opening sequence of images in a film I very much wanted to direct but am now too old ever to begin, I said to a German woman, Ms. L., almost ten years later in a poorly lit restaurant in Copenhagen in early winter, where I had travelled to visit the gravesite of Kierkegaard, who himself had died from complications of a childhood fall. The woman, I recall, had a barcode tattooed to her wrist and wore two tiny bells as earrings. I said goodbye to her outside as another winter storm gathered in her hair. Despite my protestations, I never saw her again except in the photograph I snapped as we departed and I learnt nothing in Assistens Cemetery except it is a popular spot for young couples seeking isolation. A few moments under dappled shadows before night settles in a water glass. Leave-taking. Silence. I thought of matters of love and death often as a young boy which only made me withdraw further from the small daily rituals of life and as an adult seek out crowds during my travels through Trafalgar Square, Shinjuku, New York where even locals were tourists, everyone in motion. The film stops here. I am recalling this now because the image of the aquarium frozen in time bears almost no resemblance to the sensation of standing in front of it. Eggshell-white, the beluga circling alone in long slow loops through the dark blue water, dissolving into the ink and rematerializing, back and forth as if playing a game of hide and seek, like a ghostly thought one cannot quite capture or a creature from a distant world, its grotesque beak opening and closing behind the soundproof glass, speaking to us in our inaudible childhoods. What I know for certain is if I were to make this film, the woman would not have disappeared in the snow and I would have had her letters arrive at intervals to mark the passage of time for the viewer. She would have written: it is 1999 and I am pal
e as a watermark. Sombered. To Berlin I’ve returned to find nothing where I’ve left it — the café, the opera house, even the colour of the street have changed. And yet from the television tower — a needle through the eye — the city is undeniably there, grimly apportioned out as only we Germans can. She would have written: there is in a narrow lane off Karl-Marx-Allee a used bookstore where the owner has placed in the window a photo of his deceased cat and a Fragonard calendar print of a girl reading and now customers stay away. Nature has formed us, she wrote, nature has formed nothing that does not consume itself, Goethe wrote, she wrote. The little comfort in the ultramarine morning burns off and one’s thoughts turn back on themselves like a palindrome. In her next letter, from the summer of 2003: money is a self-organizing infection and left to its own, it replicates uncontrollably. In the next decade, if we get there, the important poetry will be about money. She would have written: I cannot shake the feeling I have been dragooned into a fiction I don’t want. At some point, the muse walks through the door, becomes a character in the story and everything changes. At this point, her letters would have ceased, though I suspect she continued to write to me in secret, and so I kept writing to her almost everyday until one morning my letters were returned, bundled and unopened, whereupon I began to read my own words, the latest first and in her voice, like water filling my mind until nightfall. I felt close to her, even as the distance between us grew larger. Then in December I took the train to Berlin determined to find her and instead for reasons not entirely clear, settled into a nineteenth-century farmhouse a local architect had rebuilt into a corrugated box of iron and plate glass. For a season I did little but pace and watch a dervish of leaves outside my window; then, without warning, I returned to Copenhagen.