One time, Finn—my second step-grandfather—took me out in his speedboat, densely tangled islands whipping by out of the corner of your eye like clumps of weed frozen rock-hard, weed piled upon pile from the very bottom. We skimmed the flashing grey water in a series of hard little bumps, the vertebrae of some submerged marine dinosaur. While I thought, calmly: If we stop now, even for a second . . . if we pause on the dark water for just one fraction of a moment longer than necessary. . . .
. . . we’d sink like a stone. End up on the underneath, staring forever up, our mouths full of mud. Our bones washed wet and white as well, eventually, in that one dim glimmer of sun.
So: the dream begins at the lake. Me, bottom-locked, with nothing all around but the muffled shifting of water, that constant cold pressure bearing in from every angle. Each kick sends up a scatter of silt, grey particles drifting and dispersing into mottled green light, and I stare up into the dazzle to see—
A diffuse, floating shadow, just coming into range above me. The cold grows more intense as I begin to make out its great bulk, some unknown monster, ossified far beyond recognition; a mess of broken discoloured bones and rotting flesh too big to live, but definitely dead now. Drifting aimless with its flesh boiling away in clumps, falling slowly down towards me like dust. Like smoke.
And then it gets so large, it blots out everything else.
I dreamt this dream over and over, which was bad enough. What made it somehow worse, however, was the fact that, as those years went by, the thing—whatever it was—seemed to swell and swell, becoming a landscape in itself. Like some horrendous slice of alien sky, the scudding of unspeakable clouds. A roof-shaped doorway into Hell.
When I was twenty, I saw my first picture by Max Ernst: “Europe After the Rain,” done in 1940, after escaping from Nazi Germany. His largest work ever, it shows a panorama of decay produced through a technique known as decalomanie, which consists of squashing areas of highly diluted paint onto the canvas, then pulling it around so that the colours distribute themselves at random, suggesting through texture alone various biological structures—floral patterns, fossilized lichens, nacreous conch shells. In Ernst’s later paintings, the glassy iridescence of staffs, rods and lances, the red crust of fishbones and salt covering the ground, the mossy lace of women’s undergarments . . . all these effects are achieved through decalomanie.
For the next five straight terms at university, I slept, woke, read, wrote, and ate Max Ernst—without dreams. His vision had consumed me from the inside out, shelling me whole. I shed all my former fears at once, like some carapace, and left them behind to rot in much the same way that many of Ernst’s background figures seem to: hot, white, pearlescent. It was a wonderful time. The dream, thank God, simply couldn’t compete.
And yet. There’d have to be an “and yet,” wouldn’t there? Or you’d be looking at a blank page, right now.
But . . . you’re not.
| teacher says, begin at the end
The real question always is: how do things start? How do you know what you know? And when—or where, exactly—do you know that you know it?
For me, 2004 starts in my attic room at 676 Euclid, its air forever close and hot like someone else’s skin—third floor up, its narrow back window looking out onto next door’s roof, its even narrower front window haunted by the giant, rotating, bucket-shaped ghost of the Kentucky Fried Chicken sign across the street. The tenant I replaced, another student, had propped up both screens with hardback coffee-table books bought (as far as I could figure) at local garage sales, which made the apartment reek of mildew-swollen paper for days afterward whenever it rained. It was alien when I first moved in, breath-catchingly so, but I sort of got to like it, by the end.
. . . the end.
I came to 676 Euclid to work on my doctoral thesis: Frottage, a Play for Three Voices—The Influence of Hypnagogic Techniques on the Early Work of Max Ernst. The “play” part was my friend Vivia’s idea, not mine; my brain doesn’t operate quite that interestingly, even when I’m not distracted.
“Serious, Jan,” she’d said, looking over my initial notes. “Take a boo. You got Herr Ernst spouting off over here, you got this, um—observational?—stuff about his work you dug up, all this crazy description. And then you got the straight-up history running through like a vein. It’s a dialogue.”
“Dia means ‘two,’ doesn’t it?”
“Okay, trialogue; whatever. It’s call and response, like music. Add slides, some light-show stuff, get a space, three actors. . . .”
“Better you than me, Gunga Din.”
“Well, yeah. So—I guess that’s a yes, right?”
I don’t remember agreeing, exactly. But on the other hand, it’s not like lack of agreement ever stopped Vivia from doing—well, anything.
In order to give the thesis my full attention, I knew I’d have to get some sort of job. Best-case scenario had me in a position which wouldn’t take up most of my time, yet paid enough to maintain rent, supplies, food: easy enough to find through the back of NOW Magazine classifieds, she said, with a self-deprecating grin. Almost immediately adding the inevitable post-modern caveat, not.
Vivia, again: “Hey. You ever think about renting your body?”
“Don’t think Mr. and Mrs. Mol’d be real pleased to hear I’d crowned my dumb-ass choice to waste eight years on an Art History Doctorate by dabbling in prostitution,” I shot back, scowling down at the pack of eight-by-ten colour Xeroxes I was going through.
“No, idiot, I mean the Robert Rodriguez special.” As I looked at her, uncomprehending: “Like, testing?”
“Drug testing? Thanks, but I kind of like my liver the way it is.”
She rolled over on the futon, struck a finger-shaky pose, eyebrows and lips crimping Yoda-style. Made her voice all froggy. And—
“Ahhhh, young one,” she said. “Little of what you speak, you know. Many different kinds of testing, there are.”
“Fuck right off now, you can.”
“Jan-is. Stop being a turd.”
So we went on the web, clicked around, followed a couple of links she’d heard about. Three days later, I was down at the Freihoeven ParaPsych Institute, getting pre-tested. For being tested.
That hot little room with its stink, Ernst references scattered everywhere, the screen of my laptop blinking forever in the background and the whirr of my hard drive’s fan like somebody else’s breath in the dark. Sometimes, I wake up with my heart in my throat—eyes still shut, but far too afraid to open them. I wake up blind and panting with that fan in my ears, blood-loud, convinced I never really left there at all.
It took eight whole months for me to get it, finally . . . not what was going on, so much, as the fact that something might be going on. Might. With no way to be sure ’til I upped sticks and got the fuck out of Dodge, thus confirming my ever-more-vague suspicion that yes, there was still a world outside my apartment and the house it squatted in, and it looked the same way I fuzzily remembered. That things had once been different and could be that way again, eventually, so long as I removed myself from this place entirely; just took Eddie Murphy’s legendary advice for similar situations and GOT OUT . . .
And now you think you know what I’m talking about, don’t you? Sort of. Maybe. A little, little bit.
Yeah. Except that—unless it’s already happened to you, ladies and gentlemen—
—believe you me, you really don’t “know” shit.
| always the same, always different
When my mother (Mrs. Mol, the aforementioned) turned forty-three or so, she went on tour with a Montreal Drama School reunion production of She Stoops to Conquer which was supposed to play all across Canada. Which would have been pretty cool, except she never made it any farther than their first stop, Newfoundland; the minute her feet hit the Rock, she began to experience these dull, awful pains which grew within a matter of hours to complete shrieking agony, al
most birth-pang bad. They took her to the ER, where she was x-rayed, but the doctors couldn’t see anything inside her which would account for all the pain—actually, they couldn’t see anything at all, just a cloudy mass occupying most of her abdomen. Which is why the last thing she remembers doing before they put her under is signing a document giving them her permission to fit her with a colostomy bag, if needed.
Luckily, it wasn’t. The mass turned out to be a benign yet immense “chocolate” cyst that had slowly engulfed many of her internal organs over the period of perhaps a year: fallopian tubes, ovaries, all that. Early menopause in one, uneasy step.
Afterward, she told me she’d felt something was wrong for at least that long, but in an absolutely undefined, undefinable way—“wrong” like some sort of generalized disappointment, an angst, an anhedonia. All those words—long or short, foreign or not—we use to “explain” why our lives seem so slow, so dull, so trivial, so repetitive. So filled with nothing quite as easy to medicate away as actual symptoms.
Like a long black hood a mile or so high coming down over your head, too slow to measure or even to notice. And each successive layer of the hood is only mesh, perfectly see-through . . . but as they fold one over the other (over the other, over the other), your world gets ever more dim, dull, chill, and awful almost beyond endurance. “Normal” getting worse, always and steadily, as “normal” is—so often—wont to do.
The central question of any execution: do you want the hood on or off? Would you rather see it coming? Or would you rather simply drift away, cocooned, in warm darkness, stinking of nothing but yourself? A kind, familiar place to hide in, just before the snap, the crackle? Or the pop?
That’s what it was most like, where I ended up, living at 676 Euclid. And just like my mother, I never even knew how wrong everything in my life had become . . . never even saw it, coming or not. Not until it was long, long over.
| my thesis
Though I haven’t been able to make myself look at it since 2004, this is how my thesis began—
FIRST VOICE:
The real problem with Max Ernst, in the context of a presentation such as this, is one’s ultimate inability to classify him. Other artists were integral parts of specific schools, specific movements, and their artistic growth went on inside those schools and movements. But for Max Ernst, movements themselves were stages of growth. He continued to produce art until his death—approximately eighty-four years of work; work without a pause. His paintings range from surrealism to abstraction to super-realism; his experimentation with frottage and dripping and decalomanie had a lasting impression on the technical side of art as a whole. He wrote, sculpted in stone, wood and found objects, and published two books of collages. There is no way to synopsize Max Ernst. There is no one hole which fits him comfortably. The only method of analysis is to reveal him in stages—in a non-linear manner—in scraps and pieces that evoke not only a sense of his life, but a sense of emotional response to his work, which is his truest legacy.
SECOND VOICE:
Max Ernst was born on the second of April, 1891—the same year that Seurat died—near Cologne, at Bruhl. He was the second son of Philipp Ernst, also a painter. Max was impressed by the fact that once, while painting a scene of their garden, his father painted out a tree that irked him . . . then went and cut down the real tree, so that its continued existence would not devalue or “ruin” the painting.
THIRD VOICE:
“At the time, it occurred to me that there was something amiss here in the relationship between painter and subject.”
Yes. And this, meanwhile, is where I’d gotten to, before I finally had to leave—
FIRST VOICE:
Ill with a fever, young Max lay in bed and stared at an imitation mahogany panel across the room from him, at the wallpaper and at the plaster ceiling above, and saw shapes take form.
Twenty-eight years later, this childhood memory was to awaken in him as he gazed at the floorboards of a seaside inn one rainy afternoon. Setting to work with paper and soft black lead, he produced his first rubbings—the forerunners of the “frottage” technique that formed most of his drawings during his Dadaist period and would always remain his primary method of creation.
SECOND VOICE:
Metamorphosis: identity dissolves, or is unstable, transitory, partaking of all the different kingdoms of nature. Behind our masks, we have no face to speak of, or perhaps we simply do not recognize our real face . . . our absence of face.
Ernst’s is a world of objects: faces and bodies irreparably anthro-pomorphized, constantly substituted for by static stone, wood, household implements. But what may conceivably be the most disturbing single facet of his work remains the potent presence of the natural world, with its systems of ebbing and flowing, of corruption, of communicating vessels.
THIRD VOICE:
“The grooves of the wood took on successively the aspects of an eye, a nose, a bird’s head, a menacing nightingale, a spinning top, and so on. Little Max took pleasure in being afraid of these visions, and later delivered himself voluntarily to provoke hallucinations of the same kind in looking obstinately at wood-panels, clouds, unplastered walls, and so on, to let his imagination go. When someone would ask him, ‘What is your favourite occupation?’ he regularly answered, ‘Looking.’”
| the freihoeven institute
I’ll admit I’d expected it to be larger or—at least—more impressive. The website Vivia’d found had been well-organized, spell-checked, blessedly free of funky flash effects or blobby Scariest Places on Earth photomontages; the address was central, thus not necessitating any sort of back-of-beyond GO Train pilgrimage to Mississauga, or what have you. But all this sort of slipped away once I realized the fabled “Institute” was just a set of offices (located, conveniently enough, above a dusty neighbourhood dollar store), whose layout reminded me strongly of my worst job ever, matching telemarketer mailing address lists with phone numbers gleaned from all over North America. Each hour I’d worked during that particular summer had been spent somewhere ill-lit and ill-ventilated, doing something which was probably potentially illegal—a fairly easy conclusion to come to, since they’d move us to a new site whenever a fresh contract came in.
I paused at the foot of the stairs, eyes shaded, squinting up. “Mmmm, musty.”
“Picky,” Vivia snapped back, nudging me forward.
We had to sign in to use the elevator, which took us to the third floor. Freihoeven occupied suite 300B, in the building’s extreme southwest corner; the adjoining suite belonged to a company I was pretty sure I’d recently heard named in a pyramid scheme bust.
“Vivia Syliboy and Janis Mol for Dr. Abbott, 2:00,” Vivia told the woman behind the desk, who seemed dangerously intent on excavating the space beneath her nails with a straightened paperclip. “We’re here about the experiment.”
“Uh huh.” Not looking up: “Which one?”
“Oh. Well, we did that select-o-matic quiz generator thingie, and it recommended we try out for. . . .”
“. . . the Mental Radio recreation,” a voice from behind us chimed in, though “chime” is putting it strongly. I glanced sidelong, caught a flash of glasses—some girl, awkwardly hunched over a magazine with her hair all in her face, colourless in every conceivable way. She hauled the overflow away for a minute, and as her sleeve fell back, I saw her thin wrist was patterned like some reversible flesh jacket: bruises on top, close-packed as angry fingerprints; scar tissue underneath, an angry half-bracelet of pink-tinged white.
“Carra,” the receptionist said, almost warningly. While Vivia replied, at the same time:
“Yeah, that’s it. How’d you . . . ?”
But the girl—Carraclough Devize, her name turned out to be—just sighed.
“Through there,” Nail-lady told us, jerking her head towards the nearest door, and started digging at her thumb like she expected to strike gold. I took the hint,
skirting Little Miss Know-Too-Much’s personal space to knock at the pebbled glass door; Vivia hung back a minute, frankly interested, only to get the High-Functioning Autist silent treatment in response.
A few minutes after, we sat across from the famous Dr. A. himself, skimming our release forms while he filled us in on the program’s specifics—a sixteen-week trial, one hour’s worth of work a day, plus various types of documentation. The pay worked out to a thousand two hundred every two weeks, plus “commission.”
“Commission for what?” I wanted to know.
“That all depends on how effective the experiment eventually proves.” Dr. Abbott paused, steepling his long fingers. “Have either of you ladies ever heard of Upton Sinclair, the author?”
“Same guy who wrote Babbitt? Not since American Literature 101.”
“Exactly. Around 1930, he and his wife, Mary Craig Sinclair, decided to embark on a series of inquiries into the realm of extra-sensory perception—not laboratory-based, naturally, but rather interesting all the same. At the time, Mrs. Sinclair had already spent a large portion of her adult life recuperating from a long and physically excruciating illness . . . ‘a story of suffering needless to go into,’ her husband called it. ‘Suffice it that she had many ills to experiment upon, and mental control became suddenly a matter of life and death.’”
And: “Oh,” said Vivia. “Um . . . cool.”
I let a slow breath out through my nose and tried not to roll my eyes.
So, anyways. The story goes that instead of using ESP cards or any other set of fixed symbols, Upton Sinclair—or a close friend of theirs—would make pencil sketches of some object, real or imaginary; Mary Sinclair, lying alone in the dark in another part of the house, would try to “see” something, then reproduce what she thought she’d “seen.” This system evolved until the couple could rope in acquaintances like Robert L. Irwin, a young Pasadena businessman, who agreed (on the morning of July 13, 1928) to help them out by spending an hour concentrating on any random thing in his house, starting at the prearranged time of half-past 11:00 A.M. He chose a fork, made a drawing, stared at it, tried to clear his mind, and waited.
We Will All Go Down Together Page 23