Originally posted February 2018.
"What You Read" is a short story which will be released in ten parts in this blog. It is inspired by the work I did for “The Pendulum”. It revolves around the question of what the books we read say about us. In later years, I often visited you in your bubble of healing, a one-person apartment perched above a quiet, cobble-stoned road in a valley below the Black Forest. That was over four decades after the end of the Second World War when marigold salve would once again soothe men’s stumps. The finely bound series about plants you had given me was forgotten in a trunk in my student’s quarters, but no sooner had I stepped into your apartment with the noise-absorbing green wall-to-wall carpet than your desperation for silent healing was all around us. Sometimes when we spoke for too long, your eyelids began to flutter uncontrollably because your nerves were frayed by what had come to pass. You mourned “all that was lost” by our family in Germany, Poland and Brazil, my birthplace. The story grabbed my attention and I couldn’t let go of it. I wanted to know what was in that nothingness that you stared into when you told these stories that wore you out. You were not the only one in need of restoration. We’d both lived convulsive lives of different sorts, and I sensed that my healing was in knowing your past because it had formed me in ways I still didn’t know. Could my needs only be fulfilled at the expense of yours? I hoped that this zero-sum game would not apply to us, and sometimes stood with you in your tiny kitchen without asking any more questions, as you measured the dried herbs that you placed with excruciating slowness into a teapot. Then we’d sit down on the stools that screeched against the kitchen floor like mischievous children, and silently, without awkwardness, wait as the hot water drew the goodness out of the tea leaves. It was in those moments, rather than in the ones when I pressed you for your memories, that a very large door between us swung open next to the other closed doors. As the years passed, I began to notice that sometimes you spoke of nature in ways that alienated me. When the church bells outside your apartment chimed, you snapped angrily that “the Pope should be shot,” and that only nature decided. According to you, its one immutable rule was that the strong had the right, and, in some instances it was merciful to put the weak out of their misery. I tried to find some indication in your face that you didn’t really mean it, but there was none. All of the doors between us slammed shut in the storm your words produced inside of me. It was as though we didn’t know one another at all. Now the fine weave has lost its power to bind the pages of my medicinal plant books. The delicate paintings of herbs, flowers and their roots lie in a pile detached from their covers. Were they the strong or the weak? I haven’t had the heart to bind the pages back together again, as I continue to struggle with reconciling the different sides of you. To me, the robust marigold and the lithe-stemmed pansy had been our sanctuary, but to you they were other things too. If I bind them together again, perhaps the series can simply be mine. Outside, the plants in the collection have come to life, and as I become an old woman, having grown roots in a place similar to where yours were, I cannot deny that you prepared me to recognize them.
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Originally posted February 2018.
"What You Read" is a short story which will be released in ten parts in this blog. It is inspired by the work I did for “The Pendulum”. It revolves around the question of what the books we read say about us. Their spines were bound firmly in green and red fabric, and from the time that you gave them to me, stroking that fine weave became my secret addiction. The truth was that the robust orange marigold and the lithe-stalked blue pansies on the hardcover of the second in the two-part series about medicinal plants, burst my nine-year-old heart each time that I looked at them. They reminded me of you: of your broad, durable shoulders - from farming stock, you said - juxtaposed with your long, elegant fingers when they poured morning coffee, your addiction, into a gold-rimmed porcelain cup perched on a matching saucer. All of my longing aspired to reproduce something equally as beautiful with my sketching pencils and paint brushes, but equal always falls short in art. It was just as impossible as to believe that I could ever know you; a Sisyphean task that I knew I would never give up to the end of my days. “Our healing plants are of very special beauty,” declared the German introduction on the first page. It satisfied me that the plants in this collection were ours – yours and mine – despite the fact that we came from different worlds that intersected because I was your granddaughter. At the tender age of nine, my plant kingdom was a jumble of palms, pines, orchids and roses that whizzed past me like a slide show in the quick succession of countries and continents I had lived in with my family. It was an ephemeral experience without a lasting sensual imprint, so that when I came to those illustrations where the stringy roots of the plants had been drawn in detail, I saw myself dangling above the ground, uprooted on the page. This was a clear contrast to you and your plant kingdom which was the same as in this series, not because you hadn’t experienced anything else, but because you were deeply, inextricably rooted in it. In 1918, your parents, farming gentry from Lower Saxony who were devoted to the abdicated Kaiser, sent you to the German rather than the Latin school in the small town near their estate. It was one of the last morsels of pride for them to pass onto you in a nation humiliated in the aftermath of the Great War. These medicinal plants would heal not only because of the miraculous powers of nature in general, but also because they were German and therefore possessed strength and quality. Pride masked the more practical explanations, including that when the antiseptic for tending to the stumps of veterans had run out, there was still the marigold salve. One could never yield to the betrayers of the nation. Despite or because of the distance of time and place between us, I turned the pages avidly and checked in pencil those plants I thought I had seen. Each check was an affirmation of our common interest and our affection for one another that I hoped could bridge any difference. To make the point, I noted in my best child’s print under Monarda didyma or bergamot that, “I have this flower in a flower pot.” Whether I did or didn’t wasn’t the point. It meant that we had shared experiences, and therefore I could open another of the closed doors between us. I thirsted for your affection. The books that you gave to me since childhood seemed a sign that my longing would be fulfilled. Yet, from the beginning, the great distance in years between us gave rise to desperation, like the turbulent seas between continents. Could I know these books in the same way that you had known them, and would I know you then?
As a child, I wanted you to be one person, but as I became an adult, I noticed that you had several faces, although I couldn’t clearly make out any of them. My unease grew, and after your death I mourned you by reading and re-reading all of those books. They were your own favorites, which you had read at different times in a life spanning over a century. I thought that by reading them I could put my unease to rest. Instead, they took me down a hundred bewildering paths, leaving me with more questions than answers. Eventually, each path led full circle back to me and the potential consequences of my own contradictions; all in a time when dictators had begun to shout across the airwaves once again. Originally posted February 2018. "What You Read" is a short story which will be released in ten parts in this blog. It is inspired by the work I did for “The Pendulum”. It revolves around the question of what the books we read say about us. |
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