Somebody Somewhere (12 page)

Dr. Marek didn't have to disarm himself. It seemed very, very one-sided, almost foolish and irrational to believe disarmament should happen on one side only. But others hadn't been at war. I had.

My head was swimming and I felt nauseous. A part of me must have been on the verge of understanding. Was there a whole pile of stored knowledge I had not been able to make sense of that was just sitting there waiting for a new system by which to translate and utilize it?

Writing the book had made my hold on “my world” brittle and fragile in its raw exposure. Slowly there was less and less to turn to. Having given up Carol and Willie, all that was left were things, a world of objects.

This world was the place from which I had begun. It was the place before the creation of the characters. I was like an ingrown toenail. I had thrived in the wrong direction. In order to go forward, I had to first go backward to where I had begun; as T. S. Eliot writes, “In my beginning is my end.”

In one great swoop, my perception got knocked off its feet and I fell into a perceptual black hole. Dr. Marek gave me a rule with no exceptions. He explained that things need a nervous system in order to think or feel.

Back in my apartment, I tapped the wall. Every time I held on to a curtain, every time I looked at my shoes, a new perception of objects as dead things without knowledge, without feeling, without volition, nagged at me. I felt my own aloneness with an intensity I had always been protected from. Willie wasn't there to help me understand, depersonalize, and deny. Carol wasn't there to make me laugh and pretend nothing mattered. Everything around me had no awareness that I existed. I was no longer in company.

I felt trapped by an impending acceptance of a new logic my mind couldn't continue to deny. My infantile emotions could not bear it. I wanted to run back into “my world” but it had been bombed. Blocked, unused inner knowledge and understanding I had not made
use of screamed for recognition. Upstairs in the brain department, the rusty cogs began to turn. I felt torn in two. This time, though, both halves would be within my control.

I paced like a lion in a cage. Since writing the book, I had made a rule never to attack myself physically again. Somehow it used to relieve the anxiety. There was now no other way to express it than through tears. In my room of dead things, I hit the floor, which had once been aware I was walking on it. The floor I had sprawled my body across, the carpet I had run my fingers through, my special sunny spot in the middle of the room, were all dead and always had been and I hadn't known. I realized I'd lived my life in a world of object corpses. God has a curious sense of humor.

I had been about three when all the people around me “died.” They had stopped being thing-objects. I was like someone on a departing boat who thought it was the shore that was pulling away. I had watched people slip away and abandon me. I now realized it had been me who couldn't keep up with them.

Eventually I distinguished people from things and nature, and came to think of them as people-objects: second-rate, distant, difficult to comprehend but usable. I learned to function.

Right now, “my world” was being turned upside down and inside out. I felt abandoned, not by people, whom I'd written off long ago, but by things. There was no comfort in sight. There was nothing in sight but the gradual guaranteed destruction of all I turned to for security, and abandonment into the arms of the unknown.

Leaves didn't really dance and pictures didn't really jump off hooks on the wall and furniture didn't really stand around me. Damn “the world.” It was an empty and ugly place. My God, I thought, do they know what they have done? I had trusted them. They had nothing to give me and I had trusted them. I had given up my secret war and the security of “my world” that rested upon that secrecy. In return I had been condemned to an empty void. I was double damned.

I made a rule that there would be three things immune to this new logic of objects: my travel companions, two stuffed toys called Orsi Bear and Travel Dog, and my reflection.

I stood before my mirror looking at me. Logic told me that I was
not actually in company with my reflection, but the perception of this other moving being defied the logic. One could not cancel the other out and I could not reconcile the two.

If I had known pretense, then I don't think I had known it well and certainly not consciously. Pretense was too much of a self-expressive creation, too out of control, too exposing of the self it came from to be allowed. Now, though, as the security of my world crumbled, conscious pretense as a weapon against loneliness was born.

Orsi Bear never growled and Travel Dog never barked. They had no imaginary thoughts, they made no imaginary statements. I spoke to them. I shouted at them. I cried on them. But they had nothing to say. They were simply being.

Even if trees and grass didn't wave and leaves didn't dance, they too were still alive. I spent time hugging trees and lying in the long grass instead of my sunny patch on the floor. The trees seemed all the more wise and protective than before—the elephants of the tree world, with trunks.

I had been given a set of keys to many unexplored corridors within my mind. My view of “the world” began to change dramatically. My letter to Dr. Marek captured this like a reflection of surroundings in a lake:

April 1991

To Theo Marek,

…As for the fast progress of things, I can't bear being stuck in the middle of learning. If it weren't for it being on the way to solutions, I couldn't bear it.

It is much harder than where I've come from. I still have the spots (air particles), buttons, and lace. The characters are safer now as memories and abilities that I try hard to accept as my own, and Travel Dog and Orsi Bear are the bridges to an external world.

…In my apartment I feel “normal” and like part of “the world.” I have turned to something outside myself for security and wake up with a sense of belonging that goes beyond my own body (I know stuffed toys aren't real but turning to something outside of
myself in an affectionate way has taught me the concept). Before, most of my objects were there for “protective-defensive” value—I felt no belonging, so sleep was sometimes like a form of torture. Now sleep is a nice place…

…There is still music and art and poetry but what's changed is that I acknowledge “the world” as potentially
for me
now. It's not some great sewer with a few misfits who I thought had mistakenly got into it (the people I liked). It's not a place with two-dimensional cutout figures without any realness or anything to offer. It's a real-feeling world with a future to give me and I just need to work on the skills to reach out to it and accept it reaching me without fear.

I think my mind is too big for “my world” and my emotions and social skills will have to grow into “the world” but the people I have around me now have the patience I think, and I think I can trust them (trust in their knowledge). I can look in their faces and see that they know what they are saying about what they have (they can't honestly say they know what it feels like to be me but I can see they are happy being part of “the world”).

That's it,

      Donna.

In response to the gradual crumbling of “my world,” I constructed another removed world for myself. It would be a bridge. A way of distancing “the world” enough to take things a step at a time without shattering.

This was a world rich in language, though none of it English. I banished the verbal language that had brought understanding and shattered the security of my “my world” perceptions. English was in exile. I listened to it, thought in it, or spoke it only outside of my apartment, out in “the world.”

I found a foreign language library and borrowed videos, song, and story cassettes, and illustrated storybooks. My most recently acquired language had been German. This seemed as good a language as any, particularly considering that few people I had met in Australia seemed to speak it.

I watched TV, but only when foreign language programs were on.
I listened to the foreign stations and programs on the radio. Outside of reading for my university studies, all reading had to be in this foreign language. Large poster sheets went up on my walls and door. This was to be for communication with myself, all of which had to be in German. I wrote letters to some people I'd met during my stay in Germany and I read the German dictionary.

Nobody noticed. Few people knew where I lived and those who did were rarely invited. I would maintain control and visit them (the jump-out-of-the-cupboard-before-they-open-the-door-on-you strategy again).

The immersion into German had an advantage: I was able to enroll for the foreign languages component of a teaching degree, which would mean I would only have to teach in English for part of my course. It would be so much easier to teach in a language that was not my own and represented no direct expression of myself.

The postgraduate course taught people how to be teachers of both elementary and postelementary school students (with the emphasis on elementary).

I
t was the first day of the Diploma of Education course. There were fifty of us, students between the ages of twenty and forty from various backgrounds. We were separated into two groups and given timetables and various bits of bureaucratic garble on paper. Some had arts degrees, some had science degrees, some had psychology degrees or degrees in journalism. All were here to learn about teaching what they already knew and learning how to teach what they didn't. Staff members were introduced and the staff managed get-to-know-you and get-to-know-the-course games.

It was a different sort of course right from the beginning. It had been easy to be anonymous in a lecture theater with a few hundred other students and go to tutorials every other day, where you hid in anonymity behind the security of tables, topic knowledge, and characters.

Other students and the staff were watching constantly to find out if you were balanced enough and well adjusted enough to become an elementary school teacher. No one wanted to be responsible for entrusting fragile egos to anyone who was not quite what the education department needed.

My focus was sharpened. I took my cues from what everyone else was doing. Despite the pressure, I felt relatively safe in the structured setting of class, with its clear beginnings and endings, its set topic, and its more overt social rules. Like everyone else, I spoke briefly about why I took the course and about my own education.

The first of the classes broke up for lunch. I was relieved and yet afraid of lunchtime. Without Carol to buzz around manically mirroring people and ad libbing on their lines, I had no idea how to conduct myself socially. At least now I would have half a chance of experiencing my own life, choosing the direction and motivation of my own words, and being able to feel what I said and did, provided I could get a response out.

“Tell me to shut up if I'm being annoying,” I told one of the lecturers. “Your comments are very welcome,” she said. “They get people thinking. They add life to the class.”

I either spoke one-to-one or addressed my comments to no one in particular, so I had no way of measuring the degree to which I dominated the class. When I spoke, there simply was no class, there was only a topic or a sentence that had triggered a comment, and people around me who happened, by coincidence, to be there.

One of my classmates, Joe, singled me out as a sparring partner. His comments were fueled by an ego that needed constant victories. My comments were fueled by a fight to stay on track, to make connections, and to comprehend something.

I made a comment. Joe took it as a personal invitation to have an argument. My comments were being turned into a two-ring circus at the expense of the class.

“Break into groups,” “form pairs,” “brainstorm”—the lecturer's phrases punctuated almost every lesson. Carol's and Willie's ideas
were easily triggered. I came up with ideas in isolation. All of us had had the concept of talking “at,” “in front of” and “to,” but the concept of “talking with” was lost on me. I was like a deaf person who could talk; when someone else spoke, I either said nothing or spoke over them on my own track, an express train, stopping at no stations until the end.