The scent of old books greeted Edward
Seymour as he entered his study, the gilt stamped titles and the
varicoloured bindings speaking volumes to him of distant pathways
taken, memories, and relationships. At ninety-two, he knew they were
unlikely to be revisited with anything but nostalgia. He went to the
shelves where he kept books inscribed to him by old friends and
associates, and breathed deeply as he gazed upon them. Wilder
Penfield's novel The Torch, stood with his The Mystery of
the Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain,
and his No Man Alone: A Surgeon's Life; beside them, books by
Karl Stern, his Pillar of Fire, his The Third Revolution: A
Study of Psychiatry and Religion, his The Flight from Woman,
and his novel Through Dooms of Love. Edward recalled the year
of 1960 when both Penfield and Stern had come out with a novel and many had wondered who would be next. Even he had contemplated
writing one, and having produced twenty pages, had but it aside. It
must be in one of his old files he thought. He reached out a wrinkled
slender finger towards Stern's The Flight from Woman, an
interesting study of its time, and with his striated fingernail like
old ivory, pulled it out and put it on his desk to hazard a glimpse
of the past. Then, seeing Rainer Maria Rilke by Willem Graff,
he pulled it off too, and opened it to to see Willem's inscription to
him. He fanned the pages and a paper fell out and slipped down to the
carpet like a glider making a perfect landing upon an Aubusson field.
Carefully, he bent down to retrieve it and went to sit at his desk. A
letter size sheet, folded in half revealed two poems, typed, one from
each end as if mirrored, and when folded, resting upon each other in
an intimate alphabetical embrace. He remembered. the attractive
woman, a former patient, who had transferred her affections to him in
the mid-1970s. She'd fallen for Rilke, and then for him. Or had it
been the other way round? She'd left him with these poems after he'd
discussed the issues with her and made her cognisant of the
transference, as well as the boundaries of propriety and professional
duty. The temptation now seemed less significant, but it was tinged
with longing like the fragrance of musk. The paper itself was like a
desiccated leaf preserved as an emblem of a path not taken.
C'est le paysage
longtemps . . .
C'est le paysage
longtemps, c'est une cloche,
c'est du soir la
délivrance si pure;
mais tout cela en nous
prépare l'approche
d'une nouvelle, d'une
tendre figure . . .
Ainsi nous vivons dan un
embarras très étrange
entre l'arc lointain et la
trop pénétrante flèche:
entre le monde trop vague
pour saisir l'ange
et Celle qui, par trop de
présence, l'empêche.
Dans la multiple
rencontre
Dans la mutiple rencontre
faisons à tout sa part,
afin que l'ordre se montre
parmi les propos du
hasard.
Tout autour veut qu'on
l'écoute,
écoutons jusqu'au bout;
car le verger et la route
c'est toujours nous!
The poems didn't arouse in
him a dormant longing for youth, but did arouse the feeling that
poems were embedded in timelessness, waiting silently for the next
passerby to grab hold and briefly experience a sense of eternity. She
had been a doctor of internal medicine which had made him think of
poets being the doctors of eternal medicine. She had laughed
at his play on words. He folded the paper and put it back in its old
resting place almost hearing the echo of her laughter. He opened his
desk drawer and withdrew his journal and began to write:
Wednesday December 19,
2012 - 7 p. m.
It has been many days
since I've written this journal. Preparations for the holidays,
doctor's appointments, fatigue and forgetfulness have all played
their part.
A mild day, a light
drizzle, and now, a light snow is falling.
Received two Christmas
cards this morning. One rather special. It is lonely at the top of
the age chain.
Nostalgia overcame me this evening. I dipped into old books. In one, I came across a slip of paper
given to me by an old patient of mine, a woman who had transferred
her affections to me, the classic therapist dilemma. It's good to
know she worked through her issues and led a happier life. I wonder
if she is still with us? She was very beautiful I recall. Having
dealt with the fallout of such temptations over the years in treating
a diversity of patients suffering at one of the three points of the
classic love triangle, perhaps I'd been conditioned to resist such
extreme emotions. So many affairs had ended in broken families and
ultimately, loneliness. Very few had been successful diversions.
Thankfully I resisted the temptation. Happily married to my dear
wife, my friend, my equal, I had been fortunate. The latent affairs
of the heart had stayed within my imagination.
Another Christmas will
soon be upon us. Every year I think it might well be my last,
although young doctor Bergeron thinks I'm 'bien fort.' I feel like a
man in an hour glass, or a life-glass perhaps, standing on a small
mound of remnant sand, a mountain beneath me in the other sphere. If
only I could push on the sides of the glass, pound my fist upon the
surface, rock the glass back and forth until it fell sideways to form
a symbolic sign of infinity, and I could sweep the remaining sand
into the concave feature of the glass and lie down and rest, cupped
in eternity. I wonder why it is that some individuals when they reach
a great age, catch a second wind and become avid for life? More to
lose perhaps. Looking back, there seems to be a life hurdle that
takes so many in their fifties and sixties due to lifestyle or
genetics, but if they pass through, or over, that barrier, those last
laps can be richly fulfilling. They have been for me, though a sense
of guilt surrounds my willpower like the piping on my dressing gown.
Amelia and Duncan are
doing well. She keeps me informed every other day as to Duncan's
well-being. It has now been ten days since he emerged from his three
day coma. He is functioning very well, his memory is solid, and what
physical effects he sustained, he has overcome with minor therapy.
The doctors are still uncertain exactly what caused his fall. A close
call with an aneurysm like an asteroid passing through the Earth's
atmosphere and burning up perhaps. The only oddity of his three day
coma seems to be strange and random expressions in Norwegian, a
language he did not know previously. A mystery. He seems to
understand what the expressions mean, but he is unable to control
their capricious and seemingly unconscious eruptions. Naturally,
specialists and postdocs have been interested in his case. I have
advised him to avoid researchers. Let it work itself out I told them.
This has me somewhat
worried.
This special case of
Duncan, along with today's card from Isabelle Cloutier, have
convinced me to tell Amelia the truth about her Mother and Father.
If I should falter, hesitate, or pass away before I can tell her, I
will write it here, in brief, in the hopes she may some day read my
journals which I will bequeath to her:
My youthful half-sister
Catherine, the progeny of my wayward Father and a young secretary,
was sent to Canada before my arrival. Suffering from depression, she
found herself ushered into the care of Donald Ewen Cameron where she
was exposed to his experiments with Electroshock and drug therapy,
leading to her later spiral of dysfunction. What an unfortunate place
to have met a husband, but meet Richard, Amelia's father she did,
another patient of that misled research. When I arrived to teach at
McGill, Catherine and Richard had already found a hippie haven in the
Hare Krishna movement. Though I tried to help, they'd distanced
themselves from us. Amelia was young when they left that group and
changed religions once more, following a Yogi off to California and
we secured legal custody of their children. I never broached the
subject of Cameron's experiments upon them with Amelia. I had thought
it best to avoid creating a need to stir up the truth. The players
involved were too powerful. The whole unfortunate affair had been
sealed away, an episode from the cold war no one wanted to revisit.
The truth revealed in these cases is as rare as elephant eggs in a
rhubarb tree.
It has been decades since
I've written in my journal about Catherine and those difficult years.
Guilt? Catharsis? If you are reading these words Amelia, please
forgive an old man his sins.
As to Isabelle's letter
within her Christmas card—un hibou comme d'habitude—she informed
me that she had received a cryptic letter signed with the initials of
what must be Thérèse Laflamme, with the names of David Ashemore, an
arrow pointing to the name Jarvis Whitehorne, and the acronym,
P.R.I.S.M. It seems Amelia must have heard me discuss Isabelle's
name or I absentmindedly mentioned it in passing. Isabelle researched
Jarvis A. Whitehorne and discovered a rogue researcher in the
footsteps of Cameron. This man seems to have his own research
company, Whitehorne & Associates. The acronym seems to stand for
Peremptory Remote Intra-Sensory Manipulation. No longer is it
necessary to have a patient in a room to experiment upon according to
Isabelle, now they can insert devices and activate them remotely, or,
by the use of acoustic devices, disrupt sleep patterns and manipulate the body's chemistry from afar. It all seems so far-fetched but Isabelle assures me such experiments are taking place. It is a great abuse of science and
technology. The rational male mind has objectified the other and is
able, without conscience, to break their very spirit. Isabelle sees
the abuse of such types of scientific and technological advances as a greater threat in the future to individual freedoms than concerns over big brother
listening to their phone calls, or is it reading their emails now?
The rational male mind and the objectification of the other will
always be the source of great evil. Isabelle suggests that David
Ashemore had come across the activities of Whitehorne and had begun to
write reports about them, only to find himself, she thinks, a target.
She fears that Ashemore was told to desist in his investigations, but
continued. Much conjecture on her part she admits.
A sense of dread overcomes me as I think of such abuse. I will tell Arthur all
about Isabelle's discovery on Saturday over our chess game. I
just realised we won't be playing chess till the New Year. Well, it
will keep. Best not disturb his holidays anyway.
I shall wait till after
Christmas to tell Amelia about her parents. She has too much on her
plate right now with Duncan's still delicate health, and the closing
of his business. Good news is that Duncan has a buyer for most of his
stock, and some of the funds will be put towards a new car and a trip
to England. I would not mind seeing England once more, but for the
travelling. And I'm sure a third wheel would be unwelcome. They
never did take a decent honeymoon. I shall add to their financial
purse and also provide them with addresses of our living relatives on
that distant island.
Edward
drew a line beneath the last sentence and taking up Isabelle's
letter, pasted it down upon the facing page, then closed his journal
and returned it to his drawer. Walking over to the window, he looked
out upon the limbs of the naked trees with their layer of light snow
like Gothic tracery. Here he was, with the night birds and cobwebs,
the city glittering below like distant stars. He closed the curtains
and his eyes alighted upon the framed piece of paper hanging between
the bookshelves and the drapery. He had discovered it in a strange
book published in 1918, a book explaining the details of the gas mask
created by a research group under B.F. Goodrich, a book with haunting
images of a soldier modelling the mask, and looking like an undersea
monster. Images enough to haunt a child's dreams he thought. One of
the authors was a certain Major R. G. Pearce, who he learnt through
the head librarian at McGill, had been a medical doctor in Ohio, and
a sometime poet. The piece of paper was Pearce's poem entitled
Entropy. Edward never felt closer to the words:
When the night raven
finds our hearth and fans
The dying embers with
his wings, and space
Which time has warped
into our frames expands
In unstrained rest,
there will remain no trace
Of us on earth, but in
the firmament
Perhaps a Protean cloud
will hold my form
And it will catch the
light your star has sent.
When like my song your
molten heart was warm.
Since crumpling power
shares not in our estate
Contented we should lie
in dreamless sleep;
And hurried time will
never confiscate
The tryst which mutual
souls have sought to keep.
Our elsewhere and our
here will then be one
Beyond the reaches of
the cyclic sun.
L'envoi
If this would be, our
lives may not be vain
For smiles might ripple
over space again.
The
head librarian had given him a short lecture on the prevalence of
poets who had trained as doctors, offering a long list of names, some
well-known, others obscure. Such individuals were able to maintain a
balance of science on the one hand, and the intuition of poetry on
the other. It gave Edward hope, acted as a soothing balm for his
sense of dread. From the door, he looked back and scanned his
bookshelves for an instant, then, turning the light out, carried the
books by Stern and Graff to the living room to spend an hour or two
with his hands in the past.
© Ralph Patrick Mackay
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