JOURNAL, Wednesday, March 6th

Quelqu’un danse comme une flamme.
(“Badlands Flashback”, Bruce Cockburn )

When I met with Jean yesterday, we were talking about memories and how inaccurate or distorted they can become with the passage of time. Before I started writing about my childhood my memories were haunted by images that grafted themselves to reality, twisting them into grotesquely meaningful manipulations of the “Truth”.

I remember one incident in particular that I see refracted into a dreamlike memory through the filters of subsequent experiences. It happened shortly after we arrived on Saltspring. The Family was celebrating the summer solstice; there was a great bonfire in the clearing on the back lot of the farm around which all the mothers were dancing and spinning, wearing dresses with long sleeves that trailed to their feet. The flowers that they wore in halos woven into their hair were falling to the ground in the frenzy. The children, for the most part were naked and screaming as I remember it, but here I begin to lose faith in my memory of that night.

A few years later, when I was in High School in Vancouver, our art teacher brought in a great collection of books of European art from the 17th century. Many of the paintings had dark backgrounds of heavy oil colours with a small bright focus in the foreground, as if the artists had an abundance of browns and blacks and grey pigments to use up but that the white and yellow and red were precious and scarce. They were interesting books with large reproductions so that we could really examine each one.

I still remember my reaction as I turned the page on a scene of hell and debauchery in a woodland clearing. My stomach contracted and my hands clamped over my lips in a gesture that would, I hoped, keep me from retching in front of everyone. Elements of the picture swirled before my eyes and I thought I might faint. I was horrified and mesmerized at the same time: I wanted to slam the book shut but couldn’t tear my eyes away from the scene.

In the painting there was a central fire, huge and billowing in the forest. There were many figures around the fire: some human – made hideous in their lust for sex and drink; some animal – vicious as they fight over a dead bird, ripped apart by sets of powerful jaws that drip with blood; some mythical – centaurs and gods with horns, sneering at the scene before them. The fire gave off little light but created large, grasping tendrils of shadow extending to the outer circle of activity, along the trees (where I pictured Claire and I huddled together).

It was a graphic illustration of all the blackness and terror that I felt that night on the farm. It was as if this painter, working hundreds of years ago, had preordained my hell and the world that waited for me to live it.

On that day in art class, these two scenes – the reality that I lived on that night at the farm, and the painting that exposed my buried emotions – were bound so intricately in that the presence of old Blue, the dog at the solstice fire had been overtaken by the snarling beasts of darkness that were no more real on that night when I was twelve than they were in the painting. But they’ve since been given life, and scent, and violent intention in my memory because I needed some way to explain my fear.

The naked lust that I remember from the painting was the free abandon of dancing, twirling women in a cloud of wine, marijuana and patchouli oil; the mothers were powerful because my insecurity and discomfort gave them the power of drunken rapists.

I’ve had a dream over the years; a strange recurring dream where many of the details change each time it comes to me, but I know that it’s the same dream because I always wake with a feeling that I’ve lived this before, vaguely remembering previous versions, like I’m being draped, over and over again with identical robes, each of a different colour.

My dream always begins at the solstice fire. Claire and I are wrapped together in a blanket, leaning against a log at the edge of the clearing. We’re holding onto each other, more for comfort than warmth. In my dream Claire speaks to me, she tells me that she’s tired and hungry; she asks if we can go back to the house. I tell her that I don’t know the way.

The sounds of the strange, pounding music and wild laughter get louder; the fire is larger and brighter, erratically shooting tiny bursts of sparks that come closer and closer to us. Finally, in anger and fear, I convince myself that we can find our way back to the house if we stick to the path that we came on. I take Claire by the hand and we turn our backs on the mothers and their naked children and their threatening fire.

We go into the woods but the darkness is so overwhelming that we soon lose sight of the path. In each dream, as I begin to panic realizing that we’re lost, we suddenly find ourselves somewhere different, but always relieved to be away from all the frenzied noise that we can still hear in the distance. Sometimes we find ourselves in a chicken coop, or the barn, or a lean-to that someone has erected, or an abandoned cabin, or in front of the woodpile beside the garden. Although we find ourselves in different settings, it’s always the same feeling of comfort at being alone, together, away from everyone else in the world. We wrap our arms around each other and Claire nuzzles into my neck as I hold her on my lap. I tuck the blanket in around us and Claire tells me she loves me as we snuggle down in the night. I kiss the top of her head and tell her I love her too.

Then, each time, something attracts my attention in the stillness of the surroundings. It’s a gentle call from just beyond where we are, a hint of something out of the ordinary – the soft, rhythmic bumping of an object in the breeze, the awareness of an animal scurrying over an obstacle, the fetid scent of something old and musty nearby. It catches my attention and entices me from my sleepiness to observe what’s out there.

I realize, without horror or shock, that it’s a body, sometimes hanging from a hook, gently bumping against the wall, sometimes lying close by, peaceful, as if sleeping but still and lifeless. And I slowly recognize from the hair and the clothes that it’s wearing, that it’s my body that I see so near us. It’s never mutilated; there are no signs of violence or trauma, just the empty lifeless shell that I used to live in. I’m never upset by the sight of my body, more disappointed and resigned.

In my dream, I wrap my arms tighter around Claire’s shoulders; she doesn’t need to see this. I turn away from it and all that it has to tell me about finiteness and life, and I tell myself that I’ll deal with it in the morning.


Copyright 2003