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god and a decade ending with the brief and delirious ruling of acid freaks, post feminists and de-constructors of language

When I thought about the idea of god waking me (or not) I became afraid. There was a German lullaby by Brahms that my then ancient great-grandmother used to sing to me when I was really very little which ended with the words: “Tomorrow morning, if God wants so,
you will wake once again.…”  Our family life was altogether politically non-theistic, except for the great-grandmother who passed away when I was about four, but the idea of god deciding about my waking in the morning was still disconcerting. What if he did not want to? On a whim? Would I just sleep forever? Would I die? What if he plain forgot about me?

When I had asked my mother about the song she had explained to me that the lyrics dated to a time when it was understood that everything – everything – happened only with god’s consent and that these lines, by their content, did not deal primarily with the idea of god remembering to wake people or not.

I don’t know whether that explanation did much to put my anxiety to rest, I think probably not. But it certainly was with relief that one day I realized that I actively did not believe in god. That was an easy attitude to acquire in my family, by the way, and an easy attitude in that decade following the sixties, a decade ending with the brief and delirious ruling of acid freaks, post feminists and de-constructors of language which left a lasting impression on western societies and which was my intellectual parents’ undeniable contribution to a new cultural value system, a system that allowed for people like them to unfold their wings and discover entirely new horizons and ideas.  I don’t remember that we had ever attended any church service. Even wedding ceremonies in my parents’ circle of friends and family were civil ceremonies. No baptisms. Still, God remained a quaint distant relation who, after a history of misfortunes, had found asylum in old nursery rhymes and lyrics. All but forgotten and without charitable visitors, but hanging on.

My parents’ were avidly confessing atheists for many years until older age and the dawning sense of their own mortality softened their rhetoric. And yet, my childish sense of superstition, during the phase of their most decided and articulated stand on the topic, detected an ominous quality to the concept “god” and it took some years and my awakening intellect to overcome the threatening taste the fear of that forgotten but lingering god left in my mind. Maybe god explained and explored would have been easier to understand but I was pretty much left to my own devices to figure out what the idea of god stood for.  I vaguely feared god until I shed that fear pretty much like I had shed the fear of the nightly intruder eventually. Only much later did it occur to me that the elimination of god did not erase the randomness and with it the terror of the unpredictable nature of death.

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page 176 – still in the library

I took out my small compact powder out of my jacket pocket. I clipped it open and looked into the little mirror in the lid. My face glowed sickly pale under the fluorescent lights. Winter pale.  I clipped the lid down, got up from my chair and stepped into U – Z. As I had expected, there was no one there. Velasquez, Varese and The Venetian School, gigantic volumes, with soft, yellow pages lingered pompously yet with a limp attitude between smaller books, waiting to be released from the boredom of their shelf lives. This is what immortality means, I thought, sitting on a shelf as an afterthought to your own life. Maybe to be lifted down every few years to be perused briefly for some kids’ art assignment.  I touched the laminated, slightly deformed backs with my fingers. Books do not endure lamination well, a laminated book resembles a plastic covered sofa. One cannot enjoy it. I apologized to the volumes that were sighing with age and discontent …

I have been working on this novel for a while now. There are passages that I really love, snippets, impressions that convey the atmosphere I want to create. There is also, almost surprisingly, some real plot (unusual for me) and a couple of protagonists I can vividly picture like I can picture friends. The novel could be read as science fiction – or it could be an account of a delusion. I don’t quite know which one it is, but so far it could coherently be read as either and it will depend on the conclusion to point in one direction or the other. Any kind of science fiction could of course be an account of the protagonist’s delusions if one chose to read it like that. This is one reason I chose the genre for this particular coming-of-age story in the first place. Another one is that I have been craving for a playing field for my interest in ephemeral science and have been having a ball researching and reading up on all kinds of science projects with marginal news interest from marine bioluminescence to quantum physics to astronomy.

 

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the dragon lair

I did not stop at the reception desk but walked straight towards the staircase leading up to the first floor. I felt confident, no adrenalin rush this time.

A demanding voice stopped me: “And where do you think you are going, Miss?” I stopped dead in my track. This was not supposed to happen. I turned around slowly and walked over to the reception desk. A no-nonsense woman, maybe in her mid-fifties, observed my progress critically. When I had reached the desk, I put on my nicest smile and stated: “ I have an appointment with Prof. H. I can just walk straight up, thank you.” “Prof. H.?” the woman inquired. The buttons of her starched and ironed shirt strained against her quivering bust. “Yes,” I answered, leaning over the polished desk a bit, lowering my voice, “I have been working on an assignment she gave me.” That did not seem to impress her much. I waited. “Feeling a bit funny, aren’t we” she answered without any expression. I changed my tactic: “Please, M’am, why don’t you just call and ask her,” I suggested. “Her office is on the first floor.” We stared at each other. She slowly turned red. “Where do you think you are,” she finally hissed, “a fancy hotel? Wall Street?” She exhaled deeply, then inhaled again, as if she was practicing her yoga breath. The shirt buttons were getting a good work-out which I noticed as a detail despite my growing annoyance. Why wouldn’t she just let me find my way as was custom in the building or at least call up? I was certain that Prof. H. wanted to see me just about as urgently as I wanted to see her. But the reception desk lady behaved like a dragon in front of a lair. I thought I could even smell her foul breath. “Listen, missy,” she snarled “I don’t know what you intend by walking straight into a men’s homeless shelter and I am sure I don’t want to know. I do not care whether you are looking for your daddy or grandpa, you have to wait until they come out. What I want, right now, is for you to leave this building through the front door and not bother me any further.” I took a step back. Men’s homeless shelter? I looked around. This was unmistakably the same lobby I had crossed through the last time. “Now. Missy,” commanded the voice of the dragon lady  “… or I will call the police to see you out.”

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space, void of people

I woke up when a hand was gently nudging my shoulder. My neck was stiff. I was still sitting in the library chair. Dr. Hausner was gone. “Miss, I am afraid we are closing.” A woman’s voice. I looked up. Ms. Clarice stood right next to my chair, smiling. All other visitors were gone. I got up drowsily and carefully checked the window reflections, too. All visitors were gone. “Are you alright?” Ms. Clarice inquired. I looked at her closely. Her small golden earrings reflected the fluorescent library lights, transforming the miniature reflections of the library on the convex mirror of the gleaming curves  into a warmer, more elegant version of the actual space. An alternate space more suitable for someone like Dr. Hausner than the mundane space of Summerville library.

“When did Dr. Hausner leave?” I asked. Ms. Clarice narrowed her eyes. She ignored my question.  “You must be very tired,” she replied, “go home and sleep.” “Did you see him?”, I insisted. “Go home and sleep, Miss, I have to switch off the lights now.” I wanted to protest but she anticipated my notion and gently shoved me along. “Come back tomorrow,” she repeated, not unfriendly. We walked down the staircase together.

There was nobody downstairs either. From the winding staircase I could see  the lower floor breathing calmly. The tessellation of the carpet tiles looked like the exposed skin of an ancient creature. An empty library is a marvelous space. Really any space empty of people holds some kind of promise that seems to disappear once it gets populated. When I slowed down to linger on the staircase, I felt Ms. Clarice’s warm hand on my shoulders again, encouraging me to continue down the last few steps. I sighed. “It’s beautiful, the library, “ I said apologetically, “at night, I mean. When all the visitors have left.” We reached the ground floor. I took care not to step on the lines of the irregular tile pattern. I have never been quite able to just move without paying attention to the rhythm of any kind of tile, responding to it in some way, and today was not the day to start with it. Ms. Clarice remained silent while I gingerly crossed the open space. I wondered if I ever would get used to people not answering. Strictly speaking, I had not asked a question though. Ms. Clarice looked the kind of woman who did not have an appreciation for idle conversation.

She waited patiently while I balanced over to the cubbies to pick up my bag. I pulled out my jacket first. A small piece of paper trundled to the floor like a feeble bird. Folded from yellow legal paper. I bent over and picked it up. Ms. Clarice was still waiting for me at the door, so I simply slid it into my pocket, shouldered my bag and walked over. She still smiled, never once complaining about the delay. “Good night now,” she said simply. I nodded. She locked the door right behind me. It was cold outside. When I turned around, the lights in the library had already been switched off. The building looked deserted. I started walking into the evening.

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the library, a visitor/2

As a matter of fact, Dr. Hausner had started talking again. The low drone of his voice brought me back from my existential self-doubt to the mundane world of the Summerville library. Or not so mundane as I had just recently discovered. I drifted off again as if lured away by my own obsessive thoughts.  What was real? What was dream? Where was I when I wasn’t aware of myself? Where was I when I was asleep in my bed? I pinched myself hard to make myself listen to the melodic voice of the blind man by my side.

“Normally they go about their own business, “ Dr. Hausner concluded at that moment.  “But of course they are bored.” He seemed to be thinking for a moment, folding his elegant white fingers in his lap. Then he added: “Even in the library.“ He sounded incredulous as if that was an incomprehensible idea.  “But what are they doing here?,” I ask. “Where do they come from?”

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lunacy

From that day on my world has been different. Even though I have lost some of the feverishness that I lived with back then, a feverishness that brought on a clarity about which I knew nothing as long as it lasted, I still hold it for possible that at any moment in our lives just about anything can happen. I still know that we are like divers in a deep ocean finding access to different currents and tides, each one of them distinctly different in temperature, clarity and speed. Accepting the reality of the girl in the window I acknowledged that I preferred to be raving mad to inhabiting a world without surprises. A suburban world where everything was designed to be stagnant or at least to create the never to be questioned illusion of stability. Even my free spirited artist mother surfed the tide of that illusion. That day I rejected the comforting hand of a reality created by others for needs I didn’t even knew I might have one day. Instead I allowed myself an unfiltered acknowledgement of the impulses that my brain felt inclined to produce. I did not know whether or not there was anything out there at all, I didn’t know if we possess any kind of objective reality but whereas before that had horribly worried me (along with the question how to prove to oneself that one exists at all outside the universe of our own brain), suddenly I was intrigued by the freedom of it. So what – if this girl in the mirror did not exist, I could still see her bright and clear, she looked like a normal kid.