Anesthesia by Kate Cole-Adams

Author:Kate Cole-Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Nonfiction
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2017-12-05T05:00:00+00:00

Ghost stories

In the Blue Mountains west of Sydney there is a big yellow house filled with books. Varuna. These days it is a writers retreat. It was named by its original owners, the writer Eleanor Dark and her doctor husband, Eric, after the Hindu god of the oceans, and I don’t think I have ever stayed there without the conversation drifting into talk of ghosts. One resident claimed to have looked out of her bedroom window on a moonlit evening to see a woman standing below in the garden looking back up at her. Another described a hand pressed against her shoulder. Midnight visitations, groaning bedsprings, baleful shapes in the corners. I stayed there with the American writer and teacher Robin Hemley, who reported seeing what appeared to be a sleeping form beneath the quilt in the Darks’s marital bed. On another night, he woke in the same bed to see what looked like a figure standing against the curtains. He could not make out whether the figure was male or female but was convinced enough to ask out loud, “Who are you?”

But in the main the ghosts are not of the house. They arrive with their owners and wait until these owners are soft and receptive before beginning to stir. Bottom dwellers compressed beneath the weight of unthought thoughts, they rise into the night like slow, flat fish. I experience at Varuna an unsettling sort of mingling, my days colonized by reveries and wavering absences; my nights swarming with half-thoughts and murky hallucinatory dreams. One night during the same week Robin Hemley saw shapes in his bedroom, another resident woke from a nightmare in which, through her mirror, she saw an old woman’s corpse seize her from behind, wrapping pale powdery arms around her, locking them over her chest as she herself growled and sank her teeth into the sweet doughy flesh.

The house stands impervious; squaring its yellow stucco walls to the sun and the rain, holding calmly within it its cargo of unshelled creatures, mutant half forms, words. One morning I woke into the wash of dawn light and found waiting in the front of my mind the instruction, or statement: permission to speak.

But what to say? How do we speak the parts of ourselves that are not available to our own conscious inquiry? That we don’t even know are there? And that may not, in any case, be available to language?

We can’t march in with our big boots and kick down the doors (I have tried). We can’t set traps for ourselves—we can see us coming. Sometimes we can create the conditions for those hidden parts to express themselves. We meditate or make art or do therapy or simply walk. But there are no guarantees. Consciousness is a small boat on an immense sea. We may learn to row, we may even rig up a sail, but we can’t know what’s beneath, let alone control it. Which means our conscious self can only ever tell us part of the story.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.