Moth by Thomas Heise

Author:Thomas Heise [Heise, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781936747566
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Copenhagen, Fall 2010

The town where I had passed my childhood was a favourite subject of my memories about which I could dwell, even luxuriate, for hours while lying on a couch alone in a largely empty house bereft of furniture, or while sharing with my analyst, which I often did with my eyes closed so it seemed to her I was talking in my sleep and the long monologues that streamed out of me without any urging as I reclined on her sofa, imagining it were a raft, flowed from an underground river whose source, I liked to think, was the icy meltwater of Norway’s Austfonna glacier. But over years these memories became more infrequent and my efforts to conjure them by pouring over sepia-toned photographs of bridges or schoolrooms filled at first glance with identical children quiet at their desks, or by holding in my palm a porcelain brooch of a young Victorian couple walking horses beneath two sycamores were to no avail. Then one day I recognized the transports of my wonder had left me behind, and the prospect of remaining forever trapped within the crystal of the here-and-now was enough to usher in the most severe depression. The small cache of talismanic objects I had acquired over time and carefully guarded included, in addition to the photos and brooches, distressed maps of various cities in Europe, elaborate corals, pigeon feathers, a woman’s silk ribbon in purple, two miniature masks worn by monkeys during itinerant countryside theatre performances in nineteenth-century China, and a boy’s diary with a cross on its cover secured with a tiny rope. Relics of other pasts, they bore no true connexion to my youth. The items were purchased at estate sales and antique stores during the migratory period of my early thirties. I had chosen them out of the disorderly array of possibilities, the sheer randomness of abandoned objects, as evidence for an invented childhood, plot devices if you will, whose fictional quality assumed a truth I could barely deny. I could recall little of my life before the age of puberty and so to compensate for the honeycombed structure of my brain, I took to assembling a glass and teakwood cabinet where at night displayed items were aglow from spectral electricity emanating out of things torn from their context, a quality witnessed in the oddly bright eyes of tropical birds forced to live indoors. Whenever I moved from one apartment to another, from one city to another, as was my wont as soon as a place had exhausted its spell, I would carry the cabinet by hand, a shroud draped over it like the cage of a sleepless parrot, which only served to elicit the curiosity of each passerby on the street. I would install the box on its own stand and immediately rearrange the items by different taxonomies according the usual order — age, size, colour, organic or manufactured by human labour — but also by systems cutting to the heart of

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