Murmurations — Tomoé Hill

I know that you know that I know.

My mother still laughingly refers to this line, first uttered when I was still young, a blunt complaint about adults wanting recitations and performances, as if I were a parrot-child, my only purpose to reflect their sense of cleverness. It was the beginning of an external observation so intense it had no choice but to turn on itself like an ouroboros and become introspection; searching via the exploration of others. But neither she nor I could have imagined that as a woman, that line would be one I spoke to myself in the mirror; a plea to a self trapped within other selves, the whispering of bones in a catacomb of the living, the desire to clearly read the document of a life illegible while lived. Erich Auerbach, writing in Dante: Poet of the Secular World about the encounters in The Divine Comedy, remarks that they do not—could not—happen in life as we experience it, for “… the very intensity of life in the most vital moments makes self-awareness almost impossible.” In such a light, the attempt of searching for a meaning of self becomes akin to the eternal trials of the damned. It reminds me that at times throughout the Comedy, Dante offers the souls the temptation of bringing their names to the attention of the world once more in exchange for their story. Since I want no such indulgence, I ask myself what it is that I want: to make sense of my story, or find a perverse content in dividing myself into two selves; the listener and the storyteller? 

There seems to be an excess of bones in my life. Not just the envisioned ones of the numerous relations passed on, whether at the more or less expected times or tragically earlier, although what is familiar remains paradoxically what the unconscious recognises and stores as a kind of comfort, whether those bones are comforting or not. Cyril Connolly—writing as Palinurus—says in The Unquiet Grave, “[d]ead authors cry ‘Read me’; dead friends say ‘Remember me’; dead ancestors whisper ‘Unearth me’; dead places, ‘Revisit me’ …”

Not having been raised within the framework of any particular religion—my father having been a lapsed Lutheran, that lapse coinciding with a boyhood realisation that one of his former pastors had been a used-car salesman, the stereotype of a man selling junk as gold too strong not to be able to extricate from his new calling, and my mother Shinto, its quiet reflections existing in the peripheries of my thoughts—my mind has a peculiar fancy for collecting the bones and body parts of minor saints in the reliquaries of churches and basilicas I have visited, but also talismans of good fortune, written messages of protection, seemingly more ephemeral pieces of faith next to bodily remains, which are nevertheless bound to one another in the peculiar vanitas that hangs in my mind.

It may be that without any morbidity, I feel more kinship to the remains and relics of the living than the living themselves; the familiarity of silence often breeds intricate, if not more genuine communication—the epitome of intimacy. In Singed Daniela Cascella writes about the skulls of plague bodies kept underneath Santa Maria delle Anime del Purgatorio ad Arco in Naples, where women of the cult of the souls in Purgatory would, 

adopt a soul in the form of one of the many skulls … those women actually went and spoke to the skulls … believing they were addressing their adopted souls as they caressed and confided in them. More and more, they experienced their prayers as conversations of this world. Silence was turned out from within into muted conversations, as they truly believed they were talking to their other, silent side, in its most material presence.

In the times of my complete solitude, the silence of past years, I have imagined myself as bones, stripped of life because there was nothing enfolding them that resembled one like the lives around me. How does one confide in flesh when the flesh of others is unfamiliar? But unlike the women of Santa Maria, I have spent most of a life turning more and more inwards. If my silence has finally been turned out, it has been because the white, digital spaces of emails and Word documents remind me of bones, another place besides the recesses of my mind where I can speak to, question my other selves. 

I know that you don’t know.

What pieces of us are the truth, and which are the ones we wish ourselves to be—and in the end, does it matter? If our stories are clay, they are shaped by other people as well as the weather of experience, the things which are ugly or shameful often mythologised so that we become unrecognisable; monuments to the denial of being. To tell the truth is to know that there is none; not even in the end, after the various parts of you are reshaped and rewritten, to form a self—a story. 

When I started to write, it was a means to excavate a self long buried, turning each thought and piece of flesh the way one would a fragment of vessel or bone, brushing off the gravel and dust of the years past in an attempt to understand how I lived, who I was. To write oneself is to be, by default, unreliable. Ironically, to rewrite knowing that your narrative is palatable to some only if deliberately unreliable is a kind of reliability that is particularly, obtusely human. What started as an attempt at an explanation of self became a story, an exercise in finding and dusting off those fragments of myself; the piecing together of a bygone civilisation, gone but still standing, scattered and trapped between the living and memory, a Sebaldian journey through the ruins of selfhood. 

If a memoir is meant to be the truth as best we think we know it—and we often know a thing without ever truly understanding it—then as time went on with writing and waiting, I began to doubt more heavily: my truths, identity, the sum of my being. My experiences became shaped and reshaped by confusion until I became a complete fiction to myself, the deceitful pliability of I don’t know. Ask me if I have written the truth and I can only respond with I thought I had, knowing that there are others out there that might or would dispute my perspective entirely; that the times there were untruths, I pretended they were not in order to preserve the façade of an identity and relationships that were themselves untrue—that is, wholly false—in spite of their apparent existence. Palinurus again: “[u]nderneath the rational and voluntary world lies the involuntary, impulsive, integrated world, the world of Relation in which everything is one; where sympathy and antipathy are engrossed in their selective tug-of-war.” 

If to say I exist is a truism, then how can that be also false? Because the truth is, the vastness of identity is akin to a No Man’s Land, rarely so convenient as to be associated with a particular side. Instead, I have gone back and forth from one to another, but mostly I have spent a life muddied, unidentifiable, even obstinately inscrutable; if I am briefly accepted, it is never before long until I am on my way across that interminable grey land again. We understand what we recognise in others, and to some, that lack is too easily substituted; blank spaces are to be filled, to be accepted is to learn to become a mimic—the parrot-child, the greyness of the pliability that allows others to erase the don’t know that regardless of confusion belongs to us, replaced with an I that is anything but ours. 

I know that you know. 

W.G. Sebald’s narrator in Vertigo, on arriving in Milan: “… as I still remember with undiminished clarity, all of a sudden [I] no longer had any knowledge of where I was. Despite a great effort to account for the last few days and how I had come to be in this place, I was unable even to determine whether I was in the land of the living or already in another place.” The great Duomo replaced the churches that had stood before, although parts of the ruins remain; and as the new façade was built, I wonder if the effect was the same upon those who craned their necks to look upon it. The unsteadiness that accompanies the new, its jagged spires piercing old realities, just as it does in the book: “I climbed to the topmost gallery of the cathedral and from there, beset by recurring fits of vertigo, gazed out upon the dusky, hazy panorama of a city now altogether alien to me.” Both vertigo and déjà vu are a kind of loss of balance; one due to the physicality of the world, the other, its overlapping realities. I, too, have stood at the top of the Duomo, leaning against the slope of the roof, sick with the dizziness of height, but also with looking down at a dead city in August (most locals traditionally having decamped for one of the five lakes or abroad), stripped of an I that was instead replaced with Mrs; subsumed into an identity I did not want. I think I was dizzy during the entirety of my brief marriage but long relationship: the distant humour of realising, pressed against the hot stones of the rooftop in an attempt to quell the nausea, that being 5’2” next to his 6’2” had much the same effect, lost in the sweat that soaked the back of my shirt. 

My clarity of unknowing came just a few days later, struck with chicken pox, drifting in and out of consciousness for two weeks. In my fitful sleep—if one can call it that—the feeling, not the image, of being on the Duomo roof came back, over and over. The sick loss of balance, or was it simply the loss of who I was, not to be found again for almost fourteen years? It hardly mattered, for those years were an infinite loop; the loss of time, of identity, of sanity: I have been here before. It was not place that unsettled me as much as the searing doubt which clung to me like the Milanese heat, sticky and close, looking down upon a self I felt was familiar, but unknown. Sebald again: “Where the word Milan ought to have appeared in my mind there was nothing but a painful, inane reflex.”

I, mine, ours, the infinite loop as some great gear, its teeth forever bared. Doubt devours, but there is no rebirth as much as a recycling; the uncertainty and suspicion one has about oneself growing larger, feeding off what has been as well as what is to come. The déjà vu of doubt—that you have been here before, combined with the paralysis of imbalance—becomes a cacophonic prayer. The women of the netherworld of the Santa Maria with their skulls, but instead of silence, a never-ending scream. As Sebald says, the land of the living or another place? This is what it is to know that you don’t know. And maybe I can never be anything but unreliable: a liar, a manipulator, an ever-changing narrative. Pliable. To be a woman writing what she sees as truth is no different than to be one writing fiction, even simply speaking or thinking—all are queried, torn apart in an attempt to find the things we must be hiding. To write myself is to recognise that I and other women are fictive, but that within it is also truth. What I have always seen as a shameful pliability has more in common with incorruption, the term used to describe saints whose bodies have miraculously avoided the very mortal trait of decomposition. Read me. Remember me. Unearth me. Revisit me. 

For someone brought up in what could be described as an irreligious environment, it strikes me now that the religious imagery in different forms nevertheless saturated my young thoughts. In an art museum book, Mantegna’s St. Sebastian (patron saint of archers—when I declared I wanted to be one—an archer, not a saint—my grade-school teacher stood mystified ), shot through with arrows, carried a look on his face not quite one of suffering: instead, weary realisation of others; acceptance; the knowledge that there is no vindication for your knowledge—earthly, at any rate. In another old Time Life Science Library book exploring the physiology of the brain and myths regarding its belief, a photo of a painted carving from a medieval church: St. Dymphna, patron saint of a cornucopia of mental illnesses (everything from stress, anxiety, and sexual assault survival to the more enigmatically modern “wellness”), long golden hair coiled away from her face as she is beheaded by her father, a demon looking gleefully on. In both of them, it was the violence and helplessness of knowledge that struck me. Strangely, I would think of them when plagued and persecuted in the small sharp ways children learn to do. That I would silently combat the verbal violence against my name and face with even worse violent imagery in my head became a sort of balm; I would simply turn the pages in my thoughts to those saints. It was not until later, on a second visit to Japan as a child where I was taken to a temple, shown by my mother and a miko (Shinto priestess) how to hang omikuji—little paper fortunes—to the Japanese pines, that I would, if not completely shed my quietly violent coping, at least learn to occasionally temper it with a gentler one. Still, the dichotomy is yet another reminder that I exist in neither one sphere nor another. 

This is not to hold myself or others like me as saintlike, for I, at least, am all too human. But to become a saint is to first experience rejection—if it can be put so simply—and the saints had the benefit of knowing clearly that where they were cast out by one group, another was there to receive them. Truth lies, and lies hold more truths than one can ever know. This is where I exist: in neither and both, forever changing, never at rest. No Man’s Land, yes, but Purgatory? The latter suggests sin, and not having any strong—if any—religious faith, I recognise both sin as flaw, and flaw as human, but still reject the idea of being human as necessarily sin. What we cannot disentangle are the ideas that these flaws, or sins, are as much the result of projection as action; that one is mistaken for the other, what is incorrupt actually corrupt because we have the brutal human habit of hanging others (literally as much as metaphorically) in our flawed skin. To experience the vertigo, the déjà vu of the realities of others as ours is to be tied to the column, held by the hair, whispering to the bones, pressed back against the Duomo roof: I have been here before. The skulls and saints would agree: faith is nothing but another kind of loop, and as Walter Benjamin remarks on déjà vu in On Photography, “[i]t is a word, tapping or rustling that is endowed with the magic power to transport us into the cool tomb of long ago, from which the vault of the present seems to return only as an echo.”

I know that you know.

I spent a long time obsessed with the idea that if I wrote my “truth” it would be a way of erasing the damage of years; of feeling that I was nothing but a body of lies—despite being unaware of them, as if they emerged automatically from my lips, the result of a possession—when I was told repeatedly in fights that I was a fabricator. I thought that Truth in all its imagined glory would be a validation of the hurt and confusion, but in reality, it was not, and never can be, its reality being once again that grey space of No Man’s Land. If anything is a Purgatory, it is this: there may be no sin, but what is sin except the weight of feeling one has done wrong—is wrong? In the beginning, I let the act of writing bear the burden so much that rather than quelling my doubts, it made me ask again, over and over, just as I had in the days when I questioned my sanity, what was “real” and “reliable”: myself, my mind, or my life so far. I started to question my memories, lined up like the skulls of Santa Maria, caressing and cajoling them in the hope that what I remembered, was. But I fell apart in the smallest recollections: the memory of the omikuji, while real in the sense that I was there—I stare at the photo even now, looking at how my face concentrated on a branch as I tied the paper—is false, or not completely true, as for years I remembered it as writing messages to a deceased ancestor, not a pre-written fortune slip bought in a temple shop. Bad fortunes are tied to the trees, to be left behind, and so not come to pass. Did the paper I am tying to the pine in the photo foresee bad luck? Was my mother already complicit in wanting—quite naturally—to create a hopeful narrative for me? She made herself almost unobtrusive in my early upbringing, a quiet presence that did not speak as much as leave clues that would create a guiding form for me to instinctively follow, like the masks of the seven gods. Perhaps that is why to this day, she sends me omamori, amulets in the shape of little brocade pouches containing prayers for protection and luck. So this cuckoo memory, innocent and benign as it is, is no less disturbing than if I deliberately created an alternate explanation. 

As for Milan, I can be forgiven at least for being ill; despite not realising it at the time, I walked the city feverish, which I only attributed to my lack of acclimatisation. Nevertheless, the images that arise from that time I can grasp as strongly as a traveller reaching for the palms of a mirage: lizards at high noon darting from beneath vines on concrete, the aromatic decay of stone, mould, and incense, The Third Man on the television—Orson Welles, too, was a great questioner of one’s real and created narratives (and incidentally, born in the small town next to mine)—and even the black vertical lines of a grilled aubergine sandwich signalling a destiny of confinement. In this dead August season where almost no tourists came but I had, unknowing, the palatial hotel was but a house of ghosts. There was only one other guest, a lone man glimpsed sitting over a glass of beer at the bar, and where there should have been hundreds of employees catering to its guests, I saw no more than four, a skeleton staff rattling around the great green and black-marbled corridors. There is no longer anyone to corroborate these memories, but memories are all I have of that time. It seems to me that once the tethers of our reality are gone, those remembrances are at the whims—or mercy—of whatever it is inside of us that desires to create more lyrical narratives.  

The artist James Ensor’s oeuvre is filled with skulls and skeletons. While works like The Skeleton Painter (1896), with its mischievous skulls popping up and out from the back and foreground paintings surrounding the painter, and My Portrait in 1960 (1888), a sketch—himself a skeletal version in both—of the artist reclining with an enormous spider, are a humorous nod to the classical memento mori, they also recall the idea of the conversation with oneself—the future deceased, how complicit we are in building mythologies for ourselves, no matter how small. The bones have always known. But it is another painting of his, without any, that encapsulates what it feels to be between identities and realities: Bathing Hut (1876), a small canvas in muted blue, grey, and beige showing an abandoned, wheeled wooden bathing hut on an overcast beach, between sand and sea, the edge of both and neither. It has nowhere to go, and so what it is paradoxically cannot be, the perpetual state of greyness all too familiar. I have been here before. Truth be told, I am hesitant to look at my reflection during periods of writing, as if the staring image is my skeletal self, although less jovial than Ensor’s in its knowledge. For it is only now, in these years, that I sense the occasional undoing of the tethers of memory, and I must ask what looks back at me if all I have known is a consolation of survival, or if this is just the way of all our stories. 

A confession: after childhood, I had always shunned my photo being taken to the best of my ability. It was a record for others, but their memories felt out of sync with mine. I keep what I hold close—good or bad—in my mind and always thought that if there came a day where they were no longer there, what harm would there be? If they no longer existed in that space, it seemed pointless to have them exist anywhere else as they would hold no use for me, the image unable to acknowledge its reflection; without regret, this now seems like the hubris of mortality. In Understanding a Photograph, John Berger says “… remembered images are the residue of continuous experience, a photograph isolates the appearances of a disconnected instant.” What I had not anticipated was the metamorphosis of that residue, those ruins—its effects much like  funhouse distortions, ongoing changes in mental health, or drug-induced visions, as if who I remember was altered. I would compare myself to remembered fragments of modified realities from books and experiences: the artist Louis Wain’s increasingly fantastical and colourful cats, drawn during his steadily worsening possible schizophrenia; the abstract self-portraits of subjects under the influence of LSD, first recognisable, then nothing but a clash of angles; the queasiness from a carnival mirror that folded and stretched me like a piece of elastic until I would touch my body in a disbelieving attempt to quell the perceived dysmorphia. 

If the disconnected instant is like a fly in amber, then to live with memories is to stand on a precipice that disintegrates imperceptibly but constantly beneath your feet. Slowly, as these memory-realities shift I have come to realise writing them is no longer a static process of reportage, but a kind of drifting—the trust that the waves you no longer recognise will nevertheless bring you safely to the shore. No matter what they are, changes, tectonics, tricks of vision, they still connect these scattered versions of me. As Berger says again: “… meaning is not instantaneous. Meaning is discovered in what connects, and cannot exist without development. Without a story, without an unfolding, there is no meaning.” It is still unclear why I prefer the fluid to the fixed, but perhaps it is simply that I like how the rereading of my story becomes slightly different every time, precarious though it may be.

I don’t know/I know.

I have seen what was then overlap with what is now, further confusing my ideas of what might be true and false; hesitating over what is present, real—the shudder of vertigo again. I first visited Florence over ten years ago for my ex-sister-in-law’s wedding; a scheduled day trip for the guests before the ceremony and dinner further out in the Tuscan countryside. As with everything then, time consists of shards that attempt to puzzle together, not unlike little Kay’s ice fragments in Andersen’s fairy tale “The Snow Queen”. I remember narrow streets, occasionally running into the rest of the bridal party on strange corners, espressos that heightened palpitations I thought were nerves but would later discover were due to a faulty thyroid, and the elaborate inlay of the façade of the basilica of Santa Maria Novella, designed by Leon Battista Alberti. Most of all, I remember walking down an otherwise grey, nondescript street off the Piazza where the basilica sits and coming across the perfumery/apothecary Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella. Founded in 1221, it is an apothecary in the most ancient sense: amongst other things, in the shop you can find elixirs for everything from after-dinner drinking (Elisir di Rose Liqueur), digestive complaints, and tributes to the Medici (Elisir Stomatcio and Mediceo Liqueur, the former containing saffron, the latter, lemon balm and marjoram). I remember deliberating in a very real sweat—although the high-ceilinged room was silent and cool—over several perfumes, finally choosing their Gardenia, a simple sweet green floral, and Tabacco Toscano, a richer, spiced tobacco. The trip itself was marked with so many problems that even now I think this is the reason I can only remember it in the jagged way I do. As I have said, I was there for a wedding, and the nature of the rota fortunae is that if one is riding at its top, then others must be rotating towards the bottom. This distribution by the universe makes sense: by this time—a matter of only a couple of years—our own marriage was secretly dissolved, although we remained together for a decade, and we went about the city trying to keep the masks of normalcy from slipping. Like the Duomo’s spires, the reality of my new unrevealed relationship pierced me constantly, shaking not only my belief but the very way I observed the world. 

He was convinced the Florentine merchants were taking advantage of him, which led me to feel ill with the anxiety of confrontation on entering any establishment. Starting to be afflicted by an increasing unknown weight gain, I would look at my reflection in windows and not recognise myself, and my already-problematic shyness manifested as a terror of speaking to the myriad distant relations, resulting in memories of emotions and objects rather than people’s faces or actions. A glass of vin santo for toasting which coated my mouth and throat with the syrupy realisation of others’ happiness; the cold of the stone hallway in the castello as I walked barefoot, heels in one hand, a torn dress hem of silk gauze in the other; the long wave of dizziness at a small family dinner in an unknown village, where the musky scent of black truffles enfolded me so relentlessly that I gripped the rough-hewn wooden table and looked at the faces around me that ran into one another in a swirling wash of colour; unused to my contacts, I experienced a problem with depth perception that resulted in feeling as if I were walking off a cliff at every step or curb; a post-wedding portrait where I sat off on the side of the terrace, oblivious to my requirement—unconsciously I did not consider myself part of the family—until I was angrily gestured at to join, a photo I was later cropped from; the nights that were worst of all, two strangers in bed, repelling each other to its edges now that the electricity was gone. When I left it never occurred to me I would ever come back to the country, so laden with bad memory. Alberti’s thinking on building restoration in On the Art of Building in Ten Books applies just as well to the attempt to write and understand oneself by memory—after all, the mind is a repository:

If we are to discuss the faults of building and their correction, we ought first to consider the nature and type of the faults … Of the faults, some are integral and inherent, as it were, and the responsibility of the architect, while others result from outside influence; they may be further divided into those which can be corrected by some form of art or ingenuity and those for which there is no remedy … Some are faults of the mind … Of the mind are displaced, dispersed, or confused selection ...

Faults. There was a time not long ago when I viewed not only writing about myself but how I tried to go about it as a series of faults. Ones of remembrance, others of the assembling of narrative (the inherent and the integral), still others of how people’s perception might distort it, and how those distortions would then impact me. Simplistic as it may be to recognise myself in such terms, it is nevertheless beneficial: a good life may be said to be a useful one; not just to others, but to the self. I have since thought the best I could do with these ‘faults’ would be to consider them as pieces to be assembled. If they appeared useless to begin with, they now have new purpose. A fallen building can be rebuilt, a scattered puzzle arranged again. The trick is not only in the reconstruction—the repurposing of what was known as faults, but the perspective of the builder or architect to consider the ruin’s context as the beginnings of remedy; perhaps this is the most important part. Things that were displaced and dispersed can come back together to form the new but only if one can imagine themselves so. 

There are people who consider their foundation, whether it be family, place, identity, immovable and indestructible. And there are others who, when faced with uncertainty, destruction, or the unknown in regard to this foundation, leave. Why? Perhaps it is the fantasy that somewhere they will be able to create a foundation for themselves that is what they have perceived others’ to be. I have been the latter. If I had thought ruins could be restored, regardless of where I might go, then equally, I had forgotten that it was not a matter of empty space, new identity, distance from what was. I had forgotten I was those ruins—memories of lives I had led and left. Like the new façade of the Duomo, and Alberti’s similar work on the basilica of Santa Maria Novella, what would be new would also forever keep what had been, close. The architect imagines what can be but looks at what was. Six marble tombs of nobility were part of the latter’s old façade, and Alberti’s solution “remembered” the past by incorporating it into the new design. If I wished myself to be the architect and designer of my narrative, then the fantasy of the blank page, new ground was just that. There is always old ground, ruins, stories wherever one tries to create anew. Just as Sebald’s narrator comes into Milan barely knowing where he is, each time I came to a new place, whether it was Milan, London, Paris, or Florence, I could never shake the feeling that wherever I went, my ruins were always visible. Just beyond the façades of churches, shops, hotels, and other buildings, were the remains of lives I had tried to build and abandoned. 

Strangely, part of reconstruction for me was the remembrance of yet another ruin: an aunt and uncle who divorced after the death of an almost-adult child. But the strongest memory was not of the family unit and its unravelling, but instead of the home they had made for themselves. For years as I was growing up, they had been in the process of rebuilding a house. While most of it was finished, what remained undone was an en-suite bathroom in the master bedroom—specifically, a sauna, whose purpose I remained unclear about, although that might have been because I couldn’t yet conceive of the decadence of it in a home. Every time we visited, I would tiptoe around as children do, freely gazing at the way others live. As they were well-off, I had a fascination with the new appliances, modern fittings, and the accoutrements of people invested in consumerism: an ice-cube maker in the refrigerator, rose-shaped mini bath soaps with matching coloured hand towels, a bowl of multi-coloured glycerine bath oil beads, frosted cocktail glasses, a sunken den with a two-way visible fireplace. The en-suite was too glaringly lit, space-like, starkly white-and-black—something out of the end scenes of 2001, only with early 80s décor. I would always stare fascinated through the glass door by the bath, into the partially wood-panelled room, the pile of remaining slats stacked on the unfinished floor. On one visit my cousins and I, playing, discovered hornets flying into the en-suite. The adults immediately sent us off and shut the bedroom in an effort to try and locate the nest. Even at that young age (no doubt brought on by an explanation of nest-building) a vague idea stirred in me that they were coming to finish the mysterious sauna room. The nest, found under the eaves, was not destroyed if I remember correctly, but removed far into the nearby woods. The sauna would remain as it was, half-formed, for years, and eventually I became bored of looking in on its non-progression on my visits. I have always wondered if whoever bought the house after the family dissolved—for it always seemed a more appropriate description than broken, all of them gradually melting away from our lives and then in various ways, life itself—ever finished building it. 

In late 2017 I found myself back in Italy and only a couple of hours away from Florence. Already in a completely new life with no ties to the old, I nevertheless also experienced that familiar vertigo, although at other moments it was like watching two things on a split screen: the past, the present, all happening at once. At times the force of it would make me so dizzy I would shut my eyes, willing only the now to gain visibility in both sight and memory. Even though we lived closer to Siena, a place untainted by my past, it was inevitable that I would step foot in Florence again. Having mentally prepared myself, the loss of memory-balance was only mild, but still there in the strangest ways: the intense déjà vu upon arriving at the corner of two streets I did not know by name but feeling; the laughter in my head of the too-raucous wedding group causing locals to stare. I sat at an outdoor café table with my party of ghosts and a slice of cake, willing them away with each insertion of the fork. Coming out of a narrow street almost at the opening of the Piazza and looking up to see a murmuration of starlings, ultra-black against the streaked dark pink of the late autumn sky at dusk. The word also means to murmur—there I was, a woman of the skulls, wheeling round my own head, following the low and ceaseless keening. There was the basilica again, the station, the streets I once argued on, footsteps of my past and present crossing—or rather, colliding, the person I was then such a stranger as to seem fictional to who I was in that moment; I almost said pardon me. Between the two screens of my selves, I chose the land of the living, but I still acutely sense the static of that old life. 

Berger, following Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on reproduction and art in Ways of Seeing speaks of the fragmentation that happens to an image as a result of its reproduction—how its meaning and context changes. And I cannot help but think that this also applies to memory, both my own and how I reside in others’. That the idea that I was ever, or could be a singularity, is false. He also warns of the dangers of mystification, ascribing a fixed meaning to an object or image that both obscures and denies the ability to consider them in infinite variety. Here I wonder if I have mystified myself, as he says, “in an atmosphere of entirely bogus religiosity.” I am speaking of myself in the context of religion, ones that I do not practice, but nevertheless see similarities in. Berger again:

Works of art are discussed and presented as though they were holy relics: relics which are first and foremost evidence of their own survival. The past in which they originated is studied in order to prove their survival genuine.

What I have attempted—am attempting—to understand in myself is perhaps an impossibility. The image as he describes cannot self-regard, and so regardless of or in spite of its past, its context and meaning will forever change, so long as it is not static; available to others. But I am both static and reproduced, the eternal contradiction of the solitary who might not exist presently to others but has previously. And so a slight—if there can be such a thing—mystification is necessary to place me in the world, in a history, whether it is mine as I recall it, or if I attempt to view myself as others do; hence the impossibility. But Berger is right in that I am bestowing myself with this mystification in order to prove my past existence and present survival. 

However, the mind is not without its sense of humour. Today, for no particular reason, I layered two of my perfumes. Even though I do not consciously consider it in my daily application, if I have spoken of ruin and reconstruction, my tray of bottles must be as indicative of this, as scent is forever associated with memory. And true to the idea of some having unshakeable foundations, there are people who remain faithful to a single perfume. In my life, I must have worn hundreds and tried thousands. Just as we form immediate impressions and at other times take longer to warm to others, it is the same with perfume. The ones I have worn with any frequency are imprinted in my memory, marking times, places, and events, both joyful and negative. Some I cannot revisit, despite the undeniable olfactory logic that they still smell beautiful. This is what happened with the bottles of Gardenia and Tabacco Toscano from Santa Maria Novella—I hid them away in a drawer after my return from that first Florence trip, occasionally tried to wear them, and finally sold them, having to admit that all they smelled of was deceit and failure. Emotion turned them sour on my skin—not literally, but in my mind. Just as anyone in love or broken up finds certain connected songs especially attractive or unbearable, the brain often enhances or amplifies aspects of a perfume depending on its current or past memories. But I have taken from those scented ruins and rebuilt a love for certain notes, for my tray now holds Fleurs de Gardenia by Creed, a musky peony and gardenia. I have had inexplicable responses to some perfumes, such as Calandre by Paco Rabanne, a cold, melancholy wind of a scent that made me burst into tears with an unknown sadness on first smelling it. There are yet others which I can wear in memory only, due to their reformulation beyond my original memory recognition, like Coco by Chanel, a precious bottle of extrait that was my first “adult” perfume. The scents I layered today were Madeleine by Parfumerie Particulière, based on Proust’s madeleine, with heliotrope and bitter almond; the other, Belle Epoque by the same perfumer, absinthe, with mugwort and licorice. It only occurred to me later that this was some dark joke of memory at my expense: if eating one is remembrance, then drinking the other is an attempt at forgetting—the distant gaze of the female subject of L’Absinthe (Dans un café) by Degas.

Such is the ongoing combative relationship with my psyche that it even seeps into olfactory pleasure, a reminder that one never really forgets when the senses retain their own recollections. Nevertheless, I am amused by this enough to forever after combine the two when I wear them—a madeleine dipped in absinthe, something that strikes me as not unlike Tennyson’s lotus eaters: “All things are taken from us, and become/Portions and parcels of the dreadful past … /To muse and brood and live again in memory”. Memory is an island we want to simultaneously leave and remain shipwrecked on. 

In the title story of the collection Notes on Jackson and His Dead by Hugh Fulham-McQuillan, a documentary filmmaker follows a conductor who suffers from the strangest of afflictions: he sheds life-sized copies of himself. Of course, Jackson has only a finite number of selves, and some day he will have no more, be no more. “If he doesn’t find his meaning soon, he will die a death of fragmentation.” But until then, he is monitored by the narrator, tracing the patterns of his study’s anger and thoughts left in bodies, the most literal illustration of what it means to be divided by the self. Imaginary as he is, Jackson’s relentless torrent of selves struck me in a way I have felt with very few of the living. He and I may not fully understand what it is to be multitudes, but there is nevertheless a kind of acceptance, and when even that is lacking, a resignation that is still not wholly unpleasant. “It is astonishing how quickly he fills up a room with all those past selves.” When we say we enjoy the company of others, it is an element of ourselves we are entertained by in them; if so, then it seems wholly honest to admit that the pleasure, indifference, or hatred of the company of the self is acknowledging that I is an almost infinite we. And if we were to be completely truthful, I think if a tally were kept every time we were in some sort of emotional or psychological flux, that we would find that many of us would surpass Jackson’s output. It seems not inconceivable in writing close to the bones of one’s life, whether consciously or not, that we are simply tallying our various selves. In “The Snow Queen,” Little Kay’s ice puzzle is only complete when he can spell “eternity”. I had wondered over this for years, not understanding. It was only a few years ago that I realised that it meant finding a stillness with those selves. They and I have kept each other company for so long, that even in the times of what should have been loneliness, there was instead solitude—an odd sort where you are alone, but not. 

What, in the end, is truth in the context of a memoir or what we call autofiction? There is very little that can be verified, proved to such a point where everyone agrees a thing is true. The reader must trust the writer—and the writer must ultimately place their trust in the fallibility and fluidity of memory. Unlike Jackson’s selves, I have no physical copies of who I was at any given point in time, no external documenter—I must believe my own perspective, the very thing I have distrusted, knows me better than I do myself.  If it seems strange to refer to myself in so detached a manner, I have come to think we can only write ourselves to the most accurate degree from a distance. If experiences and people seem blurred at times, then an expectation that every memory in one’s life be perfectly clear at all times of recollection seems an impossibility, in spite of how we generally hold on to the idea that a stark and believable clarity of lived life is truth. In painting, one might say it was the difference between the static style of an Egyptian frieze, and as is discussed in the BBC documentary “Apples, Pears and Paint,” the painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s technique of blurring as a realistic reflection of how we see the world. Professor Norman Bryson notes Chardin recognises that “the eye does not see everything with the same degree of vigilant high focus … there will be one, two, or maybe three perches for the eye to rest on where things are in high focus, and the rest will be blurry.” After all, even the saints’ bones on display in the home of Dr. Winkler in the book version of The Third Man were false, the unremarkable remains of chickens and rabbits. This is never clarified in the movie, as bones are replaced with more obvious religious statuary, and so feels like a secret between the author, Graham Greene, and viewers who have read the story. Despite the message of false honesty the statues are meant to convey, they know that the bones are a truer, more complex representation of the duality—as well as duplicity and complicity—of Harry Lime and his co-conspirators. It is the holy narrative applied to them that remains the unshakeable, “high focus” truth. Knowledge and understanding are as much about the letting go as they are about attempting to see everything in the same way; what we choose to focus on is ever-changing.

As we know too well, situations are often considered binary, and so a person must be either good or bad, guilty or innocent. You tell a story as truthfully as you can, but accept the fiction of truth and vice versa as an inevitable part of the process of both the varied unreliability of memory and writing. In doing so, you allow the nuances and shadows and in-between parts of your life to dictate the narrative. In writing autofiction—strictly speaking of my own experience—the fragments of what is real become a kind of foundation, a springboard for possibility. Whether it is what we wished to happen, pure fantasy, or another but deliberately more fictitious method of organising our chronologies and mythologies, we are the holy narrative; all other things are simply the chicken and rabbit bones that become transformed. In Lucia Berlin’s memoir Welcome Home, she writes about how she had once written of Yelapa, Mexico—where she had lived—in the story “La Barca de la Ilusión”. The narrator’s husband in the story is an ex-addict, or rather, trying to remain so. As Berlin continues in her memoir:

And then, as if addiction had sent out loud heartbeat messages, the drug dealers began to show up … Whispers in our garden, laughter in the dark by the datura tree.

Berlin’s third husband Buddy had also been an addict, seduced back to morphine and heroin by her glamorous clifftop-dwelling neighbour Peggy, who may or may not be portrayed as the wealthy, clifftop-dwelling Alma or the wife of Sam Newman in the title story of Evening in Paradise, another story taking place near Yelapa and both involving Victor, a drug dealer who is mentioned by the same name in the memoir. I read the passages on Yelapa simultaneously with the two stories and became dizzy. No doubt it was only from moving my head from one book to another, but at some point the two seemed to overlap invisibly, like secret maps, or Jackson’s discarded copies if they had had the ability to walk and interact with each other. I am unsure if the stories from Evening in Paradise or her stories in general are considered autofiction more than fiction, but it hardly matters. To Berlin, a story is as innate as blood and just as vital; the consciousness of writing reality or a variation of it of less importance than knowing it flows through your veins. 

In a 2015 New Yorker essay on Berlin, Lydia Davis, quotes a son of Lucia’s: “Our family stories and memories have been slowly reshaped, embellished and edited to the extent that I’m not sure what really happened all the time. Lucia said this didn’t matter: the story is the thing.” Later on, Davis says of her, “She said the story had to be real—whatever that meant for her.” Then quoting Berlin again: “Somehow there must occur the most imperceptible alteration of reality. A transformation, not a distortion of the truth. The story itself becomes the truth, not just for the writer but the reader.” A transformation. Skulls to souls; ordinary people to saints; animal bones to relics; new buildings from ruins; the literal shedding of selves; the constant, shimmering, shifting of reality, like ripples on water. It is true that I know and I don’t know can be distortions, but that transformation only comes with a kind of control, as Davis notes again, “Some part of her mind … must always have been in control …” However, Berlin rejected stories she deemed “false”—not an indication of holding her particular style of writing to a true-false binary, but rather to one where false is deemed to be inauthentic; to put it speculatively, not being able to feel the story in her bones, whatever self they belonged to. 

I know.

How do we ever make sense of these fragments and murmurs, overlaps and shivers of instinct? Their very logic is counter to everything we have come to understand makes up a life: a perfectly ordered timeline, the perfect arc, a path you can see from beginning to end. Yet what few lives have ever had the luxury of that banality—and how we still insist the celebrated life remains straight, ordered, clear; a design which overlooks humanity generally, but even more so those of us who were not born with those narrative architectures in mind. In a recent New York Review of Books review of the exhibition “Tetsuya Noda: My Life in Print” (works from the series Diary), Eve Sneider notes something interesting about the Japanese artist’s work: 

… Noda stamps his thumbprint in the bright red hanko ink traditionally used for personal seals. This stamp is a guarantee of the work’s authenticity, but not necessarily of the truth of its subject matter. Noda isn’t interested in documenting what happened or telling us a story that coheres over time. Instead, his Diary is a testimony to the way our perceptions and memories are constantly evolving.

Reading that made me think once again about how glimpses into half of the culture I am have always come with an immense relief; suddenly there is a way of seeing that makes sense when applied to the way I have thought all these years, alone in my head. I know that you know I know. The Ma of the self—it seems on the face of it to be the same as the No Man’s Land I have described before, but one is synonymous with conflict, the other, stillness. I have been obsessed with seeing myself as whole, when how I should have viewed myself all this time—or understood, for there is never any doubt that I have looked but not seen—is blurred and in-between. But maybe it is the truth that one needs to look at what the multiple parts of oneself see as ruins, or an abyss, before one—or the multiple parts of oneself—can come to see them instead as shapes and spaces to become. Authenticity is possibility, and possibility lies in the vastness of Ma, something everyone I have spoken of here knew, or knows. The Ma of life and death, true and false, the not yet and to become, the self. There is Ma in all the variations of knowing and not knowing, too. To let the reader conflate the clear and blurred; like the starlings of Florence, to wheel inside the spaces of my life, projecting themselves with all their expectations and flaws into me, questioning what is and isn’t in the hope that they will also ask beyond—the words, the life, themselves, to reach the depths of what it means to be, become. 

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Tomoé Hill's writing has appeared in such publications as The London Magazine, Lapsus Lima, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, 3:AM Magazine, Music & Literature, and Numéro Cinq, as well as the anthologies We'll Never Have Paris (Repeater Books), Azimuth (Sonic Art Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University), and Trauma: Essays on Art and Mental Health (Dodo Ink). Twitter: @CuriosoTheGreat