The Blind Staircase

Brian George

Will Barnet, Creature, 2008

Because the axis mundi is an idea that unites a number of
concrete images, no contradiction exists in regarding multiple spots
as "the center of the world."—New World Encyclopedia

1

My earliest coherent memory goes back to the age of three. It emerges from the dark, clear after sleep, its freshness reflecting the hours of the day during which the events took place. Before this were only images or sensations with no story to connect them. Although I perhaps experienced myself as the omnipotent ruler of a world, this ceremonial function was not yet accompanied by any autonoetic—or "self-aware"—awareness. All memories took the form of habits, whose lengthening shadows were projected towards the future. Then too, it was possible that these things had happened a great many times before, but I was only just starting to figure out again how one thing followed from another, how a story must be forgotten in order to be told, how my growth was a cryptic pattern of retrieval.

So: the hour of emergence would soon take me by surprise. Whatever the traumas that had echoed through the dark, the whole of the world looked fresh, as if scrubbed clean by a flood, which had left, even for those who could determine where to look, only a handful of small traces. I could no longer see from one side of the planet to the other. On my belly, a healed scar, now invisible beneath my shirt. On a spider web, a few water droplets sparkled.

There was a time in my life when I got up early, often before the sun rose. I was as eager to get out of bed then as I am reluctant to do so now. There was so much to see, and, although time did not really yet exist, there was not a moment to waste.  Like the birds, I responded to a signal in the dark that announced that a change was imminent. A voice called me out of bed to celebrate the perpetual moment of transition, in which the objects of the day were lifted, dripping, from the oceanic night. In the background, I could hear a few atonal squeaks, as if from cities on the ocean floor. Now, the hands reaching from the depths had simply faded from my view. The screams of the countless millions who had been ripped out of their lives were not audible behind the bass drone of the currents. The past was over, and the stage had been cleared to make room for my appearance. What a surprise it was to discover that the voice I heard was my own, as a song burst from my throat.

My family had just moved to a white, 17th century farmhouse, in need of paint and buzzing with wasps, located on Bacon St. in Natick, Massachusetts. Stairways led up and down, twisted at odd angles, then ended abruptly in blank walls. As I later learned, these were designed to create confusion during an attack by the Nipmuk or Wampanoag Indians, and, by stopping the straight lines of their energy in its tracks, provide precious moments for an underground escape. Such subterfuge of design was common for houses built in that period. It was a time when Natick was an outpost on the westernmost edge of the frontier, a no-man's land where the authority of the Calvinist Elect broke down, the beginning of the savage, if seductively beautiful, wilderness.

I knew none of these things when I was three, of course, when we first moved to the house with the blind stairways, but that mysterious house and the fields around it were a true frontier to me, whose dangers were wonders, and whose objects served as supernatural signs. Natick was still very much a wilderness, waiting for one child to discover it.

2

Arthur Dove, Willows, 1940

Echoing my song, birds were singing on the roof. Branches swayed. A wasp buzzed, beating against the window, as light streamed through the tiny, 17th century panes of glass. The monsters beneath the bed had disappeared; I checked. There were only several toys with a spider-web stretched between them, on which a collection of mummified insects, moved by a draft through the floorboards, fluttered, awaiting the next step in the cycle of rebirth.

The house itself was quiet, as though emptied of its living inhabitants to make room for the dead. Sunlight fell on the floor in geometric shapes, laying down a path for me to follow. I spun in circles, bounded down the convoluted stairs, as if down the helix of a DNA molecule, and then, on the first floor, I paused to listen to the loud ticking of a clock. It seemed possible that this was the same ticking that I had first heard underwater, the ticking that, so recently, had challenged my heart to beat. At first faint, and seeming to belong to no one in particular, the sound was now as loud as that from a large drum. From "tick tick" to "boom boom," its call to arms was all but impossible to ignore. The clock seemed determined to have its way. I did not choose to oppose it.

An explosive nexus of energy, I had not a care in the world. My hand rested on the door handle, which the presence behind the hand then turned. The door swung open. It needed oil. The scent of lilacs hung in the air. A shadow moved before my feet, which was connected, in some yet to be specified way, to the movements of my body. The path of the keyhole in the sunlight led quickly from my door. There were no real boundaries. There were no rules that the omnipotent ego should be expected to obey. I could not be hurt. I did not remember that I had a mother or a father.

Like a one-inch sun, gymnastic, and crackling with atomic force, some future version of myself observed these actions from a branch. The sky was open, and every tree translucent. The ringing music of the spheres was still present as an echo. No doubts clouded the field of non-local correspondences.

For one further moment I stopped to play in the back yard, an area with which I had become all too familiar, whose magic had been exhausted. Without a thought I continued on, over the weathered wood of the fence, which, if you were not careful, would attempt to leave a large splinter in your hand. Once over it, I set off across a vast, uncharted wilderness, parting the tall grasses as I went. Grasshoppers chirped, in a wave. I could see them rubbing their legs together. Snakes tied themselves into pretzels. At the edges of my vision, treasures dug themselves up.

I knew where I was going, more or less, if not exactly how to get there. In the middle of nowhere, or so it seemed to me, a cannon from the Revolutionary War had long ago been left. I now consider: With its ragged weeds, the field towards which I was heading had never been a town square, or a park, and there was no good reason for a cannon to have been there. Perhaps, in the aftermath of some battle, it had simply been left where it fell. Or, after growing from a point, perhaps it had crash-landed, like an asteroid.

Its wheels were broken. Rust could be pulled from its eight-foot barrel in small flakes or large sheets. The object of my pilgrimage was all the more interesting, of course, for its state of total disrepair. It was a living relic, the occult antidote to amnesia, a sleeping giant inexplicably ignored by the rest of the human race. In spite of its sad condition, it had enough power to draw me forward, irresistibly, as towards a magnet. Lashed by ghosts, I was a Viking explorer haunted by the scent of magnetic North.

Who knows how long I played there? It was three or possibly four hours. I had been drawn towards the light at the far side of a tunnel, and then through a series of passageways, passageways that were neither inside nor outside of the landscape. And then, just in front of me, I found the cannon for which I searched. This was the mystery that had pulled me through the keyhole, the presence that had led me to believe myself an orphan.

An adult might look once and in passing at the cannon, recall some historical footnote, and then move on. He might pause to light a cigarette. If he had a camera, he might lift it to snap a photograph. Unsettled by the rustling of the field, he might shiver and then turn to look around him. But as a child I found no end of associations to explore, as well as stories to act out, in the presence of such a fascinating object.  Then too, it was helpful that they had left the cannon at the center of the world, in a spot that no one had judged to be important. There was nothing to prevent my occupation of the field! It was an odd spot, certainly, in which to have placed Omphalos, which now looked like a half -healed scar.

So: what did I do for those three or four hours? I really do not know. Was I lifted from the Earth, transported to a sphere of pure consciousness, from which the whole of our galaxy appeared no bigger than a pinhead, and then, after being taught how to play a glass harmonica by the birds, returned to my own body several hours later? A large spider web vibrated on the branches of a bush. The field buzzed, and the clouds crackled. There is a gap between what I know and what I am able to communicate. Filling me with warmth, both then and now, my encounter with the cannon resonates with a kind of radioactive glow.

3

Zdzisław Beksinski, Untitled, 1985

When I at last wandered home, at nine o'clock or so, having been away since the sun came up, my father, on the edge of tears, exploded. He and my mother had been worried, to say the least, wondering if I had been kidnapped by a pedophile or had crashed through rotted boards into a well. All of a sudden, I was standing at the door, perfectly at peace, with no good explanation of what I had been doing for three and one-half hours. My stomach felt hollow, and I thought, perhaps, that it might be time to eat. It took me totally by surprise that my parents would be upset.

Was I carefully supervised? I guess that I must have been. Did I automatically ask permission before setting off on an adventure? Given my behavior on that day, this seems far less likely. As I grew, I must have responded to rewards or threats, but only to the extent that these forced me to modify my behavior. Compliance was not the same as understanding, nor did it imply acceptance of the false authority of my parents. My parents were simply present, as was the early morning light and the songs of birds and the house silent but for the ticking of a clock and the all too familiar yard and the call of the field beyond. Space was open, a tactile mystery that flowed through me more or less without impediment. My father's anger must have served in its way as a ritual act of violence, the catalyst that called forth armies from a seed, the Aztec knife that separated the once half-conscious world from the self, the once half-conscious self from the other. 

I can deduce that my father did not too often lose his temper, at least with me. I know this because of my shock at his reaction to my absence. At the time, there seemed no limit to his anger. In retrospect, and as a parent, I realize that he probably fought with himself for some small edge of control. Against his desire for emotional catharsis. he seems to have measured out his words. I cannot hear or visualize every detail of the punishment. It did not involve physical violence, of that much I am certain. I do know that I was made to sit on my toy box, without a toy, and with my face turned to the corner for what seemed like an interminable stretch. Such a punishment would have been reasonable, to be sure; it was also far beneath the dignity of the ruler of a field. "Do you know that you did something very, very wrong?" my father asked. No, I did not know any such thing.

The full weight of my father's disapproval was the worst part of the punishment. This was the first time I remember feeling truly separate from my parents, as well as from the world, and even from my own sense of adventure. For the first time, perhaps, I wanted to go back instead of forward. I wanted to withdraw from the searchlight of my father's stare, which was terrifying. Even when he had finally turned it to the side, it had not ceased to threaten to turn me into an object.

4

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1942

Did phenomena exist before the day of the blind staircase, on which a child provoked his father to build a tower out of anger? The father is now dead. The child is himself a father. Those phenomena now belong to the self as other, close at hand, but forever out of reach, and not to the self as investigative eye. They exist as habits, as encoded modes of action, as opaque metaphysical moods, but no exercise can really lift them above the surface of the ocean. Glyphs metastasize, producing a new pantheon of gods. A Paleolithic murder haunts my autonoetic awareness.

The memory of that day stirs paradoxical emotions. The first sensations are those of early sunlight, of joy, of a red rip in the fabric of creation, of the horizon cracking open like an egg, of treasures excavated by a song, of the triumph of the omnipotent ego, of morning mist steaming from the grass. A bittersweet aftertaste soon follows on the tongue. I had not known that my parents were fighting, with an escalating intensity, all throughout this period. Monsters danced beyond the coordinates of my hypnagogic dream. Unconscious of the context I inhabited, I awoke from play, suddenly, to find my feet frozen at the edge of an abyss.

Soon my parents would separate, and I would see my father once or twice a year, if that. One morning he was gone, or we were. The world broke, like a wheel. It was no longer new. From Larchmont, New York, my father had once sent a birthday present. He accidentally wrote the address in Ugaritic cuneiform, and so the box did not make it all the way to Worcester. Great cracks had opened in the rich mud of the flood-plain. There were pools of coldness. You could feel the weakness of the disincarnate teachers as they begged us for fresh victims, for a few more drops of blood. Much has happened since that morning in 1957. A golden sadness has attached itself to the day of my encounter with the cannon. An angry father is better than one who has disappeared.

When I was twelve, my father would move to a house on La Avenida de Los Insurgentes, in Mexico City, to start a company and a replacement family. I would never visit this 24-room mansion, with its red tile roof, with its Romanesque fountain spurting in the courtyard, or have iced tea served to me by a passive-aggressive maid. I would be 23 years old, married, and out of art school before I saw the three-dimensional version of Robert George again. The images of that distant morning are immediate. Pointing towards the interdependent arising of the void, each object is a sign that designates not one but many things.