5 February 2013
A new project of mine. It's a bit lengthy but bare with!
Chapter 1 I heard once that happiness is a function of accepting what is. To those at Schwernheim that couldn't have been more true. Those who resign themselves to insanity babble on, absorbed in the beauty of imaginary birds, in the Messiah's face upon their toast, to the humming enigma of peace moving so fast that it is still. Those who fight their demise shatter this ideal, smearing dear and anguish on the bland white walls. Making one's safe-haven their prison, one's Mecca their gallows, making the tranquil deafeningly sinister and unnerving. Adding the eye to the storm. To a child it is all simply fiction, ushered in by the lullaby of his mother's car engine and the squeak of old gates, guarding a strange, twisted Eden of sorts within. Whether it's a dream or a nightmare depends on who speaks that day. I grew up among these creatures, brooding griffins and whispering nymphs who spoke if washing the Pope's feet in the pond out the back of keeping bees in their cold steel wardrobes. Yes, Schwernheim was a strange cradle and a warped playground for a child. But where better to raise a boy than where the brightest and darkest hours of life are married in such blissful cacophony as cannot be placed in this world? Oh the places you may go my friend, the greatest wonders you may see and seek to bottle as we humans so often do to enjoy at our own leisure, yet until you've witnessed such things as my young eyes did you cannot say you've seen it all. For there is nothing quite so splendid and twinkling, so enchanting yet repulsive as a madman. My mother was a nurse there and I her only child. My father had run off for God knows what although when you looked around our village on the foothills of the German Alps you perhaps got the sense that he wasn't wrong to go. Those who stayed in Biel never achieved much. In Biel you could be a dreamer but never one to realise your dreams. Life there wasn't bad of course, some would even go so far as to say idyllic what with the view of those majestic monuments to the Creator crowned with line and snow, ruling over their subjects in Biel's squares and cottages and farms. But for those who want more those monuments are unyielding, bearing down and booming 'Step up or shut up' through boughs and branches of the firs. I suppose Father stepped where many before him had shut up like a clam, shut out those dreams that made them wonder if they could go farther, reach higher and pull a star down for breakfast. For that, I suppose, I commend him. I bear no other feelings to a man I never knew so I guess some respect should be due. For us though, Biel was just fine. It was what lay just beyond Biel, nestled safely among the firs, which we in essence lived for. The Schwernheim Santorium had terrorised local villagers since 1856 just as Grimm's wolves and witches had terrorised them but decades before. The unknown seems to rule up some unearthly reaction in man, making him vicious and anxious beyond compare and our association with the unknown stigmatised us to some degree. Mystery had always swirled around Schwernheim like some foul mist, a devilish castle where the most disturbed and damned where caged up, cackling, screaming and clawing, hungry for just a scrap of your flesh. Stories still hung from it's gothic turrets of patients, reduced to cannabalism, roaming the woods after somehow breaking out, luring young children by with tunes played on flutes and panpipes fashioned from human bone. Children are the most tender after all. Of course that was not the case. The institution, housed in the home of some long-forgotten baron, simply served as a place to put people whom no-one understood. To mother it was a job, a means. To me it was the most fascinating specimen of humanity, a front row seat in which to examine this, the most marvellous circus if society, a frightening Cave of Wonders, both weird and spectacular. It was the best education I could have had, teaching me things a schoolmaster never could and the closer and more absorbed I got the faster it vibrated, the brighter it glowed, the louder the music played as the entire place seemed to twirl in a glittering, fizzing minuet just for me. Some of my dearest and wisest friends lived and died in Schwernheim because in Schwernheim anything could be. You could be an Egyptologist who lost his mind in Tutankhamen's tomb, Anastasia seeking refuge from the Bolsheviks or perhaps the keeper of Pandora's Box and I knew many who were. Or you could be a young boy growing up in a fairies' land with the most spellbinding oddities on Earth as your family.
Dialogue And The Doppler Effect • Opuss № I