to relieve the anxiety. There was now no other way to express it than through tears. In my room of dead things, I hit the floor, which had once been aware I was walking on it. The floor I had sprawled my body across, the carpet I had run my fingers through, my special sunny spot in the middle of the room, were all dead and always had been and I hadn’t known. I realized I’d lived my life in a world of object corpses. God has a curious sense of humor.
I had been about three when all the people around me “died.” They had stopped being thing-objects. I was like someone on a departing boat who thought it was the shore that was pulling away. I had watched people slip away and abandon me. I now realized it had been me who couldn’t keep up with them.
Eventually I distinguished people from things and nature, and came to think of them as people-objects: second-rate, distant, difficult to comprehend but usable. I learned to function.
Right now, “my world” was being turned upside down and inside out. I felt abandoned, not by people, whom I’d written off long ago, but by things. There was no comfort in sight. There was nothing in sight but the gradual guaranteed destruction of all I turned to for security, and abandonment into the arms of the unknown.
Leaves didn’t really dance and pictures didn’t really jump off hooks on the wall and furniture didn’t really stand around me. Damn “the world.” It was an empty and ugly place. My God, I thought, do they know what they have done? I had trusted them. They had nothing to give me and I had trusted them. I had given up my secret war and the security of “my world” that rested upon that secrecy. In return I had been condemned to an empty void. I was double damned.
I made a rule that there would be three things immune to this new logic of objects: my travel companions, two stuffed toys called Orsi Bear and Travel Dog, and my reflection.
I stood before my mirror looking at me. Logic told me that I wasnot actually in company with my reflection, but the perception of this other moving being defied the logic. One could not cancel the other out and I could not reconcile the two.
If I had known pretense, then I don’t think I had known it well and certainly not consciously. Pretense was too much of a self-expressive creation, too out of control, too exposing of the self it came from to be allowed. Now, though, as the security of my world crumbled, conscious pretense as a weapon against loneliness was born.
Orsi Bear never growled and Travel Dog never barked. They had no imaginary thoughts, they made no imaginary statements. I spoke to them. I shouted at them. I cried on them. But they had nothing to say. They were simply being.
Even if trees and grass didn’t wave and leaves didn’t dance, they too were still alive. I spent time hugging trees and lying in the long grass instead of my sunny patch on the floor. The trees seemed all the more wise and protective than before—the elephants of the tree world, with trunks.
—
I had been given a set of keys to many unexplored corridors within my mind. My view of “the world” began to change dramatically. My letter to Dr. Marek captured this like a reflection of surroundings in a lake:
April 1991
To Theo Marek,
…As for the fast progress of things, I can’t bear being stuck in the middle of learning. If it weren’t for it being on the way to solutions, I couldn’t bear it.
It is much harder than where I’ve come from. I still have the spots (air particles), buttons, and lace. The characters are safer now as memories and abilities that I try hard to accept as my own, and Travel Dog and Orsi Bear are the bridges to an external world.
…In my apartment I feel “normal” and like part of “the world.” I have turned to something outside myself for security and wake up with a sense of belonging that goes beyond my own body (I know stuffed toys aren’t real but turning to something outside ofmyself in an
I had been about three when all the people around me “died.” They had stopped being thing-objects. I was like someone on a departing boat who thought it was the shore that was pulling away. I had watched people slip away and abandon me. I now realized it had been me who couldn’t keep up with them.
Eventually I distinguished people from things and nature, and came to think of them as people-objects: second-rate, distant, difficult to comprehend but usable. I learned to function.
Right now, “my world” was being turned upside down and inside out. I felt abandoned, not by people, whom I’d written off long ago, but by things. There was no comfort in sight. There was nothing in sight but the gradual guaranteed destruction of all I turned to for security, and abandonment into the arms of the unknown.
Leaves didn’t really dance and pictures didn’t really jump off hooks on the wall and furniture didn’t really stand around me. Damn “the world.” It was an empty and ugly place. My God, I thought, do they know what they have done? I had trusted them. They had nothing to give me and I had trusted them. I had given up my secret war and the security of “my world” that rested upon that secrecy. In return I had been condemned to an empty void. I was double damned.
I made a rule that there would be three things immune to this new logic of objects: my travel companions, two stuffed toys called Orsi Bear and Travel Dog, and my reflection.
I stood before my mirror looking at me. Logic told me that I wasnot actually in company with my reflection, but the perception of this other moving being defied the logic. One could not cancel the other out and I could not reconcile the two.
If I had known pretense, then I don’t think I had known it well and certainly not consciously. Pretense was too much of a self-expressive creation, too out of control, too exposing of the self it came from to be allowed. Now, though, as the security of my world crumbled, conscious pretense as a weapon against loneliness was born.
Orsi Bear never growled and Travel Dog never barked. They had no imaginary thoughts, they made no imaginary statements. I spoke to them. I shouted at them. I cried on them. But they had nothing to say. They were simply being.
Even if trees and grass didn’t wave and leaves didn’t dance, they too were still alive. I spent time hugging trees and lying in the long grass instead of my sunny patch on the floor. The trees seemed all the more wise and protective than before—the elephants of the tree world, with trunks.
—
I had been given a set of keys to many unexplored corridors within my mind. My view of “the world” began to change dramatically. My letter to Dr. Marek captured this like a reflection of surroundings in a lake:
April 1991
To Theo Marek,
…As for the fast progress of things, I can’t bear being stuck in the middle of learning. If it weren’t for it being on the way to solutions, I couldn’t bear it.
It is much harder than where I’ve come from. I still have the spots (air particles), buttons, and lace. The characters are safer now as memories and abilities that I try hard to accept as my own, and Travel Dog and Orsi Bear are the bridges to an external world.
…In my apartment I feel “normal” and like part of “the world.” I have turned to something outside myself for security and wake up with a sense of belonging that goes beyond my own body (I know stuffed toys aren’t real but turning to something outside ofmyself in an
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