excerpt from flowers for the abyss: a memoir

by Glenn Wallis

Throw roses into the abyss and say:

here is my thanks to the monster who failed to devour me.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Silence at the forest’s edge. Face to face with a tiger. Behind me, evening’s breeze quietly fades. The plaint of the blackbird hushes, and the gentle flutes of autumn fall silent in the reeds. I float on dark clouds of memory. Drunk on the poppies of a fading life, I wonder: Whose lunar voice is this echoing through the spectral night?

His father is standing with him at the edge of a wood. He places his hand in his father’s. He is three years old. It is cold. He is wearing a coat but no hat on his head, just a floppy mop of black hair. His face is round and fleshy. He is looking into the woods. The woods are dark. The trees are barren. His nostrils fill with the crisp scent of pine needles. An animal rustles through the brittle leaves, sending a chill down his spine. “What was that?” he asks his father. His father looks down at him with a faint smile. “I think it was a tiger,” his father says. “Should we go look?” Without a moment’s hesitation, he drops his father’s hand, pulls away, and rushes into the woods, “Yeah, let’s go!”

Is this a memory? It certainly appears to him as one. He recalls its happening, vividly even. He sees those woods clearly in his mind’s eye. The same creeping sensation of uncanniness rises in his stomach even as he brings it to mind. Is this a memory? He has seen many photographs of those woods and of the field behind them. In one photo, his mother is pushing him on the swing near the edge of those very woods. He is about three years old and is wearing the same winter coat as in the memory and the same mop of hair for a hat. Is this a memory? Through the years his father narrates the episode to other people — and even to him — always with a kind of chuckle at the end. He is never sure what his father’s chuckle is supposed to mean. On several occasions, his father tells him that he is too impulsive. But his father is a kind man; he would never chuckle in a way that chastises his son. On reflection, he thinks this episode represents a tidy symbol of his character. Despite his apprehension, he rushes into the woods to behold the tiger. The father’s chuckle means, isn’t that something, can you believe that boy? Ask anyone who knows him well: How many times has he said that he is the fool who rushes in where angels dare not tread?

I float on dark clouds of memory. And so begins this memoir, in a cloudy haze. But “cloudy haze” is not the right metaphor. “Hallucination” is better. But then again that might be taking it too far. A Gestalt — a Rorschach. That’s it! One of those ink blocks that he’ll be asked about during one of his many sessions with young psychologists-in-training. He has his own term for what I am trying to describe here: a transmutilation. “Transmutilation” is what he calls a usage of material that alters the original to the point of near unrecognizability. Unlike the aggressive hijacking and rerouting that the French Situationists call détournement, however, a transmutilation is done in innocent good faith. It is done to capture something real and true. The term itself, though, he has to admit, suggests something more, and worse. The etymology of mutilate is, after all: "to disfigure; maim by depriving of a characteristic part."

It is 2015. He is preparing a translation of Georg Trakl’s poem “Geistliche Dämmerung” (Sacred Twilight) for the centennial publication of the great Austrian poet’s Sebastian im Traum (Sebastian in a Dream). The project never materializes, but he keeps the poem around. It flickers in his memory as he begins conceiving his memoir. Why does “Geistliche Dämmerung” appear in his mind’s eye? As he copies his translation into the manuscript, he reflexively begins changing words, metaphors, entire lines, adding and subtracting (I float on dark clouds of memory, for example, is not in the Trakl poem at all; neither is Drunk on the poppies of a fading life, I wonder) to better fit what he wants to convey. Trakl’s poem is mutilated in that sense — mutated, rewritten, trans-lated and trans-litter-ated beyond recognition. And along with the alteration of language and imagery, so is his own memory, the memory that the poem aims to capture and comprehend. Or is it? He has come to understand this creative practice as a transpiring — a passing over, an inspiring, a breathing together as in conspiracy, from one vision, one memory, one time and place, to another. He remembers “Geistliche Dämmerung” — indeed, he translates it in the first place — because the poem evokes and invokes an event that he himself has lived, a memory patiently awaiting to be recalled. For him, memory is never but a transmutilation. What is a memory, anyway? It is an extraordinarily rich inner trove of pictures (fragmented, faded, whole, or even dynamic) speech (in a variety of voices and even silent), emotions (on a continuum of intensity from dully vague to dazzlingly vivid), and much more. Scent and space are active in his memories. He smells pine needles when he conjures those woods, and he can tell you precisely where specific trees were located in relation to one another, where the swing set was and that it had three swings and a slide. (In 1989, he visits a professor’s office in Göttingen, Germany to discuss the possibility of studying there. When he returns a year later as a matriculated student, he sits down in the same chair. He apprehends it immediately. ”Your office is different,” he says; “wasn’t there a chair over there?” “Um, hmm,” the professor looks over, perplexed, “Oh, right, I used to have a chair over there, didn’t I! How did you …” The professor’s office also smelled different, but he does not mention that fact.)

Of course, he always thinks things happened exactly as he remembers them. How could they not have happened like that — he has the memory! And yet… An elusive dream tiger encircled by the faint, thus all the more eerie, timbre of breathing nature . . . Paradoxically, is a wild animal loose in the woods not a truthful image with which to begin a memoir? He must confess, along with the surrealist pioneer Michel Leiris in his masterful autobiography The Rules of the Game that, “I line up sentences, collect words and figures of speech, but what gets caught in each of these traps is always the shadow and not the prey.” What is more, the memory tiger is encountered not in its original instance, as if in a teleportation to the past, but always in the present.

As someone who came of age in the 1970s, the cassette tape suggests itself as an explanation here. The older the tape is, the less “faithful” is the once “high fidelity” of the recording. Magnetic tapes consist of two layers — a thin tape and a magnetic strip — bound together with a gelatinous glue. These layers have to make contact with one another for the signal to send within a receptive magnetic recording device, like reel-to-reel and cassette players. Over time, this binder coating loses its lubrication and cohesiveness, muting sound quality. If the tape is unused, it can even acquire a funky stickiness, causing serious deterioration. Fully aware of his deteriorating memory, his father does research. Diagnosis: Alzheimer’s. His father diagnoses the disease that will eventually kill him. Early in the process to decay, his father tells him that the greatest hope of Alzheimer researchers lies in certain promising laboratory trial results where amyloid beta plaques are removed. Like the substance on an old cassette tape, these plaques are sticky clumps of toxic protein accumulating in the brain. They literally gum up memory.

Alas, this text is neither a philosophical treatise on memory nor an aesthetic theory of revision. Neither does it, at any point other than in this Preface, contain an intentional transmutilation. As we stand at the threshold, let us acknowledge that, as much as they feel interior and lucid and wholly his, he knows that his memories must necessarily be fused with elements that are external and spectral and somewhat, if not wholly, other.

And now, into the forest of memory…

*****

A blood-red lake of sky appears in the opening where black rain clouds part. Claret red. Oozing, spurting, pulsing, like magma from an erupting volcano. Its sheer aliveness frightens him. Neighborhood kids gather, necks craned in silence. Something feels terribly wrong. Should he run home and tell his mother that something is terribly wrong? Older kids say, with a mix of hysteria and awe, “This is the return of Jesus.” The return of Jesus? Jesus, what a stupid thing to say. Five years old but knows what a stupid thing this is to say. He runs home and tells his mother about the lake of fire in the sky.

The next day everything — trees, grass, sky, cars, the air, people’s faces — is shrouded in a cold leaden gray. He feels a thickness in his stomach. It’s Monday, yet schools are closed. So he goes out to play. Everything is still. No traffic. None of his neighborhood playmates romping around. He sees a man on a porch smoking a cigarette. Is the man sobbing? The sky has turned dark again. He comes inside and sees his mother sitting in front of the TV. Standing behind her, he notices that she is crying, she is heaving, trembling, blowing her nose, taking off her glasses, wiping them, rubbing her eyes. In grainy black and white, he sees a casket draped in an American flag being carted onto the back of a flat truck. A solemn woman veiled in black is standing still. Next to her are a boy and girl as little as him and his sister. His mother gasps.

His hatred of school begins around this time. For many years to come, when the sun goes down on a Sunday, he will fall into a “blueness.” That is what his mother calls it, “blueness.” To this day he feels queasy on Sunday evenings. Henry James found “summer afternoon” an enchanting phrase. “Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to him those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.” How ugly he finds Sundays. “Sunday evening — Sunday evening;” to him those words will always conjure the grim foreshadow of heinous Monday.

Monday is the day when he has to wake up groggy while it is still dark outside and put on uncomfortable clothes and hard shoes. Sunday evening drops the heavy curtain on waking up to the smell of pancakes and the chipper voice of Casper the Friendly Ghost. Monday is the day when the monotony of the heartless machinery of school starts doing its dirty work again. Although he lacks the language to articulate it, he feels, feels deep in his stomach, the deadening oppressiveness of the classroom: The constantly bossy bearing of the teacher, who never listens to the students, just talks at them in a detached drone, as if they are an annoyance that she must endure; the herd-like obedience of his fellow first-graders, also dressed in their fancy uncomfortable clothes, slouching like broken marionettes with their hands folded before them and their feet dangling to reach the floor; the relentless mind-numbing “learning” tasks — arithmetic, spelling, reading about stupid Jack and Jill. In the first grade, he experiences the first ripples of what will soon become a tsunami of senselessness, an incapacitating inundation in the meaninglessness of existence. No one can tell him that a six-year-old kid cannot experience, in full absorption and coruscating consciousness, the soul-crushing monotony of school.

“Glenn! GLENN! Stop staring out the window!”

How different school feels from the warmth of home.

“The house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” When he first reads Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space as a grad student in the 1990s, he plunges into a reverie of his childhood home. In his mind’s eye, he can see the photographs he took of the tiny spaces of the beautiful nineteenth century clapboard house in Providence, Rhode Island wherein his life was unfolding then — the shadows of tree branches that fall on the scarlet wall in front of his work desk; the pattern of cracks and grooves in the Civil War-era pine wood floor planks; an unadorned ceiling corner, the seamless meeting of two walls. These few days’ reverie under the poetic spell of Bachelard’s dreamy book instilled in him a lifelong sensitivity to the spaces he inhabits. But in his reverie, feeling dominates over image. Those images enliven sensations that are alchemically infused in the very moment of remembrance, transmuting his past into his present. “A psychoanalyst should, therefore, turn his attention to this simple localization of our memories. I should like to give the name of topoanalysis to this auxiliary of psychoanalysis. Topoanalysis, then, would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives.” Home, for him, is a feeling of protection, as if residing in an impenetrable shell. Years later, his mother confessed to an error she had made bringing up her five children. She tried to create a shelter, she said, and so, she fears, made it more difficult for her children when the world began to do its dirty deed. But this is not the kind of shelter he means. The shelter of home is also the pit within which brews the anxiety that attaches to existential truths. It is the space of what the ancient philosophers called an epoché, a suspension. Two German philosophers have employed this term more recently. In the early twentieth century, Edmund Husserl used it in his project of “phenomenology” (a method for describing things as they appear directly within our lived experience stripped of the prejudices of collective opinion) and in the late twentieth century, Peter Sloterdijk used it in his project of “anthropotechnics” (practices of intentional self-formation which counter the effects of the “default” that the state imposes on us.) For him, home-as-epoché combines these three usages. It is a place where he may suspend his automatic, automaton-like participation in the Human Agreement System, where he may detach himself from the harassing demands of the social herd with its insistent delusions and dogmas, its biased values and judgements. Looking back on his grade school experience, he understands that home was the place where he felt he was stepping out of the flow of a coerced form of social being — called “the natural attitude” by Husserl — that will never cease to revolt him. How he felt such resistance at six years old, and the intense extent to which he felt it, is a mystery, even to him. But the revulsion only intensifies as he grows older. Like one of the cracks in the old pine planks of his Providence house, this feeling was forming into a creeping rootstalk with a life of its own. Can we “dream in peace” like Bachelard says without confronting the truths of existence — the limitations of time and space, change and impermanence, the ups and downs of fortune, decay, disappearance, death? He cannot. Contrary to the ancient philosophers’ promise of ataraxia, the state of being free from worry and anxiety within the epoché, home is where a whirlwind is swirling with increasing force. “A creature that hides and withdraws into its shell is preparing a way out. This is true of the entire scale of metaphors, from the resurrection of a man in his grave, to the sudden outburst of one who has long been silent. If we remain at the heart of the image under consideration, we have the impression that, by staying in the motionlessness of its shell, the creature is preparing temporal explosions, not to say whirlwinds, of being.” He reads that in The Poetics of Space, too.

Home! Home is where his father recites William Blake poems to help him fall asleep at night. Maybe The Little Vagabond inflamed his distaste for school.

Dear Mother, dear Mother, the Church is cold,

But the Ale-house is healthy & pleasant & warm.

But if at the Church they would give us some Ale,

And a pleasant fire, our souls to regale;

We'd sing and we'd pray, all the live-long day;

Nor ever once wish from the Church to stray.

Home is American folk music and Old West cowboy songs that his father, Robert Ray Wallis (called Bob), learned from his cousin as a boy in Oklahoma. His father’s telling of the story forges in his mind’s eyes an image of that cousin. When he asks his father how he learned all those old songs as a kid back in the 1930s, he says something like this: “When I was a boy, I had a cousin. We called her Arkie. To me, she was a woman, but she was just a teenager. Arkie was wild. She had long blonde hair that was always tangled, and her feet and legs were scratched and dirty. She would occasionally wander in from somewhere out of the blue. I’d come home from school, and she’d be sitting on the floor, strumming her guitar, singing the old songs. That’s how I heard them.” His father says that Arkie’s singing and unconventional bearing touched something in him. His father listened spellbound, as he absorbed the songs. “I can still hear her voice.” Through his father’s story and song, he hears her voice. He, too, is affected by Arkie’s strangeness as she sits bare-legged and ragged on the old farmhouse floor singing with Kitty I’ll go for a ramble/over the mountains wild. He can still hear his father’s singing, too, that heartfelt, soft baritone coaxing him to sleep — as I walked out in the streets of Laredo/as I walked out in Laredo one day. One of the last times he sees his father, his brain shriveled by ten years of Alzheimer’s, he asks him if he remembers that song. As soon as Alzheimer's begins its onslaught, he asks his father questions about the distant past — his first car in the 1940s, his visit to Greenwich Village in 1955, his battle experience in World War II. His father’s long-term memory is surprisingly clear. Asked about the lyrics to The Streets of Laredo, his father pauses for a moment, then, with the same solemnity that he witnesses on so many nights as a boy, restless in bed and unable to sleep, his father sings the entire song, all seven verses — we beat the drum slowly and played the fife lowly/and bitterly wept as we bore him along.

In 1904, his grandfather, William Walter Wallis, rides on a white stallion named Buttons to Boggy Depot, Oklahoma from Desdamonda, Texas. He is looking at a photograph of his young grandfather sitting on Buttons in Wapanucka. He’s every bit a cowboy, ten-gallon hat and all. Except that he isn’t. His pressed, white shirt gives him away. (Really, I suppose, the dead giveaway is his horse’s name. Buttons?) The family story goes that William Walter Wallis and his horse Buttons follow cattle paths and stars on their three-hundred-mile journey, missing Boggy Depot by just two miles. What brings his grandfather to Boggy Depot is that he has taken a job as a teacher in an Indian school in Stonewall. It is in the Indian Territory that he meets his future, Choctaw-Irish wife, Violet Osie Oma Luckett. Another family story goes that Osie’s grandmother was in the habit of gathering the young ones around her and relating, in Choctaw, her experiences as a girl on the Trail of Tears. He always had the impression that his grandmother was ashamed of her Indian heritage. One summer, when he is around nine and letting his thick wavy black hair grow like Medusa’s — it is 1967, the Summer of Love, after all — she lobbies hard for him to get it cut, saying, “You don’t want to look like an Indian boy, do you?”

Later, when he researches the reservation his grandmother grew up on, he has a better understanding of her complicated identity. It was just outside of a town called Violet Springs, which, as an article from a website called “Oklahoma Cemeteries” observes, “sounds like the name of a peace loving community, but the town was just the opposite. Located less than one half mile from the border of Oklahoma Territory with the Seminole nation, Violet Springs was one of the most wild and wooly whiskey towns along that line. There were all sorts of daily gang fights, shoot-outs, and bacchic revelry that made lurid history during these frontier days.” Apparently, the locals, therefore, called it “Violent Springs.” It must have been hell for his grandmother growing up in such a place. She dropped “Violet” from her name and, he supposes, “Choctaw” from her identity.

All of this happens in Woody Guthrie country, Land of the Okies. Guthrie’s most famous acolyte, Bob Dylan, came to learn of his father’s closeness to Guthrie’s life — to the plaintive songs of hardship; to the hard soil red as a rusty pipe; to the progressive politics bordering on socialism and even communism; to the Grapes of Wrath excursion of his grandfather to California during the Dust Bowl. Bob Dylan hears about his father from their mutual friend, Edward Thaler. Ed had been Bob’s roommate at the University of Oklahoma. Ed also just happened to have been dating a woman named Selma back in Brooklyn who was the best friend of his future mother. Ed is also Dylan’s private doctor. Dylan stays with the Thaler family for several weeks in 1964 while recuperating from his mystery-enshrouded motorcycle accident. He is around twelve the first time his family visits Ed and Selma in Middletown, New York. By then he had already developed a passion for rock and pop music — Led Zeppelin, Steppenwolf, The Rolling Stones. So, Ed asks him if he wants to see the room where Dylan had slept during that fabled period of his life. He and Ed trudge up to the third storey of the creaky Victorian house. “Here it is,” says Ed, “just as he left it.” He has a picture lodged in his memory: A mattress is on the floor. A faded patchwork quilt covers it. A book is lying on the quilt. Next to the mattress is a light blue Fender Telecaster on a black metal guitar stand. A scratched, light brown wooden dresser cluttered with crap. The room is large and spartan, with wooden floors and a high ceiling, all of which causes their voices to rumble as in a cavern. He stands in awe, absorbing all he can. Wow!

On several occasions, he hears Ed say that Dylan wants to meet his father. Knowing Dylan’s fascination with all things Okie, Ed, a native New Yorker, must have talked up his father as The Real Thing. But his father has no interest in meeting Bob Dylan. In his father’s eyes, he thinks, Dylan is a phony, a pretentious wanna-be Okie.

Should he had been surprised to find his father, more than a decade later, absorbed in Dylan’s Lyrics, 1962-1985?

When his father and mother die one year apart in 2017 and 2018, they leave a house packed with sixty years’ accumulated objects. When the emotionally fraught moment comes for their five children and several adult grandchildren to decide who gets what, he asks for one item only. A painting.

The painting hangs over the head of the bed in which his father dies. He was on the plane with his brother Damon to visit his parents when their youngest brother, Darren, texts him that their father has just died. According to Fia, one of his parents’ two Samoan caregivers, his father’s last words were, “Can everyone, please, just leave me alone?” That sounds just like his father — “Can everyone, please, just leave me alone?” Making that plea, his father then lapses into what the family later learns had probably been a coma. When they arrive at the house a couple of hours later, Darren had not yet told his mother that her husband of nearly sixty years was lying dead in the bedroom. Darren wanted to wait until everyone got there. Damon, who is a social worker, volunteers to tell their mother. He is relieved that he does not have to tell her. The moment is surreal. His heart begins to pound as they approach their mother. She is reading, as usual, on the couch in the living room. She looks up at us with her big, warm, Sicilian mama eyes.

“Mom,” Darren softly says, “Dad…”

“I know, he just sleeps all the goddamn time; he’s been sleeping for days.”

For as long as he can remember, his mother has made comments about his father’s subdued manner. Sometimes, it is favorably, like when she told him that the Robert Duvall character Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies perfectly captured the quiet gentleness that she loved about his father’s side of the family. Other times, it was annoyingly, like now.

“Mom…”

“Yeah?” His eyes lock onto her face. There is no way out of a heightened moment like this; you can only brace yourself and go through it.

“Dad has …”

“Died? Bob died?” Tears burst. He has no memory of what happens next, just a blur. Maybe it was an emotional overload. He can only recall the calmness and steadiness of Damon, the social worker, as he navigates the steep emotional cliffs of the moment. Damon, the most Okie of them all.

They sit with their father’s body. For some reason, Fia and Valerie have shaved their father’s beard, drastically altering his bold, auburn, Scottish appearance. Inexplicably, it takes him a while to notice the absence of the beard that adorned his father’s face for as long as he can remember. He sees that his father looks different, but assumes that it is because he is a corpse. Then, it hits him that his father’s bushy beard is gone. Why did they shave his beard, he wonders to himself, annoyed. He find Streets of Laredo on Spotify and lets it play into the room. Sniffling noses and wet eyes all around. He keeps glancing at the painting above his dead father’s head.

A couple of hours later the funeral home people arrive. Wrapped up in white linen/and cold as the clay. His mother kisses her husband’s cheek as they carry him away. The profound poignancy of that kiss becomes part of him forever.

For reasons that don’t dawn on him until a month or so later, he requests to have the painting that hung over the death bed. It is an oil painting of a woman, right profile, waist up. She is wrapped in a sheer, white shawl. Her eyes are closed as she tilts her head a downward. Her thick, black hair is brushed back into a loose bun. Other than the black hair and white shawl and blush of her cheeks, the colors are amber, marigold, rust, and clay. The frame is made of rough walnut wood, notched all around with an artist’s chisel. The brush strokes are direct, the paint thick but the surfaces flat. It is a quiet, contemplative image with an almost religiously devotional quality to it. She is an earthy, pagan madonna. The painting has been hanging in his parent’s house since they first got married. When he was a boy he thought it was a painting of his mother because it looks just like her.

Later, he gets the full story.

Photo of Glenn Wallis

BIO: Glenn Wallis has a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Buddhist studies. He has published ten books (including two with Random House Modern Library) and dozens of articles. Hundreds of his essays are published at the blog he founded, Speculative Non-Buddhism, which has over one million views. One critic has deemed that the site "publishes the best Buddhist writing on the web." He founded the band Ruin, whom rock journalist Stacey Finney calls "one of the most beloved bands in the history of Philadelphia" and WKDU deejay Mike Eidle calls "the best Philly band ever." Glenn founded the radical educational project Incite Seminars, which offers "rigorous & rebellious" seminars. According to the author of his Wikipedia page, Glenn’s work "combines rigorous academic scholarship with creative and stylistic sophistication."