Cover for The Crooked Little Pieces: Volume 6 by Chloe Jenkins.

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Penning lilts on silent wings, the songbird writes in sleep. Dreams drop inchoate notes atop a score performed by twitching plumes. Hyped zebra finches waken primed for composition.

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Signs persist in solitude. Before contrasting chirps the fledgling grown alone prefers to practise conspecific songs; estranged ones hear an ‘inner template.’ Liminal motifs flit through the wild as offspring offer edits. Ditties tailored by their heirs have further alterations till descendants find the music of their ancestors. ‘What is remarkable about this result is that even though we started out with an isolated bird that had never heard the wild-type, cultured song, that's what we ended up with,’ reports neuroscientist Professor Partha Mitra in a study of the passerines’ three-sixty pivot. Slumberous rehearsal whirls like somebody ‘learning a musical instrument,’ tells physicist Gabriel B. Mindlin.

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Drumming fingers hinged on breakthrough by a wintry window one day in the Russian Empire. It was 1906 and three-year-old Vladimir Horowitz was set to make a violent statement. ‘I wanted to play like [my mother],’ he recalled in 1985. ‘I was playing on the window, and I broke the window. My hands were all in blood.’

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Twenty-two years later pedals on a pianola hurled a four-year-old Maria Callas into throes of ecstasy. Deprived of keys, she pressed their brass obsessively in search of tones. A Spanish shawl served as her first prop in performance at her cousins’ house in Florida the following year. ‘Maria would take it and perform,’ remembered Mary Annexy. ‘She warbled like a bird.’

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A vocalist still on the verge of self-discovery flies in the fast lane with no brakes. ‘It is like the athlete who enjoys using and developing his muscles, the youth who runs and jumps, enjoying and growing at the same time, the girl who dances, enjoying the dance for its own sake, and learning to dance at the same time…’ Callas would blissfully reminisce. Novelist Trigorin in Chekhov’s The Seagull lives in limitless migration. ‘I’ve no sooner finished a story than I’m already driven by something to write another, then a third, after that a fourth…’ he tells aspiring actress Nina. ‘I write with no breaks, as if I were travelling with relays of post-horses, and I can’t do otherwise.’

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Advancing to a literary summit on his Soviet sojourn, philosopher Isaiah Berlin took the overnight Red Arrow sleeper from Moscow to Leningrad on 12 November 1944. Books’ nourishment could be exchanged for literal food in the ex-capital: unlike the former they piled high in shops. Rocked in the top bunk of his small compartment as he read through wartime newspapers, the Oxford scholar dropped them to the ground ‘like a child tossing its toys out of a pram’ when he finished, according to fellow traveller Brenda Tripp.

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After a nostalgic visit to his childhood lodgings on Angliisky Prospekt, Berlin hoped to encounter writers censored in the Stalinist regime. Acmeist poet Osip Mandestam had perished in a transit camp at the beginning of his five-year-sentence for alleged counter-revolutionary activity from typhoid fever. Contemporary Anna Akhmatova – whose husband had been executed by the Cheka – was living with her former lover, his wife and sometimes his ex-wife in an apartment overlooking the Fontanka River.

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Plying the New College academic with disserviceable questions, an Assyriologist delayed Berlin’s acquaintance with Akhmatova by boresome hours. When she finally deserted them, the latter touched on topics superseding continents and Congress: opuses of Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev in addition to more recent tomes by Joyce and Kafka. Rarely did she have the chance to limn the lines of western authors: a cathartic liberation that unsealed her own verse. Berlin listened to Akhmatova recite from The White Block, Anno Domini and From Six Books.

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Enchantment spelled a visit of twelve hours. She preserved vignettes of ‘only two voices: yours and mine’ in the second poem from collection Cinque – one that cites ‘the almost bell-like sound / of the wind from invisible Lake Ladoga’ which by their ‘late-night dialogue’ morphs into ‘the delicate shimmer of interlaced rainbows.’ Its waters had hauled scarce provisions over summer’s ships and winter’s lorries to the famine in the Siege of Leningrad. Composites of the poetess’s tête-à-tête dimmed its reflections.

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To this effigy for fugitive effulgence she devoted part of Poem Without a Hero.

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   The steps of those who are not here,
   Across the resplendent parquet,
   And the bluish smoke of cigars.
   And all the mirrors reflect
   A man who has not come
   and could not penetrate this hall.
   He’s no better than others, nor worse,
   But he breathes not of Lethe’s chill,
   And in his hand is warmth.
   Guest from the Future! Can it be
   He will really come to me,
   Turning from the bridge to the left?

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Where illusions of past solace left out ‘Lethe’s chill’ in verse, Death opened the imagination for the heroine of Ingmar Bergman’s 1978 film Autumn Sonata. Liv Ullman plays a childless mother who has lost her three-year-old to drowning. Shunning emptiness, she lets the hum of memories save Erik in subconscious. ‘Sometimes, as I’m falling asleep, I can feel him breathing on my face and touching me with his hand,’ Eva relates to her own mother Charlotte. ‘He’s living another life, but we can reach one another. There’s no dividing line, no insurmountable wall.’

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Those in creation’s thrall are loath to wallow. Self-denial, on the other hand, takes victims on another course of treatment. Combat’s torments send them floundering ‘When thoughts you’ve gagged all day come back to scare you,’ in the words of Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Repression of War Experience.’ Post-traumatic stress disorder recoordinates one's respiration in the face of taunting stimuli; the heart beats nine times more a minute.

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Forgetting is a buried treasure searched for high and low – but images interred by sufferers flare up in flashbacks. For the bon vivant of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes – a veteran made impotent in war – parties in Paris are a guidebook to effacement. He and love Lady Brett Ashley, who could never be his lover, crossed ‘onto a dark street behind St. Etienne du Mont, went smoothly down the asphalt, passed the trees and the standing bus at the Place de la Contrescarpe, then turned onto the cobbles of Rue Mouffetard.’ Past ‘lighted bars and late open shops’ en route to the Avenue des Gobelins, Jake observes how ‘the street was torn up and men were working on the car-tracks by the light of acetylene flares. Brett’s face was white and the long line of her neck showed in the bright light of the flares.’

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Rome is the wipe-out destination for a fading actress in Tennessee Williams’ The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, his sole novella. Stupefied by loss of roles, childbearing years and a late husband, Karen is ‘now leading an almost posthumous existence,’ in the words of her narrator. ‘She had selected Rome as being somehow the most comfortable place to head that kind of existence, perhaps because so much of it seemed to exist in the past.’ Crashing whitecaps deafen aches as she dissolves in what the author calls ‘an indiscriminate flooding, the undistinguished washing along and away of myriad objects in the current of time, jarring together one moment and then swept away in a steady, formless welter, meaning less than a succession of images in a dream.’

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Knocking at cross purposes in Earth, tectonic plates accumulate a stress that sends them flooding. Pounding ground begins to douse inhabitants in scattered souvenirs of wreckage. Such was land’s erasure in Alaska’s 1964 megathrust earthquake.

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The tiny island of Chenega chimed with Russian Orthodox church bells that tame Good Friday. Children relished rounds of marbles on the beach after a film projection at their one-room schoolhouse: House on Haunted Hill.

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Soon salmonberries, salmon, muskrat and porcupine were swimming through a panoply of debris. In The Day That Cries Forever, native Chenegan Andy Selanoff recorded the uncanny mingling of split timber, furniture and fragments from a place of worship ‘floating calmly in the dimming evening.’ Pent-up pressure had unleashed a palimpsest across the waves.

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Trapped underwater while her mother called her name, thirty-five-year-old Margaret Borodkin sustained her strength on sailing planks. A band of hunters rescued her as she fell in and out of consciousness. Come to, she learned of mother Anna’s passing. In 2016 Borodkin was unwilling still to document the tragedy that had destroyed her birthplace.

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Inner trauma stifled self-awareness decades later. Stranded in a desert, the protagonist of movie Paris, Texas staggers with an empty six-pint milk bottle. Ice from the freezer of a nearby bar can’t stave off dehydration and he collapses. Hours later brother Walt collects him from a squalid hospital. Despite an absence of four years, Travis is catatonic.

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Crumpled colours on a map recover memories as Walt escorts him to the latter’s hillside LA home. Allured by one of few surviving artefacts – ‘a picture of a piece of Paris’ – Travis cites a lot of land bought in the tiny Texan city where he hoped to put down roots. ‘I purchased it in the mail,’ he elaborates, at loss to explain why.

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Super-8 frames of an outing at the beach spark captures of his past. ‘We went fishing,’ remembers eight-year-old Hunter: his abandoned son. On the tv screen Travis witnesses family frolics of the boy and his long-lost wife Jane. Close by are Walt and his wife Anne, who have been raising Hunter in the interim. Mosaic tiles of life begin to reconcile the nomad to his daily tasks of getting dressed and shining shoes. Eventually Travis takes his son on a long road trip to locate his mother.

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Flagstones pave the way for the narrator of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to return to childlike innocence. Paying a social call to the renowned Guermantes in final volume Time Regained, he stumbles on another era through the taps of footsteps. ‘A profound azure intoxicated my eyes, impressions of coolness, of dazzling light… I continued, ignoring the evident amusement of the great crowd of chauffeurs, to stagger as I had staggered a few seconds ago, with one foot on the higher paving stone and the other on the lower.’

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Minutes afterward, a servant’s clang dispatches him aboard a train to Balbec’s scintillating summers. ‘So similar was the sound of the spoon against the plate to that of the hammer of a railway employee who was doing something to the wheel of the carriage… that I was now actually there.’ A serviette removing traces of his orangeade and cakes has ‘exactly the same kind of starchiness as that with which I had attempted with so much difficulty to dry myself before the window the first day of my arrival at Balbec.’ In the parlour of the Guermantes’ Parisian luxury apartment he envisages ‘a green-blue ocean spread[-ing] its plumage like the tail of a peacock.’

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Shed feathers linger unsolicited as relics of travails. In The Crooked Little Pieces: Volume 6’s opening chapter they are more akin to parchment. Anneliese dips eyes into reflection opening a drawer. I write of how ‘Amidst her flicking fingers light illuminated crinkled corners of three labelled yellowed papers:

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Dopamine: 212
Vicia Faba: 74
GABA'

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A fifteen-year-old girl accompanying scarlet peonies to her psychiatrist’s door is suddenly in grasp. Analysis of various aversion therapies has drawn out a conclusion in her doctoral thesis:

 

​Renewing one’s association with a trigger source risks the erasure of the adult personality – leaving in its wake the substitute of a blank canvas: tabula rasa.

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Objects will not rest. Twins dispossessed cope through a cornucopia of schooling, décor and display. ‘Routine and habit soon replace romantic dreams of love,’ hears amorous Tatyana in Tchaikovsky’s libretto for Eugene Onegin. Teenage Isabel had wept for her sad fate.

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Five volumes later tokens poke fun at the girls’ self-sabotage.

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Their days of camouflage are numbered.
 

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Sources

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S. Lambton, The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography: The Crepuscular Press, 2023, p. 13

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J. Fleming, ‘Nurturing a Legend:’ The Floridian, 6 August 2002

 

D. Prouse, ‘Maria Callas Speaks:’ The Sunday Times, 3 April 1961

 

A. Chekhov trans. P. Carson, Plays: Penguin Classics, 2004, p. 108

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M. Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life: Metropolitan Books, 1998, p. 148

 

G. Dalos trans. A. Wood, The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973, pp. 33–7

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A. Akhmatova trans. C.R. Proffer & A. Humesky, A Poem Without a Hero: Ardis, 1973, p. 17

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I. Bergman, Autumn Sonata: ITC Entertainment, 1978

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S. Sassoon, ‘Repression of War Experience’ from Selected Poems: William Heinemann Ltd, 1925, p. 55

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R.K. Pitman, S.P. Orr, D.F. Forgue, J.B. de Jong & J.M. Claiborn, ‘Psychophysiologic assessment of posttraumatic stress disorder imagery in Vietnam combat veterans: Archives of General Psychiatry. 1987; 44: 970–975.

 

E. Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926, p. 25

 

T. Williams, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone: Signet Books, (Fifth Printing), 1961, p. 41

 

ibid. p. 57

 

W. Wenders, Paris, Texas: Road Movies/Film Producktion GmbH/Argos Films S.A., 1984

 

M. Proust trans. A. Mayor & T. Kilmartin, Time Regained: Random House, 1993 edition, p. 259

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M. Proust trans. S. Hudson, Time Regained: Project Gutenberg Australia edition. Accessed here.

 

P.I. Tchaikovsky & K. Shilovsky trans. D. Pippin, Eugene Onegin: Pocket Opera Inc., 1982, p. 6. Accessed here.

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