In the Dark Room

by Brian Dillon

  I sit down on the bed, facing the dressing table, and look straight ahead into its central mirror (from here, I think, I can see anybody who comes into the room behind me). Below the mirror are two deep drawers whose contents I remember clearly. The bottom one is my father’s: in there, I know, are numerous discarded ties, old sweaters knitted by my mother, a few frayed shirts and a couple of bottles of unused aftershave. I grab the brass handles of the top drawer and slide it open slowly, recalling neat piles of carefully ironed clothes belonging to my mother. They are not there; instead, the drawer seems to have been tightly packed with white bedsheets, slightly yellowed with age. My dreaming mind briefly registers this slight change, but the detail is not enough to jolt me out of the bright reality of the room. I slip a hand down either side of the fabric, where there is just enough room for me to reach along the rough interior to the bottom of the drawer and grasp its contents, which now reveal themselves to compose a tightly rolled or folded package. The whole thing comes out easily, sagging in the middle as I notice that it is heavier than it first appeared, as if it were made of more than elderly cotton. I lift the soft parcel on to the bed, and as I do so I realize that it is warm. In fact, its heat is already spreading on to the floral quilt on which I’m sitting, and the unaccustomed warmth of the whole house is now beginning to make sense: it seems to emanate from the pale bundle in front of me. I start to unwrap the first layer of fabric: a vast sheet which unravels slowly till I can cast it aside on the bed. Inside, a thicker material of the same dingy white encloses three or four more lozenges, each one rolled, then tucked tightly into itself at both ends. Now that they are exposed, I can see that there is something inside: each one bulges in various directions, and as I reach out to touch the first I can feel that whatever is hidden in these strange rolls of fabric, it is rigid. I pull on the ends of the first roll and begin to unwrap it. When I have unfolded it to its full extent across the bed and uncovered the hard mass at its centre, I am looking down at a small pile of bones.

  The sight is, strangely, unshocking. Only later would I imagine (mistakenly, I now believe) that this dream dramatized the unthinkable revelation of and reckoning with some dark, repressed horror; at the time, the whole scene was overlain by a bright and fearless calm. I pick up the largest (pure white in contrast to the now murkier background) and feel its heat for a moment before putting it back. At that moment, my two brothers appear in the room beside me; I must have missed their footsteps on the landing outside. They stand by the bed, looking first at me, then at my bizarre discovery, but they say nothing, and I take this as a signal to carry on. But as I reach for the second parcel, my father is suddenly at the door, and the three of us turn towards him silently as if to ask his permission to reveal the next cache of what I know will be more relics from the same luminous ossuary.

  On awaking, I could no longer recall precisely what my father said, only this certainty: that he had given us to understand that it was not yet time to expose the remaining contents of the drawer. I felt, I think, that this was less a warning than a simple statement about the proper timing of such a revelation: my father wasn’t angry, just concerned that I should not rush a discovery which would come in time. And so, carefully, and under the calm gaze of my father and brothers, I wrapped those few bones back in their protective fabric and placed them in the drawer of the dressing table, pushing it closed again as a last gentle gush of warm air escaped the folds.

  PLACES

  ‘Memory, like the mind and time, is unimaginable without physical dimensions; to imagine it as a physical space is to make it into a landscape in which its contents are located, and what has location can be approached.’

  — Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

  ‘Space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it. It’s never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it. … Space melts like sand running through one’s fingers. Time bears it away and leaves me only shapeless shreds.’

  — Georges Perec, Species of Spaces

  ¶ Labyrinth

  It is possible to imagine the whole story of one’s childhood in the form of a list of places occupied: the relative safety of the house, the deadening or fraught space of the classroom, the giddy flux of the first city street on which one became lost. There was a period in my life when I had lost all sense of how these and other places might cohere to form a landscape in which I felt that I belonged. In truth, I had cultivated this sense of placelessness. I did my best to avoid passing through the area where I grew up, turned my head when a bus from one side of the city to another came too close to one of the hospitals in which my mother had been a patient (or worse, the hospital where she died), and neglected to visit my parents’ grave. I thought I could map the city on a new scale, abstracted from the past and dotted with forgetful blanks. But I was forever being reminded of those parts of the picture I had hoped to erase. They seeped through the overpainted surface of my memory. Streets all seemed to lead to the same district. Without a link to the place where I grew up, other, fleeting memories of the city started to awaken, and I found that certain city-centre shops – places I’d been to with my mother twenty years earlier – were horribly oppressive. My habit of avoidance had seemed to accelerate to catch up with me, so that even more recent memories quickly became intolerable to me. Eventually, what had started as a strategy for avoiding the most haunted places in the city began to spread to the whole territory, so that in time I could hardly bear to be there at all. I recall a visit some years ago, having been away for a couple of years, when I found myself quite suddenly unable to walk the streets of Dublin without being overcome by a sense that every place was haunted by my previous life there. I hurried back to my new home convinced that I could never set foot in the city again.

  What we persist in calling time is in fact only the evidence of movement in space, inscribed in the world around us in so many useful, exhilarating ways: the motion of a clock’s hands, the exuberance or languor of the seasons, the infinitesimal or suddenly accelerated erosion of a face or body. At times, this insight seems to impress itself upon us with an unexpectedly personal weight of meaning, an import which, at moments of uncertainty or regret, we might be tempted to mistake for something cosmically or spiritually significant: a sense that our own fleeting consciousness is the sole medium in which disparate moments of time and points in space might be said to come together to form a design of sorts. At such junctures, we can be tempted to picture ourselves in heroic solitude amongst the whirling garbage of space and time, or, alternatively, attuned to some higher frequency: the touch of a divinity which brings all things into harmonious consort. But I can credit neither the notion that memory orbits a Romantically inclined monad of consciousness, nor that this singular (and perhaps vacant) point is plenished by any pretence at spiritual fulfilment. I count myself a materialist when it comes to memory: that is to say, I take some comfort from the thought that I am the product, thrust into the foreground, of a haphazard spatial backdrop, not its centre, still less its master.

  Yet there is the seduction of imagining oneself at the centre of something, of making the places to which memory adheres circulate according to some system. I am still attracted, for example, many years after my first reading, by a passage in Walter Benjamin’s A Berlin Chronicle, which seems to suggest precisely a method for imagining the past without succumbing to the idealist fantasy that it exists to guarantee one’s own central presence:

  Now on the afternoon in question I was sitting inside the Café des Deux Magots at St-Germain-des-Prés, where I was waiting – I forget for whom. Suddenly, and with compelling force, I was struck by the idea of drawing a diagram of my life, and knew at the same moment exactly how it was to be done. With a very simple question I interrogated my past life, and the answers were inscribed, as if of their own accord, on a sheet of paper I had with me. A year or two later, when I lost this sheet, I was inconsolable. I have never since been able to restore it as it arose before
me then, resembling a series of family trees. Now, however, reconstructing its outline in thought without directly reproducing it, I should, rather, speak of a labyrinth.

  At the centre of this maze of memory, writes Benjamin, is perhaps ‘ego or fate’; but this is not what interests him. Rather, he is intrigued by the passages that lead to this too-mystical centre: ‘so many primal relationships’ with individuals, these are what compose the picture of his life. When I first read this passage, I too was sitting in a café, waiting: the coincidence afforded me a small thrill of self-aggrandizement, and the fragment of a cigarette packet which still marks the page in question reminds me that my friends’ arrival startled me out of a reverie that immediately seemed somewhat pretentious. For a moment, I had wondered what a graphic representation of my own life might look like, and concluded that I would be incapable of filling in the inner circles of my memorial labyrinth. How, I thought, could I possibly overcome my reticence to speak of, or even properly reflect on, the still, to my mind, very recent cataclysms that had befallen my family? The last thing I wished to consider with any kind of clarity was exactly the nature of those ‘primal relationships’. And anyway, I thought, what possible use could such an acknowledgement of the recent past really have? For a moment, however, before I closed the book, I had a picture before me of another kind of cartography, a map that would better capture my very distance from those events. The diagram, I thought, would be almost uninhabited: the true picture would not record my relationships with individuals, but with the places that still pressed on my imagination.

  ¶ A seizure of the heart

  In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the novelist has her ardent heroine Dorothea – who has recently, filled with intellectual and spiritual idealism, married the arid scholar Casaubon – react with a morbid horror to the lavish surroundings of her Roman honeymoon. While her husband abandons her for his historical research, Dorothea is left to wander, uncomprehending, among the worrying splendours of classical and ecclesiastical Rome. Dorothea, ‘fed on meagre protestant histories and an art chiefly of the hand-screen sort’, is unprepared for the brooding intricacies of Catholic iconography:

  Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them, preparing strange associations which remained through her after-years. Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St Peter’s, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.

  The denominational specifics of this passage are not what interest me, nor yet the echoes it might attract of my own Catholic childhood. What accosts me first here instead is Eliot’s insistence on the way in which the interior of the church persists in Dorothea’s imagination. Its oppressiveness is only partly a matter of theology; it arises mostly, I surmise from my own recollections, from a particular conjunction of architecture and atmosphere, of light and stone. Because the first place I wish to recall here is a church: a building which, in its monstrous presence in my childhood and its harrying significance in later years, has never ceased to come back to me in the form of certain ill-lit but persistent images.

  As a child, I knew little of the history of the church; I have only just discovered, courtesy of a website tended by a devoted parishioner, the details of its early years. Mount Argus church, situated to the west of what was then the village of Harold’s Cross, was completed in 1878, built to replace an earlier structure erected twenty-two years earlier by the Passionist order. The Passionists (or, to give them their full title, The Congregation of Discalced Clerks of the Most Holy Cross and Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ) had purchased the land surrounding a modest manor house in 1856, and had by the end of the year built their first church and already, by all accounts, attracted a large congregation. Worshippers were drawn, it seems, by the reputation (but also by the tireless efforts) of the first rector, Fr Paul Mary Packenham. The young priest, a nephew of the Duke of Wellington, had only recently completed a notable military career and scandalized his family and social circle by first converting to Catholicism, then entering the priesthood and finally (to the extreme consternation of friends and family) leaving England for his native Dublin to found the community at Mount Argus. Within a year of the consecration of his church, Packenham was dead, having suffered some months earlier a ‘seizure of the heart’. But he had already set in motion a building scheme that would see the completion in 1863 of a large monastery adjoining the church, and the plans for a much larger church to replace the one now dwarfed by the imposing grey stone of a building which one contemporary account considered ‘the noblest religious house erected in these countries since the so-called “reformation”’. The new church was designed to accommodate a congregation of six hundred, seated below vast arches and flanked by huge columns of mottled brown marble. Later, in 1924, one could look up from one’s pew and see a series of enormous paintings, vertiginously angled towards the kneeling worshippers below, which depicted such scenes as the Coronation of Our Lady, Christ and the Apostles or the order’s Italian founder, St Paul of the Cross.

  Those paintings were still there when I was a child, now considerably blackened and indistinct. Although I knew that a second row of canvases arrayed below showed the Stations of the Cross, I could never penetrate the gloom above them to work out what these dark rectangles were supposed to represent. The obscuring patina they had acquired over the decades was always linked in my mind to the enormous badges worn by the Passionists themselves: fat black hearts that hung from their robes as they passed by my seat or disappeared into a confessional towards which I would shortly have to make my way, praying as much for my terror to abate as for any forgiveness I might find there. When I recall the inside of the church, I remember first of all its shadows, and the way a black shape always seemed to be moving just beyond my field of vision, emerging from a doorway leading from the monastery (I would always try to catch a glimpse of that mysterious interior, but never saw more than a sliver of pale wall and dark tiled floor), or busying itself about a huge brass rack of candles in a recess off the main body of the church. During a Mass, as all eyes were fixed on the brightly lit altar or sunk towards the floor in an attitude I found utterly unsettling (I could never replicate that peculiar prostration: I think I was petrified of the visions that might accost me if I closed my eyes and bowed my head like all the muttering wraiths around me), I felt these hollows lurking behind me. There, numerous statues hovered, agitated by the candlelight as if subject to some pious, ecstatic tremor, or palsied by their legendary, sinful pasts. Some looked more benign than others. To enter the church, you had to come face to face with a fairly faded and chipped St Anthony: an unthreatening figure whose plaster might have been cracked and bruised by all those endless forays for lost or stolen objects to which he was daily condemned. (Of all the saints, and their various and sometimes improbable métiers, his has always seemed to me the most tragic: an unthinkable eternity spent scrabbling about for the paltry detritus of mortal lives.) Once inside, you could glimpse at least one pallid Virgin in the gloom, a placid mass of white and blue above the yellow candlelight. I hoped, always, to advance quickly from this part of the church towards the light at the other, altared, end: thus to avoid even a glance to the right, at the most thrillingly awful spot in the whole building. Here, in a cavernous pendule of the church proper, was a small chapel which I remember as being perpetually dark. It seemed to be frequented by the most pious, but also the most hopeless, worshippers: individuals who would fling themselves on to their knees at its thick brass balustrade and remain there indefinitely, mumbling indecipherable imprecations to the darkness. A still more distressing sight was to be found to their l
eft, high on the wall above me on the rare occasions when my mother led my brothers and me into this dank offshoot of the main space of the church. Here, a small patch of glass enclosed a tiny remnant of fabric which a legend below informed me had touched the dead body of a saint whose name I have now quite forgotten. The narrative that attached to this grisly relic was beside the point: what terrified me was the object itself, a dull grey morsel of mortality which seemed, encased in its vitreous circle, like a single, baleful eye, looking down on me accusingly. I dreaded its implacable gaze; on at least one occasion I was petrified by my mother’s encouraging me to reach out and touch it.

  That grim corner was linked in my mind to a matching, but daylit, spot at the other end of the church, where the body of a long-dead Passionist lay beneath a vast, whitish marble tomb. This was the grave and the shrine of Father Charles Houben, a Dutch-born priest who had come to Mount Argus in 1857. Father Charles, it was said during his lifetime, had the power to heal diseases of both mind and body; he preached to huge crowds outside the church, inviting them to reflect on the Passion to which his order was devoted. It seems that his miraculous potency had only increased in the years since his death in 1893, and by the time I was brought to kneel at his grave he was a candidate for canonization. Beside the shrine, his story was recounted in livid red letters: his legendary piety, his apparently numerous cures and his fortitude, towards the end of his life, in bearing the pain of an ulcerated leg caused by a carriage accident. It might well have been this last anecdote that I latched on to as I turned to look at an engraving that showed Charles Houben preaching to a vast throng on the steps outside. Each time we knelt before this otherwise untroubling shrine, I was secretly appalled to note that the black-robed figure at the centre of the picture appeared to be holding, in a hand raised high above the crowd, a bone. I could never work out what macabre rite was being enacted here, though I fully understood that the bone must be human. I never asked my parents about this image (it was mostly with my mother that I would have knelt there), but left the shrine, always, with a mixture of relief and dread.