Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  Some years later Gage took a job with a circus. He appeared in New York at the Barnum museum in the company of the world’s largest-chinned man, the world’s fattest woman and a young man with skin like an elephant. He had his head shaved over the scar so that his misshapen skull was clearly to be seen, and at every performance he gave a detailed account of the accident. His iron rod, from which Gage was never separated, he showed to the audience with obvious pride.

  In the 60s, Phineas Gage’s health began rapidly to decline, in consequence of both epileptic fits that appeared as late consequences of the accident and his miserable way of life. Gage moved to San Francisco to live with his sister and her husband, a successful merchant. It is said that he spent most of his time drinking copiously. The young man who had once excited such high hopes had become a social reject who brought shame to his family.

  Before he turned forty, Gage perished in an epileptic fit. The fateful iron rod was placed in his coffin. My grandfather heard of his death only five years later, for as you know, we were sorely tried during those troublesome times.

  At that point he addressed Gage’s sister and her husband by letter. My grandfather asked that Gage’s coffin be opened and that he should take possession of the skull that had suffered so sorely. After some deliberation, they agreed with good-natured amicability to this unusual request. The skull and rod can now be seen by anyone in Boston, in the museum of the Harvard Medical Institute.

  If you ever have the opportunity to visit the city of Boston, I urge you to examine those items of evidence carefully. What do they prove? I will try, in a few words, to convey my own impressions.

  The case of Phineas Gage shook to their very roots my grandfather’s conceptions of the individual, his mind, his will and thereby the idea of freedom itself. The echo of Gage’s iron bar fragmented my grandfather’s personal view of the world.

  He had as a young man been interested in phrenology, but he had never become a scholar. He was just an ordinary family doctor, who maintained – with honour, but without any unusual skills – his small-town practice and who, just once, encountered an extraordinary patient.

  For a long time, even years after the accident, he expected Phineas Gage’s complete recovery. He expected that his behaviour, his character and his state of mind would return to normal, and that he would once more be, as it is said, ‘himself’ and that he would know what to want. But he waited in vain. Gage lived to the end of his life as a kind of changeling.

  For a while, he dispensed fatherly reproaches to Phineas Gage, but later he ceased. Little by little he understood something completely new. It was as if Gage’s will had also exploded into smithereens in the accident and as if the wholeness of his being had therewith been destroyed.

  For me too, as a person of an entirely different era, the case of Phineas Gage has also been important. His permanent changes in behaviour demonstrate that an individual’s conscience, his concept of right and wrong, his sense of proportion, his decency and his morality – even his will – are dependent on particular areas of the brain.

  My grandfather, in his time, presented similar concepts in medical journals, but they did not attract any attention or understanding. Later, on the basis of quite different cases, younger researchers drew similar conclusions. Undeniably, this brought my grandfather late, if slightly bitter, satisfaction.

  How could anyone legitimately have blamed Phineas Gage? His life was ruined only by a moment of unlucky inattention, blind chance, which called him by name, and he answered.

  I believe that in his case one can no longer speak of free will. But I am sure you will understand this: if Phineas Gage no longer had the power to choose right and to regulate his own life, what is really the case with those thousands of others who cannot find their way through even the most primitive social rules? If we could see what we cannot yet see, would we be forced to admit that the worst and most seasoned criminal is in the end as innocent a victim of circumstance as was the young Phineas?

  Even if we do not find the same kind of crater in his head as my father saw in Gage’s skull, we may surmise that the same kind of inborn chaos and disorder predominate. If so, we can no longer reasonably argue that he himself is responsible for the evil he causes. We understand of course, as my grandfather did in his time, that they must nevertheless receive their punishment – in addition to the curse which nature itself has loaded on their backs. Thus we correct wrong with wrong, since we can do nothing else, neither pardon nor cure.

  And what about us so-called normal people? The fact that we are able to choose correctly, that we generally function rationally and that we even attempt to understand one another and anticipate the consequences of our actions, is perhaps not in the least our own achievement but that of the program which nature itself has planted within us. Perhaps our freedom of choice, the greatest pride of our humanity, the sacred capacity which distinguishes us from the rest of creation, is merely an illusion which, in spite of everything, we must believe.

  I wrote, as you will have noticed, ‘which nature has planted within us’. I did not mention the word ‘God’, as many a more righteous person than me would have done.

  Phineas Gage could, with reason, have blamed fate. In the disguise of merciless coincidence it stripped him of his soul in the flower of his manhood.

  Perhaps you, who are still a young man, will see a time when medicine will have achieved a full and detailed understanding of the physical basis of our soul and our self.

  That which today is still obscure will then be as clear as day.

  Note: The basis of this chapter is the account of Phineas Gage’s accident contained in Antonio R. Damasio’s work Descartes’ Error (Avon Books, New York, 1995).

  Matter Made of Time

  Håkan waited in ward number nine at his grandmother’s bedside. His grandmother was sleeping restlessly, snoring and sighing. Håkan was waiting for her to wake up.

  The patient in the next bed was singing incessantly and fingering a worn rag-doll. When Håkan got up and pulled the curtain aside slightly, the old woman looked at him and said delightedly: ‘Mama!’

  ‘You are mistaken,’ Håkan said amicably, ‘I am not your mother.’

  But the old woman said again, ‘Mama, look!’

  Håkan looked at her doll and said it was lovely. When he glanced at his grandmother again, he was astonished. A change had taken place in her features, which had a moment ago looked ancient: they were suddenly as soft as a little girl’s.

  Then Håkan remembered something.

  As a child he had had a property, a capacity or a kind of sense which he had later lost. He used it on his way to school, on the number nine tram, as it wound its loopy route through the city centre. If he looked at the people getting on and off the tram in a certain way, he could often see. In the twinkling of an eye he learned what those unfamiliar people had been like as children or what they would be like as old people. It was as if their faces changed for a moment, just long enough for him to be able to see.

  It did not work on everyone, but some people changed their faces quickly and easily, first to children, then to old people or vice versa. When he blinked his eyes – he did not always even need to blink – they returned to the age in which they happened to live.

  Håkan did not know how these glimpses happened, but it seemed that he had to look in a certain way to achieve them. Perhaps he screwed up his eyes a little, perhaps it was if he shifted his focus so that the features of the person he had decided to concentrate blurred and lost their sharpness. Thus they allowed his gaze, his will, to penetrate them. They allowed him to see the other face hidden behind the face of the moment. And there were layer upon layer of them.

  More important than the way of looking, however, was the fact that he willed, that he chose. His own will forced the change to appear. Something happened to time, it became transparent or perhaps its arrow simply changed direction for a second.

  Yes, then he had been able to break th
e asymmetricality of time. There was no essential difference between the past and the future. Later he understood that this was really the case with all basic processes: they were symmetrical, they had no direction in time: microscopic processes were completely interchangable. Only in the human world was time so decisive, so apparently irreversible.

  Why this should be so was a mystery.

  The time game was the secret entertainment of Håkan’s boring journeys to school, his private amusement, which it would never have occurred to him to tell anyone about.

  At the same age, when he was still so short that adults had to bend over to speak to him, they often adopted a certain expression, friendly, sugary and patronizing. He thought then: You think I am a child.

  He himself knew that it was a delusion, that he was not. What was he, then? Not an adult, either. A person had a thousand faces, but all of them disappeared in turn. All of them were borrowed faces, no one had their own face. No one was a child, no one was old, everyone was of every age – and of no age.

  Where then is my face, which is mine, the one which is always mine and no one else’s? Ah, there was no such thing.

  And now, as he sat by the bedside of his ninety-year-old grandmother in the chronic ward in which only dying patients were cared for, in ward number nine (the same number as the tram of his childhood), Håkan suddenly saw his grandmother’s little girl face – without even wishing to.

  His grandmother was still sleeping. Her silvery-white, thin hair had taken on a strangely green tinge. Like a mermaid, Håkan thought. Perhaps it was caused by some medicine that she was being given. And then on the pillowcase lay the glowing cheek of a little girl, until it turned once again into his grandmother.

  It occurred to Håkan that as a child he had seen multiple faces only on strangers, but on familiar people, on members of his own family, never. It had never even crossed his mind to see if it was possible. Now it grieved him. If he had seen his grandmother like that when he had himself been small, perhaps they could have become playmates?

  His grandmother woke up, turned her head and noticed him.

  ‘Håkan,’ she said weakly, but nevertheless there remained in her voice something of the old sharpness and dissatisfaction, the appetite for criticism, which had constantly been directed toward Håkan, among others, ‘You sure do look awful today.’

  Now Håkan was in a way delighted that the familiar tone was still there; the indomitable energy of everyday human life spoke through his grandmother. Where would it soon go? Would it be lost?

  ‘Would you like me to read you something?’ Håkan asked.

  His grandmother did not answer. Håkan was not sure she had understood the question. But he opened a book and read: ‘Time is the material of which I am made. Time is a river which carries me onward, but I am the river; it is a tiger which devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a flame that consumes me, but I am the flame.’

  His grandmother fell asleep again. But the old woman in the next bed sang: ‘Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen . . . ’

  Older people always said, ‘Time passes much more quickly now than when we were children.’

  But although they said that time passed more quickly than before, they did not really mean it. They thought it was only a feeling, a subjective illusion. That objectively and in ‘reality’, whatever that was, everything happened in the same tempo as before.

  But in respect of time there was no objective reality. The same time did not exist in different places.

  Håkan himself was now an older person and had noticed the speeding up of the passing of time. Year after year, it became more obvious. Sometimes he wondered whether that worn observation had become a literal and absolute truth.

  Perhaps time really was passing much faster than before. Håkan had no means to prove it; for if the acceleration of time was uniform everywhere around him, there was nothing to which to compare its speed. Perhaps his metabolism had speeded up in the same way as everyone else’s. Maybe the globe was spinning faster on its axis than before, and circling the sun more swiftly. The revolutions of the galaxy were increasing, the entire universe was expanding more rapidly.

  The unevenness of time, its dependence on place and people, puzzled Håkan. In some places time had begun to speed at a different pace form others. And some people aged much faster than others. Sometimes Håkan wondered how people could encounter one another at all, so asynchronously, at such different times, did they live.

  His grandmother woke up again and said: ‘Håkan, what are you doing here, in the middle of the school day? Be a good boy and go home now.’

  To his grandmother, Håkan was a child again. He walked the street and he was a child and he was a man. He saw the city through his memories. There was not a single street, not a single block, to which something of his life had not been transferred.

  On that corner he had been bought a blue balloon on the May Day of the year he turned seven. But it was already a bit wrinkled, and when he got home it no longer stayed up in the air. Then, it had been a great sadness.

  Where that accountants’ office now stood there had previously been a grocer’s shop where he had bought sultanas. In its window there had been willow baskets containing exotic fruits, bags of spices and packets of coffee. Now there were no longer any such grocer’s shops anywhere, and food stores’ windows were taped over with yellow price labels.

  Two street corners on, on the first floor, there had lived the woman he had first slept with. The woman was now dead, but sometimes, on that street, Håkan felt again the wafting of her scent.

  The secret of old age was the same as the secret of childhood. What raised them also made them old. What nourished them also killed them.

  He was on his way home.

  Fiat Ars, Pereat Mundus

  What a stench! I was waiting for my cousin in the art museum, and it smelt. I had never imagined that an art museum could stink. To anyone present, the reason was not unclear. In the room was a glass case, the size of a studio apartment, which was buzzing with furious life; it was boiling with blowflies and their hungry grubs. There was no shortage of food for them; like their peers, they lived on death. In the case, on top of a severed Carthaginian column, a hunk of meat had been placed, already highly putrefied.

  It would not ever have occurred to me to visit an art museum; I was not really interested in art, particularly contemporary art. But when I arrived in the city I telephoned Håkan, my cousin, and he suggested that we should meet at precisely this exhibition.

  Håkan was himself a kind of artist, although he had not achieved any fame to speak of. He developed performances and video installations, had already been doing it for a couple of decades. I had never seen any of his work, if work is what it could be called. I knew that Håkan aimed to produce sensations, but what I had heard about his work sounded pretty yawn-inducing. The name of one of his videos was La Primavera: it showed a man sneezing. I do not know whether the attack was caused by snuff, allergy or the flu, but apparently it lasted about three hours.

  My old uncle had asked me to get in touch with Håkan, and it was only for his sake that I did so. My uncle was chronically anxious about his son, although he was already well over forty and made a decent living. He imagined – completely erroneously, of course – that I could have a positive influence on my cousin. The reality was that Håkan treated me as patronizingly as he had in our childhood. I certainly understood that he found me a colourless bore, whose very job title – chief accountant – was, to him, pitiable. Håkan believed that no one with a head for figures and a job in a tax office could understand anything about the higher cultivation of the spirit. Perhaps he was right, but I have never made any claim to pass as an art expert.

  There were no other artists in the family. My mother said coldly of Håkan: ‘He may be an artist, but he’s certainly a hopeless bum.’

  Håkan said he did not belong to any grouping, he was neither a modernist or a post-modernist, neither a minimalis
t nor a maximalist. He was always part of the mainstream’s counter-current. In the ranks of the country’s artist he was a lone wolf, the eternal opponent of institutionalised concepts of culture.

  I had, in fact, never encountered an artist who had claimed anything else about himself. None of them had ever come to tell me that they were understood correctly and completely and that their work and their oeuvre had gained sufficient attention. It was quite remarkable that, although there was always much talk of the national culture’s clannishness, cliques and sects, no one had never seen an artist who had belonged to them. And if everyone belonged to the counter-current, then where on earth was the great mainstream?

  Håkan talked a lot about the end of art. He said that because everything is art, nothing is any longer art. The time was already dawning. The noblest aim of art was to destroy itself voluntarily. I did not dare argue, what did it have to do with me and surely he must himself know, since he was a professional in the area.

  Håkan had chosen this particular room for our meeting. He said that he had a new performance there this afternoon. I did not dare leave the room, although I suffered from the smell. There were so many people in the museum that I feared I would lose Håkan if I wandered into the other rooms.

  I waited in the doorway, as far from the glass case as I could. I should have taken a clothes-peg with me, for the work of art continued to smell at the door. Some people in the room held a collar, handkerchief or hat in front of their noses. But in fact only a gas mask would have been sufficiently effective.

  The exhibition had been opened just a couple of days before, and would run for another three weeks. A pity for the staff, but perhaps it was possible to grow accustomed to the smell. Without a doubt, in three weeks it would be still more nauseating.

  From my position, I could see on the back wall of the other room an enormous picture whose subject I was not quite sure of. The picture was an oil painting, but at the same time some kind of enlargement. Hairs were growing in it, in the picture they were almost two metres long, thick and black as the branches of a tree in November. It was possible that the subject of the artwork was a vagina, for between the hairs there gaped a deep and dark hole. In fact, I could not help thinking that if the intention of the picture really was to show a vagina, the artist had examined his subject very carelessly.