by Leena Krohn
DATURA
OR A DELUSION WE ALL SEE
LEENA KROHN
Translated by Anna Volmari and J. Robert Tupasela
Cheeky Frawg Books
Tallahassee, Florida
This edition copyright © 2013, Leena Krohn. All rights reserved.
Originally published in 2001 in Finnish as Datura tai harha jonka jokainen näkee.
Translation copyright (©) 2013, J. Robert Tupasela and Anna Volmari.
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ISBN 978-09857904-6-2
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Contents
The First Seed Pod
A Delusion We All See
In the Most Silent of Silences
Datura
The New Anomalist
The Master of Sound
The Voynich Manuscript
Mineral, Plant or Animal Kingdom?
The Quiet Asphalt
The Parastore
The Day of the Plum Pudding
Another Man with the Same Name
On Air, on Sunlight
The Heretics
Old Faith
A Lesson
Nicola’s Formative Years
The Second Seed Pod
The Pendulum Man and Un-Me
The Puddle
A Visit to the Hair Artiste
Don´t be Cruel
The Face in the Cheese
Loogaroo, A Classic
In the Wrong Line
Kinky Night
Phony Money
A Finger
The Moving Image of Eternity
The Old Woman Ahead of Me
The Mouse, the Wolf, and the Nightingale
The Third Seed Pod
Madame Maya
Cake
The Sound Swallower
The Trepanist
Two Marches
The Otherkin
The Ghost of the City Office
Faith is Sick
The Psychology of a Plant
The Woman Who Was Four
A Peculiar Flower Shop
The Fastest Way to Travel
A Visitation
“Thus unenlightened, lost in error’s maze”
With a Finger to His Lips
The First Seed Pod
A Delusion We All See
I can only blame myself and a certain flower for my current state. Or two flowers, actually.
The first I saw when I was seven years old. Someone had picked some flowers in the garden at our summer house and put them in a vase. The tallest had just opened—incandescent orange with dark leopard spots. The midday sun filled the room and the flower embodied summer lushness. I looked at it and asked my sister what flower it was.
“A crown imperial,” she replied.
I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I was sure she was right about the name, but I looked at this flower differently than I had at any flower before. A new idea was germinating in my mind, and it made me say, “It might not be a crown imperial.”
“It’s a crown imperial,” she said.
“But it might not be,” I insisted.
What made me say that? A sudden thought that the flower was unknowable, not just by me, but by anybody, even people who knew its name. But I wasn’t able to express this epiphany in a way that other people could understand. I didn’t mean that the flower had some other name. What I wanted to say had to do with being, not naming. The name of the flower was something completely arbitrary and beside the point. The flower was not what it was called. Not this flower. Not any flower.
We were misled even by our own perceptions. They revealed hardly anything to us about the true nature of the flower. The essence of the flower—what or who the flower truly was—was somewhere else, is always somewhere else.
“Go ask grandma,” my sister said.
I asked. I was sure that grandma would understand what I thought I now understood.
But grandma also said, “It most certainly is a crown imperial.”
Why am I telling you this? Because I then understood that this one flower could not be known, and later I have learned that this same otherness applies to all living things—people, the world, our entire reality. What we are able to perceive—see, hear, smell, and measure—gives us enough information to get by on a daily basis, but too little to understand what everything really means.
Perhaps it was that bit of information that wounded me. Perhaps that was what later made me so vulnerable to seduction by that other flower.
My sister thinks that my bad health is partly due to the people I met while editing The New Anomalist. I was infected by their distorted perceptions, that’s what she says. The accusation isn’t fair. She doesn’t know about my relationship to datura. The same flower, tragically enough, that she once gave me with the best of intentions. The damage it caused is permanent.
When I think about datura, I remember the Marquis, the chief editor of The New Anomalist, and all the magazine’s readers and contributors. I had never known that people could have such odd ideas. Together, the datura and these people formed a new pattern, a wavering structure into which I innocently stepped. It was a trap from which escape would not be easy. In a way I am still fighting for my freedom.
It has been so long now. You’ll have to tell me the year, I can’t remember today. The flower changed me, my perception of the world, and my sense of time, as well. The world is no longer the same place, and neither am I.
This is what I think I’ve learned: reality is nothing more than a working hypothesis. It is an agreement that we don’t realize we’ve made. It’s a delusion we all see. Yet it’s a shared, necessary illusion, the end product of our intelligence, imagination, and senses, the basis of our health and ability to function, our truth.
Hold on to it. It’s all—or nearly all—that you have. Try to step outside of it and your life will change irreversibly, assuming you survive at all.
If you want, I’ll let you read the notes I made at the time. I’ve expanded them here to pass the time. They aren’t pure diary entries. The dates are missing, and I doubt they’re in chronological order. How well these entries describe what really happened isn’t any clearer to the writer than they are to the reader. To describe events is to distort them. Like pressing flowers, books preserve the appearance of events, but not their original dimensions.
A woman dressed in white came to me again tonight. She is not welcome here. It’s now dawn, and I have been up almost all night.
My eyes seek the sky, the luminous clouds, before sleep. A devout person once wrote, “All is vanity, all is delusion except these infinite heavens.”
In the Most Silent of Silences
I can hear my own breathing. As I breathe in, the same high note always plays, like a note from a distant violin, or the hum of a nearby mosquito. As I breathe out, a heavy wagon rolls down a dirt road, a rough country wagon pulled by draft horses of the kind I imagine were used before the automotive age. These sounds accompany my being as persistent
ly as my awareness of the passage of time. The more silent the world, the more clearly I can hear them. In fact, it’s these sounds that give me time—its tempo and physiology, its give and take. The air that flows in and out of me is the substance of time—it’s time itself.
In girls’ school a tall cupboard was brought into the gymnasium once a year. Every girl had to bare their bosom and climb inside. But the eye that illuminated them was not interested in their budding breasts. To that eye, their busts were merely a haze through which it scrutinized the throbbing chambers of their lungs. Each year the same doctor repeated the same demands: “Breathe iii-in! Hooo-old it! You may go!”
The doctor then allowed the girls to let out the time that they had held trapped in their lungs and step out of the temporary prison cell. Even back then, my wagon moved in the dirt of the road, though somewhat more lightly.
I’m already up and have arrived at the office of The New Anomalist, though my workday hasn’t actually begun yet. I’m tired from my cough, which woke me up early. A cough is a lack of order; it interferes with the rhythm of time. It’s January once more, and my umpteenth birthday.
My uncle once wrote in my friend book:
Your heart is an empty book
Waiting for each day’s fresh-marked page
Your joys, your sorrows, the record of an age
Sights and wonders, the draught of life you took.
The year draws to its close, and January begins anew.
I feel the irritation on the inner surface of my bronchi, how swollen they are, how red.
In the dark recesses of my chest, alveoli perish one by one. How many are there? How many do I need to be able to live and breathe? How little I know of the ceaseless workings of my insides—a space where thrombocytes float to the beats of my still-hot heart.
As I make some coffee, I watch the winter day break outside the window next to the ceiling. The same life force that passes through my chest is the wind that sways both the empty swing in the playground opposite and the lone, naked tree in the yard. The tree’s branches and roots, the branches of my alveoli and vascular system, even river deltas, all organize themselves according to the same laws, follow the same patterns.
I wonder why the swing hasn’t been put away for the winter. I wonder at the silent collaboration between my organs and cells that continues without me—the end result of that collaboration—knowing or having to do anything about it. It goes on so that I can sit here underneath the window and watch the wind swirling in the empty yard and wonder why the swing has been left outside for the winter.
The door bell rang just once, and so softly that I doubted my hearing. I opened the door, just to be sure, and there stood a man, neat and shy, belted up in a raincoat. Behind him a curtain of sleet reached all the way to heavens. Mumbling so quietly that I had to strain my ears, he introduced himself and told me he was a subscriber to The New Anomalist.
“Since mumblemumblemumble,” he whispered.
Naturally, I asked him to come in and take off his coat.
“I’m also interested in alternative mumblemumble,” he continued after hanging his coat slowly and carefully on the coat rack and arranging himself as meticulously in one of our two kitchen chairs.
His hair was silvery and recently barbered. In his white shirt and elegant dove grey suit, he could have passed for a politician or the CEO of a mid-sized technology company. Perhaps he was one or the other, I never did find out what he did for a living.
“It’s a very interesting branch of mumblemumble, if I may say so.”
I was cold and had the urge to cough. I longed for another cup of coffee. My wearying dreams had been haunted by dwarfs and boa constrictors.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch what that alternative thing was.”
“Audiotechnology,” he said.
“I see,” I said, without seeing at all.
He looked at me in anticipation and I looked back at him. When I realized he wasn’t going to continue, I had to confess: “I can’t say that I know what alternative audiotechnology is.”
He raised his eyebrows, this well-behaved man in a grey suit. He was the Master of Sound. That is what I call him, and I often find myself reminiscing about him. I’ve forgotten his real name. He was one of the many acquaintances I made while working as a subeditor of The New Anomalist. He was one of the ones—the heretics, the monomaniacs—whose obsessions took up residence in my head.
He said, “Sounds are everywhere, even where you wouldn’t think mumblemumble. We don’t hear them, but they exist nonetheless. Even in the most silent of silences.”
Datura
When the violin plays—today in pianissimo—I can smell it. A saccharine, almost foul scent exudes from the flower, my birthday present. From its pot, it dominates the room, my gaze, my nose. How heavy and yet translucent the white trumpet-shaped corolla are. How they bend and sway with the slightest touch of a finger.
It arrived with my sister and brother-in-law as a present, but also as a gatecrasher.
“Have you seen this type of flower before? I can’t remember what it’s called,” Noora said as I unwrapped the cellophane surrounding the plant. “Roope hasn’t seen it yet either. Maybe you both know what it is. The lady at the flowershop told me its name, but I was in such a rush that I wasn’t listening.”
“Now that’s what I call a shrub!” Roope said.
We appraised the specimen. Its stem was an intense green and its blossoms white as moonlight. Looking at it made me dizzy. The dozen long, trumpet-like flowers reminded me of alabaster jewelry. A few had already withered. I saw the seed pods, round and thorny. I’d never owned such a plant, but one summer, I had admired one in the botanical gardens in another city. There, having wintered inside a greenhouse, it had grown and branched out into a small tree.
“I believe it’s an angel’s trumpet,” I said.
“That’s what I think it was! Angel’s trumpet! The flowers do look like small trumpets, don’t they.”
“It’s a night bloomer,” my brother-in-law said. He’s an amateur gardener like me, but knows much more about botany. “The flowers open at night. The smell is also stronger during the night. And when spring comes, you can plant it in a sheltered and sunny spot.”
“Wonderful. I think I’ll take it to the summer house,” I said.
“They said at the flowershop that it can’t winter this far north, so you’ll have to bring it back inside in the autumn.”
“I’ve heard that it’s sometimes called devil’s weed,” Roope said. “Did you know that, Noora?”
“I bought a weed as a gift?” Noora was shocked.
“At least it’s related to devil’s weed.”
Roope rubbed a leaf between his fingers and then sniffed them. He grimaced.
“The smell isn’t all that good. Technically it’s not a brugmansia, an angel’s trumpet, but a datura, a moonflower. The flowers on this one are erect, while those of brugmansia are pendulous. They are sometimes considered the same species, though. It’s a datura, I’m pretty sure of it.”
“Why do they call it devil’s weed?”
“I think datura were once used in witchcraft,” Roope said. “It’s poisonous. It has intoxicating qualities.”
“Oh no, it doesn’t seem like a very good birthday present after all,” Noora said.
“I like it. It’s gorgeous,” I said. “We don’t have to use it to bewitch anyone.”
Another coughing fit came over me and just didn’t seem to stop. I went to the kitchen to drink a glass of water, and when I got back, Roope said, “Did you know that this plant is said to cure asthma? Its poison can be used as medicine in small amounts. As is almost always the case with poisons.”
“Really? And how are you supposed to take it? Eat fresh flowers? Dry them and smoke them? Use the leaves as tea? Chew ripe seeds?”
“Don’t ask me. And don’t go trying it out, it might be dangerous. It just came to mind—I remember reading it somewh
ere. Forget it.”
After Roope and Noora had left, I fell asleep for a while. When I woke up, the datura was there, in front of my eyes, like a guardian of my dreams. Dear lord, what a plant! It swelled with vitality, flourishing more by the minute.
Out of impulse, I took one seed pod and crushed it between my fingers. The seeds were black and kidney shaped. I took a mortar and pestle and ground a couple of the seeds to powder. Why not, I thought, just as an experiment. Two seeds was a small amount in my opinion, just the right amount to be used as medicine. And it was a natural remedy after all. I made a sandwich with some sliced tomatoes and sprinkled some sea salt and the seed powder over the top.
I chewed. A strange, completely foreign odor drifted up from the sandwich. A smell that I couldn’t link to any other plant. It wasn’t a fresh scent like the smell of so many herbs, but musty in some indefinable way. I fought back my revulsion, chewed and swallowed. I was soon overcome by drowsiness. I undressed and went to bed.
The violin screeched; wagon wheels rumbled on a dirt road. I became conscious of these sounds. My mouth felt dry, but I soon fell asleep without much coughing. I had a feeling that I’d last felt as a child at bedtime: it was as though I was riding a spinning merry-go-round with my hair flying in the wind, only I was lying down as it went round and round. I found I still enjoyed it as much as I had as a child.
I only woke once, in the small hours of the night. I felt that someone in a white dress was standing at the foot of the bed. Before I could take fright I realized that it was only the tall moonflower watching over my rest.
Then the merry-go-round started up again, spinning at a dizzying speed.
The New Anomalist
The ceiling in the room was so low that even people my height instinctively walked with a slight hunch. The floor was made of unpainted concrete. The radiator was scalding hot from the beginning of September to the end of May, and there was no way to turn it down. Even when I’d bothered to wash the narrow window near the ceiling, the only window in the room, it was just as dusty again after a few days. The window faced northeast and opened onto a narrow asphalt deck where the printing house’s employees parked their cars. But at least I was able to see a strip of the opposite building’s yard between two brick walls—a swing and a birch tree. The air was not good in the room, which had once been a warehouse for hubcaps. Not a good thing considering the state of my poor lungs.
