Slowslowzo

Grief is as much about forgetting, as remembering the dead. Forgetting every morning that she’s not upstairs, but has passed. 

Forgetting and disappearances are the stuff of dystopian writings. 

These dystopias are our realities, often hidden and forgotten with people disappeared behind closed doors. I am reading wildly the writings of authors who are not scared to face such realities.

Reading wildly: Susanna Kaysen and her book Girl, Interrupted

‘People ask, How did you get there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can’t answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It’s easy’.

‘And it is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside the world and resemble it, but are not in it.’

Kaysen introduces Girl, Interrupted with a thought provoking chapter, Towards a Topography of the Parallel Universe. She considers how easy it is to not register the underworld of those deemed mad and locked away. Until you’re actually there, with your newly defined diagnosis. (For Kaysen it was the contentious diagnosis, Borderline Personality Disorder).

‘In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down, a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest, and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction. Time, too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks; faces; flowers.

These are facts you find out later.

Another odd feature of the parallel universe is that although it is invisible from this side, once you are in it you can easily see the world you came from. Sometimes the world you came from looks huge and menacing, quivering like a vast pile of jelly, at other times it is miniaturized and alluring, a-spin and shining in its orbit. Either way, it can’t be discounted.

Every window on Alcaltraz has a view of San Francisco.’