F-A-C-U-L-T-I-E-S

            I used to think that my mother was the only person of non-African descent who could relate the best to black people in North America. And I mean she could really empathize with them. Its not because we were poor, or the fact that she wasn’t White that made her so understanding. And I guess it wasn’t even just black people, but everyone in all times and places. I mean, we weren’t even American and there weren’t a lot of black people where we lived. I think it was because she saw the bad things that were going on, in the projects on TV and the crying babies with not enough food and the way people were being treated by cops. I think it was because she took everything that she saw and placed it somewhere safe in her body so that she would never forget how bad things were. Like, if she did stop thinking about other people’s suffering for one day, whatever she had put into her heart would melt into a lit stick of dynamite and blow her to pieces and she would never forget those wailing hungry babies ever again.

            In a way she was a slave to other people’s suffering. Funny, considering that that was how the whole black situation started. She wasn’t an activist or anything, she would just constantly comment on the news, and sometimes non-news, things that happened years ago, like segregated water fountains and sports teams, segregated everything for that matter. A few times I saw her watching the news and crying. I guess it was just too much for her to see dirty people on the streets having crazy drug parties in the darkness of downtown alleys – although they really just had nowhere to lie down because of all the cars – while everyone was shoveling money and taxes into building some Olympic log tunnel in Beijing, or showing some massive model for a new residential apartment block right where all those drug parties were going on. Back then I used to think she was crying because the homeless people wouldn’t be allowed to get together and have fun anymore. But I was just a kid then and I guess I saw things as really simple.

            Looking back on it though, things are still simple. Simple-mindedness. Simple solutions. Simple answers like “Love one another.” Simple. There were no philosophy books in our ramshackle house when we were growing up. I guess my mother read a few in university and didn’t see any real answers in Socrates’ one-sided conversations, or didn’t find it useful to contemplate why we exist when almost everyone out there was barely existing. It didn’t seem fair to read big books with shiny covers when some people couldn’t even afford toilet paper to wipe themselves.

I think her favourite book was my Grade Twelve biology textbook, because in it, there were no races – everyone was reduced to cells and hormones and reactions and enzymes. It explained how everyone had genes that determined what they looked like and their abilities; but genes didn’t really determine how we treated other people, and this somehow proved that we weren’t supposed to treat anyone badly and that we had no excuses. It was better than the Bible.

But what my mother didn’t see, my mother, that tight angry ball of history's ghosts, what she didn't see that I do so clearly now, is that maybe if people forgot everything, like if they had their memories collectively erased, and if we started this world all over again, we could skip coming to terms with the past and move straight on to seeing each other for the first time. Because how can you hate someone you have only just met, if you have no knowledge of the past and what its millions of different forms meant to anyone?

Every night I pray I will be an amnesiac in the morning.

            If this heart’s on fire, then what of the mind? Because it felt like it was ablaze and buzzing with black smoke and questions to which I could never find a answer, no matter how many Freuds I sought and asked.

            One Freud said of my condition, “You will only find it if you let yourself go.” He would not elaborate.

So I set out on a journey to find myself in order to do as he said. I asked my mother who she thought I was. Her reply: “You were a very good child. Quiet and polite. Even when you came forth from my womb, you did not make a sound. We thought you were dead, but it turns out that you were only keeping quiet so as not to disturb my rest.” She is the kind of woman who does not observe silence with caution.

Mothers always think of their sons and daughters as though they are still infants in crisp white baptismal gowns; they are still the pure, glowing children of whom sin has recently been removed.

“But mother,” I said, “Who am I now?”

“You are mine, and always will be.”

She is not wrong, but it was not the answer I was looking for.

I decided to let go, just like the one doctor said, and so myself remained lost to me; but in order to let go one has to maintain a certain level of indifference. I consumed everything and everyone without mercy. I loved strangers and scorned lovers and abused my body in ways that felt right and everything was excess and everything was splendor.

That is how I died.

And when I awoke, I still had not found the answer.

The second Freud said, “You will find it in your dreams.” But since I had been dead, I had dreamt only of God’s face. So I slept and slept and in my dreams were missing teeth and prehistoric wolves and things that I could not remember when I woke up. Once I saw the face of someone I loved, but I could not follow then, even if they had taken my hand in the night.

I woke up for the last time, because if dreams were no use to me, then neither was sleep.

The third Freud said, “I will put you under hypnosis and you will reveal to me what you are looking for.”

So I was put under his spell and I died for the second time. But this time was different, because instead of God’s face, it was yours, reflecting all the light in the world and I felt your hands in my hair and your breath like water. And Freud said, “It is yours to take.” So I let go, and I dreamt of you, and I found myself and what I was looking for simultaneously.

            I see a lot of things as though I’ve seen them before. They reach far back into my memory, my subconscious, my…what is it, really?, and are pulled out like lightning: just as bright and just as quick. It’s like when you smell a smell from when you were seven years old and on vacation, from the house that you stayed in far away from where you really lived, and it can’t be the same smell, that was across the ocean(!) and maybe it isn’t, but it could very well be, and now you’re there in that house and you don’t know which tense to use anymore.

            I see things on the TV, a man pressing clay into a mold like a bee, and I have seen it a long time ago. I know I haven’t really seen it before, but there’s that quick electrical flash of recognition. And by the time my mind begins a two-bodied debate, yes you have and no you haven’t, the image is gone and he is un-molding the bee and it comes out imperfect and grey like a giant mummified exoskeleton.

            Déjà vu is apparently just a seizure, some improper electrical discharge in the brain, something you can get frequently when you eat chicken breast more than three times a week, which I don’t. There was also something about anxiety and schizophrenia and disorders; but everyone has something wrong with them, and not everyone has frequent epileptic episodes in the form of déjà vu. It’s gotten to the point where I can’t separate what I’ve done from what I’ve seen on television from what I’ve seen someone do in a park from what I want to do and sometimes if I look at a part of a sentence in a book I have seen that too, except I haven’t because the book came out yesterday.

            And so because the memories and pictures and non-memories are all mixed up in my head, I just think they are all the same and I pretend I have seen them before and it helps. When I go to the doctor next Tuesday he is going to tell me why this keeps happening; and when he tells me why this keeps happening, then I will find out why the images keep happening and maybe it will stop altogether when I hand over a prescription and everything will seem so new to me, like I am living in an amnesiac dream, which is also just a seizure, and I will love everything I see because it will be newborn and interesting and nothing will be repeated and it will be a different kind of lightning, the kind that illuminates everything good and clean, like in Medieval pictures of saints and Jesus and Mary.

            Sometimes when I see an image and I feel like I’ve seen it before, I feel like I know I’ve thought about seeing it before maybe more than three times and I guess this is experiencing déjà vu itself and this is when I am most confused. Sometimes I think I have seen it in a dream but then I think about how I have already thought about seeing it before and does this make sense? Because if I try to explain it I see images that I have thought about hundreds of times because I have seen them hundreds of times on the television and in movies and I don’t know where else like for example when I see a woman being shot and falling backwards on a wooden floor I know I have seen this already and I know I have thought about seeing this already and I don’t know why because I never remember dreaming of it and it bothers me so much because she is dead. And I remember that there is screaming connected with the same image but that doesn’t make sense either because there is no such thing as déjà entendu except when you hear the same song a lot on the radio or in records or on film and they do not play children’s screams on the radio. And I do not even know if I am using the right tenses anymore because I cannot tell the difference between what I have seen and what I have not seen and what I want to see and I don’t know anything anymore except that this lightning is hurting me.