Beatriz Seelaender
Creative Non-Fiction
One of my greatest fears has always been witnessing a crime – not so much being the victim of one, but rather having to identify the culprit from a lineup. How overcome with anxiety I become even watching procedural whodunnits where the witness sits down with a sketch artist. These police sketches can hardly be as accurate in real life, certainly? Someone being capable of conjuring the map of a stranger’s face from memory is nothing but far-fetched, but an artist managing to produce a faithful portrait from someone else’s memory is mind-boggling.
Watching movies with a large ensemble cast is always a challenge – and, I’m told, a hassle to my fellow viewers – especially when the cast lacks diversity. For instance, when I saw Boys from Brazil we had to rewind the climax, as I mistook Laurence Olivier for Gregory Peck or vice-versa – still couldn’t tell you, as they both had the same terrible accent (but one was a Nazi). And don’t even get me started on those Gary Marshall ensemble romcoms.
While my diagnosis is not of outright prosopagnosia – the clinical, ancient Greek term for face-blindness – since I can recognize friends and family, my mental pictures are eternally blurry and hardly-ever updated. Moreover, the mildness of my shortcoming does not mean it comes up short at being a shortcoming.
Take the first time I realized there was something off with my facial recognition software – I was in English school, a common extracurricular for Brazilians and entirely independent from regular school, where English classes never delve much further than to be or not to be, and that’s every question. So, from the age of four onwards, I’ve been an English school regular – the only difference now, in fact, is that I am the teacher. Back in intermediate one or two, when I was eleven and learning about the past perfect for the first time – who even has a past of a past at ten – I overheard two kids talking about their regular schools. Who could have guessed that one of them went to the very school that I went to? Even more fascinating was the fact that the boy soon disclosed his class, Seventh B.
“That’s my class, too!” I said, willing to socialize over our shared misfortune. The school year had begun only about a month earlier, and I couldn’t yet have been expected to memorize my classmates’ names.
“No duh,” he said, “It’s me, Whatshisname!”
The expression on the boy’s face, as far as I can blurrily recall, was priceless – he could not comprehend how anyone could ever let his presence go by unnoticed. See, I would soon go on to find out that this boy was the most popular boy in the whole seventh year – which extended right into the middle of the alphabet. To boot, I was informed that two more boys from regular school were there. They nodded at me disconcertedly.
“I’m Beatriz,” I said.
“I know!”, the main boy replied, exasperated: I had greatly offended his popularity.
According to middle-school rules, he was supposed to be the one saying, “You know me, but I don’t know you”. His mind was racing in self-doubt. For the remainder of the year, this boy tried to get me to kiss him, always using the sacred English language to flirt with me. When we were learning tag questions, he used it to ask me if I liked him – you don’t like me, do you? I must admit, that boy, at thirteen, had game. But I was not interested in the least – that was the whole appeal, wasn’t it? Boys are obsessed with girls who don’t care about them, aren’t they? Why is that, isn’t that what it is? You see, I learned my tag questions just fine, since I was paying attention. And we write about what we pay attention to, don’t we?
Nowhere are such sensory deficiencies more evident than in my writing: I couldn’t care less about physical descriptions. Not that it’s a conscious choice not to describe a character’s appearance – mostly, it slips my mind. None of that had ever stricken me as odd – everyone assumes their way of thinking is the standard way until they come across a thread on r/writing casually mentioning that certain folks simply don’t hear sounds in their minds. I laughed disconcertedly – so these people don’t… have thoughts? Yes, they do, I am told. They just don’t hear them. How can one exist without what I was taught to think of as the act of thinking? The act of narrating? What about reading, what about music? How does that even work? And didn’t Saussure say that without language thought was uncharted nebula? Not that my thoughts are anything to write home about – most of them are swear words and complaints and sound effects. If my stream of consciousness were a radio transmission most of the broadcast would be concerned with physiological immediacies and interjections, to the soundtrack of whichever song the situation calls to mind.
And then the second blow: just as there are people who apparently cannot hear their voice – or any sound, for that matter – in their heads, there are others who cannot form mental pictures. Still, much more intelligible than a mind without sound is a mind without pictures. As I see it, it’s sound that stays intact. Without it, pictures fade. It is sound that carries them over to memory. Song association games are my favorite, as well as song recognition competitions. I’ll put on random songs and attempt to pinpoint the decade they’re from, maybe the artist. I like to guess who’s singing. I like to guess where people are from, like Henry Higgins minus the misogyny. I’m normally right.
Pictures become so much clearer in my mind when I give them a soundtrack; it’s how I see movement – how I am pulled in different directions by words and their cousins. Yes, I could tell them apart in a lineup, the way I can tell the shadows apart when I see them dance to music. If I’m listening to an audiobook on repeat, I am carried off to the place where I first heard the passage, even if I had no recollection of the act of listening. Pictures are merely scenery to me.
Certainly, there is some neurological explanation for all of this, even if it consists of disproving everything I have said. Several studies comparing visual and auditory memory have been conducted all over the world for decades, and their results seem widely dependent on their samples in that at times the subjects used both equally, and at others visual memory surpassed auditory. In the latter case, subjects seemed to recall visual elements and, from them, retrace the auditory — which I have noticed is the opposite of what I do. In any case, no permanent conclusions should be drawn from these studies.
There is nothing wrong with either inclination. I’m not bragging about being not like other girls, in fact I am sure there are many other mildly face-blind girls with poor spatial reasoning and impeccable comedic timing, pitch, and linguistic prowess (boys, I’m not so sure). And that’s not to say you cannot be ambidextrously talented in all aspects of things heard and/or seen. Just that I, from my teacher’s corner of vast anecdotal evidence, have never seen nor heard of a self-described “visual learner” with a burning passion for phonetics. And believe me, I have tried. Anecdotally, and less vastly, I have noticed that polyglots tend to make better singers. Furthermore, there’s no denying that however one may process the world will translate into one’s writing.
“We know what our heroes and villains look and sound like,” writes author Eldred Bird in a blog post titled Involving the Reader in Character Building, “Height, build, hair, eyes, accents—it’s all etched inside our brains,” he says. But is it? I have never pictured a single character of mine. Although I have a limited cast for reading, which I keep on call if there are long-winded descriptions, they are never needed when I’m writing. Still, it is a universally acknowledged fact that the human brain does not possess the ability to create random faces, meaning every character ever imagined bears the face of a real person or cartoon (yes, sometimes I picture a cartoon amidst a realistic setting, don’t ask me why).
One way or another, we all write or try to write what we would want to read, and physical descriptions of characters, places or things have never interested me in the slightest. Bird mentions accents in his post, and that is the exception – I can hear every character’s voice clearly, though I’m sure those too have been borrowed from some actor or podcaster from a canceled mid-2010s comedy show.
Unless a character’s appearance is important to the protagonist, there’s no point in paying any mind to aspects without consequence. It’s advisable to prioritize a description of style over substance, as in fashion over phenotype – the way someone dresses says much more about them than random lines on their face. There are obvious exceptions, especially if the character’s looks are out of the ordinary / a specific genetic characteristic is being targeted by biological warfare in a case of reverse-psychology terrorism – as in my story “Gingerphobia” (Fugitives and Futurists, 2022). Most of the time, though, physical descriptions are overrated.
Make no mistake, this is not about cutting what doesn’t “serve the plot” – the plot isn’t god; as far as I’m concerned the plot is pretext: a utilitarian concept infiltrating fiction. But listen to the sound of that – nice in poetry, questionable in prose. Whenever anyone asks me what the real difference between poetry and prose is, I always say that nothing should ever rhyme in prose (unless it’s prose poetry, and if it’s prose poetry rhyming is the least of your concerns).
Whereas rhyming poetry has fallen in disfavor with the chosen few, poetry is still allowed to rhyme. It just has to be very, very good – and even then, it’s very rarely published. Anyone who has read submission guidelines knows that. Rhyming poets cannot complain, for they’ve been in vogue for the previous three millennia.
Modernism and its mini-movements have shaken things up, and liberated the verse –admirably for the most part. My only bones to pick are with Futurists, who provided Fascism with aesthetic validity, and Imagists, who are really very difficult to understand. Amy Lowell, in her 1914 introduction of the movement, declared that the movement’s ultimate goal was to prioritize writing that painted a picture, rather than poems that merely sounded nice. Yet she follows that with another goal, “to produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite,” which sounds like such a contradiction to anyone whose mind’s eye is inferior to the ears.
Despite Modernism, in its purest form, having done away with metric and rhyming concerns, the case of rhyming poetry in English is special, as the case against it isn’t precedented in any other language. In romance languages, rhyme has fallen from grace thanks to its abundance: rhyming suffixes feels too obvious. In contrast, the argument against rhyme in English-language poetry is that of contrivance upon singularity. For some reason, natural occurrence of rhyme is somewhat diminished by the trappings of English, which doesn’t lend itself to rhyming schemes very well, at least when compared to other more spontaneous tongues. Consequently, schemes may grow to sound strained and overworked.
Arguably, English Modernism sprouted from a certain aversion to gaucheness, while Romance language Modernism strived for it. Brazilian Modernism’s greatest modernist poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s “Poema de Sete Faces” (Elizabeth Bishop translated it as “Seven-Sided Poem”), required reading for any high-school curriculum, starts with this very affirmation:
When I was born, one of the crooked
angels who live in shadow said:
Carlos, go on! Be gauche in life.
(1930, translated by Elizabeth Bishop, 1969)
In offering a different response to Modernism, I do believe Drummond’s seven-sided faces or whatever it’s been translated as solves that problem in a way that English modernists haven’t been able to – by turning it on (one of) its faces: here, the obvious is made into the absurd. Drummond spends the whole poems teasing symmetry, yet never daring to go there until he does. In a lyrical plot-twist, he achieves transcendence through unrequited rhyme, which any child of well-to-moderately-read parents can recite its high point since it is the silliest rhyme ever known to man:
Mundo, mundo, vasto mundo
Se eu me chamasse Raimundo
Seria uma rima, não seria uma solução
Mundo, mundo, vasto mundo
Mais vasto é meu coração
As “mundo” means world, Drummond is saying that, were his name Raimundo , that would be a rhyme; not a solution to his existential dread. Bishop’s solution is to keep the rhyme in the translation, changing the name to Eugene. Since nothing rhymes with “world”, though, she matches the name to “mean”. Once again, what we have is a rhyme, not a solution: it doesn’t quite work since the aspiration to rhyme with the world is missed.
Be that as it may, the “gauche impetus” permeating this leery – I mean, Lyric – phase is, as some may need pointing out, deeply seeded in irony. There’s nothing less gauche than rhyming in Portuguese – the length a poet will go through to avoid it that is the real accomplishment.
On the other hand, a heavy hand is something I have learned to appreciate in a poem. Because the most problematic word in the Portuguese language is “coração”, aka heart. Because it is an ugly word. Because it’s not easily sneaked in as one might its monosyllabic English-language counterpart. There are only two kinds of poet who would endeavor to use this word: the very best and the very worst.
A more radical option might’ve been to translate it as, “World, word, vast world / If my name had been Rayworld / It would rhyme / though it’s absurd / World, world, vast world / that my vaster heart shall endure”. In all fairness, these last few verses change in meaning, and the entire notion of a solution is thrown away. Perhaps the popularity of non-rhyming poems is a purposeful conspiracy of translators, who were sick of recking their brains over awkward wordings.
In a more consistent translation, one might keep it up until Rayworld and then create a new scheme: “it would be a rhyme, not an answer to what was asked / World, world, so old and vast / My vaster heart shall this outlast” or “ My even vaster heart outlasts / which even vaster hearts outlast”. One could also opt to throw the entire rhyme scheme away and pretend not to have noticed: World, world, vast world / If my name had been Raimundo / That would be a rhyme, it wouldn’t be a solution / World, world, vast world / My heart is vaster. Of course, the joke would border dadaism, and we are forced to recognize that, in the end, the rhyme is preferable to the solution.
To sum up, modernism had no little pretention of unpretentiousness, and this transpires differently in every language depending on their rhyming rates. Since rhymes are pedestrian in Romance, their simplicity is mocked as mundane, while in English-language poetry rhyme is ditched precisely because it is rare.
In some ways, the spirit of Brazilian modernism is more alive in Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear than self-serious 1920s movements. Though this tradition of shameless artifice in form poetry is looked down on by the poets-that-be nowadays, frequently written off as “gimmicky”; limericks and epigrams and all forms of nonsense verse are admirable precisely for being unstable compounds in a high-pressure environment.
There is nothing more satisfying to me than such belabored ease:
I cannot be didactic
or lucid, but I can
be quite obscure and practic-
ally marzipan(PEAKE, Mervyn. “I have my price”)
The man separated syllables for the sake of meter! To say something that hardly makes any sense! Obviously, there are examples of English-language rhyming poetry newer and just as exciting. As much as it would make for a nice poem, there’s no need for an elegy of rhyme schemes. Because the style is so out of vogue, however, it is mostly found in music rather than literary magazines. And we all know that music lowers the bar when it comes to rhyme, as it should. Still, some of the most incredible poetry is happening inside songs.
It’s not about maintaining perfect meter – it’s about maintaining perfect timing. As a marker of time, rhyme is a useful instrument. You can see that in these very sentences as I write them: timing and rhyme are much too close in sound and distance for the sentence to sound good. So are meter and instrument, which sound too alike. But this is prose. Sometimes when reading a novel I find a group of sentences in some impromptu metric alignment – most frequently a haiku. I wonder if the author’s noticed. As long as it doesn’t rhyme, it’s not prejudicial to the text, but I still separate them with a slash.
On the opposite end, we have the much-lambasted spectacle of randomverse, or “Press Enter Poetry”, prompting editors to warn us that line breaks must have purpose. But I still don’t understand the purpose of most of the line breaks I see. Are they for breathing? As the most dedicated member of the comma police, I cannot help but draw comparisons with misplaced commas – though the latter are more infuriating. People have somehow gotten into their heads that a comma must be placed any time one might pause. It’s insane. It upsets me to think about it; moving on.
This is about how people read poetry and what they look for in it. As both a reader and writer of poetry, I look for rhythm and cadence in a poem. Based on the submission guidelines of most literary magazines (I feel like I have read them all), the thing to strive for is “imagery”.
A couple years ago, when I had just gotten the courage to submit my poems, an editor’s criticism of a particular piece was that there wasn’t enough imagery. They were quite nice and helpful, and I obliged – my poem did get better, even if I had no idea what they had meant by it.
Now, what exactly is imagery? It’s not visual poetry; that’s poetry that’s shaped differently. From extra spaces to concrete poems, that’s visual poetry. Imagery is a more fleeting definition, mostly due to everyone applying it to whatever they think it means. Vague explanations include “using figurative language to evoke perception” – that’s any kind of figurative language – and “showing rather than telling” – always advice to take with a grain of salt. One of the websites attempting to explain imagery as separate according to each of the five senses, therefore creating “visual imagery”.
Having taken semiotics in college, I’m sure this pleonasm is greatly practiced among the learned, but in poetic language every redundance is taken to be intentional anyhow. Perhaps that favor extends to meta-poetics. So, I went to the mothership herself, the Poetry Foundation, for a definitive definition: it says, “Elements of a poem that invoke any of the five senses to create a set of mental images. Specifically, using vivid or figurative language to represent ideas, objects, or actions.”
There you have it; why I have never gotten the gist of imagery: my brain’s projector is somewhat broken. It’s not completely damaged – I can see places, I can see charts, texts, first-person memories (really I cannot complain), photographs, I can even come up with blurry glimpses of action; sometimes I can make people move – but that’s not a priority. Especially not in a poem. As someone whose name is not Raimundo, Drummond de Andrade says, “Why are there so many legs, my God, asks my heart (there with that heart again) / But my eyes / don’t ask anything”.
As much as I love English-language poetry, the question crept up – why does Brazilian poetry hit different? I wrote it off as some remnant of misguided patriotism (for all patriotism is misguided, and I must call out the pleonasm, and call it poetic language as an excuse). Oh, the mother tongue, speaking to my soul, all that well-placed faith in a country’s fate. But I’ve been paying attention – mostly to song lyrics. Acoustic imagery, as semiotics might put it – and that obviously extends far beyond rhyme – plays a much greater part in whether I enjoy a poem or not. It is a determining factor in whether I remember it.
When I was a kid, my dad would often make me memorize poems as a means of buying off bedtime. I would go into his office, recite the poem, and he would say, “oh, look at the time, your half hour’s up”. Math has never been my forte anyway. Maybe my mental image of numbers is hazy. The echo of the Brazilian poetic canon, however, is well-preserved in the back of my mind, emerging whenever needed, even if uninvited – for why would I go on a tangent on a text about prosopagnosia? Because it serves the plot; because it is relevant. Drummond’s Poem of Seven Faces – and yes, I’d rather translate as faces rather than sides – presented itself to me as I attempted to write a concise account of my prose upon agnosia. Seven faces knocked on my door, and they all looked the same to me; they all looked like Drummond, who goes, “The man behind the moustache / is grave, quiet and stark / He almost doesn’t talk / to the few, rare friends he’s got / The man behind the glasses and the moustache”.
I’d never looked at it that way – as I have come to realize I don’t really look at things, which is why I never find them when looking for them – but maybe that is also how Drummond saw it (badly). At its poorest interpretation, the seven faces in the poem are not related at all; they are but meandering verses without a thesis, stitched together because they seem to stem from some horizontal association with each other.
Prop Agnosia. That’s just agnosia, you know? Poem of Seven Phases: the plan, the plain, the legs, the man, the god, the name, the moon. The way that every poem is. Prose upon a supernova. Champagne supernova, though in this case it’s brandy. Brandy, Drummond says, is moving him, along with the moon. Brandy and the moon move him like the devil, though he shouldn’t say. None of this should’ve been said. Slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball has been listed as one of the most awkward lines of English schemes. But they don’t understand it. You are throwing the word before you get there. And it doesn’t arrive. A heart, faster than the world, if you mispronounce the poem. Dada. Prose upon anorexia nervosa – Hemingway, microfiction. As long as diction is preserved, it could rule the world. So old and vast, the world their words shall outlast, and the other, more inevitable world. Rose Upon Ambrosia. The corpse of metric poetry? Oppose Arachosia, which used to be a Persian Satrapi. A lot of people know the poem Leaving for Pasargadae, but they don’t know Pasargadae was in Persia. But that’s Manuel Bandeira, another modernist poet, and we start dissociating by association by keeping this up. It’s aimless, utterly aimless! This is why they say we need to map out our essays.
Nonetheless, face-blindness comes hand in hand with a poor sense of direction – in truth, I might be even worse at places than faces. The late Oliver Sachs, a prosopagnosic himself, noted face-blindness and topographical agnosia are often a one-package deal, as anyone in my family could have easily told him. What’s more, he quoted studies suggesting that difficulty in identifying faces could also translate to other objects, such as cars (which I have found out people distinguish by shape or color, not by license plate).
This explains why my grandmother and I once spent a whole hour at a parking lot looking for a car that, it turned out, was in a different parking lot altogether. I could even risk suggesting that this genetic indisposition to identify between similar individual types has something to do with a platonic view of the universe – if only that wasn’t also an individual type of orientation. “We are,” Amy Lowell says in her Imagist manifesto, “not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous”. How could I ever reconcile myself to this project? Everything material looks the same to me.
That’s just your face to have done that, we would say in Portuguese, meaning it is so like you to have walked around the wrong place because you cannot place anything. It’s just your face to fail to identify other people’s faces. Of course, mine is hardly the worse case scenario: many accounts of face-blindness include difficulty at reading emotions, which isn’t a problem for me. I can see faces in the present. I have to see them loads of times to remember them – perhaps that makes me not face-blind but face-myopic, or astigmatic. I used to be astigmatic as a kid; somehow I outgrew it. Is it possible to outgrow astigmatism? I used to need glasses and now I don’t. I remember the optometrist’s voice, though his face is long gone. It’s just my face not to remember his face.
Which brings us back to lineups, and the likely origin of my dreading them: in the 2003 film Spirited Away, the young girl Chihiro’s parents turn into pigs after eating cursed food in an abandoned amusement park. In the end, she is allowed to have her parents back if she is able to pick them out of a lineup consisting of various pigs. Five-year-old me was terrified by and ashamed of her inadequacy to perform that same task, even if it was a hypothetical scenario. Lineups have been a common motif in my nightmares ever since. In the dreams, I must save my dog from of a crowd of identical shih tzus. I always end up with some kind of changeling, my real dog lost forever. We both know it but refuse to acknowledge it.
All this for you to see why I would be hesitant to identify someone in a lineup. However, when it finally happened last year, astoundingly I managed just fine.
Why were we in Frankfurt? That was something the Polizei asked me, too. If you’re going to study in Rome, why are you in Frankfurt? Many reasons, the first and foremost being that the tickets were cheaper. Plus, my parents lived in Frankfurt before I was born and my mom wanted to visit it, so we stayed for the whole day. Our train for Munich left at one in the morning and arrived at six – why pay for a hotel room when you can sleep enroute? I was being savvy, really. Nevertheless, in all my budgeting, I had failed to consider that most unpleasant thing about Europe, which is the synchronization of bedtimes – basically, everything shuts down at ten. Technically the Hauptbahnhof is open, but even McDonald’s has a closing time.
My mother, unhappy with my arrangements and the most vocal critic the world has ever invented, soon started admonishing me. We had checked out of the hotel at eleven in the morning and spent the entire day walking around; she was exhausted. I was delighted to have squeezed four museums in a day’s itinerary. After we were kicked out of the McDonald’s, my mother sat sulking on her suitcase, complaining of the cold. Three hours to go and no place to sit, she said.
I needed to sit somewhere for different reasons – having spent the whole day without toilet access, I could no longer postpone certain calls of nature. For someone whose intestines have been frequently compared to a German train station, I was now condemned to conduct my business in the HBF’s restrooms. As much as I would like to list euphemisms for taking a shit, what happened to me in there was so infinitely grosser that it is almost irresponsible to conceal the first while describing the latter.
Like many public restrooms in Germany, the ones at the Frankfurt HBF require a small fee to enter. Unlike most public restrooms in Germany, the ones at the Frankfurt HBF are underground. The men’s room is on the left, and the women’s on the right – each has its own ratchet. Though typically I could not describe you a place without having been there countless times, the image is more than clear in my head.
The man was leaning against the ratchet. He stared at me intently as I paid my fee. He wasted no time following me. Somehow, I knew he would even before he had started – maybe it was the stare, maybe it was some survival instinct girls get when they find themselves alone with a man in an insulated underground space.
I locked myself in the stall – the door was the height of the ceiling and I was somewhat relieved at concluding there was no way he could break in. But he was there alright, two or three meters away, audibly hoisting his own petard. Yes, I took that from a jerking off euphemism dictionary – one of the other ones is “badgering the witness”. As the victim of this crime, I would rather the witness not be badgered ever again.
What was I to do? There was a stranger masturbating furiously in the underground bathroom. There were no means of communication as I had left all my carry-ons with my mother – you see, public restrooms are dirty, and I didn’t want to drop my phone in the toilet or anything. There was nothing I could attack him with. Prop agnosia.
So I did the only thing I could do, which was take a shit. I covered the seat in toilet paper and pretended whatever was happening on the other side had nothing to do with me – although I suspect the man had a thing for pooping: every time I let out a fart, he let out a moan. I assumed he would leave before I was done, but here I was flushing and he was still at it. Now he was, actively, wasting my time. I had a train to catch, places to go. My ears were perked up for any sort of movement outside. My eyes were scouting for nearby things I could hit him with.
I stared at the toilet brush. How many dirty toilets had it brushed over? How many coliforms had entrenched themselves in its bristles, how many times had it dived headfirst in future sewage? This was a fecal sample from everyone who had been to the Hauptbahnhof in, optimistically, a month.
The question I posed to myself was, “Would I rather be raped or touch this toilet brush?”. This is not really a question anyone should have to ask, yet I’m sure I was not the first nor the last woman to do so.
That fucking wanker was still moaning indecorously, no audience but me. It could be ages until someone showed up. I braced myself and prepared to run. He had his hands full; there wouldn’t be time to attack me if only I ran.
I caught only a glimpse of the wanker, on the stall across from mine, door open, aiming his penis at the wall. He didn’t look embarrassed in the least. It was a nonchalant expression, as if this were a nightly ritual, if as this were a human right. I left the restroom without washing my hands.
As an obsessive-compulsive, the first thing on my mind was finding hand-sanitizer – I had, after all, just taken a shit. I took some Purell from some restaurant’s sealed entrance. Then, I feared for my mental sanity. Would this traumatize me forever, was it about to scar me subconsciously, what if my psyche was damaged in unpreventable and mysterious ways? How would I tell people without scaring them? How would I talk about it with my loved ones? God knows I hate unpacking trauma. Hadn’t I unpacked enough of it? Hadn’t I already been through therapy? Am I going to have to go back on account of this goddamned train station wanker? The whole thing seemed so exhausting; I almost didn’t tell anyone. Talking about it, I argued with myself, would only be dwelling on it. I was fine. But once I reached my mother, she was furious:
“What the fuck took you so long?”
For once, I had a good excuse, so I used it. My mother was obviously horrified and told me to go to the police.
“But we have a train to catch,” I said. I was tired.
Still, to the Polizei I went, and they took me quite seriously, even as I switched to English. The situation called for linguistic proficiency, and my German has always been tragically inconstant, coming and going as it pleases.
No vocabulary would have helped me then, though, since they asked for a description. People expect rich descriptions from a writer – I’m sure the policemen would have been even more disappointed if they knew of my profession; they were frustrated as it was already: how were his eyes, his nose, his – I am not kidding – sneakers? Do people regularly notice this crap? I remember looking down to check the color of my own sneakers, and realizing I was wearing boots. You don’t exist in the real world, people often tell me. You need to pay more attention. To the color of people’s sneakers? While they jerk off? Perhaps I could distinguish the man’s scabrous moans, but faces are never conscious facts to me.
After a while, the exasperated policemen decided showing was, after all, better than telling. They went around the Hauptbahnhof taking discrete pictures. Then they presented me with two suspects, which is the easiest version of a lineup. They were also not technically lined-up, as the police were dragging them toward me at the platform – they had delayed the train for us, meaning the rest of the passengers must hate us.
I barely stopped walking towards the train – I knew it as soon as I saw him. How strange is the human mind. People told me it might’ve been the trauma. I don’t know. I don’t remember the man’s face anymore; probably didn’t remember the moment after I stopped looking at him. “Above all,” relates Oliver Sachs, “the recognition of faces depends not only on the ability to parse the visual aspects of a face—its particular features and their over-all configuration—and compare them with others but also on the ability to summon the memories, experiences, and feelings associated with that face. The recognition of specific places or faces (…) goes with a particular feeling, a sense of association and meaning (…) emotional familiarity is probably mediated at a higher, multimodal level, where there are intimate connections with the hippocampus and the amygdala, areas that are involved in memory and emotion”.
And resonating in my mind was poem of Drummond’s for which I cannot find a translation:
But the flesh, too, has no importance
And hurting, coming, the very chant is after all indifferent
Five thousand Chinese dead, three thousand lovers’ bodies
[over the railway
and the train that passes, like a speech, irreparable:
everything happens, girl,
and it isn’t important, girl,
and nothing stays in your eyes.
[1940. Canção de Berço.]
References:
https://writersinthestormblog.com/2018/09/involving-the-reader-in-character-building/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/face-blind
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0811884106
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/09/living-with-face-blindness/279898/
https://www.mervynpeake.org/nonsense.html
https://genius.com/Haley-heynderickx-oom-sha-la-la-lyrics
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69404/preface-to-some-imagist-poets
Beatriz Seelaender is a Brazilian author from São Paulo. Prose by her can be found in Cagibi, Guesthouse, and many others. Seelaender’s poetry has appeared in Door is A Jar Mag, Pangyrus, etc. Her novella “All According to Norm” (Black Spring Press), winner of the Bottom Drawer Prize, will be published this year.
Photo Credit: Born in Oldham, a Lancashire mill town in 1971, Nick Armbrister has lived in various places and now in SE Asia. Has many interests include writing, studying history, military aviation, current affairs. He loves Gothic music and metal, likes the 1980s for what is was (trash decade!), loves tattoos and wants more.
L'Esprit Literary Review 