Authors: Brian Keenan
The most difficult thing to deal with was that the harder I struggled to find a way out of those moments of lethargic contentment, the more confusing was the ensuing war inside my mind. At times losing the battle, I flung myself down while my mind went reeling off.
I remember one day I was fiddling with a spoon which I had been given. Without thinking I played and twisted the spoon through my hands, the way a child would do with a play-thing in a pram. I looked for a moment at my reflection in the convex curve of the spoon and was frozen with shock. I didn’t recognize the reflection staring back at me. I had become someone else. My imagination was stunned. How could I have become this thing that I saw? Even though I understood that that curve on the back of the spoon would, like the mirrors in a circus, distort and malform my features, still I could not recognize my face. I turned the spoon over and looked into the concave bowl of the spoon and again the face had changed. It was as if some Janus reflection of myself was looking at me. I set the spoon down and laughed and picked it up and half giggling, half fearful, turned and twisted from one face to the next and back again. Staring unbelievingly at my image. Black pools under my eyes, my hair long and askew like a wet mop that had been left to dry in the sun. My beard was longer than I
had known it ever to be. My body from the neck down seemed so frail in that curvature, like the body of someone with serious malnutrition.
I looked tiny and bony and my face sat huge upon my shoulders, out of proportion, not part of this body.
As I think back on it now, I think of how important that spider’s cocoon and my image in that tiny metal bowl became for me. I know that those two things more than any others drove me to find the solution to the delirium in my mind.
I decided to become my own self-observer, caring little for what I did or said, letting madness take me where it would as long as I stood outside it and watched it. I would be the voyeur of myself. This strategy I employed for the rest of my time in captivity. I allowed myself to do and be and say and think and feel all the things that were in me, but at the same time could stand outside observing and attempting to understand. I no longer tried to bruise myself by attempting to fight off the day’s delirium or tedium. I would let myself go and watch myself, full of laughter, become the thing that my mind was forcing me to be.
I knew they had a motor-generator to light the prison at night whilst bringing in new prisoners. On one occasion the generator was running, though there was no light, and the ventilation pipe was blowing in dusty hot air as usual. I could not see the dust falling. I wasn’t bothered by it. But I remember listening to the noise of the machine and the air as it passed through this long vent of piping. My mind seemed to be pulled into the noise until the noise became music.
And I listened entranced in the dark to the music that was coming from this pipe. I knew that there was no music and yet I heard it. And flowing out melodiously was all the music that I had ever loved or half remembered. All at once, all simultaneously playing especially for me. It seemed I sat alone in a great concert hall in which this music was being played for me alone. I heard the ethnic music of Africa. The rhythmic music of bone on skin. I heard the swirl and squeal of bagpipes. I heard voices chanting in a tribal chant; great orchestras of violins; and flutes filling the air like bird flight, while quiet voices sang some ancient Gregorian chant. All the music of the world was there, playing incessantly into my cell. I lay at first smiling and listening and enjoying this aural feast. I kept telling myself’There is no music Brian, it’s in your head.’ But still I heard it and the music played on and on ever-changing, ever-colourful. I heard the uileann pipes’ lilting drone.
I heard fingers strum and pluck a classical flamenco. I heard ancient musics of ancient civilizations coming all at once to fill my cell and from simply smiling and laughing I fell into a musical delirium and began to tap and dance and beat softly upon the walls the different rhythms offered to me.
For how long I did this, I cannot tell, but then suddenly I was fearful. This music that was not there but that I heard had taken hold of me and would not let me go. I could not silence it. It was carrying me away. I called for it to stop. I pressed my hands over my ears foolishly trying to block out a music that was already thumping in my head and it would not go away. I could not end this or silence it. The more I tried the louder it swirled about me, the more it filled the room. And in its loudness I was gripped with a fear that was new to me. I did not know how to contain myself or how to end this thing. My fight against it was defeating me. It was crushing out every part of me and filling me with itself. I could not bear it.
I fumbled under my mattress to find the stubs of candles that I had squirrelled away. I took out one candle and lit it in the hope that light would dispel the music that filled the room, but it did not. With my mind only half conscious, I lit another and another candle until I had filled the cell with candlelight, bright, dazzling, soft, alluring light.
But still the music played around me. Everywhere the bright burning of the small candles and me waiting and hoping that this imagined music would stop. And then I remembered again you do not overcome by fighting, you only concede the victory to the madness within. You overcome by going beyond it.
H Like a somnambulist, I got up from my mattress and in that tiny cell, naked and wet with sweat, I began to dance. Slowly, slowly at first then going with the music, faster I danced and faster until I went beyond, and beyond the music’s hold on me. I danced every dance I knew and dances unknown to me. I danced and danced until the music had to keep up with me, I was a dancing dervish. I was the master of this music and I danced and danced. The sweat rolled off me and I bathed myself in the luxury of it. I felt myself alive and unfearful. I was the pied piper who was calling the tune. A tiny cell, a dozen candle stubs and a madman dancing naked. I was laughing. The laughter was part of the music around me. Not the laugh of hysteria, but the laugh of self-possession, the laugh that comes widi the moment of victory. Every part of me, every limb, every muscle energized in this dance. For how long I danced or how long I laughed I if cannot tell. But it seemed that I would be dancing forever.
Finally exhausted, but content, the sweat rolling from me, my body sticky with myself, I sank into my corner and smiled as the music faded and left me not in silence but with a sense of contentment and of peace. And so my strategy again had come to my rescue. I had looked upon myself enraptured in this primal dance. I had seen myself go with this moment of ecstatic madness and had come back from it, unmarked. As I sat glowing in candlelight, I thought to myself it was not enough simply to react to these moments that came to captivate me but I must record them and harness them to my will.
It seems absurd to me now as I think of it but I had had with me all along in my briefcase a tiny stub of a pencil and some pieces of paper. I had refused to use them. I remember days before when I first thought that I would write or draw or do something that would liberate my mind, I had convinced myself that to do so would make me completely dependent on the resource of paper and pencil. I was also afraid that they would be found and confiscated, but now I didn’t care.
It was more important for me to repossess myself. For the next weeks I recorded the minutiae of my existence. Everything that happened, every moment of madness, every thought I recorded in a writing so tiny and cryptic that had anyone found it they would not have been able to understand it. If they did they would most assuredly have condemned me as completely insane.
I began to scratch away at the cement surface on the blocks that formed my cell. After days of scraping I had created a tiny, tiny crack between the blocks and I could see out. I would stand there behind my wall, no more than two feet from my captors and watch their every move. Watch them prepare the food in the morning. Watch them take each man to wash and bring him back. I would record all that I saw and heard. I would record the half-heard words in my head. I would record my feelings, never trying to work them into a structured language or comprehensible form, simply recording everything as it happened, how it happened. I would not edit or rearrange anything.
At intervals of three or four days I would read over what I had written and then deal with what confronted me: a rigmarole of confusing ideas, of abstract thinking, of religious mania, of longing, of grief for my family, so much of it incomprehensible to me but there in front of me, a witness to myself; I had thought this, believed this, written this.
How could I make sense of it? In all its confusion this surreal manuscript had become my magnum opus. How little a person knows what is in himself. To see all the fissures and fractures, to throw
light into the dark cavities, to see the landscape of a mind and recognize no part of it but know that it is yours is a fearful and disturbing thing. Yet it was so, and I could not deny what my diary revealed to me.
At first I could see no meaning in this jumble of words, of images, thoughts, prayers, observations and emotions. At times I thought I should tear it up and throw away my two-inch stub of pencil. But I couldn’t do it, and as the pages filled up more and more, and I recorded more and more of this unexplored landscape, I felt myself become helplessly lost in it. But I could not stop, for to see what has previously been invisible is powerfully captivating. Eventually it came to me that here in these pages there was something I could only dimly perceive, some threads running through and holding it together like the veins that carry blood to the living heart. Here in all this confusion some veins of life held everything together. I don’t fully know what it was, yet remember feeling that in these strange pages was a whole human being.
Fear of discovery, of what would happen if they found this diary was a constant worry. They would surely not be able to read it. But they could surely make me read it to them. I had written what I had seen. I had written what I had felt and these things are only for contemplative perusal. I decided that I could not stop nor tear up this chaotic memoir but that I must find some means of continuing it. I resolved to write in the code of poetry which only I would understand. If it was found I could simply say ‘Well I am a teacher, I teach literature, so I write poems’ and hope that they would not pursue the matter.
Over the next few weeks I wrote about thirty poems. I can only remember that when I sat one evening in the candlelight trying to reread them I discovered with shock and amazement that the madness of my diary was multiplied tenfold. For here was a body of poetry, some of it quite well crafted, other parts of it at least illuminating. A body of work which I could not believe was any part of me. It was as if I had seen my face again in the spoon and had failed to recognize it.
This poetry, it seemed, was written by someone other than myself. It delighted me, yet I could hardly bear to see, not so much the words themselves, but the man who had put them there: Mad Sweeny hiding in his tree of words.
In this wall which dresses me
From head to foot, entirely
Blessed you, companion
For the journeys which you gave me
Here
Where the day is badly born,
Never tired me
The course followed
By the prohibited pencil
Blessed is the hand which creates you!
Eyes on your saddle
I have pedalled
I have crossed
I have journied
Beyond myself
Luis Veiga Leitao
Each morning I awoke to find again the reserves of imagination and reflection to buoy me up from the murk in which memory’s hot pinpoints scalded me. At times I would feel overwhelmed by shame or guilt. It was always necessary to face such feelings and question why such emotional turmoil accompanied my memories. The habit I had formed of observing myself allowed me to distance myself from these emotional assaults.
My father, who had died a few years before, was frequently in my thoughts. At first there were simple incidents from the family history.
Certain moments seemed to become more complete and more filled with meaning. I seemed to understand more about each incident in the history than I did when the event occurred. These memories became less and less a recording of the past. My father became not just simply a memory but more a real presence; a presence I could feel more than see, a comforting reassurance that eased the hurt into a deeply filled sadness, yet that same sadness as it became reflective, lifted me. I began to understand the hurt that was in me. We are all creatures in need of love. My pity moved beyond myself. I wanted to reach out and embrace life. I thought of how those who have gone from us come back to us, as a source of strength that fills us with warmth.
The days chased each other and the future stood before me grey as my walls and as invincible. I sought out this memory of humanity. I was outside this narrow world of negation. I was no longer afraid of my guards’ violence, nor did I seek to judge them. Many moments came to calm me, but I could not retain them. I was always called back to my cell.
I had attempted to create imaginary pictures to decorate the walls.
Each day I would collect these mental images and try to project them onto the wall, to hold them there framed and contained within my understanding. Like a painter at his canvas I sought to comprehend their strangeness. But their monotony exhausted me. I needed to be active. I had for weeks been keeping the dead ends of the matchsticks which they gave me with my daily supply of five cigarettes. I would burn them down until they were charcoal stalks. For hours I would sit and stare at the lines and water marks in the cement. I would trace out their form with my improvised charcoal. Where the corner of the walls met at right angles I could discern what I had drawn. A perfect life-sized half of a crucified figure. The meeting point of the walls had dissected, like a huge scissor-cut, the image that I had been tracing. I stood face to face with the half-man hanging there. Around the other walls I wrote half-remembered sayings or lines of poetry. Daily I tried to understand what relationship all these had to each other. I was a vessel in which these thoughts and words mixed and became meaningful. As with any work of imagination, I discovered new meanings every day in this strange tapestry.